Peace Corps Week

As it is National Peace Corps week, I wanted to do something reflecting on Peace Corps. What does this experience mean to me and why is it worthwhile? I hoped for some grandiose depiction of the Peace Corps that leaves everyone with the same sense of pride that I feel for this organization. But truth be told, there is nothing grandiose about this experience. It is tiny moments that you tell/hope/promise yourself will add up and in twenty years, mean something you cannot possible understand.

While some people aspire to be a Peace Corps Volunteer their entire life, I considered it for less than two months before I decided it was the opportunity for me. In one of my application essays, I wrote something to the effect of, “I have never considered myself ordinary and the idea of jumping into a lifelong career of teaching at this early stage in my life gives me pause to say the least”. There was a fire in me for something greater, some adventure that I did not yet know.

I had big ideas of coming to a small village and changing things. I believed that at the end of my two years of service, I would have a made-for-TV-movie-moment where everyone would come together, throw me on their shoulders, and we would march into the sunset. Well, perhaps not that cheesy, but there was a certainty that the work I would be doing would somehow change lives.            

But here is a secret that people who are not volunteers don’t know: it is incredibly unlikely by the end of your two years of service, you will see the worth of your being there. That is a cold hard fact that just about everyone must realize during this journey and is enough to drive people home early. So how is this information supposed to make everyone feel a sense of pride in Peace Corps? Because once you come to terms with this, you are forced to find other reasons to keep you there. You learn things that make the hard days worth it. And those reasons and lessons turn out to mean so much more than simply teaching a class of Ethiopians the English present progressive tense. Through only a quarter of service, there are things I am grateful to have learned, which would have been impossible without Peace Corps.

In America, my sense of self-worth was directly tied to my sense of productivity.

Coming to site, it was impossible to not feel like: I do not do anything; I am useless. It took time to allow everything America had instilled in me to be taken away, to let go of ambitions. As a result, productivity takes on a new meaning. I can find peace in sitting at a café for two hours reading. If I go to the market to simply buy vegetables, that is enough for one day. My American self screams that I am lazy and unproductive and a waste but my Ethiopian self is starting to win. There is a joy in discovering how to be confident enough to find self-worth within, not through activities and accomplishments.

I have gone an entire day without leaving my compound. I have gone an entire day without speaking to a single person. I am perfectly comfortable with this. Spending so much time alone was my greatest fear and one of my greatest struggles upon moving to Asella. It took months to be comfortable by myself- and even enjoy it. In fact, the confidence I have in myself as a result of this experience is something I will always appreciate. Six months ago, the idea of coming home early would have meant letting people, back home, down. That idea motivated me through difficult times. My pride. Yet after spending so much time with only myself to rely on, this perspective has changed. While I do not want to let family/friends down, that would nothing in comparison to letting myself down. I have learned that while everything else can be stripped away from me (family, friends, home, culture, ability to communicate, sense of self-worth, pride, comfort, happiness, etc), I can always rely on myself. No one can take who I am at my core away from me.

In coming into the Peace Corps, I did not know a single person in my group. By the end of 10 days, I had new friends. By the end of 2 1/2 months, I had best friends. Now at 9 months, I have countless brothers and sisters. An extended family that fittingly, like a real family, I never got to pick. I can only imagine what these people will be to me at the end of 27 months. These people support and understand like people I have known my entire life cannot. They are always there to vent, listen, or just drink away troubles. This is not always done gently. A Peace Corps volunteer friend may give me the slap in the face (sometimes literally) I need to get me through a situation. I heard it time and time again from Return Peace Corps Volunteers, but now I understand it: these people will be friends for the rest of my life.

Likewise, the interactions with Ethiopians are something I could have never experienced, if not for the Peace Corps.  I have made friendships where our “Ethiopian” and “American” titles are nonexistent. The fact that our origins are a world apart is never considered or noticed (until someone argues Ethiopia is not landlocked). I have scores of adorable kids running up to me everyday for a fist bomb. I have crazy people sharing the cure to HIV/AIDS with me. If I do not go to my corner shop for two days in a row, people I can hardly communicate with will start to worry. These interactions and experiences are impossible anywhere else in the world. While some days it is exhausting, I would not survive these 27 months without them.

Overall, it comes down to good days and bad days. On the good days, I am proud to be here. I love interacting with children on the street. I can laugh and shrug off things not going my way. I look around my town and think, “I am just living in Africa. A dumb kid from Southern California, surviving in Ethiopia. Wow.” On bad days, there is one guiding principle that gets me through: I want to be able to look back 10 years from now and remember how depressed I was at times. How incredibly lonely I was at times. How miserable I was at times. I want to remember all those moments and know that I was stronger than it all. This is likely the only time in my entire life I will be able to prove myself to myself and I am not willing to let myself down.

There are 3 goals of Peace Corps that have been around since the program's inception in 1961.

            1. Use and share the skills you have to help your community

            2. Share American culture with Ethiopians

            3. Share Ethiopian culture with Americans 

Coming into to this experience, you delude yourself into thinking goal 1 is the most important. In 27 months, your school will be a better place, people will know techniques to avoid HIV/AIDS, the community will drink clean water, etc. But that is not what keeps you here. It is goal 2 and 3 that help you survive. It is making friends and bonds that are impossible to explain or understand. It is becoming such good friends with people who live 9,000 miles away from your birthplace that you forget such a distance ever existed. It is the selfishness of taking two years to live a life and learn things inaccessible to most. In the end, you just tell/hope/promise yourself all this will make sense and be worth the hard days and moments you missed back home.

Despite how I feel in certain moments, I am proud to be a Peace Corps volunteer. It has changed me in ways I do not even understand yet. It has challenged me. It has broken me. It has rebuilt me into a person I am happy to be. As it is National Peace Corps week, I just hope you feel proud, in whatever capacity it may be, to support such a program.