Choose Your Own Adventure!

Loosely based on real events

A. You have spent a year and a half applying for Peace Corps. You’ve had your fingerprints taken at the local police station, your teeth have been X-rayed (twice), you've started an admirable collection of vaccinations, have made copies of every important document you own, have been interviewed various times, have written essays, have begun attending weekly Spanish TESOL classes at your church and were even caught in the language lab during a tornado as you studied Español with Rosetta Stone. After weeks of running to the mailbox every day, you return from dinner with friends one night to find the FedEx package at your doorstep. You scream frantically, jumping in the driveway with your spouse—setting off the barks of the neighbor’s awful dog—and rush into your apartment. You’ve since learned South America is out. You’re crossing your fingers for Africa. Tearing open the letter, you read Congratulations! You are invited to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia.

Choose your own adventure! If you decide to accept the invitation, move onto section B. If you decline the invitation, your adventure ends here.

B. For the past year you’ve worked odd jobs (thanks to temp agencies, daycares, churches, and adjunct professor openings) and have lived with your parents. You’ve sold your beloved trusty car, packed your belongings into two attics and garages in two different states, and have advance paid over $5,600 on student loans, grants, and child sponsorships—taking care of every financial commitment for the next two years. You’ve bought and wrapped and hidden birthday gifts for family members to last the rest of the year. You’ve bought two year supplies of deodorant, wet wipes, and other hygiene products. You’ve spent a month typing up all your favorite Africa-proof recipes into one Word document. But your family and friends often cry when you excitedly gush about your upcoming departure. And you’ve been longing to expand your family for the past year. It’s a week before departure, and Peace Corps still hasn’t told you whether or not you’ll be with your spouse or alone for the first three months of training and living with an Ethiopian family. You’ve seen the 150-some-character Amharic alphabet online: it’s as foreign as it can be. You look at calendars that don’t even reach so far as your return. You swallow hard, and try to figure out the best way to fit those new rainboots into the hiker’s backpack.

Choose your own adventure! If you still want to board that plane, move onto section C. If your doubts outweigh your excitement and foolhardiness, your adventure ends here.

C. You’ve arrived! You’re getting used to injera and living with strangers who speak another language. You’re halfway through the three months of Pre-Service Training: 8 hour days of flipcharts and dry erase boards full of foreign alphabets, cultural norms, and diseases to avoid. It’s Field Day, the last day of your 2-week teaching practicum, and you’re leading Simon Says (or, Solomon Says). You faintly hear your phone ringing from your bag somewhere in the field. You answer to hear your mother crying: The baby is fine. But your sister is being rushed to another hospital. The epidural went wrong. She can’t feel anything from her waist down. Months go by, not knowing if you’ll see your sister walk again. And knowing you can’t see her anytime soon. Family and friends are filling her freezer with meals, taking turns with the baby, and she’s slowly recovering in the hospital. You don’t get the full story, or speak with her yourself, until a month later, as you listen and cry outside of a cupcake shop in the capital. The next time your sister calls you, it’s her turn to cry. Your younger cousin—and you’re so close to your mother’s family that this cousin is more like a brother—has been in a motorcycle accident. The helmet saved his life. He’s in a month-long coma with brain trauma. You want to visit him, to call your aunt and uncle and grandparents to cry with them, and you want hourly updates. You want to babysit for your sister and brother-in-law, drive her to Rehab, and freeze casseroles. Instead, you just hear bits and pieces. Being oceans apart, it’s inevitable that you only hear the big news—big progresses, big disappointments. But what are your loved ones’ daily challenges and small achievements as they slowly rehabilitate? What is going on? You have no idea. And no one remembers what they have or haven’t told you.

Choose your own adventure! If you decide to press on, you’re in this for the long haul, and your best option is to pray from afar, move onto section D. If you decide enough is enough, you have two beloved family members in dire need and you need to be with them, move onto section W.

