Burkina By Bobby

Spiky hair. Look at all that spiky hair. Holy God, there is so much spiky hair.

This is the internal dialogue I have with myself as I entered a nightclub on Chicago’s North Side this past December. All the girls were made up and wearing black pants; the guys were nearly as made up and wore colorfully muted dress shirts. Surely this was omnipresent before I left? What with all the talk of the modern man, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and so on. If anything, the novelty of the metrosexual was waning, wasn’t it? … Or did it transcend the novel to become normal?

Either way, I hope I am not mistaken for a metro-phobe – far from it.

Before leaving for Burkina Faso to join the Peace Corps I had shopped at their stores: Express and Banana Republic - I even owned square towed, ankle length boots with zippers. Zippers! Hell, I even had a metrosexual over to my house. His name was Mark. Is that something a metro-phobe would do? So I am no bigot, I mean... I have metrosexual friends.

Flaming metrosexual friends with leather wrist accessories.

Sure, I might have had the occasional dinner of pizza bagels and dry Apple Jacks with a Keystone Light, but that was the exception to the rule. I’m no dilettante to the art of knowing how to appreciate the finer things. So, why was I so taken aback by this posh scene and the legions of spiky haired young men? My first impulse was to blame the uniformity of it all. Sometimes an outsider unfamiliar with the dressing habits and cultural insularity of these people, might miss the nuance and perceive uniformity where it doesn’t exist.

But, I couldn’t be an outsider. These peop … Oh- My-God. Look at me using phrases like “these people”; perhaps spending two years away from my young, urban and professional friends has made me an outsider and what’s worse, insensitive to their culture. “THESE PEOPLE” are exactly that: People. Choosing a Metro-American lifestyle makes them no better or worse than you or I - If it is even a choice in the first place?

If you are asking yourself, “Bobby, Why are you writing about this and is it going anywhere?”

Or you’re concerned that this is one of those ‘Gee… things are different in America and isn’t that strange because I’m American and it shouldn’t be strange, but it is strange, and gosh - isn’t that funny?’ blogs.

Fear not, astute reader.

You see, that world I visited in December is the world to which I am returning. My friends and their friends are those urbane and well dressed bankers, analysts/ or whatever other (two years past entry level) position one holds after college. While I am proud of the work I have done and I think it is important, I have worn flipflops to work for the last two years and my appearance reflects a different social scene than most young 20 somethings.

In Short, I look like a disheveled Meg Ryan with a beard.

Fitting in is not the most important thing. I have an appreciation in being unique and apart from the rest of the crowd. However, I imagine that this appreciation is seriously tested when you show up to a job interview and are greeted with the plastered on smile and questioning eyes of a recruiter who is wondering why this bike messenger didn’t leave the package at reception.

All returned Peace Corps Volunteers make this readjustment, although with varying degrees of success. This ‘readjustment process’ is a popular topic of conversation among volunteers. We discuss what we hope to do, what will be tough to get used to and somewhere in that conversation we pay homage to the two legendary volunteers who left Burkina Faso a year before we arrived. Even though we never met them we know and applaud their story of “readjusting” to life in the United States.

Upon their return to the States these volunteers’ families or friends wrote to Elle magazine and told about ‘their arduous service of helping alleviate abject poverty in Burkina Faso.’ To paraphrase the article “These brave women went out each day in the hot African sun armed with little more than their wits and greasy sunscreen.” We find out later that this led to clogged pores, split ends and some sun damage. The girls were then assisted in the readjustment process, and then the article essentially becomes a makeover story that we have all grown so accustomed to.

It is this point in our conversations, after recounting the awe-inspiring lore of these volunteers, that the guys will lament the fact that this sort of thing couldn’t happen to them. It’s a pretty bold move for a guy to write into a magazine like Elle or Cosmopolitan and request a makeover and most of us decide we lack the nerve. We resign to the fact that we will not grace Oprha’s make-over chair or the pages of the magazines that the female volunteers leave strewn about our transit house.

But this must be the narrow view! Surely, those guys with waxed chests and hair full of wax pomade are evidence for the existence of similar publications for men … They must be getting this advice from somewhere. While they might be misconstruing some of the things that they are reading, magazines from Esquire, GQ, Men’s Health, to magazines like Playboy, FHM, and Maxim all offer advice directed at a gentleman’s upkeep.

It would be nice to get into one of these magazines - To write a short article on what it is like to readjust to the fast paced, highly stylized United States of America after living in its antithesis for two years. Also, it would be nice to get a new suit and a haircut before I step into that interview. But even if I don’t grace the pages of Esquire magazine or go down in the annals of Peace Corps Burkina history, this transition is going to take place.

If it is similar at all to the transition I made when I came to Burkina Faso, it will be similar in the sense that I will hold onto some beliefs and ways of doing things and I’ll let others go in exchange for a new approach. I have been trying for a long time to enumerate exactly what it is that I picked up or let go in Burkina. Each individual ‘way of doing’ something seems trivial by itself, but accumulated over time they form a pattern. Amenities become less important I become lower maintenance and more grateful for what I have; becoming more adventurous, trying things for the sake of assimilation, accepting and trying to understand the things I can’t change, appreciating different methods of reasoning, while having conviction in my own methods.

When you amerce yourself into a new culture, little by little, the ‘way you do things’, begins to influence the ‘way you see things’ and I suppose this is tantamount to changing as a person. I always cringe when I hear someone say, “such and such experience was life changing and made me a completely new and different person.” I do not believe that someone can be separate from their past. No amount of time in West Africa could undo the lessons learned from my parents and 13 years in the public schools of Peoria, just as living a faster paced life in Chicago will not replace or overshadow growing up from ages 21 to 24 in Burkina Faso. In the end, making sense of how all these experiences and ideas work together is what it means to readjust.

It will be interesting to see what I pick up and what I leave behind, when I transition back to living in the States. I imagine that I will have stopped blogging about Africa by the time I realize what has actually changed. So, feel free to write an editor of one of those fashionable male magazines and maybe we can read my story in Esquire detailing what it feels like to have spiky hair and how strange it is to readjust to my former life in the States because it is so different from West Africa and … gosh - isn’t that funny?