The Strangest Job

Peace Corps motto de jour is that this is the hardest job you will
ever love. The longer my service goes on the more I contend that it is
the strangest position someone can choose to put themselves in
professionally for 2 years. It is one of the only jobs where
self-awareness, thinking and “me time” can become a burden rather than
a welcome gift at the end of a long day. I personally believe that it
is the only job where over 50% percent of the employees would probably
fail a mental health test on any given day. The only business where
almost every employee has cried or stared forlornly off into space for
longer than is generally considered socially acceptable in the past
month or two.

Its is probably one of the only businesses where the last time you had
sex and how much you miss it and how sick you were last Tuesday are
polite dinner-time conversation. I feel genuinely sorry for whatever
unfortunate soul takes me on my first date when I return to the
states. I have a deep seeded fear I will get frustrated with a piece
and just casually pick it up with my hands in a 5 star restaurant. I
also contest that this is one of the only professions an American can
enter where you can eat with your hands while talking to your Mayor.
Basically what I am trying to say is that it is defiantly not your
typical job and therefore it does not have your typical outcome.
What has really started me thinking of all these things was talking to
my fellow volunteers and realizing many of us are in the same place,
and yet not in the same place at all. The Peace Corps is so
individualistic that it is sometimes like comparing apples to oranges.
The daily battles that you face can make you feel like you are on
another planet, even if you are only 5 km away and everyone in your
town knows everyone within a 15 km radius.

Our lives can be so different on a day-to-day that it often is hard to
even compare it. There is commiseration. There are many shared
experiences. But life, plain and simple daily life, is not shared with
anyone really. You are the only one that can provide perspective on
what you just saw because John was 100 miles away when you got trapped
on the side of the mountain. Plain and simple some of your closest
friends may never see something so mundane as the inside of your room.
At the end of the day you are the only one that can decide if you are
going crazy or it was just having an off moment. While you can ask
friends for advice sometimes asking a Peace Corps volunteer for
emotional advice is like the blind leading the blind. Because honestly
none of us have any idea what the fuck is going on. At the end of the
conversation you may inevitably come to the conclusion that you have
no idea what the fuck you are doing. Or why the initiative you took is
now turning out to be one hellish mistake. Occasionally on a horrible
day and you make the decision to call a friend and find out they are
having the most productive day in South America. Why am I watching
paint that is already dry while you are helping with a dengue
vaccination campaign or already have a grant for S/.7,000? The
contrast can be so startling at times, you want to hate them for
having their shit together, but you cant really. What if it’s just
that day? What if it’s just their site? And really do they actually
have their shit together or does it just appear that way? There are so
many factors that it is really hard to tell purple from yellow
sometimes.

The one thing you have to constantly remind yourself is to not play
the “I’m better/worse than you game,” because you will always loose.
I’ll admit it I am one of those people that is secretly hyper
competitive and always has to win over my competitor of the moment.
This doesn’t extend to every facet of my life, for instance I hate how
competitive “Words With Friends” is, probably because I’m terrible at
Scrabble. But I generally like to win against a fellow competitor.
Even if that competitor was blissfully unaware that we were competing,
I was winning. Because lets get serious I always do. But here I can’t
use my competitive drive in the same way because it just leads to more
confusion and wondering if your answer is fact completely wrong. When
in realty there is no right answer.

There is only grey area. Let me tell you the first time you are
scorned in another language it can be overwhelming. Even if its not
technically your boss and you are not technically in trouble the
simple language barrier can make it feel like the most confusing thing
since the invention of the internet. Maybe I am alone here but
9-year-old Katie was very very confused by the Internet. So much so I
hoped it was a phase that would go away. I didn’t have time for
dial-up when there were Skip-Its. That and I didn’t realize my sister
set an email up for me until I was 21.

One of the most unexpected things that I have begun to realize that
many of the cultural factors I used to define myself are no longer
there. I have to find new ways to remind myself of things I once
easily knew to be true. You are the one that has to force yourself to
do anything and believe in will work out. There is just no other way
around it. There are new definitions of initiative, common courtesy
and relationships. For every time you get annoyed at someone cutting
you in line you have to channel that frustration into something more
productive, because if it builds who the fuck knows where its headed.
I have just learned to become equally as aggressive while standing in
lines. Sorry senora your time is not more important than mine when we
are getting on the bus at the same time. There are times when patience
and Mid-Western niceness are not a virtue.

Being so culturally isolated you begin to learn about yourself. Your
limits, your capabilities, your desires and how confused you really
can become. And trust me I could become very confused very easily
before. It generally took me about 10 minutes to get a joke.
I was recently reading a blog called 1000awesomethings or something of
the like; 2 of the 1000 “awesome things” struck me quite intensely,
me-time and thinking. Unlike almost every other American my life is
filled with me-time and thinking. I actually have to sometimes make a
conscious effort to stop having me time and thinking about things.
Partly because I would drive myself crazy and partially because I feel
the compelling urge to be productive. You have so much time to think
about your life that eventually it comes to the point you over analyze
ever misstep, accomplishment or random thought that comes into your
head.

