Frogs in Hot Water

Humans are amazingly adaptable. We’re pretty good at just getting used to something. Things that seemed inconceivable a while ago can very quickly become normal. This is even more true when the change is gradual.

Enter the frog. You probably already know the story of the frog. If you put a frog in boiling water it’ll jump straight out. If you put a frog in cold water and slowly heat it, the water can reach boiling and the frog will not jump out and will therefore die. Now this isn’t entirely true (Wikipedia assures me that modern science tells us that the slowly heating frog will jump out when things get uncomfortable and that the frog into boiling water will die instantly, but since the post isn’t about frogs or water, I’m happy to acknowledge the science and yet still cling to the metaphor about human adaptability, with perhaps a small take home thought that frogs might, in fact, be more sensible than humans, score one for the frogs). Throw us into something completely alien and we’ll react, change things gradually and we may not notice.

This post is about gradual adaptation and about some of the sudden changes that we do deal well with (and that’s a point for humans over frogs, the score is apparently now one each, and on this note of harmony and equality, I will leave the frogs here). Living abroad on a project in a communal living environment where I live and work with an ever-changing cast of other people gives examples of both sudden change and gradual change and having the privilege of being here since the first group of volunteers (staff were here before us) means I’ve seen a lot of changes and I’ve seen a lot of adaptation.

Here are some things that are part of my everyday life right now that feel completely normal, that back in November would have seemed completely crazy. I use a water heater to heat a bucket of water that I can take into a pop-up shower so I can have a hot bucket shower when I wash, and I’m really happy about this. I use either an indoor, plumbed squat toilet or I use an outdoor western style dry toilet. Both of these are perfectly comfortable and easy. I drink green tea (because it doesn’t need milk and we don’t have fresh milk we only have powdered milk, which really, really ruins a cup of tea!!). I eat oatmeal for breakfast (which isn’t exactly tasty, but is perfectly fine and is much better than the really terrible bread (there is nothing wrong with the bread, it is just really white and really sweet so not to my taste)). I sleep on a folded Nepali mattress on a plywood bunk bed (bottom bunk, the advantages of arriving in week 1) and share my room with up to 5 others at a time. I am up before 6am every day (including weekends and holidays). I am in bed well before 10pm every night. Until yesterday I hadn’t sat on a sofa since the first week of December and hadn’t noticed that I missed it. I read a lot!!!! I haven’t watched any Law and Order or Murder She Wrote since December (but given I’ve probably seen every episode of every season of both shows several times, this is quite ok). I am super, super close to several of the staff and volunteers here. They feel like my oldest friends! And by old friends in this context, I mean 3 months – though in some cases it feels like I’ve known them for years!! I’m used to the constant changeover of my roommates, workmates, site mates. At time of writing there are 19 volunteers on project, 39 have been and gone, 20 are yet to start. People stay between 5 and 141 days. I’m used to working on site. I’m used to aloo chop (a spicy potato fritter thing) for morning tea break. I’m used to rice and curry for lunch every day (with deep fried soy balls on a Wednesday, fries on a Thursday). I’m used to pasta with volcanic black pepper every Monday for dinner. I’m used to chow mein every Thursday. (I won’t list everything, but it is the same menu every week and we don’t have a choice – this is not a problem, all the food is fantastic!) I’m used to Kit Kats, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, cheese balls, cheese and onion crisps and the precooked instant noodles you can eat directly out of the packet. I’m used to wearing a purple work shirt and a hard hat every day on site. I’m used to cement and sand and gravel and rebar and shovels and buckets and drop saws. I’m used to hearing a lot of a language around me that I understand almost none of (Nepali rather than construction lingo, I’m getting better with the construction lingo). I’m used to the wonder of the buses (and seeing several goats on the roof). I’m used to coffee shops with a menu I can choose from being a gorgeous luxury. I’m used to taking my shoes off to go into the house and getting very dusty socks (if I don’t put my slippers on). I’m used to sitting on a plywood bench that is nailed into the ground at a plywood table that is also nailed into the ground for dinner. I’m used to washing my dishes in cold water. I’m used to eating lunch at 12 and dinner at 6 every day. I’m used to having a volunteer meeting most evenings at 5pm. I’m used to seeing other people wandering around brushing their teeth. I’m used to saying hello, namaste and lasso to all and sundry when I walk down the street. (Lasso is the Tamang word for hello, the community I live in is mostly Tamang people who speak Tamang as their first language, standard Nepali second.) Namaste is the Nepali greeting that means I greet the god in you. I’m used to poor air quality and people burning rubbish in the streets. And here is me sitting in a café in Chitwan where I’m used to seeing elephants walking down the street (the rhino I saw in the middle of the road last night is not something I am yet used to, the poor thing did look a bit bewildered so I don’t image it is used to this either).

But here are some of the more gradual things that I have just been reflecting on.

Programme is a real bubble. We live and work together. Time operates very, very differently. People come and go. A lot happens in a week, and yet all of every project is exactly the same. When you’re on project for a while you see the changes of characters. People are talking about us being on season 4 or season 6 (depending on who you ask and how long they have been here). There are only 2 of us left from the start of season 1, but one of the mid-season entrants is still around. Pinpointing a change of season is a bit hard. It might be the date a particular group of volunteers arrived or left. Or it might just be that the group in one week feels really different from a week ago and exactly when the change happened isn’t entirely clear. The labels don’t matter. The changes matter. And this is made more complicated by people being on break. If you add in or remove one or two key characters then everything can feel very different. And when you go away from break you sometimes come back and it feels like everything is just 3 degrees out from where it was. Relationships have moved on a bit. Things have happened on site and on base. New in-jokes exist (don’t choke on your cheesecake). Sometimes you miss a key event (the snake, the intruder, the tuk tuk crash, the wind that blew the toilet door off, the auction, the other auction, the wedding party, the valentine’s serenading, the home visit, the momo class, etc).

For the staff and for those who have been around for a while (and who pay attention to such things) it is interesting because sometimes the atmosphere on site and on base feels really positive, friendly, collaborative, unified, happy. At other times it feels more disjointed, cliquey, exclusionary, fragmented (though never terribly so). For a new volunteer arriving during a fragmented phase our community must look really different to what a volunteer sees when they arrive into a collaborative phase. Where some changes are more gradual (like a slow shift from more collaborative to more fragmented) then it can be hard to see it sliding until a realisation hits a while later that things are now different, and perhaps that’s the hardest bit for staff – if the change is gradual they may not notice it, or at least not enough to be able to nudge things in a different direction (assuming such nudging is possible or desirable) – if it is more sudden then it is often easier to identify the precipitating factor and perhaps mitigate against it if it is a negative development or reinforce it if it is positive.

Right now on project, this group of volunteers drinks a significantly larger amount of alcohol every night than in other seasons. It’s not exactly clear to me when this change happened. There have been a couple of contributing factors, but it has been more gradual than sudden. There has always been drinking on base, which is perfectly fine. And there have always been people who don’t drink on base, which is also fine, especially since I’m one of them. But having taken myself off project for a break and spending some time reflecting on things that have been happening, I have realised today that the alcohol consumption is an example of one of the gradual changes. I was moderately aware of it. But looking at it from this distance it seems much more extreme than I think I thought it was. A gradual change I adapted to without really noticing. I wonder what else I will notice in a similar light over the next couple of days. And this is yet another excellent example of why a break where one leaves project for a few days each month is both required and essential.

To broaden this out away from project life and volunteering etc. I am reminded of conversations about terrible world events or political movements where people look back on the history and ask how people could behave in a particular way. How could people not stop x from happening, I would have behaved differently. However, in each of these cases, the event didn’t happen in isolation, it happened as the result of a gradual change over perhaps generations. How could people vote for Brexit or for Trump (the second time if not the first)? How could people collaborate in a genocide (in Germany, in Rwanda, elsewhere)? How could slavery have lasted so long? How could people treat gay people so horribly during the AIDS crisis in the 80s? And the answer is that the gradual change in the entire public consciousness meant that the decisions were made when the temperature in the water was different from what it is here and now. And that is worth remembering. Human adaptability is both a good thing and a bad thing.