Coming Back Part 3: Consumption

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of planning, visiting with family and friends, and traveling. It's been a great, though extremely hectic time, and we are looking forward to a few weeks now of relaxation back in north Washington before we fly out to Abu Dhabi June 9. It's been great to share stories of South Africa with people we have missed, and share anxieties and excitements about our future adventure. It's been a busy time.

I thought I would add today to some comments Tim has made recently about our culture shock. You don't expect to have culture shock in your native land, so it's really interesting to try and process what is going on. For me, consumption has been surprisingly challenging: not the consumption of food (which has for some time been a priority for me when it comes to spending), but of water, data, and other things (clothes) since we've been back.

When we moved to a small and basic 2-room building in a rural village in South Africa, I was surprised to find how much I didn't actually miss running water and indoor plumbing. Don't get me wrong--bathing was much less effective from within a large bucket, with a gallon or so of water, and without air conditioning I sometimes felt like I would die of overheating without showers and pools of cool running water at my disposal. Tim would also insert here that I was never the one responsible for carrying buckets of water from the tap to our house, a labor-intensive task. However on the whole the lack of running water was not a lot to write home about, and our pit toilet was superb by pit toilet standards (it had a door and a roof, a nice view and some privacy, some ventilation possibility, and was used mostly just by Tim and me).

I delight in baths and showers now, but still see little need for a flushing toilet. In some situations it is clearly extremely helpful, but it uses so much water, and it seems obsessively sanitary to me now to flush every single time it is used. I want to remain abstract on this point here, but in general there are some "mellow" situations where flushing a gallon of water down the toilet just seems excessive.

Similarly I had grown accustomed to extremely limited online data access while in South Africa. YouTube was not possible, and usually we used the internet without viewing any images, which would have cost us significantly as we were paying for our internet by data quantity on our meager Peace Corps living allowance. So it took a few days of being back in America surfing the web before I stopped feeling guilty for browsing randomly with all images loading. I think I am getting used to this one more quickly, but it is funny what a year of limited internet capabilities does to one's perspective.

There are other areas where I struggle to consume normally. I need to buy a lot of new clothes for my next adventure, as my style has changed over time as have the demands of my professional life. The thought of going to a nice clothing store terrifies me, however, and this is the weirdest one of all, because I am pretty sure I spent the last 2 years in South Africa fantasizing about shopping for nice clothes! In South Africa it seems I became more of a cheapskate than I already was. Tim is just going to have to desert me at a mall or outlet complex full of women's clothing stores and not get me until I spend some cash, because I am so far being very successful in resisting any luxurious, but completely necessary at this point, clothes shopping.

As we continue processing our experiences here we will try and share more in the weeks to come before we are off to Abu Dhabi where we are confident that a host of new cultural norms will surprise and intrigue us.