In the beginning, we were told we would go on a roller coaster ride of emotions throughout our Peace Corps service. In this beginning, I thought I was doing great in terms of dealing with the culture shock and transition to living in Mali. PST was an experience, but generally I regarded the process with a sort of indifference to my surroundings. I had been away from home for months at a time, been in countries were I could not understand the language and been culturally and environmentally different from my own. Furthermore, I was living in a village with seven other Americans, many of them becoming my closest friends in Mali. Through this process, and after I swore in as a PCV, I went to site and felt ok with my situation. It was different, for sure, but I felt like I was dealing with my current predicament in a stable and mature manor. I knew I was having hard times. My previous blog postings depict that fact very well. My ramblings on about things that now seem irrelevant or overly personal was my way of “dealing”. I thought if I were open with the way I was feeling, I would get a positive feedback from my peers. Also, I thought that I was dealing similar to other PCV’s in my current situation. Well… this may not have been true. Some of my previous postings did receive a bit of feedback from my fellow PCV’s saying I was actually writing down what everyone else as feeling. This made me feel a little less lonely in my brusse village in east Mali.
Looking back on my previous postings, and reexamining my feelings during the first couple of months in Mali, I have discovered I was probably in my low slump of this roller coaster ride that is the Peace Corps. Additionally and unfortunately I feel like I am still in this slump. Returning to site after IST has been a challenge. It has caused me to revise my thinking on why I am here, what I am doing, and what I expect of myself. Also, I am confronted with what I call the Real Peace Corps Life and what that means. I am not living life in my village, counting down the days to IST where I will visit my friends anymore. Now, my village is even more represented as my home. That is where I live. I am not on vacation anymore. And I am definitely not at home in the states. I am having to reinterpret my views of who I am as a person, who I represent, who I want to represent, what is important in life, where I want to go, who I want to be and basically who I am. This is the easiest way to describe my emotional status:
I am in the desert and look around. There is nothing to see for miles but sand. I am alone. There are no paths to take, no sun to even get a general direction of where I am. I am lost. Completely and irrevocably lost.
The thing with the Peace Corps is you have so much time to yourself you start to examine parts of your life that you may have “accidentally missed” before. Things that happened to you or around you, experiences you had, or people you’ve met, and now you have the time to start mentally processing all of this. This is a good thing, especially for me. Its good I am learning how to scrutinize who I am as a person, and discovering new ways to either keep that behavior up, or change it for the better. Although this “mental examination” is good, it tends to leave me in a slump. A terrible, low, slump. A slump that sucks.
Now, I was told by some fellow PCV’s that I either needed to 1) stop blog posting or 2) stop blog posting because my blog posts were too negative and that the Peace Corps Admin would be reading it. Now, this got me thinking and I want to make some things perfectly clear:
1)Mali is great. Malians are great. My village is great. The people are generous, kind, and very friendly AND I have learned so much already being here for five months, that I am excited about my future as a PCV.
2)The Peace Corps is great. The people I have met are incredible and phenomenally strong individuals that I look up to with great respect. I am so lucky and blessed to be able to be surrounded by such caring, courageous and inspirations people.
3)ALTHOUGH THIS IS TRUE……THIS IS THE PEACE CORPS AND THIS IS MALI…this means……
a.ITS HARD! Its SUPPOSED to be hard. So I’m sorry and apologize for being negative, but sometimes that how it is and I don’t want to sugar coat anything for anyone. For people who are reading my blog and thinking about joining, it is important for them to know how it really is here. That this is no vacation. This is hard work, which will test you physically and mentally. There will be days you will cry alone in your hut. There will be days you will be so filled with joy and happiness because of an experience at site (although I have not had one of these days yet, I am hopefully that they will come). There will be days you will feel confused, lonely and well just plan upset. The Peace Corps is not supposed to be a walk in the park. This experience will change your life. It will mold you into a new person. But before you can grow, you have to build the bricks, and sometimes churning that cement and putting that cement in the mold is hard, excruciatingly difficult and strenuous work.
b.Not sugar coating my blog and writing as it is, is not only good for other volunteers to read but its good for our families. For the other volunteers, it’s great to hear that someone else is having the same problems and might be feeling similar feelings. We have a network of friends here, but we are all dispersed throughout the country. Knowing someone else is there, that you are not alone, is HUGE, sometimes it’s all you have. As for our families, I have found it is incredibly difficult to explain how it is to live in Mali. What that feels like, how that affects us and the relationships we have; both in country and at home. Writing what is actually happening on the ground and how I am feeling, hopefully, will allow my family and friends to try and start to comprehend what I am doing here and how I am living. We are so scared to actually tell others how we are feeling because of some due consequence that might befriend us. Being truthful with yourself and others, and admitting what is actually going on, is far more courageous than shutting yourself up and lying, telling yourself nothing is wrong. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to allow someone else in, where this is precisely what we must do to survive and thrive.
Being a PCV is hard. Sometimes it even sucks. But this is 100% the place I want to be. I feel like it is right for me to be here and to be doing the work I am doing. Peace Corps life is just a more “in your face” example of real life, it IS real life. Sometimes its hard, so hard we don’t want to go on with it anymore. Sometimes its gives you the most joy and happiness, and all you want to do is bask in the radiance of the beauty of life. In the states, we don’t see it this way as much. We have so much to distract us from what reality is, that we forget the life we are living. Mali has been the most amazing experience to allow me to see the true face and reality that is life; the joy, the pain, the hardship. Just because sometimes it is difficult, does not mean you have to give up, it just means you have to work harder to get to the finish line, and hopefully, in the process, you will grow into the person you want to be, the person you can be, the person you were meant to be.
