At our mid-service conference now. (Can you believe I’ve been here over one year now?!) It’s definitely been a great morale booster and I love hearing about the cool things other volunteers are doing at site and getting ideas for my own projects. I’m excited about getting some great stuff done at site and am starting to see that I really can have an impact here. It’s also great having people to relate to and who understand the experience. The connections you can make when you all experience something so intense together are amazing and I didn’t really feel it until today.
One year in is a good point to look back and reflect. I’m happy with some projects I’ve done. We’ve definitely had a tough year here and I did the best I could in a difficult situation. But there’s still so much more I can do. I’m not done here yet. Although it’s challenging to extents I never imagined, I wouldn’t want it any other way. Despite the many times we sit and complain about site, the weird cultural things, how frustrating development work can be, being called “nasara” and constantly asked for money, and a million other things, we didn’t join the Peace Corps to do something easy. We wanted to challenge ourselves and to grow. I’ve been learning to appreciate the bad along with the good and I’ve developed a patience for it. I don’t want my service to be perfect. It wouldn’t be any fun that way. I want the difficulties, the frustrations, and the things that go wrong and I wouldn’t change them because of what I’ve learned from them. At the risk of sounding super cliché, the bad things made the good better. Those things all together make my service what it is. Frustrating, challenging, sometimes demoralizing, but all in some really weird way, empowering and fulfilling. And I hear the second year just gets better…
Thank you all for your thoughts, love, and support. Thank you for verbalizing that – whether it was a letter, package, phone call, e-mail, comment on my blog, or Facebook message. It really does keep me going and gives me just the encouragement I need. Lots of love!
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