Really if I wanted to have a whole day of me time I very well could,
and no one would scold me about it. They would wonder what I was doing
but there is no clock to punch or pre-set daily schedule. Once I
actually did stare at my room for about two and a half-hours before I
realized the time. I’m not even sure what I was even thinking about to
be quite honest. Maybe the fact the ceiling paint is an awkward shade
of off-white-yellow. Or that the hole in my floor looks progressively
more and more like a penis as the months go on. These are the
important investigations of my daily life.

I am not accountable to them in the way I was in every other job.
There are days where I am hyper productive, others not so much, and it
has nothing to do with the weekend or sense of days. My only real
sense of time is that I have to get up around dawn and accomplish
mostly everything before 2pm or after 6pm. I have learned is one of
the core elements of the Peace Corps experience is that time changes
meaning in a multitude of ways, not just a new perception of 9-5. You
have more time to yourself. Time to dream about fresh coffee with
Yours Truly natzo fries and an egg slider. Time to contemplate that
cereal costs 1/10 of your monthly income and everything you are eating
is laced with MSG. Peru, hate to break it to you MSG is not a
seasoning. It is actually illegal in several states in the USA, that’s
how much it’s not a seasoning. Time to have dreams that merge your
daily life into South Park and Sex and The City. Let me tell you
Carrie Bradshaw should not interact with Eric Cartman and Cusicancha
all in the same dream.

Its not that I didn’t stare off into space in my other jobs, trust me
I did. My staring off into space at my EPA internship is the reason I
know all the NBA teams and what city they are from. But here it is
different. In my internship I was in a freezing cold cubicle staring
at a computer and gossiping most of the day. I was at least
accountable to be physically in the office for 8 hours, but here no
one cares where I physically am. Half the time no one is the wiser. I
have a bad tendency of telling one person where I am going but not
giving them the full details and moderately disappearing. It still
holds true here. I think my host mother has almost called the police
about twice now.

You are so out of your element in the Peace Corps that it is as if
your self-awareness becomes hyperactive. You are the superman of
thinking about your own life. A weird superpower I never knew I could
possibly have. Any unresolved relationship or feelings you had will
have time to resurface. Any self-consciousness that you had will
inevitably find the time to rear its ugly head. Any music that you
loved in the states will get played on your iPod 68 times. Often the
steps you took to maintain your self-identity are now null and void in
such a foreign environment. You have all the time in the world to
learn about yourself. Even if you thought you had it pretty set in
stone beforehand.

Fun fact I still freak out about crickets because from far away it
looks remotely like a cockroach. But mice I can have a pleasant
conversation to while they crawl in and out of my shoes. I currently
have a mouse named Felix in my room. We share rice. Not really that
would be fucking disgusting. But he does in my corner and the thought
of killing him gorses me out more than his existence.
Every day in the Peace Corps, whether it’s about you, your community
or some random thing you would prefer to never know. Like what
vertical birth looks like. Today I found out that now that the rain is
over the ice starts. Aaawweeessooommmmeeee. Because I didn’t already
think every day “holy crap this is the coldest I have ever been in my
life.” I blame retroactive amnesia for my daily commentary on how cold
it is.

One of the third year volunteers recently told me that you have to be
your own advocate in this game because there is no one there to watch
your back. It’s really true. You have the office in Lima that’s very
supportive when you get robbed or need resources. You can have friends
by your side on the phone, provided you have the same phone provider.
If you have different phone providers, don’t expect a daily call that
costs saldo. Which is a luxury greater than gold on the Peace Corps
salary which is so high you don’t even have to do your taxes. But this
is more of a safety net than a vigilantly watching out for you.
If you are one of the lucky few you will have friends only an hour or
so away there to help guide you. They can be there when everything
seems to be tie-dye, sparkly, neon carnivorous dolphins on land. I
don’t know why but that is my metaphor for really fucking confusing
and strange. Just go with it. But at the end of the day it comes down
to only you. You were the only one that was there, the only one with
an American cultural perspective staring at the picture in front of
you. You are the last line of defense.

If I am being honest I don’t know I ever really fully depended on
other people in my day to day besides my family and my college
lacrosse team on the field. I was a girl you could know for 2 years
before knowing some of the most ordinary details. I sometimes got to
the point where I felt like I was self-reliant to a fault. That was
until I got here I never realized that I was still dependent on things
that were distinctly a part of the world I had built. Distinctly part
of the world I was born and raised in; external forces that had guided
me for years. When you have this much time to reflect on your own
life in a world that is so similar and yet so dramatically different
at the same time you can actually see yourself changing. See yourself
adapting to the new world in front of you. Having to redefine yourself
while still attempting to maintain the parts of yourself that you hold
dear. It’s a balancing act. A balancing act that at times makes you
feel like you are a 95 year old on rickety stilts and other times like
you are Roberto Louango durante de game 7 of the Play-offs. That can
make you feel like a sloth or the most insightful than Google.