One Year In

On August 12, I completed one whole year in Panama. I think back to the day I left the States, and I remember how little I knew. I agreed to come to a country for 27 months with only a vague understanding of where I would be, what I´d be doing, and under what sorts of conditions. Since then, all of those blank spaces have been filled in, but thousands of new question marks have arisen.

I never looked at the Peace Corps as a change-the-world kind of opportunity. I was realistic about what my impact could be, especially when working against a cultural inertia that one person can´t possibly turn around. But one year in, and with nearly ten months spent in site, I still feel a little disappointed. If you asked my community what I´ve done, I am unsure they´d have much to say. And as my friend Austin points out in a post more eloquent than mine, what little we have done is for people who don´t have a word for ¨thank you¨ in their native langauge.

Peace Corps is a 27-month commitment, and that is largely because development work is slow and awfully hard. I just didn´t imagine that I would spend so much time asking myself if it was even possible.

We´ve been told the one-year mark is a hard one, and it has proven so. These last few months have left me feeling frustrated and confused. There´s the ¨work¨aspect. My community is unmotivated, but they criticize me wondering why latrines haven´t appeared out of thin air yet, all expenses paid. Agency support has been limited or non-existant, despite a lot of effort on my part. This professional aspect is easier to deal with, in a way. I anticipated the difficulty.

But a larger portion of this discontent is more personal, a general tiredness with myself and my life here. All I think about is Peace Corps, my work, my community, and where I fit in that context. In this term of service which is supposed to be quite selfless, I find myself exhausted by how much I think about myself. Part of that is because there is no else. I am one person in a community of people who will always be a distance away from me. No matter how many great conversations we have, or how much I feel like I have some real, genuine friends (and I do), something always happens that reminds me of that expanse between first world and third world, between my life and theirs. How defeating and lonely it feels that there are some things I can never understand about them, and more things that they will never understand about me. In these cases, I am speechless, but it´s not the Spanish that fails me. It is an intraversable cultural, economic, and educational gap. That´s hard for one person to go through, but I get tired of thinking about it all the time. I wish I could change the channel, take a break and think about something else. But there is nothing else. This experience swallows you up.

So when times are difficult, it´s extremely unpleasant. But the other side of this coin is that this has been the fullest year of my life. I have had experiences that will affect me forever, how I view things, what I want to do, and where I want to do it. Even though some things have been difficult, I consider them all positive, a net gain. And I still have moments of euphoria when I think, I can´t believe how beautiful this is or I can´t believe this is my life.

I´ve spent a year in Panama. I expected things to be a lot clearer by now; I expected to know more, be more confident in what I was doing, and be able to summarize everything in a neat little package. I see now how impossible that will always be. It´s too big, too complex, and subject to change. I remain optimistic. I know I will leave here happy I came. I will have an impact in my community, and it would be nice if they thought so too. But if they don´t? This isn´t supposed to be about me anyway.