Burning

I think this is my third time writing this post. It’s been a few months since my last update, it’s been rather difficult to gather my thoughts these last few months. In no particular order, the Department of Government Efficiency visited Peace Corps HQ and stayed there for several weeks creating some awful anxiety, a teenager on a scooter decided to crash into my ankle as I was crossing the street sending me to Rabat and then to bed for a week, and I packed up all of my belongings and moved across town closer to work. I also think one of my counterparts I lent my chess set to sold it for drug money and then asked me for another 250dh to buy more drugs… but I digress.

Still, strangely none of it feels like it warranted an update, as it’s all been overshadowed by the move. Sure, I’ll go into detail here as to these events, but there’s something else I need to touch on at the end.

First and foremost, the Department of Government Efficiency is not a department of the government and has been making it less efficient (at least in the short term). However, when you are lead by Elon Musk you can choose whatever name you’d like I suppose. I’m honestly a bit surprised he didn’t just brand it Government-X. Regardless, DOGE arrived at PC HQ around the beginning of April, and it was a bit chaotic here for the first week. No volunteers really knew why they were there; Peace Corps is a very lean organization that sends volunteers overseas on a tight budget with often excellent exchange rates, and a few weeks in Americorps got gutted by some DOGE operatives over at their headquarters.

After a month of who-knows-what DOGE evidently saw that after COVID volunteer numbers were down, staff numbers were up, yet the budget was the same. Apparently, that was a good reason to cut some of the staff through a Reduction-In-Force program and a Delayed Resignation Program. I don’t understand all the details (none of which I have first-hand), but I think the odds of the Peace Corps staying functional are hovering around 50% right now. I had said 70% when DOGE first arrived at headquarters, 40% when the cuts were first announced, and I think it’s an even 50/50 right now. If the checks keep clearing, I keep serving.

Then, in the middle of this, as I was finalizing the details of my move, I crossed the street to a café and a kid on a scooter decided that speeding around and ignoring traffic lights was the career path he wanted to take in life. Unfortunately, that path ended right where my left ankle started. One of the benefits of being extremely visible in a foreign country is that when an idiot teenager crashes into you on the street, people come to see what happens fast. I made sure he was okay (he was fine despite pretending that his little scrapes compared to a rapidly swelling ankle that had just made intimate acquaintance with 100lbs of steel), and he left without an apology or even asking if I was alright. May he find God before God finds him.

I rested at the café for a bit before calling the medical office. The next day I was in Rabat getting an X-ray, and thankfully I had not broken any bones. However, my planned move that day had to be rearranged, and I pushed it back by about a week and a half.

I spent the last 2 days with my host father bringing everything into my new apartment. He has been an incredible help through this entire process. When we are around town he has to stop constantly to say hello to people he knows and to give them blessings. It is honestly amazing how connected and well liked he seems to be. Thanks to his help, I am all moved into my new apartment now. I estimate that I’ll have to save any spare change for about 3 to 4 months to furnish it beyond my bed, kitchen, and bathroom. It’s empty but it’s mine and that’s what matters. My upstairs neighbor is a kind older man named Said (pronounced sigh-eed) and he invited me to a lunch sometime this month, probably to try and convert me to Islam (again). I will absolutely go. I now live near my work, which will be a major help now that the midday temperatures are starting to reach the 90’s. Walking outside between noon and four is practically asking to faint, and I was not about to do the 30-minute walk twice per day in the heat.

Yet all of this feels like it is falling into the background of my life. The incident with the scooter and now the move has altered my brain chemistry in some way that I’m not quite familiar with. Things feel less certain and sure, but not in a bad way. I feel more comfortable in the uncertainty of life here, more grounded and more individual. I feel less constrained by relationships, but also more connected to those I care about.

Above all though, I am angry. It is not the kind of flaring temper from when I was a child, nor is it the storming abyss from high school and college. It’s just burning anger, I can only really compare it to the kind I see on the streets here in the eyes of the older folks. People in my city are often just angry. I could not tell you why, only that the summer promises to be miserably hot, the police are always brooding, and that the anger breaks under rain, shade, and worship.

Maybe there is just an inherent chaos in living here that makes one angry. Maybe it is the lack of control, maybe it is lack of opportunity, maybe it is just the desert sun. In my case, it’s probably just that I don’t have a girlfriend. Is it too much to ask for a clean set of teeth?

It’s not a bad or even uncontrolled kind of anger. It gets me out of bed, it gets me fed and washed, it doesn’t exhaust me or disable me. It is totally foreign to how I lived in America, yet I can’t shake the feeling that’s where it comes from in the first place.

Somewhere across the ocean seething,