Peace Corps Lessons

Thanksgiving has come and gone. This year I got to celebrate two Thanskgivings with a total of three turkeys and such a mix of lovely people in Madrid. I have endless unfinished blog posts, but as I'm traveling around and explaining my past three years to new people, this one was one I kept coming back to. It's about my two years in El Salvador, and the good things that came from it (rose-colored glasses and all). 

In September, I finished year three in Peace Corps - two years in El Salvador, and one in Georgia. I rarely think much about how much these three years in Peace Corps have taught me, because in the moment I don't notice. It's not until I look back six months or a year later that I think about how I wasn't always as I am. I didn't reflect much on my two years in El Salvador because I went straight from one service to the next. Although they were different - different culture and a higher level of development - the whole Peace Corps structure and approach stays the same. Coming to the end of the second time around, I think I have enough distance to appreciate the first time. Maybe after a few months in grad school I will be able to appreciate the Response position.

Coming in to my year in Peace Corps Response, I could pinpoint new knowledge I carried over from my first service - gender equality, sexual health, physical health, agriculture, various professional skills, cultural awareness, and the nonsense that is the English language are all things Peace Corps informed my understanding on. I knew little to nothing about HIV/AIDS until Pre-Service Training (PST), and I'd never given a training on anything in my life. I certainly had never written a grant or managed a project until I suddenly found myself applying for and getting my first WorldConnect grant to start a women's small business. I'd never designed a camp until I sat down with ten other PCVs and we hashed out our first GLOW camp. Realizing my working style and cementing new friendships at the same time that we were all on a "camp high" meant that I helped design and facilitate two community sexual health trainings and three more camps - one youth entrepreneurship and two Men As Partners - in my last eight months in El Salvador. I knew absolutely nothing about agriculture coming into Peace Corps, but seed money and a great young lady in the Ministry of Agriculture meant that I learned all about making my own fertilizer, preparing soil, planting and caring for seedlings, making organic insecticide, and getting people involved in the whole process. I am a swimmer, not a land sports person, and yet we ended up doing all these sports all the time. It was fun. It got people out of the house.

I remember feeling conflicted during my site interview at the end of PST - I wanted to be in a new site, no, in a site that had experience and a well-functioning organization; I wanted to be on my own, no, near enough to easily reach other volunteers; I wanted to be somewhere not too hot, no, I didn't care much as long as the community was motivated. What I ended up with was a green site (no experience with Peace Corps) in the hottest part of the country with no functioning community organization, with one daily bus and no paved roads, living with a family of eleven. My project manager in El Salvador told me she needed me in my site, that it was the least developed and a potential red flag as too undeveloped for a Volunteer to be effective. She said she needed someone flexible and willing to go solo and push people when they didn't want to be pushed. I wasn't sure I was that person, but I trusted her judgment. After all, she had seen ten years of trainees and volunteers come through her office, and she had a good eye for it. Even so, that assessment wasn't how I felt about myself. I felt unprepared and unconfident. I felt like I was going into a situation where I was supposed to be a professional, and I was a child. As it turned out, my inexperience didn't matter. What mattered was listening, connecting, and pushing. My community was as green as I was, and any approach to organizing that didn't alienate or favor specific groups was a step in the right direction. I certainly encountered my fair share of laziness, disinterest and cattiness. Frustration and overwhelming heat were my constant companions. Success, especially the tiny successes, were there though.

At the end of my service I had a conversation with our new country director about skills building. His philosophy for PCVs was not to train us in all of the specific technical skills for specific projects, but to train us to be trainers. Once you know how to parse and deliver information, it's a simple step to take a manual on anything at all and interpret the information inside for the appropriate group. Peace Corps has hundreds of manuals on everything under the sun, from agriculture to building schools to health to life skills and professional development. You don't need to be an expert in all of them, you just need to know how best to utilize the resources so the community learns and remembers it. I wish I had known that earlier - it would have saved a lot of feeling totally inadequate.

