If you had predicted freshman year over dinner at Leo’s that I would join the Peace Corps, I would have laughed till ginger ale shot out my nose. Then I would tell you about a trip my family took to Kenya when I was seven. I ate gazelle, chased baboons, and enjoyed myself thoroughly. But, visiting a Masai village, my brother pointed at the walls of the dung huts and told me just what dung was. Shit? I was in the Business School freshman year, and though I didn’t know what I wanted to do after, my plans in no way included a dung hut in Africa.
Sophomore year, I dropped out of the Business School for an English major, ensuing my lack of direction elicited dozens of suggestions to look into the Peace Corps. Unless an unforeseen problem arises during the Peace Corps’ tedious medical examinations, I’ll receive a formal program invitation six weeks before my program departs for Africa.
People are always keen to tell me why I must be volunteering. It’s because I feel bad that my dad’s an oil executive, one person told me. Or, as many think, I just couldn’t think of anything else to do.
The Peace Corps is an 820-day commitment. This means I will spend two years learning and speaking a tribal language; I will go two years potentially without electricity; I may live in a dung hut. (https://www.top5.com) I’m not doing this because of qualms about my place in the world or a lack of future prospects.
If I felt guilty, I would volunteer at a soup kitchen. And there are plenty of jobs I would love to do; I will be doing some of them in the Peace Corps, and get to them again when I return.
I had thought of the Peace Corps as a patriarchal organization, a quasi-imperialistic group of development workers helping people the volunteers believed did not know any better. These early negative conceptions were not uncommon even when the program was first founded in 1961, despite JFK’s desire to buck the increasingly popular notions of the “ugly American” and “Yankee imperialism.”
The summer before my sophomore year, however, a family friend returned from volunteering in Latvia. She stressed the lack of structure in the program, so that workers could more easily give communities what they needed in order for locals to get their programs off the ground. The point was not to do charity work but rather to train the local people to do the work themselves. Self-sufficiency is the objective.
This is the model of ambassadorship that I support and want to be a part of. My main project will be teaching, but I’m encouraged to come up with other programs in my free time and even work with other organizations.
I hope that I will be able to discuss issues I would hardly be able to read about on the Internet with people speaking in a language not even taught at Georgetown. I understand that it will be hard; I realize that as a wealthy American, my priorities and lifestyle are completely out of whack with the way much of the rest of the world lives.
But I leave my AIDS in Africa class each week frustrated that today’s policy makers are completely unfamiliar with much of Africa’s many diverse cultures. Out of whack or not, I look around Georgetown and see dozens of student-run groups and realize we have the power to make changes too.
I am nervous—I have no idea what to expect—but I hope to make the most of my two years and work toward the Peace Corps’ mission, no matter how much the seven–year-old in me prays for a cement-walled house.
