For Whom the Bell Tolls

I am on vacation. School is over, and I am only “working” half-days at the campus. Although I have not figured out exactly what it is I am supposed to be doing there for a half-day, I show up dutifully anyway. With all of this new and luxurious free time on my hands, one would expect more to show for it. I expect more to show for it. But the only thing I have really been doing is reading, and reading like mad. I haven’t read like this, really, since I was a kid. The second I entered undergraduate school as an English major in 1998 until I graduated in 2009, I have been told what to read. Even during holidays and summer breaks, I had massive lists that I was desperately trying to cover. When I defended my dissertation and that part of my life was “over,” I felt sort of lost for a while. Then I came here, and I was too busy to even think about reading for enjoyment. The work and culture and difficulties of here overshadowed any possibility to read seriously. I managed to get a book in here or there, but not like now. Here lately I have realized why I spent eleven years of my life studying books. During this break, I have read some trash, some new fiction that was supposed to be good but wasn’t, and some new fiction that was actually quite good. I have also read some classics. I re-read For Whom the Bell Tolls, and it was better than I remembered. You read it, and it stays with you, rattling around in your heart and mind. I think it really moved me this time because in some ways it reminded me of where I am and what I am doing now.


“What right have you, a foreigner, to come to me and tell me what I must do?”—Peace Corps stresses that its mission is to share culture and help countries develop their own potential via their natural strengths and talents. Yet every single day I have this thought about myself that Pablo has about the American Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls. I feel this about myself here in Cape Verde, and I feel this attitude from people here. And of course, I don’t blame them at all; I understand it. Again, Peace Corps would argue this is not what volunteers do at all. But isn’t it? And even if Peace Corps doesn’t think we and they are doing this, the only thing that really matters is what the people of Cape Verde think….

“No. There was nothing to be gained by leaving them alone. Except that all people should be left alone and you should interfere with no one. So he believed that, did he? Yes, he believed that.” –do I believe this? Maybe. I don’t think Robert Jordan (Hemingway) means to leave a fellow human without aid, but I do think the message is to allow people to come into their own, to reject what they will and accept what they will. We want to “help,” but I am not always sure we truly understand what that means; in fact, I suspect we really have no idea…..

I will finish my service term here with the Peace Corps, but the way I will finish it is still unknown, even to me. But I do know this, “But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing.” After all, “the world is a fine place and worth the fighting for, and I hate very much to leave it.”