#HowISeePC: Confronting the Critics
If you’re a Peace Corps volunteer — or friends with one — you’ve probably seen this hashtag before. It shows up unabashedly on all of our instagram posts and blogs; and usually accompanied by a photo of some free-roaming chickens, beautiful host country scenery, or groups of people working in tandem on a community project. They’re the images of Peace Corps we know and love. Marking them with the hashtag #Howiseepc fortifies our beloved cult identity as volunteers and diligent citizen ambassadors of world peace.
Don’t get me wrong, Peace Corps is all those things. It’s romantic and glorious and wonderfully life-changing and life-affirming at the same time. The purpose of this blog post is to talk about why Peace Corps has such a influence on the lives of volunteers and host communities, and why my belief in the concept of the Peace Corps remains stronger than ever, despite fluctuating levels of enthusiasm for my day-to-day work.
I write this because when Peace Corps service hits you right in the face, hard — as it tends to do — the only option is to get up and keep trying while your ego stays on the floor.
Any good Peace Corps volunteer has a well-told story about how they arrived at the decision to take this job. Some seek to make drastic changes in their lives and careers while others are psyched to find an all-expenses-paid opportunity to learn a new language and live abroad. I joined the Peace Corps for a combination of all these reasons, plus a deep, unwavering, comes-from-the-gut belief in the agency. Why? Let me explain.
When you tell someone you’re quitting your job to join the Peace Corps, there’s a lot of judgement. My fellow volunteers can attest to instances when someone tried to talk them out of it — convincing them that the money, success, and power they would leave behind wasn’t worth the experience. Personally, having graduated from one of the most politically active liberal arts colleges in the country, these weren’t the critics I faced. Many people were thrilled at my decision to join the Peace Corps, especially the countless professors and coworkers who all identified as returned Peace Corps volunteers.
Yet, there were a handful of people who deeply criticized my decision. International volunteerism often gets a bad rap, and for good reason. But I want to dispel some misconceptions about the Peace Corps and the people who decide to be part of it.
First of all, being a Peace Corps volunteer is a real, if non-traditional, job. We must pass language exams, gain technical knowledge, and build working relationships with people in a professional culture entirely different from our own. Peace Corps service is no walk in the park, and anyone who brands it as a superficial commitment for kids who aren’t qualified for “real jobs” is kidding themselves. In many ways, Peace Corps service is the realest job you could ever have, and if you make it through 27 months in one piece, you have my respect.
Secondly, the Peace Corps is not, in any way, a political organization. As volunteers, we’re prohibited from sharing strong opinions about American or Colombian politics with our communities. The Peace Corps is also an independent agency from the State Department — in fact, our supervisors answer directly to Congress. Lawmakers fund the Peace Corps, approve the creation of programs in new countries, and ask for updates on how volunteers are advancing the goals of the organization. State Department = foreign policy, Peace Corps = international development and cultural exchange. For all the critics who brand the Peace Corps as just another way to flex our soft power muscles in isolated parts of the world, keep reading.
If our communities don’t pick up what we’re putting down, we’re the ones who are forced to change our agendas, not them.
As a currently-serving volunteer writing this at three o´clock on a Monday, I can tell you that the my day-to-day life here is incredibly mundane. I do my laundry, study my Spanish, read books on my patio, and chat the days away. The amount of time I spend “working” in the American sense of the word is a fraction of the time I spend bonding with members of my community. After all, the real painstaking work of a Peace Corps volunteer involves building relationships with people we often struggle to understand.
When someone drops you off in a foreign village in the middle of nowhere, you’d be silly to think you’re the one in control of that situation. In reality, you’re the outsider; any and all preconceived notions about how people live their lives will have to be thrown out the window if you are to survive.
The Peace Corps is a grassroots development organization at its core. That means that the way every individual volunteer does their job looks completely different depending on their circumstances. This is one of the reasons I believe so deeply in the mission of the Peace Corps: it’s community-driven development in every sense of the term. If our communities don’t pick up what we’re putting down, we’re the ones who are forced to change our agendas, not them. By nature, our work is centered around building human capacity, and grants that fund material infrastructure are few and far between. That means we depend on people to get our work done and help build our lives in a foreign country.
At the end of the day, it’s evident that Peace Corps service has far more of an impact on the volunteers who complete it than we could ever individually have on our communities. You can see it in volunteer blogs, instagram posts, and photos marked with PC hashtags. 27 months of service makes us better, more empathetic people through myriad challenging experiences that test every fiber of our moral character.
So for the relatively low cost of my annual stipend and health insurance, you, the tax payer, get one hell of an informed, empathetic, bilingual, citizen who confronts ambiguous challenges with ease. I don’t write this out of a place of egoism, either. I write this to communicate that when Peace Corps service hits you right in the face, hard — as it tends to do — the only option is to get up and keep trying while your ego stays on the floor. As citizens of one of the richest, most politically powerful nations in the world, isn’t that what we want for our young people?
