Regaining Sanity

Peace Corps allocates up to three days per month for volunteers to rejuvenate. We call this "regaining our sanity". These days are normally taken consecutively and are for things like internet, a warm shower, or even dinner at a restaurant. Ideally a trip out of site coincides with other volunteers' trips and allows you to get some work done too. Every 3 weeks to a month throughout my service this is what I've done - I've left site to "regain my sanity". (Not that I lost it, right?...right?) That is, except for the the six weeks of June and the first half of July, when I left site only once. Those six weeks helped me focus on my continuing integration into Ngabe culture and reflect on the challenges I have faced.

If you ask me about the most difficult part of being a PCV, my rapid fire response would be: bugs at night (yes, even with a mosquito net), lack of food (especially veggies), people not paying for photos I print for them and children stealing my peanut butter. But if pressed to think hard about the Peace Corps experience, I would say there is only one great challenge: trying to balance a successful integration into a new culture and language (or two) while simultaneously being an effective co-facilitator, educator and empower-er. Recently, I ran across some literature that Peace Corps had sent me before going to Panama. There was a quote from a volunteer in Guinea-Bissau that I underlined over a year ago.

Most of us agree that although we knew Peace Corps was going to be hard, it is often hard in a different way than we expected. We all worried about adjusting to the bugs and the heat, but that's the easy part. It's more of a challenge to get used to dealing with a perplexing bureaucracy, the lack of motivation in some host country counterparts, the lack of technology and education, and cultural barriers.

 This quote explains how I feel very well and leads to the logical question: how do you get through those barriers and achieve real integration? As Peace Corps has taught us, culture is experienced through the behavior of individual people who have been conditioned by a set of values. With this in mind, cultural integration requires three skills: predicting the behavior of others, accepting the behavior, changing your own behavior. The secret to successful integration lies in the reality that you don't have to approve or adopt a particular behavior; you only have to accept that behavior as in line with the values inherent to that culture.

This is easier to do when practiced on oneself first. For example, once I realized why I want only one wife, (yes I know it's illegal, but ultimately, it's because polygamy is not socially acceptable in the U.S.), I can accept why my counterpart and best friend here has two wives (ultimately it comes down to status). Family and family size are highly valued in Ngabe culture, so having multiple wives makes sense here, but while I can understand that cultural difference, I still don't like it and find unfair. But, at least we can both approach a conversation from a feeling of mutual respect and understanding, rather than a paternalistic and ineffective "you are wrong, do-as-I-say" attitude.

These are skills that PCVs try to use when we are faced with perplexing new behaviors. After all, my friend in site has to deal with my selfishness, punctuality and excessive reading. Thus far the integration process has cruised fairly smoothly over the few (peanut butter related) bumps we've had. Sharing our cultures has been mutually beneficial, to the point that we understand and trust each other. Now, I honestly feel comfortable calling this place home. It seems that our out-of-site mantra "regaining my sanity" no longer applies to leaving my site. I will start referring to those trips as "remembering my American-ness".