Monday, March 18, 2013

This Too Shall Pass


2 weeks ago, I went on a surprise vacation.  As many of you know (thanks to my tendency to obsess) I had a mysterious foot problem throughout my time in Mozambique so far.  It was getting worse (swelling and pain) so I decided to talk to the peace corps doctors.  They ordered me for the nearest x ray machine that weekend – I asked off from work for a day, and planned to be gone for 4 days.

Well, it turns out that 10 is the new 4.  After a 12 hour chapa journey and x rays and a long, educational wait in the lab waiting room (AIDS is bad, according to posters) I had a verdict: I had a formerly broken 5th metatarsal. This means that a week of daily physical therapy (which manifested itself as a foot massage and 10 minutes of ultrasound daily) would supposedly fix it.  Miracle of miracles, I think it’s actually better – which is good, because it took me 3 over-packed vans, 1 truck bed, and 15 hours to get home (a journey that should have taken 6 hours).  Despite the transportation, the week was nice.  A lot of volunteers passed through the peace corps office that week, and I was given a new best friend by peace corps – another guy who was there for the whole week of ultra-sounding as well.  It was also nice to eat meat (ALL OF THE GRILLED CHICKEN) and as I found real Oreos in a real grocery store, my faith in humanity was renewed.

Surprisingly, I waited calmly.  I only wished once that I had a functioning ipod and I didn’t take a book out to read.  This provoked a realization: It took me 6 months to get good at waiting.  Without knowing it, at some point in the past few months, I have surrendered and learned to (mostly) accept the things that I cannot change.  The world will turn, I may show up to dinner late or on time, I may get home before or after dark, I may fall off the back of a broken-down truck while the men try to push it forward.  And life goes on.  It’s a cliché in the Peace Corps:  You get good at being bored.  My level of patience and need to be constantly entertained is still in flux, so expect a progress report in the next 2 years.  But I can already report that the number of times I think “Ha de passar” (the Mozambican version of “This too shall pass”) has increased at least tenfold.  As it happens, that is exactly what the foot doctor told me about my newly reformed 5th metatarsal.

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