Hello friends and family,
So this was an incredibly slow week, so slow that I decided to pack up shop for a few days and go to the prov house in Mkushi so that something would happen. And what did I find in Mkushi? Not enough, because I’m STILL BORED.
Nothing about my predicament is unexpected. One of the unspoken commandments of Peace Corps Zambia is that, “boredom is NOT a volunteer’s best friend. It is your most reliable companion.” It finds whenever I hear Bemba that’s too fast for me to follow, or when my service drops during my dinner, right before a movie’s climax. (This happened to me about six times this week while watching Dunkirk. I still haven’t finished it.) I’ve tried escaping boredom so many times, but no amount of audiobooks, podcasts, or anime will change my fundamental situation: I’m a GenZ’er who idles hot and likes the fast-paced, high-tech American world I grew up in. Rural Zambia was always going to drive me crazy, the question is: how quickly?
Very fast, it turns out. Months ago, I forgot my phone charger on my first day at site. I turned off all of my electronics to preserve their battery and leaned into spending time with my host family and Kindle. Now, I consider myself a reader and a social person, but I was not ready to go cold-turkey with technology. I spent so much time staring at the blue sky and watching clouds creep by at a snail’s pace. It felt like the vast emptiness of the corn fields were being poured into my mind. “Mind numbing” of the highest degree.
Of course, I chose to come to Zambia and knew full well that I would get really, really bored. At the time, I saw that as a feature. During training, I told a fellow volunteer about my secret desire to be placed in the most remote of remote villages, with no cell signal at all. “If I’m gonna be here, why not get the full treatment?” I said. I am so grateful that that didn’t happen. Everyday, I thank the all-mighty lords of Peace Corps that I can stream anime from the comfort of my own hut.
I should confess that I’m partly to blame for my persistent boredom: I’ve gotten good at prioritizing and delegating tasks, so I trim my to-do lists down to the absolute essentials, then tell other people to do them for me—makes me feel like a real corporate leader. Most days, I can finish everything around lunch time. I spend the afternoons running, studying Bemba, watching YouTube, puttering around, and trying, above all, not to go insane.
We’ve all read pieces about how the technology of the modern world has robbed us of a deeper, more primal way of life. It’s not totally wrong: things like Amazon, washing machines, Instagram have made life less tiresome and boring, but at the cost of hard work that provides meaning to our lives. Suffering and boredom may not be pleasant, but they’re real.
But I can say, with confidence, that the “old way of living,” sucks. Need proof? Come to my village and ask the kids if they would like a smart phone for Christmas, or if the mom would like electricity or a stove. Boredom is becoming scarce in the modern world, but the flip side is way worse. When I’m back state-side, the first thing I plan on doing is ordering sushi from my couch and watching Netflix in 4K. And trust me, I will not be bored.