Mental Health Update

Well I'm a little over 6 weeks into my service now and I thought I should give y'all, and myself really, a little evaluation of my metal health.  Don't worry it won't be as boring as it sounds.  I'm at the training center in Thies again after just 6 weeks at site and it really is kind of surreal.  The shift from PCT to PCV is huge mentally and being back here is showing me how much happier I am now than I ever was during PST.  Looking back at journal entries and blog posts from those first few months its a little embarrassing how much I was freaking out.  For example when I first got here I was absolutely terrified of leaving the training center to walk around Thies, and now that just seems absurd.  Initially I was willing to get ripped off rather than actually try to bargain because bargaining was uncomfortable.  Yeah now not so much.  In fact now I will argue at length in order to get the price down by just a couple hundred CFA, less than 50 cents. Also I used to just smile when kids called me Toubab or asked me for money.  Now I tell them they’re rude and ask them for money.  The list goes on and on. 

I think the big difference now is that I’m past the giant wall of swearing in and I can actually see what my life is really going to be like.  I have to say starting to plan projects does wonders for increasing one’s perception of self-efficacy.  The little things help too, like not having to live out of a suitcase or being able to cook food for myself if I’m tired of rice and fish.  Those who know me well know that I’m a bit of an old man sometimes, so it’s also been nice not being around so many people and being able to go to sleep when I want. You may think that’s lame, I think it’s amazing.  My hut has become my little cave of restful solitude and I already miss it.

Don’t get me wrong things are definitely challenging, but now they’re challenging with a somewhat visible purpose to life which helps make things more bearable.  Other things are just purely frustrating though like having the Alhum driver blatantly overcharge you by 500CFA.  I knew the appropriate fare and I knew he was ripping me off so I told him so, and then proceeded to argue for a while until I got frustrated and may have insinuated that he was being racist.  There was also the time over thanksgiving where a cola nut seller grabbed my broom, I had just bought a broom, and wouldn’t let go unless I bought 2 kilos.  Yeah I started in French then switched to Seereer and then finished in English because neither of those previous languages got my point across.  It was pretty funny though because when I switched to English he started copying everything I said.  I made him say some pretty unfriendly things about himself.  Ok so maybe my mental health isn’t 100% perfect but the more comfortable I get here the more I can’t stand people being disrespectful to me.  I personally think that making the cola nut man say he was an ugly rude disrespectful stupid man was good for my mental health.  I also like my new tactic for dealing with people who call me Toubab.  I turn around and call them African. I did this to a group of Moto drivers in Kaolack and they loved it.  This is something I never would have imagined doing when I first got to country. I’ve grown so much :-). 

It really does make me happy though looking at how comfortable I’ve become.  It feels cool to be totally fine with walking around a crazy third world city and crack jokes in the local language.  That’s freakin cool!  How many Americans in the entire world do that? Not many and call be arrogant but I’m pretty proud of that.  I’ve certainly come a long way from that first week of wanting to get right back on the plane.  I have a long ways to go for sure, but right now as I take stock on how far I’ve come, I think I’ve done alright.  Those are my musings for the night.  Stay tuned for pictures of Thanksgiving, All Vol, and IST.

Cheers,

Garrison

Laughter and Grief

If you really want to know a culture look at two things, how they laugh and how they grieve.  The laughter will show you their joy and the beauty of their humanity, and the grief will show you how much they really value that joy as the gaping hole that is the absence of a human life throws into sharp relief what has been lost.  The Senegalese laugh hard.  They are always smiling and seemingly ever ready to take joy from the world around them.  A world which in all honesty often gives them little to be joyful about.  This absolute love of life means that the Senegalese grieve hard as well.  Loss of life is absolutely devastating to them and they grieve it like nothing I've ever seen.  The men sit quietly weeping while the women wail.  I've experienced few things in my short life as primal as the Senegalese funeral of a young man killed in a car accident that I went to this past week.  And that's all I have to say about that. 

