The 'Tough' Part

On the agency’s website and in its recruiting materials, Peace Corps service is often touted as “the toughest job you’ll ever love”. And if you speak with a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV) upon her arrival home in the US, odds are good that her portrayal of her service will not be too far afield from the official tagline. Speak to someone in the first six months or year into his service, however, and odds are good that the ‘tough’ part of the tagline will heavily outweigh the ‘love’ part. To my surprise, I have failed to defy those odds.

Before embarking on this chapter in my life, I (like, I would guess, most other Americans familiar with the work of the Peace Corps) envisioned the ‘tough’ part of life in the Peace Corps as learning to live without all of the many comforts most Americans have come to take for granted: electricity, running water, grocery stores, reliable personal transportation, air-conditioning, television, refrigeration, etc. Add to that vague notions of having to learn a new language, being isolated from family and friends back home, and adapting to unfamiliar cultural norms (Am I supposed to take off my shoes when I enter someone’s home? Am I supposed to make eye contact with people?), and you probably have a decent representation of the tough part of Peace Corps service in the public consciousness.

As I shared many of these preconceptions of Peace Corps service, I believed that I was particularly well suited to thrive as a Peace Corps Volunteer. As an ‘outdoor enthusiast’, I’ve long known that I have the ability to adapt to living with few creature comforts for sustained periods of time. As a long-time rock climber and runner, I’ve long known that I have a natural propensity to endure long periods of pain and misery to achieve distant goals (being a public policy graduate student certainly qualifies here as well). I’ve rarely had trouble meeting people and making new friends when placed in situations where I know no one. My prior work in politics and government and the time I spent volunteering for various organizations demonstrated a strong ethic of public service. I’d traveled to places as diverse as Costa Rica, Peru, and Bangladesh and, other than getting pick-pocketed within three hours of my first foreign trip (excluding a day or two each in Toronto and Juarez), I’d found traveling abroad to be immensely enjoyable and rewarding. What other qualities could one need to be an effective, fulfilled Peace Corps Volunteer?

In two words: Patience and Persistence. The kind of patience and persistence required to be a successful Volunteer are altogether different than what one typically conceives. By patience, I don’t mean an ability to tolerate waiting. Being tolerant of having to wait more than we’re accustomed to in the US is one of the challenges of Peace Corps that I anticipated. Although I cannot say that I enjoy waiting four hours for a khumbie to fill up for a trip that should take one hour, I’ve certainly been forced to make peace with waiting. The Patience I’ve struggled with most (and it is definitely patience with a capital ‘P’) is being at peace with the knowledge that I could be substantially more effective and more productive elsewhere. My principal motivation for entering Peace Corps was to ‘make a difference’ in the lives of those less fortunate than myself. How does one sustain one’s motivation for Peace Corps service while simultaneously holding the belief that one left behind a career and a set of volunteer activities that almost certainly made a greater difference in the lives of those less fortunate than oneself? Should such motivation even be sustained? For how long? Those are among the many questions I’ve found myself wrestling with for months.

One obvious solution to resolving my dilemma would be to simply find ways to become more effective and productive in my work. This is where Persistence comes into play. At least two or three times each week, I walk into work with a new plan to address some of the myriad causes I perceive to be limiting my effectiveness as a Volunteer. With rare exception, I walk home that evening with my plans thwarted (yet again), my self-confidence dashed and motivation to try again the next day at a perilously low level. As one of my ‘veteran’ Volunteer colleagues here in Limpopo puts it, to survive as a Volunteer, you have to somehow sustain the enthusiasm to start new projects knowing full well that pretty much any project you start is almost sure to fail to generate long-term benefits and, in some cases, may even cause long-term harm. At first I thought he was exaggerating; now I’m not so sure.

If you’ve read this far, you may be asking yourself why I’m still here. In a word: Hope. (How about that for triteness?) I hope that, one of these days, I’m going to have learned enough from all of my many, many failures that I’ll actually be able to get a non-fundraising project off the ground. One of the problems with hope is that holding on too long can lead to regret if the object of hope is never fulfilled. In the absence of progress on ‘making a difference’ over the next few months, judging whether I’ve crossed the fine line separating Persistence and unrealistic hope is likely to be one of my biggest challenges. If I’m lucky, there’ll be no need to make that judgment.

General Update:

In one week, the group of Volunteers with whom I arrived here in South Africa nearly seven months ago (i.e. SA-19) will participate in a full week of training back at our pre-service training site in Mpumalanga Province. It should be a great opportunity to reconnect with a lot of friends I have not seen in the five months since we graduated from trainees to volunteers.

Not long thereafter, I’ll have my first visitor from home! My girlfriend and I will be touring South Africa for several weeks. I couldn’t be more excited!

PS – Thanks to those of you who sent me Happy Birthday wishes over the weekend!