Whatever You Do, Work Heartily
Jane Haines is a Peace Corps Volunteer currently serving in a pueblo in the department of Atlántico, Colombia
When I was five years old, I stood at the back of a large, ornate sanctuary and watched my mom take the oath to be ordained as a Presbyterian pastor. Someone next to me, a family friend, leaned down and whispered “wow, two pastors for parents, you’re really in for it now.” And I was.
Every movie we watched as a family turned into a literary-theology lesson about representations of God and the Holy Spirit (the most notorious cinematic moments were Harry Potter’s death and Aslan’s rebirth in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). I learned the Greek alphabet when I was four years old from studying my mom’s seminary textbooks, and my brother and I memorized a Hebrew dinner prayer that, to this day, we still know like the backs of our hands. My aunt is also a Presbyterian pastor, and I spent a good chunk of my formative years listening to my parents preach in church sanctuaries from North Carolina to Virginia, West Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio.
If the Protestant work ethic existed, it would be alive and well in my family.
Encyclopedia Brittanica defines the “Protestant ethic” as a sociological theory in which “the value attached to hard work, thrift, and efficiency in one’s worldly calling, especially in the Calvinist view, were deemed signs of an individual’s election, or eternal salvation.”
If you didn’t grow up receiving Calvinistic theology lessons at the dinner table like I did, here’s a brief explainer: an individual’s “eternal salvation” is a reference to the idea of “predestination.” It’s one of the core beliefs that characterizes protestantism, and a key tenet by which the father-of-Presbyterianism, John Calvin, is known. Predestination states that God, and God alone, predetermines our eternal salvation before we’re born, and any human efforts we make to be more holy, or act in God’s image, are futile.
As Encyclopedia Brittanica states, “hard work, thrift, and efficiency” were signs that God had predestined that person to spend eternity in heaven, not hell. Believers work hard both for God and in God’s image, using the fruits of their labors to help others who are less fortunate. Puritans, for example, recognize a moral obligation to distribute their wealth, not just accumulate it to infinite ends.
Growing up in the Presbyterian Church, I witnessed many a “Stewardship Sunday” where a pastor discusses the responsibility of financial stewardship with her congregants. This act of giving money to the church is called tithing, and tithe derives from a Hebrew term that means one tenth, or ten percent. A standard expectation is that congregants give ten percent of their wealth to the church or, more generally, to the poor.
In case you’re confused by now, you read that right. Calvinists believe that God predetermines whether we end up in heaven or hell. Hard work in God’s image is a sign of salvation and, despite that our actions in life before death have no effect on that salvation, believers strive for Godliness nonetheless. What could be worse, after all, than being destined for hell? Acting like you’re destined for hell.
The father of the Protestant work ethic theory, Max Weber, argues that the first Puritan pilgrims (whose belief system is based in Calvinism) sewed the moral ideal of hard work into the fabric of American culture. This ethical foundation, he posits, was fundamental to the success of capitalism in the new United States.
Granted, this is one interpretation of many, and predestination is a fraught concept in both the Catholic and Protestant churches because, essentially, no one knows why God does what he does. I use this line of reasoning in an attempt to understand why we, as Peace Corps Volunteers, almost universally struggle with an impossible American productivity standard and, more broadly, to find fulfillment in our service.
In his piece for Harvard Business Review, “Worry isn’t Work,” Dan Pallota explains how the Protestant ethic affects our contemporary work style:
Many of us have grown up thinking that if we are properly self-punishing then we are somehow being responsible. “What, I’m a nervous wreck — how could I possibly take on more?” On the other hand, if, God forbid, we are feeling carefree, we have this nagging sense that we’re being downright irresponsible, certain that if we don’t get right back to self-flagellation then the other shoe is going to drop. And hard. We don’t correlate our sense of responsibility with what we are actually producing. We correlate it with how hard we are being on ourselves.
