On Being Alone

I think most people that work in international public health or even people who are expats in some form will agree: one of the most difficult things about doing your job in a foreign country is being alone. Access to the Internet is highly valued for this reason: you have a connection to your friends and family. If there's a bar where you can hang out with your co-workers or other expats, so much the better. (This gets tricky in countries where bars are taboo, or if your co-workers are all married with families and don't go out.) But a lot of the time, you'll be alone--you could be alone in an office, doing statistical modeling, or you could be alone at home, watching TV you don't quite understand, or you could be alone in the field, like millions of Peace Corps volunteers since time immemorial, a.k.a. the sixties. Either way, it gets hard, being alone. It's something that you have to learn how to do. And once you return to your home, you have to re-learn how to be around people.

Although my co-workers were fantastic and lovely and friendly people, they had their own lives to live and their own families to take care of once the work day was over. This meant that I was alone a lot of the time while in Bangladesh. I was the only student working at JiVitA, and I was the only foreigner in the state (as far as I could tell). I actually had an entire floor to myself in the office building where we all worked, and I could go an entire day without saying anything out loud, although usually some sort of swearing would happen throughout the course of a given day. At home, I had the entire building to myself: all three floors in Gaibandha, all six floors in Rangpur. Halfway through my stay, I looked up the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, hoping to connect with some other expats, but it turns out the US State Department cancelled Peace Corps in Bangladesh back in 2006. (When I told Becca this, she said, "That means we fixed Bangladesh. You're welcome.")

It is surprisingly difficult to be alone a lot of the time, or at least it was for me. You see stuff that you think is funny, like badly worded or misspelled or somehow ironic English, and you want to share it with others. (My favorite? A bus clearly made out of papier-mache and Bondo that had the words "CONFEDENT JOURNEY" emblazoned on the side.) Or, you see something in the field that you've never seen before and you want someone to explain it to you in the context of your own culture. Or, you see something that is very difficult or troubling, and you don't know how to process it, and you'd rather not go home and think about it by yourself. In these cases, it's good to have others to talk to and interact with. And if you don't have them, you start to develop mechanisms to get by. A lot of these are things that will make you seem insane, like talking to yourself, which I did a lot. I also downloaded a lot of TV to watch. I'd have it on in the background, even in the morning when I woke up, or at the office while I was working (I promise, I was really working). Having a routine also helped. I would get tea at precisely 10:30am and 3:30pm every day.

And one of the upsides to being alone is that you can get a lot of work done. I researched Stata code-writing libraries. I downloaded Tex on my computer with every intention of learning how to use it (I haven't yet). I trained capoeira by myself on the roof of the dormitory. I read some excellent books that randomly happened to be lying around in the dormitory: one by Kazuo Ishiguro called An Artist of the Floating World and one by Rory Stewart called The Places in Between. For a brief period I tried to watch Bollywood and Dhaliwood movies, but after seeing the movie Page 3, I cut that out. Sometimes I would randomly get up and stretch or do a handstand against the wall. I read Neuro papers that I didn't have to read. I started writing a novel with my little sister for National Novel Writing Month. I killed ants with a relentless fury. I sang to myself. I danced by myself. Mostly I wrote in my journal about how bored/tired/hot/sick/itchy I was. It doesn't make for very interesting reading.

(By the way, being by yourself also means that you don't have to be polite for anyone else. I am now really good at loud belching and picking my nose and farting. I sometimes forget that I'm not alone anymore and do these things on the bus or in lecture halls. This would be normal in Bangladesh, but that isn't quite the case in Geneva.)

I was lucky in that I had a lot of friends that I could chat online with, and they were all totally great and indulged me whining about everything that I didn't understand about Bangladesh. But after a while, it became much easier to avoid socializing altogether. Talking to someone, especially in person, seemed like a gargantuan effort, a herculean task that would leave me winded and wanting to sit down and ignore other people for a couple of hours, maybe take a nap to get my energy back. Even now, when I'm in a large group of people (especially people I don't know), I sometimes feel nervous and like I have to get out and go be by myself. This is surprising to me--it's not a common emotion for me to have. So this is an adjustment that I'm still making: although now I'm more comfortable living alone, I'm no longer in a place where I have to be.