American Hard Corps
I received the most beautiful letter from an ex-girlfriend in the Peace Corps yesterday. It came all the way from Burkina Faso, one of those African nations with nothing, absolutely nothing: no resources to speak of, piss-poor farmland, endless problems with drought and insufficient water supplies, not even access to an ocean, as Faso is landlocked. She's there to teach English, French and chemistry to kids in some completely forgotten village, some backwater that's like the last place that God made. And she's learning so much. I don't know if she's enjoying herself per se, but I know she's maturing, growing, becoming even more human by the day and week. She's out there, gettting the facts, good and bad. Her life's not easy, that's for sure. But reading her letter made me want to join the Peace Corps tomorrow. It also made me want to buy a plane ticket to Burkina Faso, but that's another story.
I know the Peace Corps seems kind of cheesy and outdated, especially in an era that's subbed out social entrepreneurship for idealism. I know that many people have had pretty miserable experiences in the Corps, and that, all things considered, quite a few Peace Corps projects yield very few lasting results. Still, it seems like that's almost the idea, and the idea is a good one.
If you join the Peace Corps, you're not signing on to work with some gung-ho band of professionals with deep pockets and narrow, achievable goals. You're going to do precisely what most volunteers do: live a strange, fascinating and tedious life in some village, fail and succeed in equal measure, and get the facts about what existence is like for most people. And by "the facts," I don't mean just surface information about culture, social systems, history. I mean the real essential, meaty stuff, the info on what's really going on in this world: the poverty, the suffering, the simple joy, the effort, the stark unsupported challenge of working for a living. The Peace Corps is certainly not the only way to learn these facts, but from what I know it often presents them to you in a way that's not easy to ignore.
That's not to say that "the facts of life and death" don't exist in America. It's just that here they're often obscured, harder to recognize outright. Everything in America is complicated, slathered under a layer of marketing, deflected by archetypal posing, masked by courtesy, or just hard to believe. Irony and a remarkable willingness to lie have crept into our hearts and messed with our ability to perceive honesty and reciprocate it. America has gotten lost in an artificiality of its own design.
That's why the Peace Corps is essentially sound. We join it to offer what help we can to nations and people that need it, but most of all we join it to discover what the hell is going on here, without disguises.
Sorry for the long discursion on a topic I suspect nobody really cares about. It's just something I've thought about a lot myself. I was going to join last year; if I had, I would have been gone by now. I realized back then that I didn't really know why I was doing it, and it probably would have been a horrible mistake. Now, I know why I would go, and I'm once again in the process of interviewing for a possible departure a year and half from now. Still not sure if I'll actually do it. Julia's letter makes the prospect more real, more frightening, and more tempting than ever before.
I know the Peace Corps seems kind of cheesy and outdated, especially in an era that's subbed out social entrepreneurship for idealism. I know that many people have had pretty miserable experiences in the Corps, and that, all things considered, quite a few Peace Corps projects yield very few lasting results. Still, it seems like that's almost the idea, and the idea is a good one.
If you join the Peace Corps, you're not signing on to work with some gung-ho band of professionals with deep pockets and narrow, achievable goals. You're going to do precisely what most volunteers do: live a strange, fascinating and tedious life in some village, fail and succeed in equal measure, and get the facts about what existence is like for most people. And by "the facts," I don't mean just surface information about culture, social systems, history. I mean the real essential, meaty stuff, the info on what's really going on in this world: the poverty, the suffering, the simple joy, the effort, the stark unsupported challenge of working for a living. The Peace Corps is certainly not the only way to learn these facts, but from what I know it often presents them to you in a way that's not easy to ignore.
That's not to say that "the facts of life and death" don't exist in America. It's just that here they're often obscured, harder to recognize outright. Everything in America is complicated, slathered under a layer of marketing, deflected by archetypal posing, masked by courtesy, or just hard to believe. Irony and a remarkable willingness to lie have crept into our hearts and messed with our ability to perceive honesty and reciprocate it. America has gotten lost in an artificiality of its own design.
That's why the Peace Corps is essentially sound. We join it to offer what help we can to nations and people that need it, but most of all we join it to discover what the hell is going on here, without disguises.
Sorry for the long discursion on a topic I suspect nobody really cares about. It's just something I've thought about a lot myself. I was going to join last year; if I had, I would have been gone by now. I realized back then that I didn't really know why I was doing it, and it probably would have been a horrible mistake. Now, I know why I would go, and I'm once again in the process of interviewing for a possible departure a year and half from now. Still not sure if I'll actually do it. Julia's letter makes the prospect more real, more frightening, and more tempting than ever before.