A Preface

“So, what are you doing over there?”

An often-asked, and for PCVs, an extremely loaded question that unknowingly preys on our worries and insecurities.* What are we doing over here? Depending on the day, we can answer our friends and family with pride, joy, anger, tears, or a vague, evasive statement.

I began writing a couple of entries about what it’s like to be a Peace Corps Uganda Education Volunteer and then decided that I need to preface them with this: I’m going to focus on the good things, but I don’t want to pretend the bad parts don’t exist.

Every PCV’s experience is different, vastly different, even within the same country. In describing my official position, I don’t want to seem dishonest. A lot of what PCVs do and experience is hard, and painful, and full of heartache. While we’re in it we don’t know how to process it ourselves. We also don’t know how to talk about it with others. We’re reluctant to explain the things that are happening in our host country which we really disagree with because we worry those are the only impressions you will take away. We can’t give you all of the context, have you meet all of the people involved to make you understand how we can disagree so strongly with something but still live with it. We don’t want to talk about how we’ve spent days in bed trying to understand it ourselves. We can, however, give you pictures of cute kids and tell funny stories about how we discovered that the word for “vegetables” here sounds just like the word for “buffalo.” Those are real things, true things, but sometimes not mentioning the other side of our experiences can make what we say feel like a lie.

Being in the Peace Corps also makes you question life, yourself, and your choices constantly. And you know what? Most people don’t do that enough. At my year mark in Uganda, I battled with depression, criticizing myself for not having done enough, grown enough. But then I realized that I haven’t questioned my life like that in years. 365 days would go by and the only thing that would really mark the passage of time was the ending of a lease. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed my life – but I never really looked at it. I wasn’t worried about self-acceptance or my personal growth. There were parts of myself I didn’t like, and it was so easy to not think about them, to distract myself. But here, you can’t do that. Here, life is so much more immediate and there is so much more time on your hands, time that you can’t fill except for with your thoughts. This job, this place, forces you to examine your actions, your thoughts, your heart. And it doesn’t allow you to close your eyes.

There’s no doubt that being a Peace Corps volunteer is the hardest job you’ll ever love, and I’m only just starting to learn how to love it – and how to love myself. But I want to think positively. I want to focus on the growth, the self-discovery, the connections, those moments that will be the ones shining in my memory. I will keep those other moments too, the ones full of confusion and pain and grief, but for now, those are just for me. 

"I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind...At these times...I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure."

- Albus Dumbledore

*But don't stop asking!