Post by Lara
23 January 2014
When we were home over the holidays, we had a lot of conversations
about our experience thus far in Sierra Leone. Tarantulas were high on the list
of topics that came up, as was the heat, and the fact that we eat rice for
almost every meal. We were asked what
the best thing is, what the worst thing is, how many students we teach, how
many chickens we’ve killed, and what the religious makeup of the country is. We
enjoyed fielding all these questions and giving our friends and family some
idea of what life is like for us here.
At one point my dad half-jokingly asked me, “So, are you going to tell
your little sister she should become a Peace Corps volunteer?” My response may
have come across as rather harsh: “I don’t think that I would tell anyone they
should join the Peace Corps.”
OK hold up—before you go thinking that this experience has
turned me against the government agency that’s had my life in its hands for
almost 2 years, let me explain. For
Kevin and me, joining the Peace Corps was an incredibly big choice. If you know us personally, you know that
choice came at quite a cost. We both had steady, salaried jobs that we gave up (as
in, not going to get them back) to come here. Kevin sacrificed two years of
professional experience in engineering to join, hoping that two years of
foreign aid work in a country that could most definitely use more mechanical
engineers would be enough to convince future employers of his potential. We put off starting a family for the time we
volunteered (malaria prophylaxes and pregnancy apparently don’t mix). We had to
be willing to learn a new language (or two!), to eat whatever was laid before
us, at least as long as it took to be able to cook our own food, and to go to
work in parts of Sierra Leone that even some Sierra Leoneans refuse to live
in. We knew when we joined that we were
in for the ride of our lives, and we were willing to sit back and see what
these two plus years would bring.
Another favorite question from our family and friends was,
“Would you do it all again?” Every time, I felt the need to give a rather
complicated answer: “If you’re asking whether I would make the same decision
again a year and a half ago, yes. If you’re asking if I plan to volunteer again
for another 2 years, no.” Two years is a
long time to be away from everything and everyone you’ve ever known. The Atlantic Ocean is a long distance across,
and though we have been incredibly, crazy-fortunate to have been able to make
not one but two trips back across the pond during our service, we still feel
the distance. In the time that’s passed
since we left Ohio in 2012, we’ve had one nephew born, 5 first cousins announce
they’re expecting (3 of those babies born so far), two siblings get engaged and
one of those married, and two siblings move across the country. We’ve missed weddings, births, funerals, and
family gatherings. And though it’s
tough, I do think the experience we’ve had here—the relationships formed and
the life lessons learned have been worth it. That being said, I’m not signing
up to extend the time I’m away.
It seems to me that if you’re the kind of person who can
enjoy two years living in a foreign country, eating new foods, learning new
languages, managing with limited communication and electricity, adjusting your
cultural lens and re-evaluating your personal ethics as need be, then you don’t
need someone to tell you that Peace Corps is a good option. And if you’re not that kind of person,
getting on a plane to a developing country is likely not going to change your
perspective. People who learn about what
being a volunteer is like and think, yeah, I could get behind that—those are the
people who will be willing to take the initiative, fill out the application, go
to the interview, and wait (it was 11 months for us!) to hear back. And those
are probably the people who will make good volunteers—as opposed to someone who
was told by their advisor or their friend or their big sister that they ought
to do it.
Obviously we’re all cut from different cloth. I don’t want to suggest that anyone who looks
into volunteering for a reason other than the one I had is wrong—but I also
think it’s important that anyone who decides to spend two years working for a
cause, any cause, comes to that
decision on his or her own terms. Kevin
and I are happy with the choices we’ve made, in part because they were our
choices. I can only hope the same for my
little sister, no matter where life takes her.
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