My Own Personal Coney Island Cyclone

Emotional roller coasters are an interesting thing. Even if you know you’re on one, the highs and lows still take you by complete surprise every time. On a real roller coaster you can see the drops coming. You feel yourself getting tenser and tenser on that first, long upward climb, dreading and welcoming that moment when you’re at the top and all you have left to do is to take the plunge. You’re ready for the fall. You live for it. But when it comes to emotional roller coasters, you can never be ready for the falls and they are not even close to anything you could call fun. You can be cruising along all content when all of a sudden you are falling without warning, not knowing the reason why or how long the fall will be.

Over the past few days, I found myself on such a fall. As much as I love Peace Corps, this job can be incredibly difficult in the sense that you rely almost entirely on other people to accomplish your work. As much Tigrena as I know, it isn’t near enough to accomplish things on my own. So when my counterpart is busy, as he often is, I spend lots of time wandering the city and trying to find something to do. My counterpart has been incredibly busy lately and so I accomplished very little at work. Most of my friends were also busy, and so I spent a good part of the time just hanging out by myself. Now don’t get me wrong. I always have a lot of free time and I usually enjoy time with myself. But the past few days were much slower than the norm, and I was running out of ways to entertain myself. By Sunday, I was out of things to do, and beginning to feel pretty… how do you say... “blah”. I was unmotivated, incredibly bored, and had little idea of how to pull myself out of my funk. I tried to shake it off, but in the end I just went to bed and figured I’d wake up feeling better the next day…

But Monday, I felt even worse. I had one of those days where I woke up and just knew my day was going to suck. Unfortunately, this time it actually did. I accomplished nothing at work, missed all my friends and family in the US a lot, couldn’t focus and did terrible during my Tigrena lesson, and was just tired and cranky all day long. By late afternoon when my counterpart called to cancel our trip into the field the next day, I was done. I had done little to no real work for several days now, and I was becoming incredibly frustrated with doing nothing. I went home and shut myself in my room so that I could wallow in self pity to make myself feel better. Fortunately for me, my family decided they wouldn’t let me and bugged me for several hours until I finally began to lift a little out of the funk I’d been in. By nightfall I was laughing and no longer a sourpuss, and, while I still had no idea how I was going to accomplish any work this week, I was determined to try. They always say that the early bird gets the worm, so I set my alarm for 530 and decided I was going to go for a sunrise hike the next day to see what animals I could record for my inventory.

The hike yesterday was the best decision I could have made. I don’t know how I can ever live without mountains again, because the majesty of mountain peaks, gorges, and valleys in the early morning light is unparalleled. I hiked for over 2 hours, watching the colors of my surroundings change from shadows full of mystery to vivid greens, blues, browns, and greys that I knew held the secrets of life. I sat and listened to the birds waken, singing their songs of thankfulness and happiness to the sun for returning to warm them. I felt the trees and rocks around me begin to stir, groaning and stretching from lying still for so long during the night. And I watched the river race noisily over the rocks, taking the knowledge whispered to it by the mountain it originated in to an unknown destination miles from where I was. And as I sat there watching, hearing, and listening to all these creative things that really only existed in my head, a phrase often quoted to us by our trainees echoed once again in my head. Just like the quiet, sleepy hike that I had somehow turned into my own rendition of Pocahontas’s “Colors of the Wind”, “this experience would only be as much as I made out of it.”

And so, with my new determination, I returned to the city to have what had to be my busiest day in Ethiopia so far. I had a productive meeting with my counterpart. I visited the high school again and finally met the environmental club teacher that I had been wanting to meet for a long time, where we made plans for me to help out with the club in the future. A teacher I met at the high school accompanied me to the Agriculture College I’d also been dying to visit, where I was given a tour and had the opportunity to establish a relationship with the vice dean with the promise that we would collaborate on projects in the future. I also visited a primary school I hadn’t yet been to and also met their environmental club leader and vice principal. By the time I went home that day, I was exhausted but happy, content with the many possibilities I had just opened up.

You see, while emotional roller coasters are difficult, they are even better than the wood and metal contraptions. While you are at the top of a real roller coaster, you aren’t looking around to enjoy the view. You are anticipating the upcoming fall, maybe even wishing you were safely on the ground again. The great thing about not seeing when the fall will come is that you have time to pause and enjoy every moment of the view at the top, a memory that will last forever no matter how many times you fall.