D. After months of summer and then forced observation, you finally feel like a real working individual. It’s the first time you’ve felt busy in Ethiopia. Your schedule looks like this:

Monday: Soloda School English Club

Tuesday: Soloda School 8^th grade National-Exam-Prep

Wednesday: Adwa School English Club

Thursday: Maria Luwiza School for the Blind English Club

Friday: Adi-Mahleka English Club

*Additionally, for two weeks at a time, you work alongside English teachers at Soloda School, in the Teacher Mentoring Program, observing their classes and giving feedback, teaching their classes while they observe you, teaching together, then more observation and feedback. You also have trainings scattered throughout the months, to teach methodology.

Your spouse’s schedule looks like this:

Monday: English Class for 3^rd year college students

Tuesday: English Class for 1^st year college students

Wednesday: English Class for 2^nd year college students; Professional Development meeting with English teachers

Thursday: English Class for 1^st year students; English Class for 3^rd year students

Friday: English Class for 2^nd year students; English Club

*Additionally, he is organizing and recording native English speakers for a Listening Manual he created, to accompany the English textbooks.

You are “busy as beaver,” to quote an Adwa friend, but you find yourself wondering what sort of good Beaver is doing. Is he making a dent? In the abstract, you know why you came, why you’re staying: to carve for the suffering world a nice slice from your life’s pie. It’s the least you can do. But is the pie helping? Does its flavor and nutritional value even meet the needs of the world? Realistically, your pie has become English clubs. English, English, and more English. And yet you quiz a 7^th grader with 8 years of English behind him, on his colors, and he can’t even name red or blue. Can I still say that what I’m doing is worthwhile? you ask yourself. You know that in order for the people of Adwa, of Ethiopia, to be properly educated, the entire school system has to be reworked from the bottom up; and it could take decades. The problem is too big to solve anytime soon. You decide the only tangible good you are doing shows itself in who you’re employing and what causes you’re donating to with your Peace Corps allowance: the financial and relational difference you’re making for your neighbors. But couldn’t you do this from the states with a wire transfer?

Choose your own adventure! If you decide to discuss this dilemma with your spouse, seeking his wise counsel, move onto section E. If you decide your time is too valuable, and your single drop in this colossal sea of dysfunction is doing no good, move onto section X.

E. Over tea you prod your spouse: Do you think we’re making a difference? An important, legitimate difference? Is our teaching the poor grammar, grammar, and more grammar actually improving their lives? He doesn’t hesitate. Of course, he tells you. English is their ticket to a career, their route out of impoverishment. Think about it. If a kid doesn’t want to be a bajaj driver, a souk-keeper, or a farmer—if he wants to be a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer: what sort of textbooks for those fields would be written in Tigrigna? They need to know English if they want a good job. And we’re helping them get there. He makes sense; he always does. You realize you’re not just blowing hot air: you actually are a humanitarian, and what you’re doing is worthwhile.

You press on. Move onto section F.

F. You now have two gorgeous nephews to meet: Zachary Alexander and Samuel James. Likewise you have two gorgeous tomatoes sprouting from your garden kas bi kas (step by step). One morning both tomatoes—the only vegetable evidence in your garden—are missing. You find one on the ground nearby, with what looks like either a stab from a beak, (or a stab from Meron’s pointy teeth), in its side. “Elementary,” your spouse says, eyeing the neighbors’ chickens.

Choose your own adventure! If you decide to kill the chicken in revenge and retribution, move onto section G. If you decide to be passive-aggressive and eventually ask your neighbors to keep the chickens out of your yard, move onto section Y.

G. The chicken was delicious, the best doro watt you’ve ever tasted. But two days later you’re doubled over with a bacterial infection. Turns out, you were unaware that the chicken you thought you cooked for 3 hours only cooked for 1—the electricity, on its daily cycle, was turned off (and, hence, your stove as well), and you didn’t notice.

You must seek medical help. Move onto section H.

H. You take a bumper-car-like taxi to the nearest health center. When the bajaj comes to a stop, you assume the driver misunderstood. This is a…health center? you wonder. You approach the towering metal sign that lists all the offices. There is not a single English character printed on the sign, but your spouse can read the foreign alphabet. When he pronounces one of the lines, it sounds vaguely similar to something your neighbor said to you before you left. So you try that one. After waiting in various lines until you figure out the proper one, the doctor finally sees you. You mime to each other and use a translator (your Peace Corps doctor) via cell phone. The doctor prescribes Claritin and a Rabies shot. You refuse the needle—Really, sir, I don’t see how Rabies comes into all this—but the Claritin somehow works. You feel well enough to go back to work. As you walk on the school’s campus, one of your favorite teachers flags you down. She’s a sweet girl, younger than you, and she does a great job teaching the preschoolers. She begins crying, telling you she gives most of her salary to her parents, and asks you to give her money so she can quit teaching and begin her singing career.