It's something I thought about in my Response post, and that made me say "yes" to things I know nothing about because my counterpart is excited about them. The fact that she's excited means that there is a good chance anything I learn and teach will actually be utilized within the organization, and that's enough to get me to become knowledgeable on the subject. I think the radio program is a good example of that. I knew nothing about radio and had never made a radio show in my life (still haven't, in fact), but my counterpart wanted to start a radio club and give trainings to youth. She didn't know anything about radio either, we just had some equipment in the office and the blessing of the Open Society Foundation. That was our starting point. We applied for some grants, got another PCV on board, put together a manual, and went for it. We struggled through the first set of trainings, but the second set, a camp for girls, was much better. By the time the third set rolled around, Helping Hand volunteers were giving all of the trainings and the whole thing was running as a station with ten shows a week and new youth coming in all the time, getting trained by their peers, and going out to report on their world. The point wasn't to know everything about radio. It was to put just enough resources in the hands of motivated people, then let them run with it.   

Development is slow, often unbearably so. But I learned a lot. And I found my people. I didn't come in with any grand delusions of changing the world or "saving" my community. I wanted to find people who would learn with me and persevere without me. So I found my people.

My lovely Alfonso, who learned to hold his head up and be comfortable in his own skin. He was my best counterpart and most active supporter. He took every chance to learn and teach, even though it terrified him to put himself front and center. He went from my quiet English student who I wasn't sure even wanted to be there to the facilitator for two regional Men As Partners conferences and my constant partner in crime. 

And Nuris. All of the women's group put in hard work, and I'm glad for it. She was responsible and engaged, and I knew she would show up for everything. We started the two years with nothing - few skills and no organization. Every single training - sewing, business, cooking, baking, agriculture, decorative flowers - she was there. And she took that knowledge home. She started a little garden. She made clothes for the school and the community. She taught pizza and dessert classes. She made flower wreaths for the church to sell for day of the dead. She came to the Ministry of Economic Development's session on female entrepreneurship, with every intention of taking that knowledge and building her own business with her sister. She was one of those people searching for something to learn so she could make something of the life she had. 

Edwin. Little Edwin, who at thirteen accompanied me everywhere and got teased for being my shadow; who taught me the names of all the trees, bushes and plants in the entire area and soaked up English like a sponge; who learned to make bracelets, then sold them (for a pittance) at school, walking around with his whole arm covered in new designs and a backpack full of all the colors we could find. Edwin played Jenga and Phase 10 and cards. He baked all the desserts with me, watched hours upon hours of Cake Boss, and conscientiously copied down every recipe so he could make them again on his own. We picked mangoes and jocotes, and escaped the heat by playing in the river, invariably spending the walk trading brain teasers. By the end, at fifteen, Edwin was a little too cool for me. The little boy was fading and the teenage interests were starting to occupy his mind. Those two years we shared as siblings were the best, though. 

All of my host family, both in training and in site, made my two years worthwhile. Lydia, Andres, Isabel, Denis, Walter, Doris, Olvin, Edwin and Nayely (and little Brian, for a bit) in La Suncuya, and Roberto, Ana and Diana in Nuevo Cuscatlan. They opened their homes to a total stranger, and accepted me as part of the family. They showed me the utmost care and love. 

My Peace Corps family too - especially Clelia, Sylvia, Vicky, Jenny and Elisa - who provided the support and comedy I needed to keep myself on track. And my cohort. We went through it together, sometimes suffering, sometimes reveling, always with our hearts in the right place even if our minds wandered. We did all of this cool stuff; some of it worked and some of it crashed and burned, but such is life. We taught each other a lot, and gave the support we each needed. 

Finding the right people is what made those two years in Peace Corps worth it. It was worth the sickness, cattiness, heat, frustration and distance. I've become much more confident and self-assured, and that has a lot to do with surrounding myself with people who inspired and challenged me. I don't discount the practical knowledge at all - I'm incredibly happy to have learned as much as I have about a wide range of topics both through trainings and through living. These past three years have cemented my interest in development and gender equality, among other things, which I'll delve into in graduate school. For me, those years in Peace Corps El Salvador were what I needed to set me on a path I want to follow. 

I'm grateful.