Here is someone else’s take on their Peace Corps experience that I ripped off of another volunteer’s blog (sorry Beach). I like this write up…particularly the parts about displacing all those lost Midwesterners and learning to live with a level of chaos. I also think that a good amount of it rings true…the parts about patience, flexibility, having a sense of humor, etc. Anyways, enjoy.
From “Strange Stones,” by Peter Hessler, The New Yorker, January 12th, 2009:
Later, I learned that the Peace Corps had always drawn a high number of Catholics. For some reason, it’s particularly popular in the Midwest . . . It has to do with a solid, middle-country liberalism, but there was also an element of escape. Some of my peers had never left the country before, and one volunteer from Mississippi had never traveled in an airplane . . . The experience changed you, but not necessarily in the way you’d expect. It was a bad job for hard-core idealist, most of whom ended up frustrated and unhappy. Pragmatist survived, and the smart ones set small daily goals: learning a new Chinese phrase or teaching a poem to a class of eager students. Long term plans tended to be abandoned. Flexibility was important, and so was a sense of humor . . . Sometimes I thought of the Peace Corps as a reverse refugee organization, displacing all those lost Midwesterners, and it was probably the only government entity that taught Americans to abandon key national characteristics: Pride, ambition, impatience, the instinct to control, the desire to accumulate, the missionary impulse – all of it slipped away . . . From the beginning the Peace Corps had represented a type of foreign aid, but another goal had been to produce Americans with knowledge about the outside world, which could benefit their own country. The organization had been inspired in part by the 1958 book “The Ugly American,” which criticized a top-down approach to foreign affairs. At some level, I came away with a deep faith in the transformative power of the Peace Corps: everybody I knew had been changed forever by the experience. But these changes were of the sort that generally made people less likely to work for the government. Volunteers tended to be individualist to begin with, and few were ambitious in the traditional sense. Once abroad, they learned to live with a level of chaos, which made it hard to have faith in the possibility of sweeping change. Many of my peers in China eventually became teachers. It was partly because we had been educational volunteers, but it also had to do with the skills we developed – the flexibility, the sense of humor, the willingness to handle anything an eighth grader could throw at us.