Tabaski, Abraham and God

Bon Tabaski!  For those of you who may be a little out of the loop, Tabaski was Nov. 17^th and I gotta say it was quite a good day; from the perspective of me as a human that is.  From the perspective of a sheep it was a very very baaaaaad day.  Sorry I had to.  For those of you still out of the loop Tabaski is the celebration of God providing a Ram to be sacrificed so that Abraham didn’t have to murder his son.  There are more euphemistic ways to say that, but why ruin the vivid imagery.  Christianity and Judaism have this same story of Abraham and Isaac but in Islam it’s an especially big holiday.  Every family buys a Ram or two or three, depending on finances, and has a truly grand old feast.  For weeks leading up to today you would be hard pressed to find a single car traveling in Senegal that didn’t have at least one sheep strapped to the roof.  Like I said bad day to be a sheep.  My Tabaski though was awesome.  I’m still stuffed.  It started out with a trip to the mosque in the morning for prayer and ritual.  I don’t really know what was said, but it was nice.  At the end of the prayers everyone got up and shook each others hands while asking for forgiveness for anything they may have done to the other person.  I really liked this part.  We need more things like this in the states.  After the mosque we went into the town and started killin some sheep.  The Imam killed the first two and then everyone proceeded to their respective houses to kill the rest.  I personally watched 7 sheep die today.  It wasn’t pretty.  Anyone who eats meat though, I suggest that you watch an animal be slaughtered at least once so that you can be an informed meat eater.  Too many people are in denial about where their meat comes from.  Let me fill you in.  It comes from cute animals with soft petable fur and adorable faces who have mothers.  There you go.  Now accept that and keep eating.  I did.  The food was truly delicious and my family even invented a new way to torture me with it.  They call it “Advance”.  This lovely bit of maniacal generosity involves feeding me and a few other people our own bowl first since there are lots of people and they want to make sure we get enough.   Of course when the second round of food comes no one knows that I have already eaten, so they still force massive amounts down my throat.  Maniacal generosity indeed.  After lunch we sat around and chatted, drank tea, met relatives who came in from out of town, and generally basked in the glory of the day.  Twas a truly good day.  Summary over.

I should probably leave it there but I’m going to do the stupid thing and add in personal commentary on the subject of religion.  I know I’m stupid for doing this, but I can’t keep my mouth shut.  Disclaimer: this is a commentary on the story of Abraham and Isaac, which belongs to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and thus I am not commenting on any specific faith, just faith in general.  Ok bases covered, here we go.  I do not like the story of Abraham and Isaac one bit.  It strikes me as an example of both man and God at their absolute worst.  What is there to celebrate about this story? Should we be celebrating that a man was so devoted to God that he was willing to murder his own son? Or maybe we’re celebrating that God was merciful and saved his disciple… from a problem that he himself created.  This story is down right scary.  I’m not naive I understand what is being celebrated: God rewarding devotion.  I understand it perfectly well, I just think that it’s completely wrong. 

Devotion in and of itself is not bad.  Deference to something greater than oneself is beautiful and can lead to great things like humility and selflessness.  It seems logical though that one should reserve such reverence and devotion for something that truly deserves it.  Say God for example.  People generally accept that God is worthy of devotion.  People have said of God that he is perfect goodness and love.  Well now that does sound pretty nice.  If God is perfectly good and people out of their own free will decide to worship him because of this, well that’s all well and good.  The problem comes with this story of Abraham and Isaac where God decides to test that devotion.  God commands Abraham to take his only son to the top of a mountain and offer him up as a sacrifice.  Abraham, my dearest most faithful disciple, murder something you love for me.  Murder your own flesh and blood.  In my name, the name of perfect goodness and love, do something of unspeakable evil.  Do you see what I’m getting at? Any God that requires and tests devotion is inherently unworthy of having it in the first place.  Its petty and childish and exactly the kind of behavior that would get you a time out in kindergarten.  In one of my favorite plays “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” (Great job Chico State Theatre Dept!) one of the characters asks if God’s love is conditional, “because if it is then that love is rendered utterly false”.  If God loves unconditionally then there is no reason to require or test devotion.  Some might say that God was teaching, showing the world that complete devotion leads to great rewards.  This may be so, but murder is a rather despicable way to teach a lesson.  Perhaps the ends justify the means.  That too has been said before. Yes in fact, right before some of the worst atrocities in history.  God cannot be an ends justify the means kinda guy.  If he is then he isn’t perfect goodness and love, he’s just someone with a lot of power and that is something to which no one should be devoted.  Am I saying no one should be devoted to God, no of course not.  It is neither my place nor my desire to do so.  I’m simply saying that in my opinion both Abraham and God made some big mistakes here, and I hope they’ve learned from them.  Maybe that’s the true lesson here. 

