When you enter Peace Corps, the most sacred word you will hear is "integration". From your first session at pre-service training (PST), to your conference a year into service, the word integration will be tossed around with a reverence and an abandon that seems almost contradictory.
"When you get to site, you need to integrate yourself…"
"Being integrated with your community is key to your safety… "
"Language will really help with your integration…"
"On a scale of one to ten, how integrated do you feel?"
"You know, leaving site this much is really going to hurt your integration… "
IntegrationIntegrationIntegrationIntegrationIntegration.
Without understanding what they're saying, integration is the first Peace Corps vocabulary word new trainees will latch onto and, before they've been to site to digest it, confidently parrot back. Before truly understanding what they're being asked to achieve, they will end training convinced of its necessity for success.
I was anyway.
As a young, naïve applicant and trainee, this idyllic concept was the very reason for joining Peace Corps: "I want to find home in a new community!" I gushed in my personal statement. Once in training, I found this aspiration had been packaged conveniently into a neat, palatable (loosely-defined) synonym: integration.
While it's meant to encompass the lofty goal of seamlessly blending into an African community to the point that no one notices or remembers that you're American, in reality, integration more than anything describes the picture in your head that you have of what Peace Corps will be like before you actually live it; it's a comforting, but largely empty touchstone breathed sanctimoniously from staff to trainees, from PCV to PCV.
If you're like me, you may jaunt off to site with a fuzzy, subjective, wildly optimistic picture of what "integration" at your site will look like, and it's how you will measure your success as a volunteer. Teaching, eating local food, learning the language, it's all just paying dues to achieve the greater goal. The ultimate accomplishment.
I, like everyone else, was very confident in my ability to master the steps that lead to integration. I've never failed at anything in my life, I certainly was not going to start with Peace Corps.
Here are the steps:
Step 1: Learn the local language
Expectation:
Step 1 seems easy enough. I basically, kind of know some Spanish after 4 years of blowing off Spanish classes so, if I REALLY TRY, learning Luganda in 6 months is definitely do-able.
(Evidence of this endearing confidence can be found this video a friend and I made based off of this earlier blog post.
I should note this video is not endorsed by Peace Corps and was made for personal use.)
Reality:
Luckily/unluckily, you are told your school expects you to use only English at work, leading to a vast majority of your day being explicitly designated as "English-speaking".
Out of school, when you do choose to fight the good fight and make an effort to practice your language skills, you realize you are terrible.
Like.
Really, really profoundly awful at the local language.
You can say your name. You can say where you work. Maybe you can introduce your friends and say a handful of other random, 911 phrases. But, basically, this is you. (Not sure why I'm so on this Spanish kick, but oh well.)
You retroactively have an epiphany. You now appreciate that you are:
Not in any way fluent in Spanish but
A lot more comfortable in Spanish than Luganda and
The little Spanish it took you four years to acquire would be really helpful if you knew it in local language. Who knew colors, numbers, time, weather, animals, feelings, conjugations, and past tense were actually things I use in daily conversation?
Again, luckily/unluckily, you're comforted to find that almost everyone speaks English, which helps to cover your (vast) knowledge gaps. You may, over time, find yourself just saving everyone a lot of confusion and awkwardness by speaking English right off the bat.
Weirdly enough, compounding all of this, you are not actually enrolled in a Luganda class (blow-off or otherwise), and no one is going out of their way to consistently sit down with you and work on your language skills (unless you get a tutor like two people in our thirty-person cohort did).
I can tell you from experience, after seeing my entire cohort take a language test one year into service, that it is unlikely, as a PCV in Uganda, that you will ever become even mildly proficient in the local language.
RIP Step 1.
Step 2: Be an excellent teacher
Expectation:
I will be an excellent teacher.
Reality:
I am not an excellent teacher. I don't even like teaching. Why am I here? Why are any of us here? Oh god life has no meaning.
RIP Step 2.
Step 3: Make local (BEST) friends
Expectations & Reality: I have to say there is a lot more optimism here than with Step 1 & 2. Some PCVs really do make incredibly close connections within their host community, and that impresses me more than I can describe. Personally, I have not. I have found Ugandans whom I respect immensely and I love the teachers at my school, but I wouldn't say we have traversed the vast gulf of cultural differences to become close (or best) friends.
I do think, though, if there is hope of integration as it is promised during training, it lies in Step 3.
(For me) RIP Step 3.
So, what if you're like me? What if you came in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, worked hard to "integrate" for a year and half, and then somewhere in your second year realized you are not? If I acknowledge that I am far from feeling comfortably "integrated" (whatever that means) 15 months in, is there any hope for, or point to, the next 8 months?
This is the trap I found myself in, though I hadn't articulated it to myself. In my second year, what began as a foray into law school applications turned into a disassociation from being in service altogether. I drifted into one of the deepest and longest slumps of my Peace Corps service.
I'm going to leave it here for a moment, and switch to our second topic: Fight Club.
First, it is imperative that you watch this video (sort of graphic, but the rest of the post isn't going to make sense without it).
Done? Ok great...
I was recently struck by how accurately this described my Peace Corps experience:
"It will hurt more than you've ever been burned and you will have a scar."
