Scared of Mauritania

Ok, I am as scared as I can remember being for a long time. Not boogie man hiding in the closet scary movie scared that I feel in my throat. Sitting the night before my execution knowing I die tomorrow scared. In the pit of my stomach a physical presence that keeps me from being able to draw my breath all the way in.

When you get an invitation from the Peace Corps you have ten days to respond. If you don’t reply then they pass it on to someone else. My invitation was delivered to my parents so seven of my ten days passed before I even got to see it. I’d send them mail and ask for more time, but what’s the point? I’m either going to say yes or no and I’ll not learn anything more in another five days.

I’ve been asked to go to Mauritania. It’s a sparsely populated chunk of desert below Morocco. Their specialties are drought and malaria.

Amber spent some time going over the variety of maladies you can encounter in Africa. There are actually four kinds of parasites that cause malaria. If any of them ever get in then they never go away. You live with the little buggers and they are hopefully just not strong enough to make you sick.

Amoebas are another parasite that will try to put as much of your insides outside of you for four or five days. All you have to do is be careless with the water.

Worms too. Worms that will eat their way in between your toes if you go wading. Worms that will nest under your scalp. Worms that will infest your lungs and form cysts, but only because they need to be coughed up and swallowed to get in the blood where they really want to be.

“I am 30.” God… That just doesn’t mesh with my picture of myself. What happens if I wait til I am 30 to have kids? Everyone on my father’s side of the family has had cancer but himself and his mother. What happens if I never get to talk to my child as an adult? Never get to see their children.

I’m 24 now. I’ll be a month away from 27 when I come back from Mauritania.

I’ve always felt like I was getting ready for something. That my life was in preparation. That I was getting ready to great things… some day. I’m a kid; a college kid, right?

I feel like I am being asked to get on the adult bus. To go out and join the real world. To stop getting ready and start doing. But I don’t feel like I’m ready.

This is a cusp for Stephanie and I as well. Time to stop preparing. Time to stop being college kids with a lifetime to spend. Time to, as they say, shit or get off the pot.

And she’s sure. She can see some life in front of her with me and that makes her happy. I feel like I am grasping in the dark. I don’t feel like I am all here. Again, like there is some crucial part of me that will make everything make sense and it is just not in yet. That I just need more time to figure it out…

I am not going to wait though. I am not going to leave this country without having moved in one direction or another. I can feel very acutely that I am headed toward death and I am not going to wait on this because I am scared. If I didn’t know enough that would be fine, but I do; I just don’t want to choose.

And I don’t even know that they need me. I know that they need someone, but do they really need me? I am really good with computers. I went and checked how my computer science exit scores ranked and I am somewhere around the 96th percentile. I’m really proud of that; especially coming out of a program that ranks somewhere around the 60th percentile on average.

If you need stuff done with computers very likely I can help you. I’m still employed by the people I co-oped with (part-time working 0 hours.) If I want to I can go back there and work. They gave me two grand the day I left as incentive.

I’ve got good leads into the grad program at Vanderbilt. I really think if I can do at all well on the GRE I can get in. That’s what I’d do if I didn’t go to Africa. I really want to teach some day and I need a Ph.D. to do it.

I know that there are places that really want me. The skills that I am really good at. Not just me as a good natured willing body. I can do a fine job of teaching English off somewhere, but it feels like using a telescope as a hammer. I have a particularly good use and I would like to be used that way.

I don’t even feel for the people anymore.

For the longest time it was enough that there were people starving; people dying. I’m afraid to go there because I might get sick? What about the people who live there every day? What right do I have not to suffer? What makes me different? …

Designing algorithms is about seeing systems, recognizing their quintessential elements and figuring out an effective method to represent them.

I know that somewhere there are people starving. I know that there is nothing about me that makes me more worthy of life than those people. I know that the arbitrality of the distribution of suffering sets up instability in the system.

I used to be able to empathize with these people. Imagine myself a starving African child, or a entrepreneur in China or a Russian prostitute. It was imagination, but I could put myself in their life and see how hard the choices I faced were. How if the real me were there that the world would have shaped me into a different person.

I don’t feel connected anymore. There are just faceless statistics. Poor pitiful bodies struggling in a mire of their own making. Their humanity lost. I am afraid of connecting to them. I know that if I know that what I have is ill deserved then I may have to give it up. It’s just so easy to not think about it. To get caught up in the day to day and worrying about how I am going to take care of myself and losing sight of the rest of it.

Most of the images are kinesthetic with some visuals. It feel like how water runs downhill. That sense of a natural flow and adapting to the change in circumstances. It feel like my natural direction is to try and balance things. Try and make suffering less arbitrary; try to give people a chance.

I feel sometimes like a little steel ball bearing. I bounce around off other people and off the events of my life. I feel the weight of myself and the impulse to roll long and straight without bouncing so much. To be about something larger.

I want to make a difference. I’m facing 30 now and 50 after that and maybe 80 eventually being no more. I had a dream last night of thousands of candles in a dark room. They didn’t light the room, but only created little pinpoints of flame. Every so often one would blink out or another glow into life. Sometimes winds would blow through extinguishing great swathes.

It wasn’t sad though to see these life-flames go out. It just was. Not even “it was ok because new flames came in the places where old ones went out.” It was just ok.

I know that my flame will go out and after that time will eventually obliterate any trace that I ever was. It doesn’t matter what I do I can’t make an indelible mark on history. Given a long enough view it all goes away.

I don’t want to waste my time. I want my life to be spent well. To be about something larger than myself. I want to be about God’s business. I don’t know how to explain that to most people though because as soon as I say God they stop hearing me and start hearing their own ideas. Ideas that aren’t wrong really; just not all the way right. It works better just to not say it at all.

Still working…

Will