My beef with the Peace Corps Tanzania

I have to say, without trying to be a rain cloud, Peace Corps people (at least in this country) really rub me the wrong way. I know that that’s pretty much a gross generalization, blah blah blah….but I don’t care. They always try to play the p-card (p as in poverty) “oh my life is so tough I live in a village.” Dude. You get stipends, you get to travel, you get time off, you get paid thousands of dollars at the end. The villages (at least the ones I know about) are incredibly beautiful. I’m not playing the p-card and I drained the majority of my savings to come here. It sucks but the sacrifice was worth it. I think I’m mainly just annoyed because they act like an elite club and isn’t that the opposite of the point PC is trying to make? I also am not really a fan of JFK’s foreign policy (Bay of Pigs, anyone? Anyone?), which I always think of when I think of the PC (since he started it). Maybe they’re apples and oranges, whatever. So yea, I’m a little biased. At least it exists and they try to do wonderful things and no one’s perfect, lord knows.

I’m sure this sounds bitchy but imagine you’re me. You’ve lived here for nine months- not an eternity but not a tourist jaunt. Enough time to grow a baby inside your phantom uterus. You work with locals, you speak the language and you’ve finally stopped getting harassed in town because you look like you know where you’re going (oh sweet sweet victory!). It just makes it doubly insulting when these Peace Corps people who have been “at the site” for three months think they know how it all works here and say, like tonight, talk on and on in my face drunkenly about how tough they are. I mean, just because I’m white and not PC I don’t know what I’m doing? It’s also insulting to the people that live here. A person can live in a village for two or three years here and still not fully know what life is like for the people living in these isolated rural communities. Maybe they’ve lived there, but have they grown up there? Have they made families there? No. It’s possible I’m just bitter because when I meet PC volunteers they always assume I’ve only been here a few weeks and I always want to tell them to shut their pie hole. I guess it’s just frustrating because you can make a difference anywhere, it doesn’t have to be in East Africa or Southeast Asia, and it doesn’t have to be with the poorest of the poor. But if all people get out of helping others is bragging rights, then what’s the point? If that greater message is missing, then it’s all in vain. I feel pretty proud sometimes that I’ve gone out into the streets and met kids and criminals. I love that some of the Amani kids have become my best friends (and they’re fourteen). It feels liberating to bridge those connections, but I also think it’s so so important to keep in mind that what I feel lucky for is this window of observation and eventual interaction that I’ve been granted. In no way can that experience be romanticized because the lives of the kids, the criminals, the scavengers, are their own. Others can’t claim them. And the Peace Corps, volunteering, it’s definitely romanticized. If I don’t come out of my experience with a greater understanding of the unknown, then the lesson has been lost. If all I think about it is me and what I’ve done at the end of this, then I’ve failed. That’s not the point. I think the point is gaining a greater understanding of the human condition, of the relationships we make, the lives of others and what we choose to do in those seconds before our choices are made.