As a Returned Peace Corps volunteer, I cannot express how much I learned during my time abroad. More than any item or tangible object I own, I value my Peace Corps experience and treasure it as most certainly the toughest job I LIVED. When considering whether or not to join the Peace Corps, the following is a list of reasons that make a two-year stint in a developing country one of the best considerations you might make.
1.Adventure
Joining the Peace Corps is like taking adventure travel to a new extreme! When we think of true adventure, we think of hiking the mountains of Africa or the trails (unpaved of course) of Nepal. We think of dusty bus rides through jungles, broken down trains creeping past deserted countryside and having to forage for food in a land in which we do not speak the language, understand the customs or relate to the culture. The Peace Corps takes these distant, murky images and makes them a day-to-day reality. From the moment you step off the plane in your host country to the moment you board a plane for your return trip home (which, for many volunteers happens well after their two-years of service), living as a Peace Corps volunteer is never short on adventure. Admittedly, the adventures are sometimes less exciting and physically demanding than, say, hiking the Annapurna circuit in Nepal, but they are meaningful, challenging and inspiring nonetheless. As a Peace Corps volunteer in China, I dealt with adventures in language (try buying chicken breasts at a local market and not knowing the word for breast, for example), culture (you learn quickly that if the guy across from you toasts you with jet-fuel tasting rice wine, you must return the toast and slug down another shot of liquor in response, let you be considered terribly rude), and physical living conditions (killing rats is harder than you might imagine, particularly if you attempt to do so in any humane way at all). Thus, Peace Corps offers adventures in travel (from the getting there to the being there) as well as adventure in your daily life – from what you eat, what you say, where you shower and ultimately how you view yourself and the world around you.
2.Travel
Perhaps one of the biggest “perks” of Peace Corps is the opportunity for travel. Not only will you travel to your host country and live there for two or more years, but you will have the opportunity to travel throughout the region you are stationed as well. As a Peace Corps volunteer in China, I was able to travel extensively throughout the province in which I lived, throughout China as a whole and to several neighboring countries including Thailand and Cambodia. When I first joined Peace Corps, my experience with international travel was limited to Western European countries, and I thought Paris was the ultimate city/destination in the world. Now, I would give anything to be able to return to Cambodia and take my husband and children to see the amazing temples, taste the extraordinary food (I mean, French baguette and café-au-lait while watching the sun rise behind Angkor Watt is fairly extraordinary) and meet some of the warmest, friendliest people in the world. Not only are you able to visit new, exotic places based on your close proximity to them, but Peace Corps also prepares you for budget travel like no other experience can. After living at your Peace Corps site and on your Peace Corps allowance for a few months, a $30/night hotel in Phnom Penh will seem like a decided luxury. A flat-bed truck ride from one border town to another will be fairly normal, and you will find you can walk much further than you thought possible simply by having done it every day as a volunteer in your local community. Plus, any country you visit with other Peace Corps volunteers always turns into a good time! Peace Corps volunteers will almost always host you, take you to the local hot spots, teach you how to get by with the language and warn you about scams and other pitfalls that most travelers, even the most seasoned, may fall victim to. In short, you travel experience and opportunities will probably be better during your service as a volunteer than any other time in your life, so pack light, keep your eyes and ears open and hunker down – the word “travel” doesn’t even begin to do it justice.
3.Culture
Learning to live and thrive in another culture is nothing short of amazing. Yes, it can sometimes be exhausting. I remember thinking more than once, “Geez, I wish I could just walk outside, get into my car, go to a restaurant, order food, eat it, laugh with my friends and come home.” It was never really that easy. Aside from the physical logistics, living in another culture makes everything – all those day-to-day chores – more challenging and often times much richer and more exciting. Going to a restaurant and ordering food is difficult, for example, in a country that doesn’t have a culture of standing in line. At KFC (our only American option for the first year of my service), I would be so excited to dig into my two-piece chicken meal deal, but getting the dirty bird became mission impossible given the utter lack of queuing in China. Of course, after two years I became a pro as muscling my way to the front of the line, screaming out my two-bird order and throwing money over a sea of my black-haired counterparts to ensure my order would be delivered as quickly as possible. Of course, for every challenge there are two or three utterly endearing and life-altering experiences. I recall being bathed by my Chinese mother – something entirely unheard of in my own culture (I was 25 at the time). My Chinese mother would take me in for a shower, scrub me, wash my hair, towel me dry, comb my hair and put me down for a nap. I recall a restaurant owner’s wife taking me to the medicine shop, by the hand, to buy me cough syrup when I had a cold. I recall my students thinking it was entirely acceptable to share answers with each other during exams – this was not thought to be cheating but to be “helping,” a cultural distinction I still find hard to accept. Living in another culture ultimately teaches you not only about a new people and place but much more about your own culture – the norms and practices that help you define who you are and your place in the world. You will question yourself, your country, your friends, your family, your religion. You will compare and contrast who you were with who you are now, and your own culture will most likely become an amalgamation of your past and present. I believe the cultural aspect of serving as a Peace Corps volunteer is primarily what most affects the culture of your future.
