For example, I’ve never been much of a jealous person, but the inequality of volunteer placement and circumstances breeds a kind of jealousy. Other volunteers get to live in a welayat where all the volunteers are located around a central city and get to meet up as a group every weekend, whereas the volunteers in Balkan are too spread out to meet up much. Some volunteers live in houses with microwaves and washing machines and family members that speak decent or fluent English. Volunteers who are dating (or just sleeping with) other volunteers get to see each other regularly. Health volunteers get to take vacation whenever they want. Some volunteers live in places where they can write grants and not have problems whereas others live in places where their grants are shut down. Staff plays favorites. I would be lying if I said I haven’t experienced jealousy over some of these things at times.
In the States, I wasn’t one for gossip, either. I’m not that interested in other people’s drama. But the Peace Corps life is a breeding ground for gossip. It’s the way volunteers bond with one another and it makes for something to take our minds off of not having bathed in three weeks. Every week there’s something new. Someone has hooked up with someone, or someone who is dating someone is flirting with someone else behind their back or the government has done another stupid thing that screws volunteers over.
I think I’m more judgmental too. Back home, it didn’t matter if my co-workers got drunk on the weekends and threw up in public or got into bar brawls. It didn’t matter if they had overnight visitors of the opposite sex, because it was their private lives and didn’t affect my professional life. However, in Peace Corps, there’s no such thing as a private life, partly because of the rumor mill and partly because we’re living with host families and in communities where we are watched every minute of the day. So a volunteer doing stupid things in another welayat can impact my professional life in Balkan. If a PCV really messed up, it could have consequences for all of us, including even getting us kicked out of the country. On a less dramatic scale, it makes Americans look bad when, for example, volunteers break things in a hotel or barf all over their sidewalk. One of my biggest pet peeves, and I hate to call it a pet peeve because that “cutifies” my annoyance, is Americans behaving badly abroad. And I’m afraid that soon some of the volunteers’ luck will run out and their antics will be observed by the wrong people. So when someone’s decisions have the possibility to affect my life, I get a little more judgmental about them.
I’m more cynical too. After seeing how wretched this government is and how little hope there is for reform any time soon; after seeing how ineffective organizations like UNICEF and Peace Corps can be; after seeing America through the eyes of someone who’s living abroad and only sees the news on yahoo and MSN and just marvels at how a serious candidate for president can say things like there should be no separation of church and state; after witnessing these things, I sometimes just want to throw my hands up and say “I quit. There’s nothing to be done; the world is going to hell in a hand basket; I just hope Jesus comes soon.”
I don’t do that, of course. But the temptation is there. So what to do when I feel that way? I think about a student I once had who told me she loved me more than her parents because I came to her band concerts. I will never forget that moment. Here was this honor student, kind and funny, whose parents had never come to a band concert, track meet or anything else for her entire high school career. I know she’s not the only kid for whom I filled the role of caring adult. So as long as there are people I can encourage, I will. And I try to keep my cynicism and all those other bad things in check.