Having a Good Day in Senegal

Hannah had a bit of a hard day yesterday (She got stuck behind a pretty brutal car accident for 2 hours) so she told me to have a good day for her.  Here are my subsequent texts in response to that challenge.  Its just too good not to post :-).

#1 Commencing good day. Step one wake up. Check.  Step two listen to Mika (Blue Eye's-Touches You). Check!

#2 Step three drive to the end of the peninsula to catch a car before it fills up and see the ocean on both sides of me separated by only 50 meters. Check!

#3 Step four wait for an hour in Mbour for a car and then barely get a place (middle in th back) probably just because you're white. Check and win!

#4 Step five get out of the car while they strap baggage onto the top and run into 4 of your friends catching another car after their language seminar. Check!

#5 Step six listen to Mika again in the car followed by a bunch of classical music for the play I'm writing in my head. Check.

#6 Step seven get lost in Kaolack at night, find the regional house, cook some spaghetti, and eat someone elses cake while losing miserably at scrabble... Check!

Step eight involves a phone call to the aforementioned girl but that's far too cutesy and gross to post in a blog.  So why am I posting this random sequence of texts.  Well this day could have been really bad.  For all intensive purposes it wasn't a particularly great day: it was long, and stressful and tiring.  But because I had the mindset that it was going to be good and had to be good no matter what, all of that stuff just became amusing.  We can't control the world around us, but we can choose how we react to it.  I'm no Zen master and on other days I will not be so level headed, but its nice to remember that sometimes you can just choose to have a good day regardless of what actually happens.  There's my wisdom for the day.  Now everyone go have a good day for me :-)

Cheers,
Garrison

My Theatre Company

Fair warning this post has absolutely nothing to do with Senegal.  Ok now that that’s out of the way let’s talk about theatre.  One of my biggest concerns with joining the Peace Corps was how taking a two-year break from theatre would affect my career.  I’ve been keeping track of my friends and their professional progress over the past few months and a few days ago I randomly got really jealous.  In the throws of this mysterious bout of jealousy I voiced my career concerns on facebook.  That’s a bit of a euphemism.  I actually posted a pessimistic status update saying, “I wonder how far behind I’ll be after 2 years in the Peace Corps”.  My friends rightfully shot down this unwarranted pessimism and reminded me that I’m right where I need to be.  I couldn’t agree more.  That being said though I want to share my aspirations here so that, if nothing else, I can put them out of my head and focus on the task at hand.  Here we go:

Most of my theatre friends know that my overall goal is to start a theatre company of my own.  Few people though actually know the extent of my goals… they’re a little ambitious.  Looking at the theatre world today I see the best, most creative, and most valuable work coming not from Broadway or LA, but rather professional regional theatres around the country.  One of the best examples of this is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland Oregon.  This complex of three theatres offers a diverse season of professional shows in repertory so that on any given weekend you could see 5 different shows in one place for very reasonable prices.  This ability to see so much high caliber theatre in one place has made Ashland a tourist destination and as a result the town is flourishing.  America doesn’t need another actor trying to make it on Broadway or in LA, god knows there are too many already, but it does need more professional regional theatres, and that is what I am setting out to do. 