There is no better way to learn another language than by joining the Peace Corps – particularly those hard to learn languages like Mandarin Chinese. Sure, colleges abound with excellent, highly rated programs. I met several people in China who had graduated from Ivy League programs and who could read and write Chinese much better than any Peace Corps volunteer could hope for after even two years in-country. But, I rarely met anyone who could sit down with a local farmer and talk over beer and bar-b-q about local politics, marriage or life in the countryside better than a volunteer. The Peace Corps teaches languages in the most hands-on, real-time, real-life way possible. You pick up local dialects, accents and slang. Your language is peppered with colloquialisms and color. It becomes more than a list of relevant vocabulary and grammatical structure and more a fluid tapestry of history, culture and memory. The vocabulary and grammar can be studied and filled in later, but the relevance and richness of studying a language among its people is unique to the Peace Corps experience because very few people outside of a country ever really live among its people, at the grassroots level that Peace Corps affords. The foundation for language that Peace Corps provides is what makes the program so unique and developed.
5.Friendships
Not only does Peace Corps allow you to make and develop meaningful, unique and rich friendships with people in your host community and in the countries in which you travel, but the friendships you make with other Americans will be some of the best, strongest and most relevant of your life. Both my friendships with the Chinese and with other Americans stretched me and shaped me as a person. My two site mates (other volunteers living in my city) were women I am fairly certain I would not have befriended here in the US. Both are now among my best friends. My friendships with them challenged me in many ways – and given the circumstance of being alone in a foreign country with few Americans with whom to befriend, I really worked at making those friendships succeed. I had to – my options were very slim. Having worked so hard at those friendships and having gone through such a life-altering experience with two other people enabled us to develop relationships that are much deeper, even today, than the relationships that are typical here in the US. The friendships I made with my Chinese counterparts are also life-long friendships. They are friendships that taught me as much about another culture as they did about myself. I take with me, even today, the lessons I learned about friendship in China – about loyalty, frankness and humor. I find that I brought home with me a different way of viewing and expressing friendship – again, an amalgamation of how I viewed relationships before my service and what I learned about human connection during my service. I learned that friendship goes beyond language, beyond money, beyond education. My friendships in China were more often based on laughter, on food, on curiosity and on shared experience. The Peace Corps experience allows for a depth and breadth of relationship experience that is uniquely strong and decidedly rich.
Living in another country offers an entirely new perspective on many, many aspects of one’s life. Living in another country as a Peace Corps volunteer takes this experience to a new degree. Peace Corps volunteers do not live in high-rise luxury apartments, ride in hired cars or eat at swank restaurants. With small monthly stipends and basic living conditions, the volunteer’s lifestyle is meant to mirror the average host country national’s own lifestyle, at least in terms of monetary support and living conditions. Thus, volunteers do not live at the lowest levels of poverty a country might face, nor do they live at the top. The goal is to live as average a lifestyle as is typical in the host country. In addition to a more typical standard of living, volunteers also live within and among their community. They do not live in separate housing or eat in different restaurants. We lived on the campus of our school, in a typical apartment building, among other Chinese teachers. We ate at the same restaurants, ate the same food, shopped at the same markets and rode the same broken-down buses as everyone else. Because of this, Peace Corps volunteers have a unique perspective from which to view not only their host country but also themselves. Living so closely within another culture allows for a much deeper exploration of that culture and subsequently a richer examination of one’s own culture. Peace Corps volunteers bring this perspective home, and it shapes not only our experience then (with the Peace Corps) but our future experiences and how we shape and define who we will be in the years to come.
