Sunday, June 28, 2009
This will be a multi-entry essay covering my recent attempt to hold an English camp in my village. This project was a labor of love and brought me to the brink of total collapse. Giving up and returning home was in my head numerous days following this project for the first time ever in my Peace Corps service. I'm choosing to write about this experience because I believe it is a perfect window into what Peace Corps service is truly like. I don't want this experience to fade with time and I don't want the details to slowly bleed together and then be forgotten all together. Finally, without my girlfriend Christine, I would have never been able to come out of all of this in one piece.
What is Success?
Part I
Part I
I’ve started this story at least a hundred times in my head and perhaps a hundred times more on paper. In my head it is fluid, as if just one of many passing dreams which grace my pillow and then just as quickly fall away again. And yet I can’t seem to transfer what my mind is able to do with such ease into words. Perhaps a drill and a cup of some sort would do the trick. A container of some kind will obviously be needed to catch the spillage of these liquid thoughts, which seem awash in my brain. A dixie cup should do. I’m not that smart. Shouldn’t need to hold much.
The story is simple, really. As a Peace Corps Volunteer here in Thailand, I wanted to hold an English camp as I was expected to hold such English camps at some point during my service. I planned said English camp, English camp turned into mammoth cluster fuck, students never knew the difference, and so English camp was technically a success. This is the basic outline of what happened. The problem is that my English camp was not a success. Not as it was originally intended to be. And yet it was. I had never seen my students so excited to be learning English or to be at school for that matter.
A complete mental collapse occurred roughly a day or two before my English Camp was to take place. This was due to the cluster fuck issues, which were referred to above. These will be addressed later. At this point my body was running on autopilot and 3 in 1 instant coffee. Finally, with the camp complete and everyone having gone home for the day, I got the hell out of Dodge resolving to take some time off to get my head straight. To figure out what just happened and what the hell was I really doing in this country. Everything needed to be reevaluated.
Success is a difficult thing to quantify in Peace Corps. The butterfly effect is in many ways, real as a volunteer has no idea what kind of impact he or she will really have on an individual or community years down the road. The current Country Director of Peace Corps Thailand likes to tell the story of how he began a small co-op watermelon garden in his village in Issan back when he was a volunteer in Thailand in the late 60’s. Little did he know that years would go by before he would return to that same village to discover that the community leaders of that village would take that idea and run with it. Now, the province of that village is the leading producer of watermelon for all of Thailand with our CD’s village leading the way. This is a great story to tell green horn volunteers as they complete their training, as the ripple effects of our presence here can never fully be measured. It’s also a horrible story to tell as it soon contributes to our own self-loathing and depression.
It has been studied and proven that within three months of service, Peace Corps Volunteers come down from the initial high of being sworn in as volunteers and arriving at site full of hope and ideas of how to make the world a better place, starting with their villages. Once those three months have passed, many if not all PCVs learn the reality of Peace Corps life, which is often very different from the commercials. After being filled with excellent project ideas for nearly 3 months during training, it can kind of be a bit of a let down when the ideas you’ve been day dreaming about are quickly shot down or ignored the moment you arrive at site. It hurts a bit… getting kicked in the balls hurts too.
Having a good idea shot down or ignored is part of life though as anyone older than you will testify. But I will argue that this is a wee bit different. Few middle management types have ever had an HIV/AIDS education camp turned down because “no one here has AIDS” even though you attended one of the village leaders sons funerals just last weekend. Cause of death…AIDS related infection. Even small improvements, which seem logical, are shot down for the simple reason that those in charge simply have their heads so far up their asses that they can’t see anything except their own stomach.
And then the volunteer is reminded of the story of the watermelons and how a simple project can have far reaching effects long after we’re gone. This is all well and good except for the fact that few people will ever tell you during training that for every project that gets off the ground, a minimum of 5 dead or dying projects were left in its wake. And then the volunteer takes another drink.
As a volunteer, it is our job to come up with project ideas with the help of our community in order to better our community. But due to the ripple effects of our role here, the impact of these projects may not be felt or seen until long after we’re gone. Because of this, a volunteer will often only see a project in the beginning stages, when the project is struggling, and near total collapse. This is why success is difficult to measure in Peace Corps. If a person were to ask a volunteer if their project was a success or is successful at the present time, the volunteer would likely say they didn’t know or would possibly reply in the negative. Honestly, who knows…
This is the fate of projects in Peace Corps Thailand and as such, the fate of the volunteers who work so hard to make something of them. My project, most recently, was an English camp. But not just any English camp, this would have a twist which I hoped would bring my community together…
