As most of you know, my wonderful mother just took me on vacation to the Canary Islands, a group of Spanish-owned islands off the coast of Morocco. I've been back in my village about a week now.

I'm very glad I was feeling happy with life here in Guinea before I left, because it was quite a shock to be back in the Western world again. I wasn't expecting it to be so developed in the Canaries, but Las Palmas is a regular city. There were supermarkets. Shopping districts. Historic buildings. Sushi bars. Ice cream. I even found a Baskin Robbins, and a Bennetton.

It is hard to describe the effect that all of this had upon me. It was a coming back into myself, a reminder of a life. Not quite like waking from a dream, but something similar. I had been losing perspective, cloistered away in the little world of my village. I've adapted here, learned to deal with constant miscommunication, both in terms of inadequacy of shared language and the lack of a shared cultural understanding and cultural cues. That is: we can't talk, the Guineans and I, and we rarely know what we're really saying to one another. I am on an island of one (except when I see other volunteers - then we form out own little cloistered universe of Volunteer Land). I had gotten used to the isolation and, like a constant static, had grown less aware of it.

When I found myself in the Canaries, I was still deficit in language (Spanish) but suddenly back among my own fish, culturally. The Canaries may not be my native section of the sea, but at least it is water and I could breathe it.

People didn't stare at me. I was unobtrusive, surrounded by other tourists. It was not only the color of my skin which helped me to blend again, but the entire Westernness of my being. It was almost humorous to find that my nose ring was helping people to categorize me again. It seemd like such absurdly small fine-tuning.

And I could catch someone's eye across a room. Give a gesture, a glance, or say a few words, and complete meaning would be conveyed. I took great joy in flirting, partially because of that easy feeling of wordless understanding. I knew how to signal a waiter. I knew where I was supposed to sit to wait for a bus. I was in context. And it was so much easier! And nowhere was this more apparent than with my mother, since we have 25 years of shared history. When we saw each other for the first time in the airport, we were gleeful and hugged and looked at each other for a while....but really it was just the first few seconds that were weird. Then, it was just Mom and me.

And it was me. This is so hard to explain. Anyone who has studied psychology knows that pretty much all we can say about personality is that it changes with situation. And so I am a rather different Stephanie in Africa than I am at home - I pay attention to different things, I react differently - because I am in such a different context. So, when I found myself again in the Western context, and in my family context, I found that I suddenly felt like the "old me". Anyone who has experienced a homecoming knows some of what I am talking about. But I have come home many times, and never experienced something quite as jolting.

There was also the jolt of the physical surroundings to consider. So much to look at! There was so much there! Road signs and shop signs and advertisements, stores, and city squares, sidewalks and glass windows. We have all this in Conakry (the capital of Guinea), too, but not so clean, not so much, and not so flagrantly rich. And certainly not so many choices. There are a few supermarkets in Conakry, but in the same space of shelving in the Canary Islands there are about 20 times the number of goods. Mom laughed at me the first time we went into a small superette. I stood, eyes glazed, in front of the hot drinks section. There were so many things that I could have! And I could have them at a reasonable price. Those very two facts made me want those things, although I certainly hadn't missed most of them in my village. I returned to Guinea with a suitcase full of granola and pudding mix.

This is a lesson of capitalism. By selling things back and forth, we've gained the capacity to produce great quantities of "things", and the wealth to turn ourselves towards such non-survival needs. Our survival needs have been so well-met - we have excellent health care, education, lodging (although I'll bet there are more homeless people in the U.S. than in Africa) - that we can turn ourselves towards these material goods. And we have to stay interested in these material goods, or our capitalist system won't work. But we end up with these huge volumes of choices - which movie to watch, where to shop, whether to drink Twining's Earl Grey or English Breakfast - choices that "don't really matter", but they need to be made because they're in your face, and these choices use up our precious time and energy until we're ready to go to bed at night. It seems the only way out is to divorce oneself from the inner workings of the system somewhat as my friends at Magic have done (www.ecomagic.org) but that is the choice of an alternative minority, rather than America-At-Large.

Here in my village, I make decisions as to whether to talk to this child, how best to propose my idea to an official, whether to go into town today or tomorrow and whether I feel I need spaghetti or oranges in my body right now. It's not just that life is slower here but that there are fewer choices available. What is needed and wanted is what is available - one brand of spaghetti, a few old taxis, pretty bolts of cloth - and little more. Anything beyond would be wasteful, and not used by people of such limited resources.

As I was in the bus leaving the Canaries, I cried real tears seeing the store signs pass by, and I tried to capture it all. This is my home, my own. But upon arrival at the airport in Guinea, I found my mind wandering as I looked over the plain monotony of brown dirt and sparse trees. And I realized suddenly that my mind was wandering, that I was allowed to wander. It's quiet here. Even the landscape is quiet. It's simple.

I recently got a letter from the last volunteer to have my site. She said, "after you leave Africa, you don't really remember the boring or frustrating stuff. I really miss Guinea. Life there was simple. What's different now? I have a better-paying job...".

Yet, at the same time, I miss home. I miss chocolate pudding, I miss apple pie. I want to watch re-runs of Gilligan's Island or a bad slasher film. I love this deep and complex thing which is America. I love it all the more for having been here in Africa, because I now see it for what it is more clearly. But I am also more critical.