There is no doubt about it – the Peace Corps builds confidence, strengthens character and increases a sense of independence unlike any other experience I can think of. One of the great aspects of the Peace Corps is how “hands-off” the Peace Corps staff is during a volunteer’s service. Other than a few months of language and culture training, volunteers are left to basically make it on their own. It’s challenging, to be sure. It’s hard to try to find the local market, figure out what food to buy and manage to make your purchase in a local dialect. There are days of utter frustration, humiliation and disappointment. And then, just when you think it’s all for not, you will make your way home from the market without getting lost, with a bag full of food and a new tidbit of information collected with language skills that had been lurking in the back of your mind all along. And the sense of accomplishment is second to none.
8.Diplomacy
I cannot think of a better time for America to engage in a bit of “soft diplomacy” and I cannot think of a better vehicle than the Peace Corps for the average American to contribute to the diplomatic process. For people in other countries, all over the world, to be able to meet an American and learn about our culture on a one-on-one basis is very, very important. What I found most Chinese thought of America is that their impression of us is based almost entirely on the movies we export. That struck me as particularly problematic when I saw these movies while I served overseas, with a new appreciation for their influence and with a new perspective. I was, in short, horrified. No wonder the world thinks we are drug addicted, sexually perverted morons without morals, ethics or any real sense of or appreciation for culture. I was happy to know that my friends overseas could meet a “real life” American – one who is not addicted to drugs, does not have sex with strangers, cares for her parents and does not wear skin-tight tube tops over a pair of fake breasts. Peace Corps volunteers also serve as ambassadors when they return home, as diplomats for the country in which they serve. Many Americans, for example, were surprised to learn all Chinese people are not running around rice paddies in straw hats with water buffalo nipping at their heels. They are not all Buddhist or Daoist. They do not all eat dog. They are not all short or skinny. They are funny. They are clever. They are human. Nothing, absolutely nothing, conveys the human experience more or better than human beings. Peace Corps allows for that very human experience to be explored and shared among two different cultures at a very basic, day-to-day level that is unique and very rewarding.
There are few opportunities in life that allow for one to give AND receive so much in return. When I joined the Peace Corps, I joined to serve as an English teacher. I went to China knowing that the experience would certainly change me, but I was not prepared for how much I would give and for how much I would ultimately receive. I felt that I was doing “good” work in teaching English in China. So many of my students would not have otherwise have had a native English speaker with whom to practice and from whom they might learn English. Aside from in-class lessons, I was able to set up a scholarship fund for female students, start and participate in a women’s group and a soccer club and share much of my culture and experience with my students and within my community. I feel that I was also able to share a sense of volunteerism and “giving back” that was sometimes less present in the Chinese community and within the culture. Of course, my “giving” was completely overshadowed by what I received. By the end of my two year stint, I felt somewhat a sham by being the “teacher.” I learned so much from living among the Chinese – so much about them, their culture, their experience and their “world.” My world, as a whole, grew exponentially during my time as a volunteer and the experience continues to “give back” through my sharing it with others and in my daily life. I can think of a lot of volunteer work here at home and overseas both that is meaningful, relevant and important work. Certainly, all of it is a balance of “give” and “take.” But the Peace Corps, again, just takes it to that great extreme.
There is no doubt about it: Peace Corps builds resumes. It can help you get into a better graduate school program and looks great when applying for jobs. I know several volunteers who were wait-listed for medical school and law school programs prior to serving as a volunteer and who were then immediately accepted upon completing their service. I was accepted to a graduate program for which I had no relevant experience other than my Peace Corps service. When I spoke with the director of my program at my graduation, he told me he was so impressed with my Peace Corps service he didn’t really care about my lack of academic experience for my degree. When I went to look for jobs after graduating from my MA program, I found employers always looked highly upon my Peace Corps service. It was considered, too, work experience, and it was taken into consideration when negotiating a higher salary for me in one position. I cannot think of one time when having served as a Peace Corps volunteer did not reflect well upon my application for either academic programs or employment.
If you are considering joining the Peace Corps, I hope the above reasons will help clarify just how amazing and life-changing the experience can be. It isn’t for the faint-of-heart, but the lessons learned and lives changed are ultimately well worth the price of admission.
For more information about the Peace Corps, you can visit the official site at www.peacecorps.gov.
