nine degrees north: MuSTaches

MST has come and gone, and I'm back home in Clarin listening to a cacophony of throaty calls coming from the rooster farm next door. Gone only a week, yet all my house spiders took to opportunity to spin themselves giant new webs that stretch across each room exactly at head level, which I've been accidentally tearing down, face first, since I arrived. It's like Halloween come three weeks late.

Mid-Service Medical and Mid-Service Training mark a vague middle of our Peace Corps service. Time for Batch 269 to get the one thorough, in-person check-up we will have, and attend a conference strategically placed to coincide with another low point on the roller coaster chart of volunteer emotional health. The medical portion is invasive enough that I will spare you too many details here, but suffice it to say that there was ample poking, prodding, uncomfortable questions, and that anything that can be extracted from the human body was bottled and taken away for lab tests. The sexually active male volunteers may have had it the worst though - with one particularly uncomfortable test involving an extra long cotton swab. Sometimes celibacy does pay.

The conference was pretty standard, but with one marked difference. For the first time, in addition to the sessions on volunteer alcoholism, coping with stress, sexual harassment, and policy updates, we also started having sessions on topics like career planning, understanding the Non-Competitive Eligibility status we will have for government jobs for the year following Peace Corps, and the Peace Corps Follows program offered at many graduate schools. See the common theme? Life after Peace Corps. A few fun and informative electives were offered as well. I attended sessions on alternative livelihood projects, organic gardening, and one excellent session on taking the GRE by talented education volunteer Mark Fullmer. There was also, of course, the company of 116 other volunteers to enjoy, and plenty of non-Filipino food to go crazy over. Peace Corps has an uncanny ability to guess what a bunch of raggedy, mildly homesick, 15-months-in volunteers want to eat during conferences like MST (ie. soft tacos, chocolate chip pancakes, sandwiches, and bacon).

The highlight of the week was the long-awaited occurrence of the premier social event of the season (who are we kidding, of the year), 'Stache Bash 2011 - for which plenty of male PCVs had been planning for months prior, as evidenced by the staggering amount of facial hair present in otherwise sobering sessions. The second night of MST, these bearded gentlemen all locked themselves in a room together for a couple hours of male bonding and mustache-shaping. Meanwhile, those of us endowed with double Xs gathered in another room to pass around bottles of Red Horse and speculate about what designs they were finally settling on next door. That's when CRM volunteer Morgan Chow got her hands on a brown eyeliner pencil, and doodled up a nice whimsical 'stache of her own. I was next with a nice fat horseshoe, the mustache I would have been born to wear would I have been born male. Over the next half hour, I had the immense privileged of 'stache-ing up about twenty women. Interestingly, while it had taken many of the men weeks of agonizing to come up with their designs (which, to be fair, were expected to be competition-caliber), each and every woman seemed to know instantly exactly which mustache would best suit her personality and/or bone structure, and after all were finished, there was not an identical shape among them.

The event itself was a wildly good time, and a testament to the creativity and shamelessness of the PCV. Each man strutted or sashayed down the aisle to a theme song chosen to match his mustache and costume, and displayed himself either flirtatiously or boldly in front of a panel of judges that included both PC staff members and volunteers. The MC, education volunteer Claire Pelley (who herself had opted for a Frida Kahlo brown instead of a 'stache) regaled the rowdy audience with barely-appropriate quips and jokes while, in true PC fashion, two "Save Don't Shave!" protesters cried out emphatically about beard rights.

In the midst of all of it - the medical exams and the conference and the madness - a rather important date managed to slip by, quite unnoticed. It was November 18 before I realized what had happened, that November 16 had come and gone. November 16, 2012 is the Close of Service date of Batch 269, and a date that is drilled well and deep into the skulls of even the most contented volunteers. So, when its 2011 counterpart came and went, it took with us what feels to me like the most significant milestone so far. By the time I looked at the date on my watch on the 18th, we officially had less than a year to go in our Peace Corps service.

I might dwell on this further - try to analyse what this milestone means to me, try to wrap my head around what I have accomplished in the last year and were I have failed, and how to best use the remaining (slightly less than) twelve months, but saving me from all that uncomfortable self-examination is the very near date of November 28 and what feels like the most important milestone of all - seeing my mother and brother for the first time in well over a year. So, with extra pillows to buy and spider webs to tame and an air mattress to track down, I'll have to save all the existential pondering for December.