Community Partners

We all come into Peace Corps hearing these golden projects of town-wide projects in which the people are so motivated to change their situations, but what it always comes down to is your community partner. And what they didn’t tell you is that a good community partner is worth its wait in humitas!

Being from another country and not always knowing the culture or the language, Peace Corps volunteers try to always with community partners or people in the community that you can trust and work with on projects. Ideally, a community partner should be someone that lives in the community and is motivated to help out their neighbors, someone who is willing to give their time away for the greater good, someone intrinsically motivated.  You get the idea.

But what is ideal is not the norm, unfortunately. As a community health volunteer my officially community partners are personnel of the health post, as well as some leaders in the community.  But out of a total of four people who were my original community partners assigned to me, I work with maybe one. 

What I found out to be the case in my community is that practically all (but two) professionals live in the community below, which is an hour walk away, so trying to coordinate with them is a nightmare. Add to that the fact that they don’t live here; hence there is no real reason why they would want to help out the community in their free time. In addition, the people that can help me, can only help me two-times a month, which in my line of work of health promotion, is nothing. 

So what do I do? Well, I do things on my own and hope that someone comes along. This isn’t always the best strategy, but last year when I was waiting on my community partners to help me, I just decided to do it on my own time, since I had more of it. I started teaching English and health classes in the schools. I started a youth group in the afternoons. I did a school garden with the primary school. Little by little, things started picking up and then all the sudden my community partners wanted to work with me. 

I’ve had the pleasure of working with practically everyone from my health post, along with high school teachers and primary school teachers. Even professionals from Bambamarca that I randomly meet have come and helped me in my town, including a nutritionist at the local hospital and an agriculture engineer that works with the Ministry of Agriculture. You never know who you will bump into and start working with in the future.

What Peace Corps has taught me, among many things, is to work with what you got. When you first get to site you are imagining that everyone will want to work with you and that all the families want to change their lives for the better, but of course, that is never the case. People have a hard time understanding what you are here for and they have their own lives to concentrate on.  Everyone’s situation is different, so you just try to do what you can with what you got. 

With the month of March, school is back in session, which means plans need to be made, meetings held, and lots of work to be done. Now only one thing awaits...who wants to work with me?