In honor of the holiday, I submit to you my ode to Peace Corps labor.
Not a lot going on down here lately.
(Now before you pass hardcore judgment on all of us development bums and hippies living down here on a tropical island for two years let a girl explain herself…)
Sometimes. This job blows.
Sometimes. Brickwalls run towards your forehead even if you aren’t interested in banging it against them.
Development is not easy. There are many players involved in this game, and I often feel so much smaller than the task at hand. Seeing poverty and its symptoms: ill education, gender and racial inequality, corruption, no motivation, etc is SUPER difficult.
I think all of us volunteers can say there have been times when we have wanted to blow this popsicle stand and move on to the next thing. I know I have.
Recently, this feeling has stemmed from the lack of interested in my classes.
I’ve tried business classes, environment groups and a computer service youth group. And yet, no one showed. I am left with my English book club…
…which, I must say, is going VERY well. The girls are not only learning English and about the US, but they are also becoming increasingly more aware of cultural changes within DR. Most of this, I attribute to the age gap between the younger three of the girls and the older woman in the group. It’s incredible to hear the women talk about their roles in the community. The debate their roles in relationships down to whether it’s okay to tell your boyfriend “his butt looks good in those jeans today.” Highly entertaining.
But it’s hard to define success by this one class when there is so much down time in my hot, hot, oven of a house.
Don’t get me wrong: I feel my sweaty time with development and other books, Spanish studies, and GRE prep… I just can’t help but feeling how awesome and capable I would be at those things in the air-conditioned comfort of the US of A.
And I also love my barrio, even though I still suck at volleyball and will never find the “pa’ mangar mi visa” song entertaining… never.
I guess the point of this is to say that sometimes, quite often actually, in this line of work… the small failures blur your vision of the real purpose of things: working with community towards a common goal. And it sucks to realize that all of the solutions to surviving this thing emotionally involved extracting myself from direct contact with that community(GRE, Spanish, reading, watching things on my computer, talking to other volunteers on the phone, etc.)
It’s like Paul Farmer’s long defeat theory… only not theorized but lived.
The good news is that this lull will end and sooner than I think: the high school has asked me to start working with them again. More news on THAT later…
Happy Labor Day!
It’s all down hill from here. Keep having fun.