Peace Corps Prepares Us

Written 14 and 15 April 2015

First step in joining Peace Corps is reading the website.  My process started – well, it started in 1985, when I first considered joining, but let’s fast-forward to maybe September 2013.  My recollection is that the website said, in direct words, that Peace Corps volunteers should expect to feel depressed, lonely, frustrated, anxious, bored, isolated, useless, misunderstood and miserably unhappy at points during their service.  Also elated, effective, quietly content, awestruck, triumphant and deliriously pleased.  They spend a lot more time warning about the first set of feelings, though, and kept it up throughout the long application process.  At several points, they asked how I would deal with stress and sorrow.  I told them I would write in my journal, talk to my friends, get some exercise and accept that life, wherever one lives it, includes stress and sorrow.  I did not mention the vociferous swearing and crying.  I presume they know to expect that.

They provide useful, detailed guides to the probable affects of living in an alien culture, including a 34-page booklet designed for volunteers’ friends and families, so the folks back home understand why you’re cracking up.  It is called, “On the Home Front,” and actually begins with a discussion of all the reasons friends and family might worry about their volunteer.  Fun!

After a while of reading all this material, and writing and talking and thinking about it, I began to wonder whether it was a clever method of making us all depressed enough that we’d be accustomed to the feeling by the time we got on-sight.

About six months before I left, I started eating meat.  Yuk.  I was a vegetarian for thirty years for every reason you can name, so this was not amusing for me.  I had a bite of salmon at one sister's house in early November, and a bite of turkey at another sister's house at Thanksgiving.  I was easing into it, you see; I had to grimace extensively to get each of those bites down.  In December, Mandy and Carl invited me to his work party, for which they prepared a massive raw bar tray, and I ate two bites of lobster with admirable facial discretion.  By March, I was forcing myself to consume several pieces of chicken and one of lamb from the luncheon buffet at Palace of India, which I would quickly wash down with a pound of naan and a bowlful of paneer.  Now I can eat beef and everything and look like I'm kind-of enjoying it.

I also got into the habit - more or less - of shaking out my shoes before putting them on, in case of spiders or scorpions.  In the last couple weeks in the U.S., I took long, hot showers every day.  I'm usually more of a short-and-warm shower-er, but I was trying to stockpile some luxury.  That is also why I took to wearing cashmere and velvet in late March, as packing up the house intensified.

The medical preparation was extensive, expensive, time-consuming and necessary.  A few months before I was scheduled to leave, they told me my lymphocyte count was too low for me to serve, and I panicked, very briefly, then went to the health-food store and bought all the immune-system boosters I could find, knowing I didn’t have enough time for them to work.  Lymphocytes are a component of white blood cells.  I swallowed one massive and two normal-sized pills three times a day, fixed myself a kale smoothie with macha every morning, and hoped the shingles vaccine was perking up my white blood cells.  When I got yet another blood draw, the count was still low, and Peace Corps decided I was just a chronic case who would probably be okay.  I kept taking the pills, as I live in hope, and had several more smoothies.  Mango-kale was especially good.
 

The best part of the medical prep, though, was the discovery that my teeth have roots deep enough for a six-foot tall man.  My dentist makes statements sometimes that leave me bewildered as to a response.  Usually I’ve got a metal pick and a suction device in my mouth and don’t need to reply, but this time I was waiting for the films in his hallway, so I had to say something.  I chose, “Oh.  Oh, my.”  “No wonder the novocaine didn’t take the first time,” he replied, smiling.  I really like my dentist.

We did not actually get dozens of packing lists, but it felt that way.  There were probably at least six, mostly written with a lot of additional suggestions made in a conference call about a week before we left.  They recommended bringing sheets, a pillow, a sleeping bag, a blanket, skinny jeans (not appropriate for work!), Chacos or Tevas (not appropriate for work!), anything you especially love, a laptop, an external hard drive, music, books and movies to hear, read, watch and swap, work clothes (slacks or below-knee skirts or dresses, sleeved shirts, something more formal, nothing transparent, covered-toe shoes), coffee, good kitchen knives, Mexican spices, two water bottles, a heavy fleece or two, two pair of eyeglasses, a flashlight, and two swimsuits in different sizes as you will change size.  Your luggage had better change sizes if you’re going to cram all this stuff into it and still meet the size and weight limits.

Some of the 31 members of Namibia 41 were way underweight; a couple brought only one checked bag instead of the allowed two.  Aren’t they amazing?

Floating or dragging, we all gathered at a Hampton Inn in a not-that-dodgy part of Philadelphia around noon on a Monday.  Once we had signed the registration sheet, and initialed to attest we hadn’t been arrested or recruited as spies in the last few weeks, we were officially Peace Corps Trainees, a major upgrade from Peace Corps Invitees.  Then we started the educational activities.  Our icebreaker involved naming the most interesting thing we had packed – it’s not a competition, but if it were, the woman with a yoga mat and a machete would have won.  We made group drawings of our anxieties and aspirations, with plenty of snakes, failures to learn the language, stick figures standing alone, crying, and stick figures holding hands with other stick figures.  One group had a bug on the anxiety side – what if it bites you, and it’s poisonous?! – and one on the aspiration side – can’t wait to eat bugs!

We talked about Peace Corps’ Core Expectations, of which there are ten.  I wrote a limerick to illustrate One and Three:  Bob is feeling homesick and sick/He’s not learning his language so quick/Girlfriend says, ‘Come home’/And he feels so alone/Bob need to commit through thin and thick.

Acknowledging the reasonableness of Core Expectation #1, "Prepare your personal and professional life to make a commitment to serve abroad for a full term of 27 months," I took up meat-eating after several decades without.  This is my US fridge, with February's chicken sausage and bacon, which I ate with blueberry pancakes.  The pancakes were great.  Meat will probably get its own post eventually; it's much beloved in Namibia.

My key takeaway from ‘staging’ was our perky-in-the-best-way facilitator telling us that while initially we might want to rely on family and friends at home for support, we would quickly develop relationships with our fellow PCTs that would provide that, and in the long term, it would be our Namibian hosts, partners and colleagues who would help us keep going.  I like the idea of that progression.

I am looking forward to experiencing it.