Getting a little Perspective

It is coming up on one full year since having left for the Peace Corps and it seems like the appropriate time to assess the situation. You think one thing when you're leaving, another when you get there, and after about a year (from what I'm noticing) an entirely different thing. Like in the Little Mermaid, a whole new world, greener grass fraught with bluer blues and she couldn’t even speak, very sad. (Please remember that I am speaking about the Disney version where she doesn’t melt into sea foam at the end.) In between there is a sine wave of emotions.

So at this moment in rather nostalgic form I'm back where I started a year ago with Peace Corps; in Lusaka watching 40 new volunteers listen to the same speeches and ploys to draw them towards one part of the country or another. Watching them feverously taking down notes on this and that. Doing their darndest to look cool, sexy, yet deeply concerned with the problems facing developing countries.

I can remember looking cool, doing my best peanut gallery in a whisper to my new best friends. I had an idea of what it would be like driving in the bush and living on love, with no electricity, running water, ect. I was prepared for that. I was prepared to be dirty and rough. The PC training program is a series of test or hoops you must jump through in order to become a volunteer. You voluntarily give away a lot of freedom so as to voluntarily give up all the amenities of the western world. You have expectations--Mother Theresa in nature—of offering your wealth of knowledge and compassion to a community falling over themselves to hear and learn. Gradually through training you come to find out that it isn't exactly like that but you still hold on to that idea, just in case (it will make a better movie).

Then when you finally jump through the last of the hoops and find yourself fully vaccinated against a Whitman's assortment of diseases you find out what someone should have prepared you for a bit better; Western attitudes and styles of work haven’ quite caught on. I did not have an idea what it would be like to change from a standard of work that I had finally mastered to that which is found out in the rural area. Flexibility is what we heard. “Be flexible.” “You have to be flexible.” What is flexible? It is like “enhance,” a vague term thrown about casually to distract you from the truth.

Part of that truth I had assumed, and knew in reality would be change. I knew that it involved less structure and less results. I think it would have been nicer to have a bit more reality, i.e. “abandon hope all ye that make this journey” with a little Farside cartoon—they love those here. Put some humor into the situation to be faced. No need to be a downer about it but maybe prepare for the worst as opposed to the best to avoid mental breakdowns or rogue behavior by volunteers. I have 24 hours a day, seven days a week for what I would say is one credit worth of course work. I want to do more but I can't get my "class" to show up for more than one credit hour. I am trying to teach English to a four-year-old. That is not my primary activity.

It is difficult. People who know me and know how I work know that I have a tendency to take over. Sometimes a hostile takeover and sometimes subterfuge. I'm being tested. Here I can't take over if I tried. I can't make people do anything. In America if I had someone on my team that wasn't doing their task up to par I would simply do it myself, problem solved. If I were trying to be a team player I would work with them, subtly reminding them of the objectives or simply imposing my ideas.

This isn’t the case for every volunteer. Every situation is different but there is a trend and that is what I am speaking of. I'm tortured between whether I am a bad volunteer who isn't doing enough or if the community (community leaders) are not really serious about creating an environment for behavior change. I’m honestly back and forth, even while I write this. World AIDS day was a moderate success in the fact that one teacher really stepped up and organized everything on our side. But hardly anyone showed up. Now is that my fault or is that the community’s fault? Does the lack of community interest fall on my shoulders? I feel like I should have been mentally prepared a little better for this. I don’t like that complaints fly so freely from my tongue or being angry so much or feeling guilty because of how little I have to do a lot of the time. So I just have to change the strategy, get over it and get on with it.

I knew that it sounded beautiful and ideal on paper; we* all want to sing that song. It sounds the same to people who know volunteers. We are doing a good thing and it is hard, just like they said it would be. The tagline goes “Peace Corps is the hardest job you’ll ever love.” Maybe Peace Corps is the hardest job to love.

*Except for that one guy who when I told him that I was joining the Peace Corps replied that he “didn’t like helping people.”