Peace Corps for Realsies

Seventeen days in.  I still haven’t quite been able to wrap my mind around the two years part of Peace Corps, but at least now I have more of an idea about what those two years will actually be like. 

The most surprising element of volunteer life so far, is how typical my experience is.  I have found myself astounded by how much my individual experiences and emotional reactions to these experiences are exactly what volunteers who have been here for a while talked about during training or at the regional house before we went to site.  It’s funny to think back on those conversations now.  I remember thinking that things like feeling like I was living in a fishbowl of constant observation didn’t seem like it would be all that hard.  Well, it’s exhausting.  Working up the energy to leave my hut to constant scrutiny, albeit extremely friendly scrutiny, can be really hard.  Going from a jam-packed training to a life in village where you make up your schedule as you go turns out to be pretty hard, despite my initial thoughts that people were making a big deal about nothing.  We had a session during training about volunteer mental health where they gave us a handout that details a typical volunteer’s emotional experiences at every month of service.  So far, in this sense, I am nothing but typical.

However, there are some definite circumstances where I have found that my experience has not been typical.  For example, I have Pat.  Well I did have Pat, until he had to go to Dakar to get a knee injury checked out.  (It must be noted that this injury was sustained while he was doing the worm at a dance party during training.  It turns out that nothing is torn, there is just an excessive amount of fluid accumulation on the knee which was causing a lot of pain.  He should be coming back in a few days, Inshallah.)  As for now, I am experiencing what Peace Corps is like for everyone else in our training class.  It sure is a lot harder.  For example, I couldn’t run to Pat when wasps started building multiple nests inside our hut each day.  I had to deal with the nests (and the maggots inside!) by myself.   I hope that Going Alone (title of the book I’m reading for inspiration in this unforeseen aspect of my first weeks of service which is about women going on solo adventures) will expedite my process toward my goal of being more badass.  Since Pat has been gone, I’ve also been sleeping inside, which is no fun.  I have found I wake up every night at 1:08.  Apparently it takes my body eight minutes to realize that the electricity (and thus the glorious fan) has been cut, and I wake up drenched in sweat and panicking.

The main way my service has been atypical so far is that I have actually been doing things.   Our work for the first few months is supposed to be focused on community integration, which I have been doing a lot of, but there’s more to it for me.  I’m doing double-duty integration: my Malinke community and the health center community, most of whom were sent here from Dakar.  I’m pretty confident that I was placed at this particular health center, which my boss described as the best health district in the country, because of my status as a Masters International student.  Over the past few years I have had reoccurring doubts about the order of doing things (grad school and Peace Corps in particular, since it made everything more complicated, especially with getting married in the middle), because every day I’m more and more excited about this placement.   I think my French proficiency had something to do with it too—it’s funny the trajectory our lives take and the things that lead to other things.

Anyway, integrating with the health center staff has involved hanging out there and waiting for them to tell me what meeting is coming up (nothing seems to be planned very far in advance).  So far, while some of my stage mates have talked about how, on their busy days they meet three people, I’ve been able to do some translating between hospital staff and patients, observe data compilation for a baseline survey about the capacity of all of the health posts in the district, be made part of the hospital hand washing committee, helped to edit a report (about the measles outbreak that recently occurred in the area due to people missing vaccination campaigns in their constant quest for gold), done two radio shows, and help to carry out a Schistosomiasis prevention and deworming campaign. 

Having studied International Health and Development in a developed country, it has been very interesting to really be a part of how the theories are put into practice in the real world with all it’s practical limitations.  For example, how do you prevent hospital-borne infections in a hospital with no running water?  That’s a challenge for the handwashing committee that I’m on.  How do you target a prevention campaign when you only receive 25% of the medication you requested in order to cover all the school children in the district?  We ended up targeting the daaras, or Koranic schools, where the children were deemed to be most vulnerable.  How do you send out teams to measure kids to determine their dosage of preventative medicine when the health center only has one tape measure?  You get creative, and make a tape measure out of knotted rope.   Experiencing these problems and their solutions are at the heart of why I wanted to do Peace Corps as a part of my career trajectory in working in global health and development.  Working at the community level now seems even more essential.  Even two weeks in, I am confident that these years spent seeing up close how projects play out on the ground and how they affect individuals and communities will make me a better public health professional.  That is affirming when real Peace Corps gets hard, which it often has and often will.