As volunteers we all have slightly different reasons for joining the peace corps; a love of travel, a desire to travel for the first time, the need for a change of scenery, an uncertainty of what to do next, but one thing we all have in us is a desire to leave the world a better place than it was before us. This is the real reason we join to change the world, to wake up and say I made those kids lives better, I gave them hope, and an opportunity they didn't know was there.
For the two and a half years of service this is the reason we woke up, got dressed and fought like hell to see our projects succeed, to see our communities grow, and to see a child find hope in themselves. Along the way we became part of the culture we lived in. We starteed to act differently, picked up mannerisms, words, actions, and a way about us that said I am from here. We gained friends and in some cases a kind of family in our new culture as we began to shed our own. Our perspectives changed, we learned what it meant to not have, maybe even what it felt like to really be hungry. We learned the struggle of poverty, how hard it is to break the cycle and raise above it when you are fighting just to survive. We learned a kind of patience that almost makes us freaks of nature in this I want it now way of life. Of course while we were living this life, we weren't fully aware of what was happening, we were just living life trying to make it from one day to the next.
Then we came home, and it hit us how much we were this other culture, this other way of life, and how much we changed. Yea we maybe came back tanner and weighing a little less, speaking a strange broken english adding foreign words in randomly, and not really being able to articulate very well. But our core being changed too, the way we view the world and ourselves, want we want from life, the way we live, the way we dance and eat. We will forever be marked with this peace corps thing. In some ways its a curse, you know that whole ignorance is bliss. It is definitely easier to fit in, when you feel like you fit in. I doubt very many of us would change it for a second though because for most of us this change in ourselves, this ability to serve the world community was both the most difficult experience of our lives, but also the most rewarding and amazing two plus years of our lives. We have each other that get that, and few others that fully understand all that was our experience. We miss a land that was our home but never a birthplace in much of the same way an immigrant misses their birth place, longing to return but never knowing when that may happen. Back in the US we search for people like us feeling out of place with people that a mere 3 years ago we would have fit in with. When we go to a new US city we question whether the water from the pipe is drinkable, and wonder if there is hot water.
Hopefully though no matter how much we miss life in our other country, the people, the purpose, the way of life, the being a part of a community, not just a face in the crowd, we know that we were that difference in someones life and we accomplished soo much more than we ever thought we would. Maybe not in the ways we thought but maybe in a much more human sense instead of a project sense. I know for me, not a day goes by that I don't remember the children by the sea, and I hope that they grow up to be the amazing men and woman I know they can be.
