Transitioning

Since being pulled out of my site in June, I have been in the middle of one of the biggest transitions of my life. Ask any Peace Corps Volunteer, and they will tell you that the first month or two at site is the hardest. You are dropped into a place where you don’t know much of the language (except what little you learned during training… unless you’re a Deaf Ed volunteer, in which case you know nothing), don’t know where anything is located, and only know the one person who brought you to your site. Those first few months are therefore spent trying to learn some practical phrases in the local language, making friends, and figuring out which lady sells the best street food.

I went through this process back in August 2018. I arrived in Wa and, after deciding I didn’t care much for the person who brought me to site (he was a little too sexist for my taste), realized I had zero friends. Thankfully, I made friends with Christie, the only deaf teacher at my school, who let me trail her around town so I could learn where to buy anything I needed and welcomed me to her house for dinner so she could teach me how to cook (but ended up just doing everything for me anyway). Because of her, I made several other friends in Wa-- both hearing and deaf-- and started to feel like I was part of a community. After a few months, I could make my way around town blindfolded, was learning some local spoken language, and had people I regularly visited and felt like I could be myself around.

Moving to my new site in the Northern Region, I have had to go through the integration process all over again. I went from knowing so much about my former town to knowing absolutely nothing about my new one-- I had no friends, knew no local language, and had no idea where to go to find things. The first two days at my new site, I was so overwhelmed, I couldn’t even bring myself to leave my house. I did not know how to get to town from my house, and I was worried I’d get lost. If I went outside, I’d be greeted in Dagbani, my new language, and be laughed at for not knowing how to respond. Who would I even greet? To whom could I go to recount my adventures at the end of the day? No one came to mind. I felt alone and lost.

This became better when I began work at my new job. My boss became like a big brother to me, and I could easily talk to him because he knew the same Ghanaian Sign Language I used to communicate with my friends in Wa. He is brilliant, so we had (and continue to have) really great conversations about the culture of my new region and deaf rights, something he is really passionate about. Like Christie, he took it upon himself to show me around town and even went with me to purchase a bike, which he rode around proudly (with me on the back) greeting every person he knew on the way back to my house that day.

I also began to make friends with the security guards stationed at the government buildings near my house. If my boss is the big brother I never had, these men have become my fathers, teaching me a little Dagbani, helping me when my bike starts giving me problems, and gifting me with yams and tomatoes from their farms. Recently, they even gave me the sweetest compliment: they told me they loved how “simple” I was. At first, I was taken aback, as “simple” in the U.S. is not something you want to be called. Here, however, it means you are joyful and see the best in things most people complain about. It’s moments like this that make this whole transition seem more worthwhile.

I will admit, I experienced another low in my transition process during my mid-service training in August. We were supposed to give presentations about what we were working on at site, and while everyone else was just hitting their stride, I-- and my fellow Upper Westers-- was back at square one. Everyone had projects they were working on, had figured out creative ways to better engage their students, and had host country nationals they could accurately call their best friends. Meanwhile, I was not sure what my work would look like at my new job (my NGO has never had a PCV, so it took some time to figure out what work they wanted to give me) and I barely had any close connections at my new site. Additionally, it was difficult to talk about moving sites without choking up, so I felt further alienated from my peers, who talked about their sites with such joy and passion.

However, while MST was a low for me, things have gotten so much better. I am beginning to see some of the positive effects of my move. For one, switching to a job involving more advocacy, something I have been passionate about for a long time, has been more fulfilling for me. Additionally, I have made some new friends out of the transition that I might have never gotten so close to if we had not gone through such a rough time together.

I will admit, I still have my rough days. There are times when I think about my deaf friends in Wa, or my students, or my Upper West PCV community and I get teary-eyed. However, I am working on keeping as much contact with those people as possible. I schedule video calls with Christie and my “husband” Mubarick a few times a month, I message the few WaDeaf students who have phones to keep up with how they are doing, and regularly check up on my “Upper Best” family. I go out of my way to make friends with people at my new site from Wa and enjoy talking to them about how great Upper West is. After all, according to my security guard friend Zak, “even if you move far away, you always have a special connection to your first home.”

I think he’s right. No matter how far away I go, and even if I never get the chance to go back to Wa, it will always have a special place in my heart.