My worst night
I hesitate to write this. It was long ago, only about four months after I arrived in South Africa for the first time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1998. I was twenty-three years old and never in my wildest dreams thought I would live in Africa. It’s been twenty-three years, exactly a half a lifetime, but that doesn’t seem right at all. It feels like it was last week, give or take. Sure, in the time since the worst night of my life I have had a more than two-decade career, earned a PhD, got married, had kids, changed careers again, moved several times, traveled and worked in almost forty countries, but when I think about it that night, it seems so recent.
Before I go into what I hesitate to write about, a bit of background. I was not always the confident, outgoing woman I am today (I say with jest- sort of). In my teens ‘cool,’ ‘confident,’ ‘strong’ would not have been words I would have used to describe myself and I am about ninety-nine percent sure not words others would have used to describe me either. I was extremely sensitive (I heard that a thousand times, ‘you are so sensitive!’ as if it is a horrible thing to not like people being mean), I was awkward, confused, and unsure of myself. This lasted until…well, as I sit here in my mid-40s we will just pretend it ended. I am still sensitive, I just now know that is part of my strength. I am still awkward and confused and unsure, I just fake it way better now. While I was unsure of many things when I was younger, I knew that I wanted to see the world. I wanted to live in another country, to travel, to explore places that were different than where I grew up. I come from a place where this was not particularly common at that time, especially for a girl, and while I didn’t get told it wasn’t possible, I didn’t exactly have role models to figure out how to make it happen. My dad traveled for work but he was an engineer, a job I wasn’t sure I was cut out for. I can think of literally no one else I knew who worked internationally. So, when I went to college, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and decided I would become a pilot. I had been flying small planes since I was small with my dad and thought this might be a way for me to travel. It took all of one quarter in college (Ohio University was on the quarter system) to realize I would be spending tens of thousands of dollars as an aviation major to likely be a flight instructor making ten dollars an hour. Female pilots were still so rare I wasn’t even sure I would be taken seriously (side note: I recently found my original medical clearance for my pilot’s license and it was addressed to Mr. Monroe- my maiden name- it’s like they couldn’t even imagine a female was applying). So, I switched majors. I found out there was this major called international studies. I had never even heard of such a thing but this kid in my dorm with purple hair had that major and it sounded cool. Plus, purple hair! My family didn’t do purple hair. This was exactly what I needed. I had no idea you could actually study the WORLD! I was amazed.
Around the same time I switched to international studies, I met a graduate student whose name I cannot remember but who changed my life. He told me about his time in Poland in the Peace Corps. It was the first I had ever heard of Peace Corps, and I knew at that moment that was my plan. Based on his stories, I imagined myself in Eastern Europe, working in a school, having all the same amazing experiences he did. I spend the next three years setting myself up for acceptance to the program. I volunteered, I tutored English as a second language, I took classes I thought would help me get in, and I did it! I got into the Peace Corps… South Africa.
Africa was not on my radar. I had taken classes on European history, European geography, German classes and French classes, European Political Science classes, all in preparation for my Peace Corps Eastern Europe experience. Clearly the universe had different plans.
So, in January 1998, I moved to South Africa and did my three months of training in what was then the Northern Province (now Limpopo). It was the hardest three months of my life. I have never been so homesick; never felt so out of my element. I had finally gotten something I wanted so bad- to live in another country- and I was miserable. I felt like that awkward, sensitive, unsure fifteen-year-old from years past. I cried myself to sleep most nights and felt nauseous most days as I barely made it through. At one point in that training I decided to drop out and I talked to the training director. He gave me advice that once again changed my life. Give it six months. In six months, no one could say you didn’t try. In six months, you will have seen what life in your community is like (this was just training, we would go to our sites in three months). In six months, you can say ‘I tried and it isn’t for me’ and be sure. I had that six-month date on my calendar, some time in mid-June. I knew that was when I was going home and knowing that took at weight off me I can’t explain. I felt free because I knew it would end soon.
Yet, once I went to my community, called Mayflower, I knew within a few days knew I was there to stay. I could say with ease that the homesickness was gone, the doubt was gone, the struggle of if I made the right choice was gone. In fact, Mayflower did start to feel like home. I made friends who became like family, and still are, I learned each road, where the gogos (grannies) sat who sold the best bananas, the perfect time to go to the one small store as they were taking the vetkoek (fried bread) out of the oil and it was still warm. I stood out like a sore thumb, but that too became familiar.
