What it's about

So I guess it's up to everyone to figure out what they're going to get out of their Peace Corps service and it's hardly a thing that is a written law anywhere, you know?  Sometimes I think about what I was expecting to find out here and my first, most honest thought, was adventure.  Of course, I was in middle school then and perhaps I had more complex, serious reasons at the time that I can no longer remember, but I'm pretty sure that's not true.  Adventure.  This idea of adventure grew slowly into a desire for understanding.  I wanted to understand another culture and another lifestyle so completely different from my own that it would be impossible to achieve by simply entering the corporate world and requesting a move to a foreign hotspot.  I wanted to see behind the curtain of  the life that I was born into.  This is the most honest, driving desire that I had for joining Peace Corps.  Curiosity and determination.

I never joined Peace Corps to save the world.

Honestly, I didn't join to work at all.  Don't take that the wrong way, I certainly always intended to do the job I had promised to do, but it was a sideline to my genuine intent.

I don't know what I thought about making bonds with the people in the country I moved to.  I can't claim to have thought about it much beyond the idea of an African hut and a moonlit ritual dance.  Or whatever.  That thing that all of us think.  Lots of curiosity and misguided imagination ... and a lack of imagination in the area of human bonds-- the place where imagination is almost always the most worth having.

A lot of volunteers comment on how difficult it is to blog while you're here.  It's not for a lack of time.  It's not for a lack of available paper and pens, or, for that matter, computers in this age.  Our families ask for updates and emails and it's the strangest sensation to desire to explain and then to be stopped by the force of your own experience.  Certainly, a lack of description in this case isn't for a lack of things to describe.

Peace Corps encourages us to take the time to reflect.  We get weekly emails that invariably contain this reminder somehow.  They send us quotes, tell us stories, make contests for our blogs, and make it an actual part of our biannual paperwork.

Are you telling your family?

Are you telling your friends?

Does everyone at home know that secret corner of Georgia like you do?  Are you telling them?

Although it's certainly not a bad idea to encourage this (it's a great idea), it seems a little unfair.  Certainly volunteers twenty years ago out on an island who were alone for months on end were not required to give constant updates on the alien world that they inhabited, nor understand and express clearly their personal growth and emotional change on a day-to-day basis.  I think it's a great idea to try, but don't blame us if we struggle in silence.

It's kind of like this.  Imagine that you've lived your whole life the way that you understand it now, and then, one day, you begin to wade into very dirty, murky lake.  At the beginning, you can swish your feet around and see them as the mud swirls around them.  You wade a little deeper and you can't see them anymore, but you just saw them a minute ago so that isn't really a big deal.  Then, you keep going deeper.  You can't see your legs now, or your torso, either.  You're not sure what you're doing anymore, but you keep walking in.  It seems like you've been doing this for a long time, but honestly, it's hard for you to say.  You wade a little deeper and begin to submerge your collarbone when somebody from America calls or you get a peppy email from Peace Corps asking you to describe in detail the effect of the lake on your feet.  At this point, you could have flippers and you wouldn't even know it.  "Wait!" you cry.  "Hold on, I'm just not sure anymore!"  "What's the big deal?" they ask.  "Just look down."

One thing Peace Corps is beginning to show me me is that you often don't know how something has changed you until strange, late moments.  Until a thought you have months after an event strikes you and you take the time to track it back to the experience that founded it.  Until you suddenly realize that in this landscape of difference, you are no longer constant yourself anymore.

They ask you that question, you know.  When they interview you.  In a little office in LA, a little man asked me how I planned on coping with being in a completely different culture.  How exactly, he asked, did I view my personal identity?

I told him that I had been through it before in Argentina.  That immersion in different cultures forces you to consider what makes you different.  That you come up with a core understanding of yourself, of your values and your likes and dislikes and that you take that as who you are.  This is too bald of an explanation, forgive me that.

And it's true, what I said, and that dude probably heard some variation of that day in and day out at that job.  He told me about building a computer lab in Moldova and I privately wrinkled my nose (no African moon dance?), although now I can appreciate what an accomplishment that really was.  I can also appreciate that it didn't invalidate his experience in the slightest.  Turns out it isn't all about those moonlit dances after all.

I think it's about not knowing what the hell it's about.

But I don't really know.