Together, Alone

 Post by Lara

9 January 2013

The bonds that form between volunteers are a special thing—we met each other on the cusp of what we all hoped would be a life-defining experience. We didn’t know what to expect, but we knew that whatever it was we would face it together.  We came into each others’ lives just as each one of us moved a world away from our friends, relatives, and sometimes significant others. We filled a gap for each other.  The friendships we created might be viewed as something of a necessity—a survival tactic we employed when we found ourselves so far away from everything and everyone we’d ever known. That might be why it took us a while to realize that we weren’t all in this experience together.

Peace Corps service is, for most of us, an emotional roller coaster.  You just left your life for 2 years and set off into the great unknown. You’re trying to learn this language, but some days you just don’t have it. All the new things around you are exciting and fun. You have a good day at work and come home energized. You have a bad day in your village and come home sad, or angry, or completely wiped out. Service is not what you expected it to be. Other volunteers are not who you expected them to be.  You start to feel like you belong, and walk around triumphant and grateful.  You hear “breaking news” stories several days (sometimes several months) after they break, and go home feeling glum or disconnected again.  I honestly cannot think of a time in my life that I felt so many things at the same time, or experienced the kind of mood swings that you read about in psychology textbooks without batting an eye.  The toughest part about all this, though, is that so often you face these things by yourself.

For Kevin and me, joining Peace Corps as a married couple has been an eye-opening experience.  We occasionally ride the emotions together, but so often we find ourselves in completely different places—Kevin may come home from a great day at school only to find that I’m frustrated and needing to vent. Right when I was getting the hang of speaking Mende, Kevin was vowing never to try speaking it again.  We go through bouts of culture shock and acceptance, but hardly ever at the same time. We go through different tastes, alternately enjoying and disliking the foods that are available here, but often at different paces.  In short, even though we have experienced nearly all of the same ups and downs, trials, triumphs, and discoveries, our timing has always been off.  Sometimes we’ve felt the same emotions, but we respond in completely different ways. Kevin’s more likely to get angry while I’m more likely to get quiet (they tell me I’m scary when I’m quiet!).  I’m more likely to make a phone call or write an email while Kevin often decides it’s not worth the effort. We both disappear into books, but not always the same ones.  Even us Flautes, who live in the same place and see all the same people and eat all the same food are leading solitary lives, in some senses of the word.

In a larger sense I think that’s true for all Peace Corps volunteers.  When we get together and talk about what we’re going through, it’s not hard to say, “Yeah, I’ve felt that way too” while at the same time thinking, “that was months ago! How is it that you’re just getting there?”  With the perspective of a year and a half of service, I can say that we do share the experience, though a lot of what we go through feels like we’re going it alone.  

It can be even more difficult to compare these kinds of feelings with the volunteers a year ahead of and behind us. Kevin recently found himself talking to a Salone 4 volunteer (they arrived a year after we did) who was frustrated that every Sierra Leonean she meets expects her to remember them when they see each other again 6 months later.  Reflecting on this, we realized we’ve both had that frustration, but it was over a year ago that we had it, and it seemed like a distant memory rather than a current problem.  I’ve heard it said that while we volunteers tend to consider the people we came here with as brothers and sisters, the groups immediately surrounding us are more like cousins. They’re family, but you’re not as close to them.  They also tend to be going through lows when we’re feeling more comfortable, and dealing with culture shock when we’ve come to know what to expect.  We noticed the same differences with the Salone 2s who came before us—for us, it felt like they didn’t understand or they brushed off our problems, but now being in their position, I can understand how it’s difficult to remember what you were feeling a year before in order to empathize.

What I’ve taken from all this is that it’s easy to look at the surface of something, like a group of 45 Americans heading off to join the Peace Corps, and see only similarities. From there, it’s easy to expect everyone to solve problems the way you do, to react to new information the same way, to feel happy when you’re happy or sad when you’re sad. With time, though, you come to realize that even though we’re here together, learning and working and playing and growing together, we’re all making this journey on our own.