And I also love Guinea. I love the pace of life, and the fact that everyone knows each other. I love seeing huge tracts of undeveloped land. I love eating fresh pineapples and mangoes. I admire a people so resilient, and it's wonderful not to see kids complain. These are people standing on the ground, quite firmly, very practical and very stubborn. Each of these points has a frustrating side, of course - nothing ever happens here! These people don't want to change! Isn't there anything to eat besides bananas today?

Several people have asked me what I think about the thing that I am doing here - this thing called "development". I'm going to respond in the same wish-washy sense as I have just talked about Guinea and the U.S. I love it. I hate it. It's necessary. I disagree with the whole idea.

The problem is that of a changing world. If Africa were on another planet, it could muddle along just fine. Life would be hard, people would keep dying young, but it would survive. But it's not on another planet - it's part of our world. We are compared to Africa and Africa is compared to the West. Africa has to deal with the West and the West has to deal with Africa. Why is the West - the developed world - so different? Well, here's what I think. We all learned about the importance of the industrial revolution in school but did we really understand what it meant? We, our ancestors, thought up a new way of doing things which was faster and easier. It allowed us to create things and we were able to devote our time to other diversions. Science, religion, etc. kept growing and we just kept creating, building, and pretty soon we had towns and stuff. Or at least it happened something like that.

Why didn't Africa have an industrial revolution? It's just that way. The sky is blue. The industrial revolution was a natural outgrowth of the European mind. That is why it happened along with all the other things that followed suit. It was in the cards.

Such things are not in the African cards. Not in the same way. The mentality is different. They're not stupid or slow or uncooperative or all the other stereotypes. They're just in the position of being faced with our system of doing things. This is not a system that they came up with themselves. We are trying to squeeze them into a square space of our own design.

For instance, a hypothetical small village wants to ameliorate their health problems. So they call on the obvious solution - please, Mrs. United States of America, build us a health center. This is an outside solution and, trying to make it work, you can hear the grinding of gears. Officials don't keep appointments to discuss the plans. The sand is not ready by the time they promise. Money mysteriously disappears from the budget (and into the officials' pockets). The project goes slowly. Then there are few people educated to staff the post. They have trouble doing the paperwork, creating reports to send to Conakry. Sometimes they sterilize the needles. They don't give out information to their patients on how to avoid the disease the next time. The villagers are suspicious of the health center staff, and only come in case of emergency. Things at the health center are slap-dash because that's the way things are. This sytem was created by us and given to them because it interests us. And the results (i.e, better health) do interest them. But the method is lacking. That's why the best things happen when somebody from within the community thinks of something and follows it through - their way. Ideally Peace Corps is here to support those entrepreneurs.

So I think top-down, outside-in development is depressingly futile. But at least some schools and health centers get built and things get a little better step-by-step. But even then - the kids aren't learning much by Western standards and the health care is substandard and nobody even explains to the villagers what malaria is. Are we really doing much other than to highlight to Africa that they are not up to our standards? We're measuring them on our scale.

On the other side of the coin - pro-development: Africa has to adapt. It's simple Darwin. To survive you have to change to match your surroundings. I would like to quote from William Langewiesche in his book, Sahara Unveiled. He is speaking about the Tuaregs, the native nomad dwellers of the desert, and the aftermath of French colonialism.

"It is said that by imposing the rule of a foreign law and forbidding the old business of trading (the French) strangled the Tuaregs. But the truth is that the world outside had changed anyway . . . the French could not keep these changes from happening but they could protect the Tuaregs from the consequences. As colonial masters the French were sincere and well-intentioned. They thought they should help the Tuaregs to maintain the nomadic ways. They encouraged the Tuaregs to indulge in a way of life that became a fiction...

The concept of pure ethnicity is as dangerous as that of pure race. All people are mongrels. "Indigenous" societies are subject to the same requirements for change as others...(The Tuaregs) thought they could live in isolation from the world though they never had before..."

And, too, the problems of the Guineans rest on the shoulders of the Guineans. They don't tend to look to the future. They take what they need for today and rest. They don't complain and don't ask questions and they're not looking at the larger picture. But for all of this I certainly don't blame them. I understand. Life is difficult here and constant complaint would simply frustrate and depress. I wonder, too, about the effect of the religion. Another quote from Sahara Unveiled:

"Insallah. God willing. You hear it again and again in conversation, a sort of cultural reflex, a constant reminder of faith. We will meet for tea, God willing. The weather will change, the rains will come and our herds will survive, insahallah. And if none of it happens that too is God's will...

Westerners accuse Islam of excessive fatalism, but fatalism is just the ingredient necessary to function in such a place. I talked to the director of Peace Corps in Mauritania, who said the American way is to take action today for a better life tomorrow - which is equally a statement of faith. In Mauritania, the Peace Corps has proved largely impotent. The desert twitches and sweeps aside good intentions."

"Americans ignore history...The national myth is that of creativity and progress...They believe in the future as if it were a religion; they believe that there is nothing they cannot accomplish; that solutions wait somewhere for all problems, like brides."
          -Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake