#YesAllWomen, #NotAllMen, Peace Corps-style

It's probably June, 2004. The phone rings in the middle of the night, waking me out of an exhausted sleep. I grope for it, check the display. It's about three a.m. and I don't recognize the number. I mute the ringer and try to go back to sleep.

The phone rings again. Same number. I'm pretty sure I know what this call is, but there's an outside chance it could be someone from Peace Corps Jordan or the U.S. Embassy. I'm a warden, which means four other Peace Corps Volunteers would consolidate at my house in the event of political unrest or natural disaster, and I would be responsible for calling them all with the consolidation order. Just in case, I pick up. "'Allo?"

"Hello-oo! What your name?"

"None of your business. Don't call again." I hang up.

My phone immediately rings again. Same number. I mute the ringer and save his number as DoNotAnswer3. It rings again. I let it ring till it stops, then it rings a fifth time. I grab a notebook and start a tally. Six. Seven. On the eighth call, I pick up but don't speak. I'm cross-legged on my comforter, phone by my knee, but I can still hear him.

"Hello? Hello? What your name? Hello? Hello? Why you not talk me? Hello?" The phone goes dead.

He calls again. I hit the green button but leave the phone on the bed. "Hello? Hello? Why you not say hello? Hello?" After a few more tries, he hangs up and calls again.

In Jordan, it doesn't cost me anything to receive a call on my cell phone, but it costs him money if I pick up. I hear him getting angry. "Hello? Why you do this me? Hello? I spend money this call. Why you not talk me? Hello?"

All told, he calls me thirteen times in under an hour. The moment he or I hang up, he calls back. It's four a.m. on a Wednesday, and I have to leave for school at seven to teach, but I'm not angry. Not this time. I'm actually pretty pleased with myself, because I had never thought of picking up without answering, running up his phone bill. It feels inspired, and it feels righteously vindictive.

I have only recently begun saving these numbers in my phone as DoNotAnswer, so even though I'm calling this one #3, there have been dozens. They usually happen in the middle of the night. Sometimes, though, we Peace Corps Volunteer girls get these calls when we're with a Volunteer who is a native Arabic speaker. He'll take the phone and demand, "Who do you think you are, calling my sister?" That number, at least, will never call again. A male relative's authority carries extra weight in Jordan, where honor killings happen about a dozen times a year.

Before I leave for school, I call Samir, the Peace Corps security guy. I tell him what happened and give him the number of DoNotAnswer3. Samir says he'll take care of it, and I trust him to do the culturally appropriate thing. Peace Corps trusts Samir, and the U.S. Embassy trusts him, so I trust him more than any Jordanian man I know.

Samir is a small, compact, nondescript man. He's quiet, soft-spoken and gentle. I don't always notice when he's in the room. He doesn't talk about what he does for us, except to say, "I'll take care of it." Word gets around, though.

"Now, brother, is that how we treat guests in our culture? Is that the culture of hospitality the Prophet Mohammad taught us? Shame on you, brother!"

* * * * *

It's nearly midnight the next night when the phone rings again. It's DoNotAnswer3. I ignore it, but by the fourth ring, I am getting angry. "What do you want?"

"Why you tell him about me? I just want be friends." When I hang up, he calls back, again and again. This time, I don't bother to run up his phone bill. I just cancel the calls as they come in. I text Samir and tell him DoNotAnswer3 is calling again.

* * * * *

Friday morning, I'm yanked out of bed by a very angry gut. I spend more than an hour in the bathroom with food poisoning, and then collapse back into my bed. The phone rings, and I pick it up without looking. "'Allo?"

"Good morning, Maryah. I'm in Faiha', and I'm coming to see you." It's DoNotAnswer3, and this time he knows my name and the name of my village. From somewhere below my heaving stomach, I find the strength for outrage, and fear. I call Samir and tell him everything. He tells me to stay home and keep my door locked. I'm too sick to go anywhere anyway.

* * * * *

That afternoon, Samir calls. "The plainclothes police are coming to get your statement," he says. "They say they're in Faiha', almost to your house. Just tell them what you told me."

I can see the nondescript beige sedan pull into my neighbor's driveway, up to the gate of my garden. I come out on the porch as two men get out of the car. I can't invite them in, as a single woman living alone, and in fact they come no closer than the middle of my yard. They want me to explain what happened, but my Arabic isn't good enough and they don't speak English. Finally, I call Samir and pass the phone down so he can explain again for me.

We're three or four meters apart: I, standing up on my porch and they, standing down in the yard. All around us, the neighbors have come out on their porches, staring shoulder-to-shoulder, making no secret of listening to our conversation. It makes me feel safe today, knowing that my neighbors are watching out for me.

After the police return my phone and leave, the headmistress of my school sends her 18-year-old son to find out what's going on. I explain as well as I can, since her son doesn't speak English, either. When he understands, he grins and shakes his head. "You didn't have to call Peace Corps! You should have told him to come on over." He plants his fist in his palm with a loud slapping sound. "We would have taken care of him!"

* * * * *

DoNotAnswer3 is arrested the next day. They don't need me to press charges. He had already been arrested five times for the same harassing behavior.

Often, when Peace Corps Volunteers gather, we swap horror stories. Male Volunteers had their own kinds of horror stories, but they frequently ended theirs with, "But it's so much harder to be a woman in Jordan!"

One day, a married Volunteer pushed back. It was much harder for her husband, she said. It is the imperative of the woman to ignore her harasser, protecting her reputation by not responding, and her security by not further antagonizing him. Men, on the other hand, are compelled to respond. If her husband didn't confront every epidsode of misogyny with outrage, she explained, then they both lost their respect in the community. Her husband is a reticent man, quiet and gentle, and it was extraordinarily troubling for him to have to react with anger and implied violence every day.

Jordan has the highest attrition rate in the Peace Corps. It seemed to me that more men than women cited gender-based harassment as their reason for leaving. Their empathy for our experiences impressed me from the very first week on the ground. They took every misogynistic statement or action seriously and personally. They regularly called out their male colleagues and even strangers on the street. "Is that how you would want me to treat your sister?"

Looking back, I think it was harder for the men in Peace Corps because they weren't prepared. No one was talking about "rape culture" in those days, at least not where I could hear them, but I had internalized it like all the women I know. Before we even arrived in Jordan, we women had already developed some of the defense mechanisms we would need to ignore misogynistic micro-aggressions. We had developed the internal monologue to refute what we heard. "I'm not a baby, my worth doesn't depend on your sexual needs or aesthetic preferences, I'm not a bitch just because you're not getting what you think you deserve."

The men we served with likely didn't see these micro-agressions as often as we did back home. They had the luxury in America of choosing whether to get involved. I don't blame them for that. I think it made it all the harder for them to become the powerful feminist men they became in Jordan, among the strongest voices speaking against rape culture on my Facebook Newsfeed today.

I thank them for their support.

No Swimming at the Beach!

Arverne by the Sea, Queens, NYC, NY

From No Swimming at the Beach!

When Hannah proposed a day at the beach for Memorial Day, I jumped at the chance. I love the water, the sun, the waves.... We took the A Train out to the Rockaways to our usual beach spot in Arverne.

This is our third summer going to this same spot on the beach: the summer before Hurricane Sandy, and now two summers since. It gets busier and busier each time we go, first with surfers and now with sunbathers, too. Next time probably we'll head farther up the island.

It's also the first time we've been yelled at for going in the water. The reason I love the Rockaways is because they have real waves for jumping and body-surfing and just general interest. I wasn't intending to really swim today, just get wet and jump some waves for a bit. No sooner were we hip-deep than the park police started blowing her whistle. "There's no swimming here," she says. "There's no lifeguard."

"What about the surfers?" They go out farther, and closer to the rocky jetties, with surfboards heavy enough to do some real damage in a collison with someone's head.

"That's different. There's no swimming."

One more reason to go farther up the beach next time!

From No Swimming at the Beach!

2 Wilderness Memoirs

Brooklyn, NY, USA

I'm working on two major writing projects right now: a set of novels about wilderness conservation and wolf preservation in Montana, and what finally seems like a successful attempt to write a memoir of my Peace Corps service. One morning, perusing the popular East Village McNally Jackson Bookstore, I found myself in the memoir section. I spotted some phenomenal memoirs I had already read, like human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi's Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope. I walked out with two memoirs I could consider "research" for my current projects: Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors, and Here If You Need Me by Rev. Kate Braestrup.

In Fire Season, Connors leaves the urban jungle of New York City journalism for a short vacation with a friend serving as a lookout in the Gila National Forest, and quickly finds himself with a new career: fire-spotting by summer, bartending by winter. I picked it up because one of my novels takes place mostly in a fictional disused Forest Service cabin like the one Connors spends his summers in (except mine is in Montana), and I thought I could pick up some good atmosphere. I did that. But along the way, I got absorbed into his world, seduced into the idea of a long, golden summer alone on a mountain peak, a man and his typewriter and his mostly-loyal dog.

