I’m sitting in a
Starbucks with a beautiful foggy view of the ocean thinking about just far I am
from my cow-infested pampa overlooking Bambamarca. Tomorrow marks my last
official day as a Peace Corps volunteer, and at this moment, I’m not exactly
sure how to put my thoughts into words.
Yesterday lunch
conversation steered toward how we have changed and grown during our Peace
Corps service. I would have to say that I am now more confident with who I am
as a person; a goofy one at that. All my time alone has given me the chance to
get to know what makes me tick and unwind, so to speak, and as a fellow RPCV
once told me, Peace Corps is like getting a PhD in yourself. Amen to that!
Peace Corps has also
taught me about how some things in life just don’t work out the way you
planned. Granted, I could have learned this lesson anywhere else, but for some
reason, Peace Corps is a perfect pressure cooker for failure and disappoint.
Not that I didn’t have successes in my service, I did, it’ s just that being American
has given me this inherent belief that if I tried hard enough at something and
give it my all, that I can accomplish success.
In the case of many
projects during my service, such as the community youth center, no matter how hard
I tried to recruit professors and kids to come, in the end, if I wasn’t there,
it wouldn’t function. I also gave it “my all” trying to please my health post
staff, which as it turns out, was never possible. I probably spent my first
year trying to make these people happy, which of course, in turn made me
miserable. And while it took me a while to learn my lesson, I finally did come
to the realization that pleasing people gets your nowhere. Anyone on the street
could have told me that, but it took me two years living in the campo of Peru
to figure that one out.
An article recently
came across my pantalla about a Peace
Corps volunteer in Sengal (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maya-lau/what-the-peace-corp-taugh_b_1099202.html).
She writes, “I survived two years in the Peace Corps. My proudest
accomplishment during my time in Senegal, one that can't be expressed on a
résumé, is how much I grew up.” She also goes on to describe that many
volunteers come to Peace Corps with grand plans to change the lives of their
entire communities, but “our hyped-up expectations of success are often
quashed--we learn quickly that smaller is better.”
I too had grandiose plans when I first came
to site. I had heard of volunteers building libraries made out of plastic
bottles or building 200 improved cooking stoves in the community. I often
had dreams of doing something that would immortalize me in the minds of the
community members. I held this dream probably until about one year in when I
realized that some things just weren’t possible and that smaller IS better.
That while building 200 improved cooking stoves would benefit the community,
soon the plancha will rust or the
bricks break. The only thing that is sustainable is education. So why don’t I
leave the construction and “big projects” with NGO’s who have a bunch of money,
and leave the small group educational sessions to me? So I did, and am that
much happier for it.
Saying goodbye to my
host family was probably the hardest thing I had to do thus far in my 26 years
on this earth. Leaving my real family before I came to Peru was hard. As I
crossed the security threshold and looked back, I had to tell them to leave because
I couldn’t stop crying. But always in the back of my mind, I remembered that I
will be back; this job in Peru is temporary. In reverse, leaving my host family
didn’t give me that assurance because I was returning to my family and friends
and culture; I wasn’t just going on a trip. And while many community members
asked me “cuando regresas?” I couldn’t
give them a straight answer because honestly I don’t know. Life in the states
is so unpredictable, anything could happen in the future.
I'm grateful for my experience in Peru and the relationships I
have formed. I'm extremely grateful to my host family who took me in as
one of their own, especially my host mom. When I came to Peru I had one family, but as I’m leaving, I’m
leaving with two.
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