What is Peace Corps?
Now, I’m only 3 months into my permanent service, and I can only speak for my personal impression of the SOCD program in Peace Corps Kyrgyzstan. I’d be curious to see how my opinion changes over the course of my service, and how it compares to other volunteers in this country and others. That being said:
I feel like Peace Corps is more of a professional organization than anything else. Granted, a really sweet one that pays my bills, but still.
Explanation:
First off, when someone says: “I just got back from Peace Corps,” what do we think that means? This question got me thinking.
See, here at my site, I really have very little interaction with anyone who doesn’t live in town with me (and, no PC staff lives here…). I see my family everyday, my fellow volunteers, and my coworkers. I make connections with other locals, and try to arrange projects and work to do. That’s life, day in, day out.
So, where does “Peace Corps” fit in? Really, it is the social connections, the community they provide with other volunteers, that safety blanket. Everything else is either a convenient bonus or a bureaucratic necessity i.e. Peace Corps wants to know where I sleep every night. Also, there are invitations to various training events, and other newsy type updates: how to prepare for winter, relevant vocabulary and sometimes bureaucratic type issues. And then of course there are the nickels they deposit into my local savings account.
And This Means:
I am a professed “community development worker.” With no skills under my belt, and essentially no money to introduce into the local economy, my doings basically involve getting to know as many people as I can, getting to know this place as best I can, and at some point beginning to help these people improve their quality of life.
Peace Corps doesn’t really seem present there, does it. As far as I can see, Peace Corps is an amazing vehicle to get me into this community, they are my foot-in-the-door. The rest is up to me: do work, be happy, show that Americans are nice people, etc. You can see here, if I had some other way of getting in the door, really, (aside from the convenient little time frame PC imposes, and the clear resume addition it can become) I could do all of this without them.
(That being said, I should aside that being part of Peace Corps does give me the confidence to believe that within my two years, I will get something done. If I were on my own, I imagine I’d have to be pretty haughty to believe that.)
I think, before, I maybe thought that “Peace Corps” would be a more concrete thing. That when people said, “yeah, I did Peace Corps,” that it meant something specific. That, like, there was some box that that statement fit into. But they are just so surprisingly and delightfully hands-off, that I just don’t know what that could be.
Originally written Sept. 24th, 2009
