There’s a saying that “All stories are true, and some of them actually happened.” This has been taking on new meaning for me as I write my memoir about Peace Corps.
It’s going on ten years since I started my service in Tanzania, and seven years since I returned home with Ron. A lot happened in my 2.5 years away—not just Ron entering my life, but fundamental changes to who I was as a person and how I saw myself in the world.
When I left home, I felt estranged from American society, and I was lonely and awkward. It was in Peace Corps that I finally gained a sense of belonging, feeling myself to be normal and likable at last.
I want my memoir to be largely about those changes—about my relationships with Ron and with myself. To a large extent, the adventure I had in Peace Corps was internal.
But as I was getting ready to start writing, I realized I would face a logistical problem. I had spent hours and hours of journaling during Peace Corps, and my journals were going to be invaluable to the project. But I remembered that my journaling had largely been about these internal changes, and if I want this memoir to have substance, I need to also write about Tanzania.
It’s been so long since I’ve been in Africa, I thought. What if I can’t paint a picture of what my day-to-day life there was like? What if all I can vividly remember are conversations with Ron, and I can recall only vague descriptions of my projects, my Tanzanian friends, and the details of my life?
Shortly before starting to write, I was unnerved to realize I couldn’t remember how I used to put water in the sink in my Tanzanian kitchen.
I had no electricity or running water in my village house. My “sink” was just a wide, shallow plastic dish placed into a hole in my wooden kitchen counter.
I could remember some things: standing and washing dishes there just like with an American sink, and the way that whenever the water in the dish got dirty, I would simply lift the dish out of the counter, walk it outside, and dump the gray water onto the grass.
But then…what? Did I carry the empty dish back inside and pour water into it from a bucket? Or did I carry it out back to the water tank and fill it up there, then bring it in?
Troubled, I asked Ron this question. He helped me remember: I filled it inside.
This small incident left me fretting that I wouldn’t be able to conjure up other details, either—much less the feeling of Tanzania and village life.
But then something unexpected happened. Once I started opening up my journals, I noticed that the way I remembered Peace Corps was not the way I’d recorded it after all.
In my thousands of pages of journaling and letters, I did record many details about daily life, not just Ron and my inner struggles. I wrote about my concern for a woman I knew who went to jail, and another whose belongings were stolen during a drip across the country—women I’d forgotten about until reading my own writings about them now.
I was upset about women’s rights in Tanzania, and about the overcrowded school next door to my house. I wrote about the many funerals I attended, the first of which led me to feel accepted in the village. I described how my world was shaken when I later saw one of my best friends, one of the strongest women I’ve ever known, a shell of herself as she mourned her brother’s dying of AIDS. I wrote of my two cats, and my chickens, and the way little kids would run up to touch my head as a greeting of respect.
And I wrote about Ron—but that’s not all the way I remembered it either.
As I read through my journals, I realized that the story had become simplified in my memory. For years since Peace Corps, I’ve thought that what happened there was this: I chased Ron for the first half of Peace Corps, always wondering whether he liked me back, until eventually he did.
But in my journals, the reality comes to life in much more nuance and detail. Sometimes I wrote about ways he annoyed me, and that I wasn’t sure we were right for each other. Sometimes I was annoyed at myself for clinging to him, and I strove to not let myself get distracted from my service by my crush on him. Later, I wrote that I was realizing I loved him, and that I cared more about his wellbeing than about whether he even loved me back.
Entering into the mind of myself at age twenty-four and seeing the way I used to think, it feels almost as if I’m researching the thoughts of someone else. I would never have remembered all these details if not for my journals. I marvel at the way I used to be able to spend days on end with friends without needing space to myself. Or how I used to try on characters from movies and books, not yet understanding how to be a person all my own.
Even though less than a decade has passed since that time, my own younger mind has become mysterious to me.
I’m so grateful for the richness of these journals. They’re making me realize how inaccurate memories can be, or at least how oversimplified. I could write my memoir without the journals, and it wouldn’t be untrue. As in the saying, all stories are true—the story I’ve been telling myself about Peace Corps is meaningful and powerful in how it influences me today.
But I’m so glad, now, to have this other story, the story told by younger self as all this was happening. I will try to do her justice.
