ku amerika

I’ve now spent the past two Independence Days in the company of government-issued friends in a dusty, faraway land. And in the months between those two fourths of July, they have taken on deeper meaning, as I regularly catch myself fantasizing about a place where things are easier: where people show up on time, where I am not a spectacle, and where I do not lie awake thinking about all the different kinds of sandwiches, unable to sleep through all the Pavlovian drool. Mostly – and quite notoriously, at this point – I cannot think of the United States without feeling a huge, swelling appreciation, and a subsurface urge to cry. Malawi has made a sentimental patriot out of me. From 5,000 miles away, I finally see how incredible we are: how rare and precious it is to come from a hodge-podge nation of mongrels held tenuously together by the ideal that we are all the same, that we are born free, that we deserve to be happy. We fail, over and over again, to live up to these ideals, but still we reach for them – and that is extraordinary.

And yet I know, on some level, that I dream of a cartoon America. In July I went back home, and I saw something with more shadows, more complexity. I heard the verdict of the Trayvon Martin case while sitting in a Burger King. The only other diners were construction workers, sitting startlingly separate and in stone-faced silence: black men at one table, white men at another. I went to a public forum where people in my small Missouri town voiced opinions about a proposed human rights ordinance that would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation – and my jaw dropped at some of the things that were said. A bevy of citizens stepped up to announce, “I’ve never seen anybody complaining of [discrimination] in our town, so it’s a non-issue. We’re wasting our time here.” I couldn’t stop thinking of Malawi, where homosexuality has long been illegal, and of how many battles we all have left to fight.

In late June, in the middle of my mid-service “what am I even doing here?” crisis, I was given an incredible gift: being one of the first people to meet the group of twenty new Peace Corps volunteers. I was with them when they experienced, for the first time, the very things I have become numb to: bumping along in the backseat of a range rover on a red dirt road, dodging goats and chickens, sensing our mere presence send ripples in every direction, leaving a trail of stares, waves, and cheers in our slipstream. They were delighted. They were enraptured. They found it beautiful. And I did too, just by seeing these Americans’ fresh reactions to this wild, wonderful place that I find so frustrating, so infuriating, so slow, so joyous, so hilarious, so warm. It was so powerful I nearly cried, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of it just now, as I hugged my family good-bye for another year, choking back a very different kind of tears in the security checkpoint.

It’s easy for us Peace Corps volunteers to paint one-dimensional pictures of America and Malawi, to pine for everything we had on the other side – but god, we have so much, in these perfect people, in these two deeply imperfect worlds, and in all the gifts scattered between them.