Choose your own adventure! If you decide to become her financial sponsor and agent, move onto section I. If you kindly explain to her, Salary yallan; fakadana iya (There is no salary; I am a volunteer), move onto section Z.

I.  Funding the ex-preschool teacher’s singing career worked out better than you thought. You get a lifetime supply of the latest Tigrigna jams, along with bonus tracks of the ABC song. While overseeing the production of one of her new music videos (which involves four men in matching bright blue shirts and white pants shaking their shoulders in a grassy field), Ethiopia’s most beloved pop start spots you. It’s Teddy Afro! He says, Hey ferengi. Be in my music video.

Choose your own adventure! If you shrug and say Ishy (okay), move onto section J. If you’d rather have no part in this, your adventure ends here.

J. Teddy Afro’s music video that has you cameoing on a camel beneath a waterfall is a huge hit. It’s not only played in various cafes throughout Ethiopia, but it’s also playing in Indy’s Major Restaurant and Cleveland’s Empress Taytu. Your family is so proud of the talents that have brought you this far. Even prouder is the Ministry of Education, who views the video during a tea break. The Minister calls up the government, and one month later, you are elected the first American Prime Minister of Ethiopia. The only condition is you must rule from atop the famous camel.

Your unforgettable adventure ends here—for the time being.

W.  You’ve met your nephew and your name is on the all-nighter-swap schedule while your sister is in the hospital. You’re babysitting and cooking and helping them in every way you can. And it’s lovely. But you’re also homeless, jobless, carless, and wiping away tears whenever you get distracted enough to think about it. A dream deferred. In your cramped childhood bedroom, you’re missing your 3-bedroom villa with its expansive, tropical, and parrot-type-bird-filled yard. You crave injera and watt for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and this surprises you. You have few people to speak Tigrigna with—your spouse, and the staff of Indy’s Major Restaurant. The nighttime sounds of ambulances don’t quite compare to the hyenas. Your next item on the life plan is your spouse finishing his doctoral degree, but he hasn’t been in country to renew his GRE tests; neither has he begun applying to schools. You’ll have to tread water together for at least another year, doing something you never planned on or wanted. But at least you’re home, with family.

Your adventure ends here.

X. You are home in the USA’s comfortable embrace, drinking apple cider and eating green beans and everything else you’ve missed. Today you washed and dried your clothes in a machine. Immediately following your shower, when you scratch your wet arms, your fingernails no longer come away black (a sign that you’re living on paved roads). But five times a day your mind and heart feel sick. You’ve never started something you didn’t finish, with the exception of one batch of gingerbread cookies in ninth grade: the first time your pubescent nose met that unbearable scent of molasses. (You gagged into a scarf and turtleneck and called your best friend Elizabeth to come over and finish baking for you.) You’ve always been stubborn, reluctant to give up. How could you have left the grandest adventure of your life unfinished? You blew it. Hopefully you’ll forgive yourself—eventually.

Your adventure ends here.

Y. You never do get around to giving the neighbors an ultimatum: either they keep their chickens out of your yard, or they help you build a fence. Hereafter, your garden with its compost soil and fertilizer (thanks to your spouse’s newly-acquired composting skills) yields no fruit. There are no cucumbers—and hence, no pickles—or radishes, or snow peas, or zucchini, or dill, or mint, or cilantro in your future. Your gums start bleeding, and Where There is No Doctor tells you it may be scurvy, from lack of vitamins.

You must seek medical help. Move onto section H.

Z. She looks stunned and the tears stop. Did you—a ferenji—just say you had no money? Is it possible? She looks up at the sky. Is it falling? Yes, it is. The sky is falling on top of you, and you smile with relish—Henny Penny’s cousins who stole your tomatoes are getting their just desserts.

Your adventure ends here.