How do you take this crazy experience and boil it down to a few soundbites, interview responses, or one's elevator speech? This is the ultimate task in processing my time here. It's possible that even I won't fully understand my service until I have returned to the US and am packaging my experience for an audience back home.
My time in the Peace Corps is really two stories. The first story is the fun, superficial collection of stats and anecdotes perfect for an elevator or the local bar. For example...
Over the past two years, I have:
- Lived without electricity in a thatched roof hut that I built in the jungles of Panama
- Lived with an impoverished indigenous population called the Ngabes on the equivalent of an Indian reservation
- Bathed and washed my clothes in a river
- Hiked an hour and traveled 3.5 hours in a dugout canoe to get to the closest place with electricity
- Lived in a site without cell phone service
- Hiked in all of my food and supplies
- Built an aqueduct serving an entire village
- Built a spring capture to provide water all year long to another village
- Formed five water committees and then trained those committees on managing community funds for a future water system. The committees were composed of mostly illiterate adults
- Saved a girl's life from a venomous snakebite
- Got amoebas and Giardia
- Learned to use a machete
- Owned and used a hammock
- Made banana beer
- Climbed the tallest peak in Panama and saw both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans
- Saw sloths, armadillos, poisonous tree frogs, crocodiles, dolphins, starfish, tons of tropical fish, vampire bats, spider, howler, and white-faced monkeys, rays, margays, kinkajous, sea turtles, countless types of tropical birds, and much more of your garden-variety Panamanian flora and fauna
- Became at peace (or learned to kill without pause) with tarantulas, scorpions, and cockroaches
Then there's the fun statistics. By the numbers (approximate):
- Consumed 2,000 bananas (plantains and all the other various types of bananas that exist in Panama)
- Spent 150 hours riding in a dugout canoe
- Spent $150 on candles (about 1000 candles)
- Spent 500 hours hiking through jungle
- Read about 100 books
- Lived off less than $4000/year
High five! What an awesome two years!!!
Then there's the other story. It's the story that I guess I've been telling all along. In some ways, it's the easier story to blog about, but maybe not as easy to share in person. It turns out development work is really, really hard. My site was extremely challenging. The idea of improvement for improvement's sake is not a value shared by all cultures. Americans are driven and chastise those that don't pull their weight. We have a lot of development infrastructure in place that we take for granted - physical, technological, economic, social, legal, political, educational, and cultural.
This is the story that's a little more of a buzzkill. It's the story of children dying, projects failing, aid wasted, and all the frustrations that come with a cultural disconnect. It's the longer, more complex story that can never be confined by the walls of an elevator. But it's an equally important story to tell.
And this dichotomy, this line I will learn to walk when I return to the US, that gets at the heart of service. Peace Corps has been wonderful and humbling, full of adventures and boredom, truly engaging and fundamentally lacking, all at the same time.
