EL SAlvador: August 2013

Today marks the end of my Peace Corps service. This is a moment I’ve been anticipating for 2 years now, with a mix of emotions that ranges from gleeful, minute-counting excitement (back to the land of washing machines! And Vietnamese food!) to a leaden, panic-laced dread (what on EARTH am I going to do with my life?). But for better or for worse, my time in the savior has left an indelible mark on me and taught me some valuable (and other, not so valuable) lessons. So, I’m going to get sappy and introspective and spend a moment or two sifting through the debris and hopefully come up with a coherent, legible blog post summing some of these lessons and reflections up.

1. You can get used to anything (physically) – To quote an email I recently received from my father: “You were pretty girly before you went to El Salvador, if I recall.” Coming into Peace Corps, my nightmares centered mainly around mud huts, rats, lack of electricity, and other horrors that come with living in not-America. Upon arrival, though, what I learned is that even the biggest diva (read: me), can adapt to almost anything physically with time. Granted, my living situation has been pretty cushy when we take into account that I’m living in El Salvador. I have a tile floor, my house almost always has electricity, and we haven’t fully run out of water ever. That being said, I’ve still made do with blistering heat, hand scrubbing all of my clothing, cooking over a wood stove, and finding all sorts of critters in my bed (with mosquito net tucked in…I’ll never solve that mystery), scorpions crawling in my hair, pit latrines where cockroaches fly up out of the hole at you as you go to sit down, and all manners of disgustingness floating in my food. This sounds horrific, and in retrospect it has been in a sense, but what my nightmares now center around is the core-shaking self doubt that I think PCVs shoulder as the swear in, and probably don’t shed until COS (or maybe not even then, I guess we’ll see). This self-doubt stretches to all areas of life – do I even know what I’m talking about when I give classes at the school? Do people in my community really like me? The realization that my Spanish will never be good enough to follow a conversation 100%; the realization that my projects probably won’t be sustained once I leave and I probably haven’t made that much of a difference in the end.

2. Say yes to everything at least once – Yeah, soup with hairy meat in it is probably going to be the most disgusting thing you ever eat (spoiler alert: it was), and that dance that doesn’t end til 3 AM is going to give you the worst headache of your life and make you absolutely hate reggaeton music until you die, but every experience is worth having once. And even those experiences that make you want to blow your brains out in the moment (the cross country, 8-hour road trip to go to a water park filled with dirty children and obese adults, for example), at the end of the day will at least make for an entertaining story that you tell with a laugh (albeit rueful). And, doing these weird things that I would never have elected to do of my own volition have introduced me to new and interesting people and things.

3. Pre cut up, bagged fresh papaya and watermelon for a quarter should be an international thing. So should cheesy, beany pupusas 3 for $1 and the “nut man” who wanders around selling raisins, cashews, almonds and peanuts. I’m going to petition the new mayor of Boston and I highly recommend you all do the same in your hometowns, because these things make even the most tiresome of errands worth doing when it means a constant stream of amazing snacks.

4. Patience – This song has been sung many a time by other PCVs and myself. It was preached to us at every training session we ever attended, and I wisely impart these recycled bits of wisdom to the new trainees arriving in country now. Besides being “girly” pre-PC, I’d say another core quality of mine has always been impatience bordering on intolerance. In El Salvador a maintained quality of impatience will essentially lead to a maintained state of frustration bordering on anger. I wish I could say that I shed my type-A impatient nature down here, but in truth the best I can say is that I’ve learned to suppress it.

5. Sometimes I’m actually not the best person for the job – Resounding “duh”. My type-A impatience/intolerance has made me fairly independent and very much a “if you want something done right, do it yourself” type of person. However, I’ve learned here that that is actually not the case often. While I may be the best person to write a letter soliciting money from the American NGO that’s going to fund our water tank, or the Peace Corps branch that will give me money to paint murals on the wall; when it comes to asking our mayor for a garbage truck it most certainly is not me who is going to be the most eloquent. Nor should I take the lead on the school garden. These are obvious examples, but I’m having a hard time finding more concrete nuanced examples that can express to you that down here I learned that there are plenty of things I’m actually not all too good at, despite 23 years of telling myself I’m the best.

6. How lucky I am – this is another tired reflection that aid workers gush about – we are so so SO lucky to be born in the US and don’t deserve it. It’s something I’ve said my whole life without really understanding it, and something I don’t think one can fully appreciate without living in another, underdeveloped country for some time. I’m not just talking about the physical comforts that life in the United States provides – yea, I’ll never take a washing machine or a hot shower for granted again. But what I’m talking about more than anything are the opportunities we are afforded just by dint of being American citizens. A Salvadoran may not even make it through third grade, and if they want to graduate high school have to grapple with traveling long distances, huge economic roadblocks, and often family reticence to waste a potential laborer on education. Even if a Salvadoran achieves a high school diploma, one of those is worth about as much down here as a Bachelor’s degree is in the US – aka nothing.

7. And lastly, you can eat a tortilla with anything. It works as a taco or burrito wrapper, torn up into your chicken soup, or as a way to mop up the end of your chow mein or macaroni and cheese. In fact, it has practically rendered the fork obsolete in my mind.

In sum, I don’t think I’ve learned anything earth-shaking or revolutionary that almost all PCVs before me haven’t learned, but I’m still very grateful for the experiences that I’ve had, the things I’ve learned personally, and the changes that 2 years of hard labor (ha) have wrought on me. I also don’t expect these revelations to be particularly titillating to anyone who isn’t me (sorry, readers), but I still anticipate the “what did you learn in Peace Corps?” type questions to be numerous upon my return to the states, so maybe there is a chance that you all will find these musings at least somewhat interesting.

Now I am off for 6 weeks of travel around Central America with Jamie and Kara. I also managed to convince Benjamin, one of my oldest friends from home, to come join us for part of the trip. I'll keep putting up pics and posts here when I can, so stay tuned.

And finally, please look at some pics from various going away parties!