Peace Corps is like Puberty

Feb 19, 2008 - 11:19 AM PST

Peace Corps service is like puberty. The highs are incredibly high, the lows are seemingly bottomless, and you can’t really explain either one of them. The day I arrived in Kenya I met Leah, a volunteer who had already served a year, and she shared that insight with me. After the first two days of training I was bursting with naïve confidence— “I’m learning so much Swahili!...I love goat meat!…Yeah, I’m sure that water is OK to drink!” Two days later, that enthusiasm vanished instantly in the candlelit gloom of the most uncomfortable dining experience imaginable. I was surrounded by eight or nine unfamiliar faces of all ages. All were bantering loudly in kikamba, a language that I had just found out existed hours earlier, and that sounded nothing like the bits of Swahili I had been so excited to learn. Despite the language barrier, I could tell my presence was the subject of this impassioned exchange, and the only time it abated was when the eldest son Paul placed a heaping mountain of ugali (corn mush) and sukumawiki (kale) in front of me. I hesitated for a moment, and Paul announced condescendingly in his clipped English, “This is the ugali. You eat it.” Thanks Paul. The laughter and snickering continued as I struggled with the bland ugali, which, to put it mildly, I hadn’t developed a taste for just yet. Urgent questions echoed in my head—“Do all of these people live here in this tiny house with me?...Were they even told I was going to be staying here?...How soon could Peace Corps get me on a flight back home??...”

The day had started with such promise. My host baba (father) had come to pick me up at the training center and brought me back to his home, where I would be residing for the remainder of my pre-service training. We then wandered around the area for a couple of hours. Baba seemed articulate, funny and genuinely happy to take me into his home. We approached a fork in the road and he abruptly stopped and vaguely said that he needed to “go this way”. He told me to go back to the house and we’d meet up later.

An hour later I was peering from behind my ugali at these hostile strangers, baba nowhere in sight. When the dinner mercifully ended, the whole group moved into the other room where a tiny television was wired up to an old car battery. The glow from the TV lit up everyone’s face and I could see I had been replaced as the primary object of fascination by… Shawn Michaels body slamming Triple-H. That was how I learned that every week the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation shows WWE wrestling from the US. I sat down next to Paul and he excitedly asked, “Shawn Michaels… he is from your country??” This led to a deeper conversation about the differences and the similarities between our cultures. By the time baba finally returned we were all talking and I no longer felt like an invading alien. By the time I went to bed I was feeling great again and thought about what Leah had told me when I first arrived. I started to realize that if there is one consistent feature to Peace Corps, it is that there is no consistency. A single day can be alternatively depressing and euphoric, hopeless and inspirational. The important thing is to try to temper the extremes and stay relatively even-keeled. And after awhile the ugali and sukumawiki actually taste pretty good together.

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