Show Them Your Teeth

Now that I am on the other end of the first year and working at a new pre-service training I am reminded of a phenomenon in Peace Corps that reminds me of reality television. It isn’t the funny anecdotes or the blunt confessionals. It is the “show no weakness” mentality that seems to be an unwritten oath among Peace Corps volunteers.

It makes sense if you think about it. When you come into Peace Corps you feel a bit like you have the cards stacked against you: you are going to somewhere you presumably never have been; you will be learning a new and likely obscure language; you’ll have limited contact with everything and everyone you ever loved; and you’ll be living in conditions you might not have even experienced when camping. So, a prospective volunteer signs up for this grand adventure knowing the odds. The last thing they want to do is admit weakness.

It’s funny though, we aren’t in reality TV game show where we will be voted off one by one from the land-locked stretch of Sahel we by necessity began to call home. Yet, some trainees look at it with this mentality asking questions like: ‘who will be the first to go?’ Maybe it makes them feel more safe to consider someone else to be the ‘limping gazelle’ because we all secretly fear that it is ourself. We don’t want to admit what could be perceived as our fatal flaw: a lack of travel experience, an ill loved-one, a flare for the extravagant, a long distance relationship, a periodic voice that asks ‘Why are you here?’ I didn’t admit my long distance relationship for several weeks for fear of being seen as a potential early termination and most volunteers don’t admit their ‘ET’ voice unless in confidence in the dark corners of local buvettes.

Looking back it is clear to me that this fear is not necessary. Early termination isn’t a contagious disease, it’s a personal choice made by a volunteer. Isn’t it better to take a good hard look at your feelings surrounding your service while they are manageable instead of waiting until they explode from the proverbial can of worms? Everyone thinks about going home occasionally from the time they find out they have an invisible auto-eject button. Under the stress of the rollercoaster that is Peace Corps, I think it only natural. Personally, I say that sometimes the best thing that prevented me from going home was just talking about it with someone who didn’t have an equally low morale. We sorted out the feelings and moved on.

So, I say abandon those parts of your brain that reality television shows have infested. I mean, I don’t even know where to get a tiki torch in Burkina Faso to put out at the closing credits, anyway.