Third Goal

Okay, living in foreign countries and being in the Peace Corps is not a solo experience. I once believed people joined the Peace Corps and were shipped off individually or with 2 or 3 other people to remote villages somewhere. This isn’t how it works at all. The Peace Corps program in each country is based on the flow of groups of volunteers. For example, my wife and I came to This Eastern Europe country with 35 other volunteers. All 35 of us flew out together, lived in a hotel together the first week in country, and see each other on very regular occasions. We are the ninth such group in This Eastern Europe country since 1996, making us group 9. As an aside, the program has been twice cancelled and restarted due to wars and conflict.

This is more or less how it is for all the countries, though most countries have had far more than nine groups of volunteers pass through. Because of these large groups of Americans that go through their PC experience together, there develops a sub-culture of Americans in the Peace Corps who get together to hang out, complain, etc.

While volunteers who know each other well talk about more interesting things, a common discussion among groups of volunteers, especially at the beginning was the level of “suffering” that we were going through. After all, everyone joins the Peace Corps expecting and hoping to live simple lives full of inconveniences that we would like to tell ourselves most Americans couldn’t handle. After a week in a hotel with the whole group, volunteers were assigned to villages. Myself, my wife, and four other volunteers were chosen to live with host families in a small mountain village with no sewage system, sporadic electricity, and roads that were constantly wet with the runoff from baths and sinks. Living here, we were able to claim for ourselves the trophy of suffering. We held this trophy by making subtle jabs and comments while talking to volunteers who were living in more posh villages with things like flushing toilets and maybe a paved road. We would gleefully talk about rats in the outhouse, piss in the roads, electricity going off for a couple or hours during the days, etc. This was especially useful conversation because early on none of us had any idea what the hell we were doing here…we had nothing by which to measure success or failure so we pretended like we were suffering…of course, we would really be more upset if our toilet DID have somewhere to sit or if we didn’t have to pick rocks out of the rice.

So now, nine months after having had lived in that village and six months after the bunch of volunteers were dispersed to our sites around the country, we all experience varying degrees of suffering that we love to compare when given the chance. The volunteer in a village may see him/herself as a slightly more genuine Peace Corps volunteer than the one in a town. The volunteer in a town who hand-washes their clothes may see him/herself as a more authentic volunteer than the volunteer in town with a washing machine. Those in the towns may want to look down on the volunteers in the capital, because the volunteers in the capital have it all: McDonald’s, a good supermarket, three Chinese Restaurants, and maybe even high-speed Internet. That’s my wife and I, poshy capital-dwellers. Oh, and I just bought a DVD player. And our washing machine is pretty new. So what are we? Do we suffer the least? We certainly get the occasional comment from volunteers, “this is so nice, don’t you feel like you are in America?” with a sort of pompous attitude combined with a false self-image of village folkiness. And what do I think when I go to the villages? Wow…THIS is nice! No car exhaust, your neighbors care about and know you, you get tremendous opportunities for language practice, and there are farm animals. I LOVE farm animals, they are so much nicer than people trying to catch a bus. Plus they moo and cluck, which is cute.

So that’s that. Let’s zoom out a little bit now. All over the Peace Corps world (literally, the world) there are various levels of development and suffering that volunteers experience. There is sort of a regional hierarchy in “suffering” levels that, anecdotally, goes like this, from least to most: Africa ‡ East Asia ‡ Central Asia ‡ Latin America‡ Eastern Europe. This whole classification is a bit ridiculous, because the living conditions in Albania (Eastern Europe) are obviously far worse than those in South Africa. So, this bizarre hierarchy of suffering allows those in Africa to go on and on about how they are in the real, hard-corps Peace Corps and everyone else is living the good life while those in Central Asia or Latin America can look down their collective noses at volunteers in Eastern Europe, because those volunteers have nicer living conditions…

And right there it hit me. I just said “nicer living conditions.” I started writing, “because those volunteers have INTERNET.” No, practically every Peace Corps volunteer in the world has fairly frequent Internet Access. ….I couldn’t write CABLE TV…no, this is also available and common among volunteers around the globe. Same with washing machines. In fact, the Peace Corps gives every volunteer in the world a higher-end (by varying local standards) apartment or house with any combination of Cable, Television, Washing Machine, Microwave, etc. The Peace Corps gives every volunteer more than enough money to eat meat most days of the week, surf the Internet, travel around the country, buy a DVD player, and have their stray cat spayed or neutered. So what does this mean? The Peace Corps doesn’t mandate physical discomfort (“suffering?”) and apparently doesn’t believe it necessary to be a successful volunteer. So, when we talk about how much we “suffer,” at least on a country-by-country or region-by-region leve, maybe we are judging our personal suffering by those around us. This means the volunteer in Eastern Europe is suffering more than the volunteer in the Caribbean because Eastern Europe has 38% unemployment while the Dominican Republic has just 15%. Oh wait, or maybe the DR volunteer is suffering more because of the country’s higher infant mortality rate (2.3% versus 1.2% in Eastern Europe). Or maybe again, the PC volunteer in this EE country is suffering more because the area has slightly more people living below the poverty line (23% versus 20%). But, the DR has a higher illiteracy rate. But, this Eastern Europe country has a lower GDP per capita. It goes on, and such comparisons could continue on and on between Peace Corps regions or countries. Maybe suffering is physical beauty? This would put the volunteer in Moldova at the pinnacle of suffering and the volunteer on the coast of Thailand in the poshiest Posh Corps in the world.

But, what good do these macro comparisons do? Am I poor? Does my child have malaria? When rats were in my toilet, was I suffering? No. Suffering isn’t rats in the outhouse. Suffering isn’t walking a mile to get water and getting diarrhea after you drink it. Suffering isn’t getting rained on when you sleep. Suffering isn’t showering once a week. Real suffering is none of these. Suffering is when your 3-month old baby dies because you can’t afford to take it to the doctor. Suffering is feeling stupid and worthless because you never learned to read. Suffering is giving your baby AIDS because you couldn’t afford a $10 medication. Suffering is when you and your family die because of your ethnicity.

We, the Peace Corps volunteers, are not suffering. Not a one of us, whether we are in the Ivory Coast or on the coast of Sunny Thailand or in a country headed towards membership into the European Union, we are all in the Posh Corps together. And since we are all in the same thing, we may as well call it the Peace Corps.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 12th, 2005 at 7:05 am and is filed under Americas/Caribbean, Europe/Eastern Europe, Peace Corps News, Europe/Southern Europe . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.