I was skeptical about Peace Corps until I saw what it could do: Pat, Sara and I were in the same Ag group and had to give our charla presentation on natural pesticides.
Likewise, my friend Rachael from high school was skeptical about Peace Corps until she learned how we worked. And what we didnt do. We didnt have money, most important of all, so we had to learn what the community cared about doing, and had to find ways to empower those people to do that for themselves, rather than rely on American aid. That alone is what separates us from every thing else people are doing now, and it´s why PC has produced reality-based development leaders that have great knowledge of their communities. And while we had to learn to make do with the resource available to us, living there we saw plenty of examples of money thrown at poorly-designed products that were not wanted by the people and that accomplished nothing while strengthening their dependency on others.
Instead, we learned their language, asked them what was important to them, and helped them to devise ways to implement those projects with the resources available to them. Sustainability in every way. You can start one thing or another, but sharing skills is automatically sustainable. So, when you discover that about Peace Corps, you have respect for what the people are there doing, rather than writing their efforts off as a misguided attempt towards futility and irrelevance. Like Rachael seemed to have done.
But as I said above, my feelings towards what PC does changed when we gave our charla. It was during that short hour--having run around town to buy avocados and chocolate to share with the people attending, hopping on the E bus at the six lane highway, five bags full of food in my arms and then stepping onto the bus with its surplus of stuffed animals hanging in all of the corners and the public service announcements pasted on the walls; ¨Go to your kids, they want you to come home¨ or ¨Drinking only makes your problems worse¨--running towards Sarah´s family´s home and tucking in my shirt and putting on my belt and my best shoes. But something was wrong, the memo did not get sent out broadly enough and we had to debate whether to continue having our charla or not. We decided to, since Carla and Nabor our teachers had a limited amount of time to see us perform.
And we did it. And Pat, who didn´t know Spanish at all when he arrived in Bolivia, for the first time in his life spoke for 15 or 20 minutes on complicated subjects. That meant everything to me, and showed that this PC program, which is relatively cheap and known as the best face of American diplomacy, worked wonders. While Pat remained as lovably asinine as ever-- far more so when we were about to leave-- he was like a different person. And I was proud of that guy, and could only imagine how much harder the process had been for him. I came knowing Spanish, and sat bored through the classes. But he had caught up and was doing something I couldnt do before I got to Bolivia.
The second thing I learned about PC was that it was fundamentally about us, the volunteer. No matter the good we could do, we ourselves always gained more than anyone else. Nosotros mismos. It was a struggle later to find peace with that, since this is supposed to be a selfless endeavour. Yet, the resolution to this I found in the need and continuing desire engendered in me during and after the service to continue working for others. So it´s a two-year crash course, where you are put into a blender and come out of the end more solid and closer to Earth than ever. But it´s a painful thing to go through. And if you take those two years as a bridge to a 20 year career in development, or global education and diplomacy, then you have many opportunities to repay that debt.
PC itself gives you a lot of grief and heartache. But Bolivia gave each of us enough to make up the difference and in ways we continue to recognize long after we´ve left. So the earlier, and suffering question of it being worthwhile becomes laughable after awhile.