Peace Corps Volunteers, it turns out, are particularly well-seasoned in our self-flagellation practice. There’s a reason social media accounts like the former @jadedcorps and @howapcvputsitgently are so popular and relatable to volunteers globally, despite our wide array of experiences. Their dark humor expresses an innate guilt many of us harbor about doing right by the concept of “service,” and all of the seemingly selfless hard work it implies.
Every Peace Corps volunteer has had someone say to them, at least a handful of times, “oh, I thought about doing the Peace Corps, but two years is a long time,” in a complimentary-but-condescending tone that implies that’s something we don’t already realize. And sure, to them, two years does seem like a long time for a plethora of reasons — not the least of which are our burgeoning economic futures as young, twenty-something college graduates.
There are the mid-career professionals who decide to join the Peace Corps as well, who, despite the prior “burgeoning economic future” argument not applying in their circumstance, are still berated with judgement over the steady job, aging parents, or college-student children they might be leaving at home.
Retirees are really the only group of volunteers who face little-to-no skepticism related to what they’re leaving behind in joining the Peace Corps, but rather, what they’re risking. In many cases, it’s their own health. What a crazy thing to do when you’ve been medically cleared by several rounds of testing and doctor’s appointments, then guaranteed free medical care and accommodation for the duration of your service (at the expense of the agency’s reputation should they fail to provide it, nonetheless).
“I couldn’t do it, but I’m sure you can. You are so brave.”
Furthermore, one of the Peace Corps’ principal goals is to foster mutual understanding between Americans and host country nationals in the places where we serve. If the protestant work ethic exists, we must assume that it seeps into our everyday interactions and into the agency’s broader approach to international development. Service, after all, implies that volunteers make their time useful to someone other than themselves.
Ay Dios mio do we have an abundance of time — and there is no longer or more nauseatingly slow passage of that time than during your first few months of service.
“Spend your time integrating into the culture!” your bosses might say. Even when you don’t feel like you’re working, trust me — you’re working. Greeting people on the street, drinking juice with your neighbor, congratulations, it’s all work! You signed up for the most relaxing job ever.
After you submit a fancy report about your site for which you spent an entire day formatting the table of contents, you get to start the “real” work. Now is the time to whip out your stacks of training manuals and shine like the Qualified American Citizen that you are. This ethos carries you onward for another three to six months.
Sometime within the first year of service, though, your friends get busy. The fried food and daily carb-bombs make you feel more sick than well-nourished, and your host mom has accepted that she just doesn’t understand why you dress, um, like that. Days on end pass when your classes are canceled without notice or nobody shows up to meetings. You spend many hot, solitary hours sitting in your hammock listening to podcasts or locking yourself in your room. You start to get depressed, then you feel guilty for being depressed, because “what privilege you have to be in this place.” What privilege you have to get paid to do nothing.
(While we are volunteers, the agency still pays us a stipend at the rate of many Colombian’s monthly earnings; it’s a salary that our family and friends work harder and longer hours to receive.)
It is at this point that you start to feel like nothing, certainly not anything you do, matters; so you start trying to find meaning in something — anything — about your service. You did, after all, make this huge two year sacrifice when you signed up for the Peace Corps. What a horrible realization it would be to find out your service was predestined for mediocrity before you even began.
This is why, on any given corner of the internet, you can find blog posts written by Peace Corps volunteers that are chock full of corny observations about their new environments. The culture is strangely intriguing, families more closely-knit, and the volunteer discovers a newfound inner serenity and a slower pace of life.
I, too, was writing in my journal one year ago about the little moments that I thought fulfilled me about my service: meaningful relationships with friends I met just a few months before, or niceties exchanged with people I pretended were my friends (they also pretended we were friends).
A lot of this appreciation we’re taught to do, for the experience, for our sites, for the people in our sites, is actually part of our training. Colombian staff teaches us how to help our future work partners take advantage of the assets and resources available to them, rather than fixating on the intractable problems their communities face. We’re asked to see our service with appreciative eyeballs — I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve said the words “appreciative interview” in Spanish and English over the last 17 months.
But at what point does all this “appreciation” morph, and even cheapen, our service experience? At what point does the American lens deny the realities lived by our Colombian friends and family? Does pretending we understand their struggles and triumphs actually serve to diminish their pain? Should we really try to find meaning in everything?
