Peace Corps Week

Today marks the close of the official Peace Corps Week, a time when current and returned volunteers alike are encouraged to educate others about the countries in which they served and about Peace Corps itself.

My favorite Peace Corps slogan is this: “It’s the toughest job you’ll ever love.”

I’ve been stuck on the tough half of that slogan for a while now. When I try to describe how I’m feeling to friends and family, the only adjective that comes to mind is tired: I'm tired of being perpetually dirty, tired of being isolated from fluent English speakers, fellow countrymen & women, and other followers of my faith, tired of putting myself into the tiny box that constitutes proper female behavior in Ethiopia, and most of all, tired of hitting roadblock after roadblock at school.

If it weren’t for a large stubborn streak and a more-than-healthy dose of pride, the combination of loneliness and discouragement probably would have sent me home by now. I’m glad I’m still here though, so for once I’m grateful for my stubbornness and pride. They are the last reasons in the basket to go, and they keep me from quitting on the days when the other reasons have already been pulled out and haven’t done the trick.

Being here still and reflecting on my experience so that I can write about it for this blog, I was able to have (and to recognize) a seemingly ordinary but actually quite remarkable morning yesterday:

At about 9am, my landlady called me in to her house for coffee. My neighbors and I all gathered in her living room, some of us with our crochet projects in hand, to sit, chat, and drink coffee. The topic of conversation was my town’s first violent crime since I’ve been here: a murder and a subsequent revenge murder. To find out what had happened, since I can only pick up fragments from full-speed conversations in the local language, I called my neighbor’s son, who has great English but is working elsewhere, to ask him what was going on. He then called his mother to get the story, and called me back to explain everything. Thanks to him, I was able to join them in expressing our dismay that such violence had come to our usually peaceful town, and sympathy for the families involved.

After coffee, I went out to the main road to stock up for the weekend on various food items. My favorite shop owner greeted me by name, asked how my work was going, and made sure I got her freshest eggs. At my bread place the owner knew when he saw me coming to start getting two rolls of bread ready for me, and at my favorite fruit stand the 10-year-old daughter manning the stand helped me pick out the biggest bananas. Walking home, children at three separate houses spotted me, shouted my name and ran over to shake my hand, beaming up at me. Last, my neighbor’s son accidentally kicked his ball onto the street, and when I tossed it back to him he very deliberately said, “thank you,” choosing my language even though he doesn’t think he’s very good at English. Then, not 10 minutes after settling back into my house, my neighbor shouted for me to come join them in enjoying some freshly baked bread.

All of this was packed into one morning. On the surface, it was just me going about my routine: drinking coffee with neighbors, grocery shopping, and hanging out in our compound’s common area. If this was a facebook status update though (that is where hash tags are used, isn’t it? Uh-oh, I may be about to reveal just how out of touch I really am…), you could safely tag this story with #community support, #generosity, and #friendship. This is where the love half of that Peace Corps slogan resurfaces. How can I not love a life that includes children running to shake my hand, neighbors sharing their bread with me even though they can only afford to make bread on holidays, and a community that is not in the least bit desensitized to violent crime in their town?

If I had one critique of that Peace Corps slogan, however, it would be that Peace Corps is so much more than a job. It’s your entire life, for 2 ¼ years, for better or for worse, but really for both. You cannot possibly emerge unchanged, nor can you leave your community untouched. Those transformations are messy, but they are absolutely worth the struggle.

Happy Peace Corps Week!

Motivational quote from Pinterest
that seemed appropriate. :)