The Married Couple

Today marks two years that Patrick and I have been married, although the last six months feel like they should count for two years just in themselves.  We have experienced so much, and thus learned so much about ourselves, each other and our relationship that marriage in the Peace Corps kind of feels like a time warp. 

In honor of this anniversary, I want to share my reflections on doing Peace Corps as a couple.  On the Peace Corps website, it says that 9% of volunteers are married, and I think that the experience is wholly different than that of the majority of our fellow volunteers.   Also in honor of this anniversary, Pat and I finally went to see the waterfalls our region is known for.  

smallest waterfall we saw, but technical difficulties currently prevent  pictures of bigger ones from being shown here

Happy Anniversary!

I have mad respect for the majority of volunteers who have a more traditional experience and take on Peace Corps, their community integration, and their work all by themselves.  I have done a stint of about a week on my own, and Pat is doing about two weeks by himself right now, and it is rough!  It took us two and a half years from the time we hit ‘submit’ on our application (so not including the time writing it, which was something I worked on intermittently for about a year) to when our plane left for Senegal.  Two and a half years is longer than our Peace Corps service.  Despite the many hoops we had to jump through and the pressure that applying to the Peace Corps put on our relationship status (you have to be engaged to apply together and married for a year to serve together), I just have two words to say: WORTH IT. 

I’ll be the first to admit that I lack many skills that most adults frankly should have.  Since part of doing Peace Corps seems to resemble the show Survivor (in the aspect that you have to survive in trying conditions and not in the aspect where you could get voted off the island), it has been really great to have a partner who is really good at finding solutions to the challenges of daily life in Africa and takes delight in finding creative ways to make a trying situation much easier.  I, on the other hand, have a hard time just folding things, for example, which makes things like fixing a bike, building a cinder block oven or stringing up a hammock from the beams of our thatched roof into insurmountable challenges.  When I catch Pat daydreaming, he is often imagining something like a cool way to make a bookshelf out of wood from the bush.  I’ll admit it, I need him.

And he needs me too, which is one reason why we are a good team.  While I may not be good at practical things essential for survival in the hut, I do happen to be really good at picking up languages, which is essential for survival in the community.  We have come to depend on each other much more than we have ever needed to before, which in turn has brought us much closer.

As a couple, we do not experience the isolation faced by other volunteers.  We can air and share concerns and triumphs at any time with the persons whose advice or co-celebration we most need.  I expect that this will be huge in a year and a half when we finish our service.  I can’t imagine having accumulated all of these cultural jokes, hysterical or heart breaking memories, dear friends and crazy acquaintances, and returning to America and having no one from my former life who can understand.  I am confident that having gone through Peace Corps together will make coming back from Peace Corps a much gentler process.

When we received our invitations to serve in Senegal, I was invited to serve in the Health Sector, and Pat was invited to the Environmental Education (EE) Sector.  I looked forward to being able to work in different sectors and develop our own specific projects but to be able to collaborate when we wanted to.  Right about the time we got here, however, Peace Corps HQ decided to phase out the EE program and combine both programs into a new community health project framework.  That means that we are both under the same project, which has both benefits and challenges.    We can work together, bounce ideas off of each other, and funnel our teamwork into work projects, which is excellent.  I am a big fan of collaboration.  However, I think it might have been healthier to only be life partners and not be constant work partners.  We spend about 24 hours a day together most days, and while there is still no one’s company I prefer more, I think it might be a healthier system to work on different things and then come together to improve them.  As we get our feet on the ground and figure out where we each really want to take our service and our projects, however, I think this will happen more.  The first three months we were really just trying to integrate into our community (in theory anyway…we actually did a lot of work), so that was good to do together.

Other challenges include living in a one room hut.  If you need some space…too bad.  The only place you can really go is the concrete slab that covers the hole in the ground that is our toilet.  Peace Corps can bring about many stressful situations, and it can be hard not to take out your stress on the person you share a small space with.  We have recognized tendencies to do this and are actively trying to work on it, but it’s definitely an issue.   However, working together to normalize the day to day of hut life has proved to be a great joy. 

Coming into the experience of Peace Corps in West Africa as a couple, former female volunteers from the region had warned me that it might be frustrated as the female part of the team because people would always go to the man first, so I had tried to mentally prepare myself for this.  I haven’t really experienced this too much at all.  Maybe because I have an easier time with language this gets evened out?  Regardless, it has been a nice surprise.  Female volunteers are also pretty consistently barraged with marriage proposals and the like, and I still get that, but MUCH less than single volunteers, and only from randos who don’t know Pat and I. One thing that I hadn’t been prepared for with West African culture and our coupleness is the constant tendency to compare.  Volunteers often feel compared to the volunteer who came before them, but we are constantly compared to each other.  “Sadio has learned Malinke better than Ibrahima.”  “Ibrahima is better at biking than Sadio.”  This can be very frustrating, because they are so blunt and constant with their bluntness. 

Before we left for Senegal, the idea of Peace Corps service was so intangible that I didn’t get nervous about the big things like “will I successfully integrate into my community?”  Instead, I was nervous that our stage-mates wouldn’t want to be friends with us because we were “the married couple.”  During Pre-Service Training,  I really struggled with not feeling as close with my fellow trainees as I hoped too.  As I cried that friend groups seemed to be developing around me but not including me, Pat consoled me that I had a deeper friendship amongst the group of trainees that anyone else could hope for.  Friendships have come with time, but it has felt hard to not feel sought out, especially during large group get-togethers and trainings.  I try to not take it personally…I really do feel like people assume that we have each other and they don’t need to seek us out because we’ll never truly be left out.  It  help matters that whenever we are at the training center, they always stick us in a room way far away from everyone else, so we are totally isolated.

It has been interesting to hear from our volunteer cohort their observations on us, their married couple. People were really impressed that we always sat with other people at training, which is funny to me because we are just being social, nothing too impressive.  I overheard someone say that she wanted us to adopt her.  Another person has told me that she never saw herself getting married until becoming friends with us, and now she does.  These last two statements I count amongst some of the better compliments I have ever received.

They say that Peace Corps changes you, and I’m sure it does.  It has already.  It’s a blessing to be able to change together, to witness each other’s growth, and to grow together through the challenges.  Plus, let’s be honest, I don’t know if I could do this without him.  Two years of marriage have passed so quickly, and two years of Peace Corps will be a whirlwind too.  I’m so glad to have my best friend and team mate for life to whirl with.