Endurance

This is how an expert sufferer looks with
a 102 degree fever on a 110 degree day.

 If there's one thing Peace Corps has taught me these last sixteen months its perseverance. How to put up with inconvenience, deal with difficulty, and keep going despite any amount of pain, discomfort or misery. To accept any circumstance and continue on regardless, because most of the time that's the only option I've got. I never would have made it up Kilimanjaro without these lessons. I don't know what I would have done (sat down and cried?), but I wouldn't have been able to put one foot in front of the other and continued to the summit between bouts vomiting and diarrhea without the endurance I've learned here. I can endure a double-ended intestinal assault on a 60k bike ride, 8 hours in a cramped vehicle suffocating in gasoline fumes and body odor, or an infestation of spiders (or earwigs, or biting ants, or scorpions), with a resilience I never thought I possessed. In short, I am an expert in misery. Acknowledging it, coping with it, moving through it and accepting it as an inevitable part of life in Africa. Thats not to say its always easy, or that all suffering is created equal. For instance, I find it much easier to spend a rainy night squatting over a hole in the ground expelling all the fires of hell than to endure the millionth "xonknop" (red-ears) from a stranger in a country where I'm trying so hard to fit in. Not all trials are handled in equal grace, but none the less they are handled. It is somehow comforting to think, during a bout of illness or a period of abuse, that "this isn't the worst thing that will happen to me in Senegal." I don't know why that helps, but it does. I can't possibly allow myself to go to pieces over something if I know there is worse yet to come. What doesn't kill me only makes me stronger, and Senegal hasn't managed to kill me yet!