This is going to sound arrogant I know, but I don’t just want to make another professional regional theatre, I want to redefine altogether what regional theatre can be and its purpose and value in America.  I told you it was going to sound arrogant, but stay with me.  I am envisioning a theatre company that is completely unified with and nourishes its community artistically, culturally, financially, educationally, environmentally, and physically.  Let’s break that down:

• Artistically:  First and foremost this company needs to offer the highest caliber theatre possible.  It would produce a variety of works both classic and contemporary in repertory and would support the production of new plays through workshops and full fledged premiere productions.  This would ensure that even though the company is regional it would still be relevant to the rest of the theatre world and contribute to its evolution. 
• Culturally:  This company would truly be a part of its community with dedicated social areas such as a restaurant/ jazz lounge, coffee shop, book store, and beautiful outdoor areas.  It would be an open space for the community to gather regardless of that particular evening’s theatrical offerings.  Beyond simply a place to gather it would also be a place to investigate local issues by offering workshops in social community based theatre as a means to open forums of discussion on relevant issues in the community. 
• Financially: Too often theatres take from their communities financially through constant calls for donations.  This company would support its community financially by bringing in tourism and boosting the local economy. 
• Educationally: This company would offer extensive educational outreach programs such as youth theatre classes, free performances for local school children, small scale tours of performers to surrounding areas, and performance opportunities when available for local children and young adults. 
• Environmentally: Every theatre built by this company would be certified LEED Platinum and every show would strive to eliminate waste in all aspects of production.  For some reason the theatre world sees it fit to investigate the worlds problems and claim high moral authority while taking more than its fair share of world resources.  It is far from convenient or cheap to make sure that sets are recyclable and energy use is minimal, but we cannot pretend to be exempt from our obligation to reduce our carbon footprint just because we’re making “art”. 
• Physically: This company would literally feed the surrounding community through the implementation of a substantial organic rooftop farm.  This might sound indulgent and in no way theatrical, but what better way is there to connect with a community than to feed it?  The United States is arguably the most prosperous nation in the world, and yet there are people who cannot afford to provide proper nutrition to their families.  Beyond just this there is a crisis in America of centralized food markets that require unsustainable amounts of energy to produce and transport food.  America needs more locally produced organic food in order to feed future generations in a sustainable way. Food from this farm would be provided free of charge to local schools and low-income families, and of course to the restaurant/ jazz bar. 

This is not the model of traditional professional theatre and it will not be as profitable, but there is just something fundamentally right about theatre feeding its community so completely.  It harkens back to the reason that theatre exists in the first place, to bring communities together to try to understand the world just a little better.  The traditional model of professional theatre may investigate the world, but it doesn’t bring a community together.  I feel like I don’t deserve to make theatre if the only point is to make theatre.  There has to be something more, and this feels like something valuable. 

Like I said I’m a little ambitious, but here’s the real kicker.  I need probably between 20 and 40 MILLION dollars to build this complex of theatres.  So if you know any billionaires who are loose with their money, forward them this post ;-).  I don’t mean to be flippant.  In all seriousness I have a lot of work to do before I can even think about building a theatre.  Firstly I need to learn how to make some seriously good theatre and that probably means grad school.  All of this is for not if the theatre sucks.  I also need to find the right town to do it in and gather some pretty talented and dedicated technicians, designers, business people, actors, directors, stage managers and friends.  I think maybe I’m a little selfish with this project, because I want it all.  I want to be able to do professional theatre while living in one place and having a family, I want to be able to feel like I’m contributing to my community, and most of all I want to hang out with my friends.  Why do theatre with strangers when I can do it with my favorite people in the world?  Just sayin.  Steppenwolf did it, why can’t we?  Ok there are a million reasons why we cant, and maybe its impossible, but what good ever came from only doing things that are possible.  People said that it was impossible to dig Africa out of poverty but here we are.  Huh.  I guess this post is about Senegal too.  I honestly have no idea how this is going to happen, but its something that I can see dedicating my life to create.  I think it’s worth it.  There we go Universe, I put it out there, now mull it over for a few years and I’ll get back to you when I’m done here.  See you then!

Cheers,

Garrison 

P.S. Theatre 150X kids so at the end of the semester you’ll have a project where you have to write a manifesto of what you think theatre should be… take it seriously, you may try to make it happen for real some day.