My comfort was interrupted about three weeks after I arrived. I was living in a small room behind the house of a local business woman. She would often stay the week in town (about an hour away) and so I was there alone. She had a young man, in his twenties I would guess, who watched the house for her when she traveled. He lived in the house and I lived in the guest house out back. One night I had played cards with him until around 9pm. We then went our separate ways and I went to bed in my little guest house, locking the door. It was a skeleton lock, one with these huge old-fashioned looking keys and a lock you could look through. I had my keys in the lock on the inside of the door. I was in my bed and since it was just one room the door to the outside was about six feet away from my bed. At some point after I fell asleep I woke up to the sound of my keys falling out of the door lock. I looked as a man wearing a mask came into my room, walked over to my bed and held a knife to my throat and told me he was there to ‘take my virginity’ (no comment as to whether that part of his plan was problematic). My first thought was fear as I felt the sharp end of the knife at my throat and he slid it down to my chest then up again and felt him start to crawl on me, but that was instantly changed to rage. It was pure anger. I was mad as hell. Who comes into my room and threatens to rape me, wearing a mask? I started fighting, hard. I tried to rip off his mask, screamed at him, kicked, hit, clawed. He was so shocked. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that I would fight with a knife to my throat. I was eventually able to get out of bed and run out of the room. Not knowing what to do, I tried to see if the young man who watched the house was home so I pounded on the door. He didn’t come out of the house but instead came around the side and I then knew it was him. He was the one who attacked me. I was a whole new level of mad. I confronted him, he denied it, and I ran to the house of a teacher I knew in the community and stayed with his family for the next few weeks. I refused to go back to that house, knowing that man lived there.
I won’t go into details of what happened when I reported it, but let’s just say the South African police were less than helpful and the Peace Corps didn’t exactly instill confidence in their ability to handle the situation either. In other words, pretty much nothing happened to help me, and in fact very much the opposite. I was told by the Peace Corps not to discuss it with other volunteers so I wouldn’t ‘scare’ them and was never once offered counseling. The Peace Corps nurse though was great. She made sure I got the physical care I needed and checked on me often after that.
What amazes me, twenty-three years later, is I never considered leaving. Even after this experience I never thought, well this is it, the sign I need to go home. I had forgotten about my six-month plan by then and stayed another two years. I moved houses and would see that man around the village from time to time, but I stayed. I made these two friends in Pretoria a few months after this event. I am still close to them and we often talk about those days. They said that when they met me I looked shocked, like I was just trying to survive. Now looking back that seems fair. I was in shock, from that experience, and from the daily struggles of seeing extreme poverty, and navigating a system of racism and colonialism that had torn a people apart. I spent those two years in shock. I moved on from my attack as best one could, slowly, over many more years. I had plenty of other near misses to deal with over that two years, and while that was the worst by far, it wasn’t the only time I was in danger. I didn’t have time to dwell. But now, more than two decades later I can say that that was the worst night of my life. A night that changed me. A night that still gives me panic attacks and keeps me up at night with a flashlight and a baseball bat if I hear a weird noise. A night that led to almost a decade of paralyzing fear when alone.
The fact that that was the worse night tells you something about trauma, about how trauma can manifest in unexpected ways. A year before that night while I was in college, I had a similar experience- a man in my room who was not invited but who had barged in in the middle of the night and who I didn’t fight. I cried, I begged him to stop, but I didn’t fight because I was in shock. My crying didn’t stop him like I was able to stop the next time with my fists and knees. I never reported that time in college. I told my best friend and my boyfriend at the time, both of whom got me through that last quarter of college. I was actually in the process of applying to the Peace Corps and was worried if I reported I wouldn’t get in. I am pretty sure I was right about that. I recently read about a woman applying to Americorps who was denied entry because she was raped and was getting counseling for it. I am pretty sure I would have been denied entry to the one thing I had been striving towards for three years. I think to this day that when the second attack happened again all the rage, the anger from that first attack came out of me. After the attack in college, I was able to move on within a few months, but not easily after the attack in South Africa, even though I was ‘successful’ in fighting him off. I spent the next two years in shock and next decade in a mild to severe panic depending on the moment. Yet that shock that started that night shook me out my awkward, unsure phase. They say that when an insect undergoes a metamorphosis they turn almost to liquid and then reemerge in a new form. I was liquid for a while. Never quite sure if I would melt away due to fear. It took a decade of what I now recognize as PTSD but I finally did emerge. I did so as a confident, strong woman. I knew I could survive. I could fight and win. I could do things others didn’t dream of. I became who I am that night. I would not wish it on anyone; fearing for your life is not the best way to enlightenment. But I can look at that moment, the worst moment, and say I have a fire and a strength I didn’t know was there. I won.