Prior to joining the Peace Corps, I looked on with admiration for years as several of my mentors and friends spent their own 27 months serving in foreign lands. One of them Tweeted often about the glamorous, cosmopolitan, young professional life she dreamed of living upon her return. Another made music-video-style GoPro features of her cool vacations; yet another posted an Instagram caption about the time her host dad spat out her guacamole.
How meaningful, I thought, as I read her vignette, written in a style I would master oh-so-well during my own service, about how she went to the trouble of making tortilla chips from scratch and mashing her beloved guacamole from hand-selected avocados. But, she explained, her Paraguayan host family was used to eating avocado with milk and sugar, not salt and lime. When her host dad spat it out and left the table, the rest of the family followed suit.
I told my mom that story in the days leading up to my departure for Colombia. As I waxed poetic about the mysticism of intercultural exchange and resiliency, she replied, “that’s not cultural exchange, Jane, that’s just rude.” I rolled my eyes and thought that she couldn’t possibly understand the monumental importance the guacamole represented in this volunteer’s journey to breaking barriers and building relationships with her host family. She was right, though. Spitting out the guacamole was just rude.
All the existentialism that comes with Peace Corps service, all the feelings of “I don’t matter” and the counter feelings of “I do matter, if only by my own tiny, irrelevant definitions of success” are nauseating. The stories I tell myself inside my own head are far scarier than anything I’ve experienced externally during service — including a mouse knocked cold by my eternally-oscillating bedroom fan in the middle of the night.
Nonetheless, this endless cycle of worry, doubt, and guilt somehow makes me feel like a “good” volunteer. If I sit in my house worrying about how good of a job I’m doing, that’s surely a sign that I’m doing a really good job! A good job, that is, despite the fact that many of the challenges and opportunities I’ve been sent to address are well beyond the scope of my control.
Regardless of all this dogma about Protestants and their work ethic, it’s a pretty universal idea that people want to live lives of purpose. One of my favorite reporters, Jill Filipovic, references this concept often in her writing about family planning, and why many women in low-income countries say they want to have more children, despite an obvious lack of resources by which to raise them.
Their reasoning, she says, seems counterintuitive, until you consider one simple reality: if you lived in a place where nothing you did seemed to matter, where opportunities were scarce and, despite generations of effort, your family just couldn’t seem to get a leg up, wouldn’t raising children be one of the most important and meaningful ways you could spend your time? What if systemic forces like government corruption, post-colonialism, and wealth inequality were so ingrained in your reality that you didn’t recognize them when they hit you? Your good fortune — or lack thereof — could easily seem like a predetermined act of God.
We, as volunteers, are tasked with the mission of providing resources or knowledge to our community that they wouldn’t be able to otherwise access. That’s why Peace Corps spends so much time and money training us and selecting the right candidates for service. We are commissioned to serve on the presumption that what we do actually matters, though our everyday experiences tell a different story.
So we cling desperately to a sense of worry, of responsibility, for things we cannot control. Admitting that worrying is useless, that it only serves to placate our own imposter syndrome and make our hair fall out, would be to admit that our “bravery” was all for not. That the health, wealth, or opportunity we sacrificed to come here was not ours to begin with, that we are not the protagonists in this story.
In a very ironic, very biblical way, choosing to let go of the supposed meaning we should find in our service is freeing. If God predetermines our fates — or, in this case, some large social, economic, or political force does — life leaves us immense room for trial and error. We get space to be selfish and frustrated, hot and tired. Feeling those things doesn’t make us ungrateful or spoiled, being human does. And over that, we have no control.
This is so difficult for volunteers to accept, I’d venture to guess, because it runs contrary to our ethic, the one that lauds work as a means to glorify some version of the greater good and produce a bounty to share with others. But what if your hard work barely ever resulted in bounty? What if you only harvested one tiny, juicy strawberry during your service?
I’d say you should enjoy it with all the gluttony you can muster. You’re doing the work of the US Government, not God.
