When I started Peace Corps, I was told repeatedly to leave all expectations behind. And in small ways, I think I did a good job of that for the things that I encountered during Pre-Service training. Bucket showers? Huge cockroaches and spiders? Terrible food? Sexism? I knew it was coming but I didn’t know how, and I adapted. But the unexpected parts of my Peace Corps service haven’t been small things. They’ve been pretty big.
I didn’t expect that I’d be tackled by a crazy man while inside a walled, razor-wired compound, or that I’d still be reeling from the effects of that trauma more than a year later. I didn’t expect to spend 6 weeks in America miserably sick to my stomach. I didn’t expect to have to become ambidextrous because of a repeated stress injury that took me out of site for nearly 3 weeks. And I really, truly, didn’t expect to see parts of a child strewn across the road I live on after a tragic truck-pedestrian accident in late May.
I made myself a promise when I joined Peace Corps that if I felt like something had happened to me that would give me permanent damage, I would come home. Otherwise, I told myself, I would persevere. Honestly, I think I’ve broken that promise to myself at this point, and I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. When I come home, I’ll have to see doctors about the wrist problems that have plagued me for two years without explanation, and I’ll have to deal with the anxiety and perhaps even PTSD of my attack. I’d like to think that both of these aren’t truly permanent, but aren’t those the sort of things that I had given my permission to come home for? Sometimes, especially recently, I ask myself: what is the straw that could break this camels back?
Today, I thought it was the death of this child. I don’t even know him, but he was walking home from school, minding his own business on the shoulder of the road (our sidewalk) when a truck came along and I quote “totally destroyed his head.” This is my absolute greatest fear, and I have on occasion been laughed at for jumping across the drainage ditch as a truck barrels past. I live in a country with no regulation. Do their brakes work? Could their steering column snap? It all seems possible, especially to someone who as experienced the “impossible” twice in my life. Why yes, when I fall sick, I prefer it to be a rare disease with only 200 cases in the preceding century. Why yes, when I’m assaulted, it would be within a guarded, walled compound. It’s become very hard for me to identify what real risks are as opposed to fantastical imaginings that would never happen.
But I’m still here. And I think I’m going to make it to my COS date in August (barring completely unpredictable political issues). I think I’ve stayed because for every bit I’ve been “damaged” from this experience, I have also grown. For every moment that it feels like misery is out to get me, I remind myself that my friends and neighbors live in this crazy, uncertain place, for their whole lives. While they are upset and angry about the death of a child, they are not distraught in the same way I am. I have learned that sensitivity is a privilege. That I have so rarely experienced loss is an underestimated privilege, one which I have done nothing to deserve.
Never before in my life have I seen the stark difference between youth and adulthood as I do here. And frankly, I think I fall too often in the youth category. I have felt naïve and protected at times. I have wanted to joke around and befriend my peers—but then I would lose their respect as my students. I am starting to recognize that I must soon take on my burdens of duty and responsibility, although in Peace Corps, with no dependents, it is easy to feel free and young, at least sometimes. But other times, when I am dealing with the mayor or teaching adults older than myself how to be entrepreneurs, I am reminded that I am no longer a child. When I go back to America, it will be time to be a “real person”. And I hope that that “real person” will be stronger, and more determined, and more mature, because of the unexpected events that have unfurled during my Peace Corps service.
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