I live in New York, as Connor did, but I grew up in the countryside. I appreciate the yearning for the open trail, of wilderness and wild as far as the eye can see, as I experienced it backpacking the Appalachian Trail with my Girl Scout troop. Even in the depths of the Central Park Bramble at midsummer, you don't get that. But like Kerouac and the college kid who was supposed to be Connors' once-a-fortnight relief, I don't think I would last. I found myself envying Connors' ability to be completely alone with himself and not lose himself.

From April Flowers

I think Kate Braestrup's world is far more manageable, though it emerged from tragedy instead of ennui. I bought Here If You Need Me because I'd heard her speak on the WNYC program On Being. When her husband, a Maine State Trooper, dies in a car accident, she takes up his dream of becoming a Unitarian Universalist chaplain, eventually becoming the chaplain of the Maine Warden Service. What started as following her husband's dream turns out to be exactly what Kate needed for herself. As she writes about waiting with families, accompanying wardens on their rounds, and locating the occasional body, she learns what it means to be present. Being a chaplain, she finds, is only sometimes about praying together or confronting grief. Sometimes it's just about listening with an open heart. It's not about making sense of the world so much as being in the world and really seeing it, feeling it, appreciating it.

Kate's book is about grief, and I did cry. It's also about finding humor, and I laughed more than I cried. Most of all, it's about living a life of faith that is gentle and nonjudgemental, that opens the heart. When she references scripture, it is to bring the text alive in new and unexpected ways, lending it direct relevance to the simple things in life. She writes in a free associative style that should be confusing, especially after the more traditionally linear narrative of Connor's Fire Season. Instead, Braestrup's Here If You Need Me flows from scene to backstory to scene to theology and back to scene so seamlessly that I had finished the book much faster than I was ready for it to be over.

From Lake in Maine

Accidentally Vegetarian

Brooklyn, NY, USA

Five days last week, I ate an entirely vegetarian diet. It wasn't planned, by me or anyone else. It just happened that, when I opened my refrigerator or visited the grocery store, none of the carnivorous options appealed to me. Spring is in the air, even a hint of summer, and what I wanted were veggies. Just veggies and rice crackers and cheeses. (Vegan, my friends, will never be the lifestyle for me! Not even, apparently, by accident.)

I'm not philosophically oriented to vegetarianism, but it's been a year for me of compelling arguments to partial vegetarianism. It started to really stick in my mind after Elly's Goucher reunion picnic last spring. Sean said something in the course of conversation about being vegetarian once or twice a week because it's better for the environment. It stuck with me as something I could really do, an opportunity to improve my footprint without giving up the deliciousness of beef entirely. Every so often, I would say to myself, "Oo, today I ate vegetarian!" and then go back over my day and realize I'd had beef stew or a ham sandwich for lunch. "Next week," I would tell msyelf.

I was hesitant for primarily two misconceptions. First, I associate vegetarianism with tofu and soy, to which I am allergic, and which has some pretty negative environmental, health and economic impacts as well. On the occasions when I've accompanied vegetarian friends to a vegetarian restuarant, I've found it almost impossible to find something (other than leafy greens, which I really dislike) that I could eat. It got worse when I cut 90% of gluten out of my diet. Second, I had some concerns that I could feel full on a vegetarian diet. Protein is the thing that makes us feel satisfied, and no matter the stuffed feeling of lots of vegetarian mass in the stomach, I was sure I would still feel hungry.

At the Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office's Intergenerational Spring Seminar, one day's meal was entirely vegan. I found their argument compelling. UU-UNO Director Bruce Knotts explained that an enormous contributor to global warming is our meat-centered Western diet. It wasn't the idea but the execution that disappointed me, and reinforced those preconceptions I mention. All I could eat that day were gluten-free veggie wraps at lunch and leftover gluten-free veggie wraps for dinner, because everything else had soy: faux-chicken, tofu, seitan. Even the rice and beans had added soy sauce, for reasons I simply can't fathom.

What finally did it for me last week was a tactic I developed in my first summer in New York City, up in the Bronx. It was a revelation to me the day I realized that if I don't like leafy greens, I don't have to put them in my salad. Instead, I head to the grocery story for fresh veggies in as many colors as I can find, each color representing a different essential nutrient, and chop them up in a big bowl. An apple, carrots, tricolor peppers, a purple onion, brussel sprouts, a pear.... In this bowl, you'll also see garlic-and-herb feta cheese. I make a huge bowl of it, and scoop it into single-serving tupperware for lunch each day.

This summer's twist is that I've passed on the dressing. In the Arab style, I dice a pair of lemons and mix them in. It keeps the apple and pear from browning, and gives it just enough flavor to make dressing superfluous.

Now, I feel like I really can do as Sean suggests and be vegetarian once or twice a week.