What is it you do?

When I say that I am a Peace Corps volunteer, I commonly get asked what it is I do in my community. Well, my assigned title is “Community Health HIV/AIDS Educator”, but that really doesn’t explain what I actually do. In fact, I’m not even entirely sure I could accurately explain what it is I do. I guess I do a lot of ‘small’ things and not really many ‘big’ things. 

(Helpful, I know)

I really wouldn’t even say that I do much community health work – at least in the traditional sense. You see, the thing about Peace Corps is that no experience is exactly alike. In fact, it can be radically different even among PCV’s serving in the same country.

For example, there’s a fellow PCV in Swaziland who works for the World Food Program. She lives in an apartment in Mbabane (the capital of Swaziland). She has a maid that cleans her place up and does her laundry, and she has more of a traditional ‘desk’ job.

I have none of that.

I guess I could say that my community is my workplace, I am my own boss and I do whatever I want. ….a vast oversimplification, but that’s my general understanding of it.

Sure, that may sound awesome on the surface, but it’s actually pretty daunting and frustrating at times. The American educational system teaches you to follow directions and it does it well. That same model is replicated in most blue and white collar jobs. So, what happens when that’s all smashed to hell?

Well, chaos, basically – at least for a time.

I spent the first 5-6 months in my community just building the structure needed to succeed. I made connections with school principals, chiefdom leaders, NGO’s, church groups, youth groups and the like. I tried to get involved in anything and everything that I could. I had this idea in my head that a successful PCV was someone who was involved in everything, everywhere.

I started teaching life skills lessons at the local primary school. Basically, we focused on good decision-making skills, male and female anatomy and the onset of puberty. Now, no offense to all the wonderful K-12 teachers in the world, but I HATED it. I hated classroom teaching, I wasn’t comfortable working with kids, and I don’t think I was very good at it either. But I pressed on because that’s what I thought a successful PCV would do….

………

I’m now roughly 16 months into my Peace Corps service, and my views on service have changed rather radically. I have long since ditched the life skills lessons along with some of the other projects that neither I nor my community had any passion to complete. I now work primarily with a savings & loans group in my community. I conduct regular workshops on basic accounting, household budgeting, investments and financial literacy techniques.

I absolutely love it.

I love planning the lessons, I love answering their questions and, most of all, I love the comments that I get afterwards from members who were inspired to start their own sewing business or saved enough money to afford the fees to send their children to school next term. Unlike the life skills lessons, I feel that that these women are actually listening and getting something out of what I tell them. Also, I’m much more comfortable with the topic at hand, I have an easy time communicating with the women and I feel like I’m actually making an impact of sorts.

I stopped chasing this ideal vision of the perfect PCV that I had in my mind, and instead I did what worked for me and my community. It turns out when you’re not constrained by a superior telling you what exactly to do and how to do it, you can tailor a project that responds to your community’s needs, utilize your own skills and meet your true potential.

Peace Corps has taught me many lessons over the past year. I think the lesson I learned here was to stop idealizing my life and perhaps be a bit more introspective. We’re all blessed with certain skills and abilities, as well as limitations. It’s what makes us human. I had this certain ideal of what Peace Corps service was going to be like. Once I trashed that, I – along with my community – was better off.

My experiences over the past 15-16 months have made me reevaluate some aspects of my life. I was holding onto a lot of idealizations and wasn’t being entirely true to myself. I’m working on grad school applications right now, and the essays that, in sum, ask ‘what you want to do with your life’ have really helped me focus on that question. (I’ll expand on this in a later post.) 

In the meantime, just keep on keepin’ on.

Sipho