If you are like me, when you feel unsuccessful in Peace Corps (and you will often feel unsuccessful), you will be Edward Norton. You will try to escape. You will find happy places in what helps you achieve this escape: comfort food, TV, drinking, drugs, leaving site, travelling. You will, constantly, feel an impulse to soothe the discomfort.
If you are like me, at times, you will give in to these escapes. Which brings us back to the slump.
These past few months, I realized I was watching TV and sitting on my phone a lot. Like.
A lot, a lot.
I would make it through 4 Gilmore girl episodes, then a few of Community, and then wrap it up with a movie. Meanwhile, I would hover on email, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, and Buzzfeed.
I could argue I was doing this because school was wrapping up and I didn't have much to do now that law school applications were finished, but that didn't quite explain it. I wasn't going back to any of my earlier activities. I wasn't playing guitar. I wasn't outside with my neighbors. I wasn't shopping at the market or making meals. I wasn't reading. I wasn't exercising or doing yoga.
I was stressed. I was escaping.
Without even realizing it, I had become addicted to falling into worlds that were not the one around me. And the more I tried to escape, the more being present caused me anxiety. I had trouble falling asleep, I had trouble leaving my house, I had trouble doing anything productive.
Then, for some unknown, inspired reason, Fight Club came to me.
"Stay with the pain, don’t block this out… This is your pain, this is your burning hand. It’s right here!"
Pinterest.LawSchoolAdmissions.Email.GilmoreGirls.Community.Buzzfeed.Bachelorette.Sleep.Facebook.
"This is the greatest moment of your life, man! And you’re off somewhere missing it."
This is your home. This is your school. This is your community. This is your world.
"What you're feeling is premature enlightenment."
On the brink of lethargic desperation, I tentatively channeled my inner Brad Pitt. I aspired to acknowledge and lean into the discomfort.
For the past several days, I made a conscious effort to force myself to be here. When I found myself staring at my phone for too long, or realized I was on my third episode of something, I looked up, look at the walls, at my door, and literally said to myself: "I am here. I am here." It may sound stupid, but it helped. I grounded myself in the reality of where I am.
I tried to go outside more into the big, scary, "here". A few days ago, I went down to the kitenge (cloth) market to pick up some orders. I was shaky. I felt like I was stepping out into the light after a very long time of anxiety-ridden-but-somehow-strangely-comfortable darkness. I must have looked uncertain. As I was passing nervously through the labyrinth of the market, a very large (seriously, this guy could have worked as a bouncer and fit right in) Ugandan man called after me: "Hey, baby!"
I froze.
I was rusty. I wanted to say something one, because I was mad, and two, because I was going to have to pass this way again and wanted to nip it in the bud. But, I was in kind of a haze. I had avoided harassment by escaping, and having to deal with it after so long of avoiding it I felt more than anything, tired.
I doubled back, stared him down, and asserted: "Do not talk to me like that! I do not appreciate it."
The man laughed.
Laughing, my friends, is a very effective way to make someone feel defeated.
The next day, I went to run errands. On the 20 minute walk, every few minutes someone harassed me in some way. Kids yelled "mundu! How are YOU?!" and asked for sweeties (or money). Boda drivers cat-called after me (or asked for money). Women asked for my contact information (or money).
For some reason, all of this attention bothered me even more than it had when I first got to site. I felt like I had paid my dues, and now I was just exhausted. I realized why I had started escaping in the first place. I guess I had never articulated to myself how desperately I had bought into the story of "integration", how different I thought site would be by now, and how tiring it was to constantly feel like all of this discomfort was my fault in some way. Like, this was all happening to me because of failures on my part: not being outside more, or introducing myself to more people, or handling situations better, or speaking the language more fluently, or, or, or..., I think in summary, integrating myself.
Which brings us to our replacement story and final topic: Small Victories.
Here is the truth: For most people, integration is a myth.
I will never be a Ugandan. No Ugandan will ever mistake me for a local. I will never stop being cat-called, or asked for money, or completely free from any of the attention that comes with being a white woman in Uganda.
Integration (whatever it means to you) is a nice ideal to strive for and, if you've achieved it, great. But, for most people, it's a poor standard by which to measure your success.
Here is the epiphany: Success, in Peace Corps, is in the small victories. And I mean s-m-a-l-l victories. It's finding comfort in being here and being here. Wherever that is, whoever it's with. It's in respecting and appreciating what we have, where we are, while we have it, while we're here.
Success is a day like today, when I went to that same kitenge market, saw the same man who had called me "baby", and wasn't called after. It's having a conversation with that man thanking him for being respectful, and walking away with a handshake. It's the small victory.
Small victories, rather than this lofty, amorphous idea of 'integration', are what should be emphasized from the beginning. If I could talk to an incoming volunteer now, I would tell them that they may never learn the language, they may never feel completely comfortable walking down the street, they may never have a desire to teach, and that's ok.
What they will have, and what they should strive for, cherish, and recount are the small victories.
Some days, victories will gush forth, innumerable. Those are the good days. The highs.
Many more days, they will struggle to think of just one. Those are the hard days. The lows.
But I would tell them, that even on those days when there is only one, small, tiny success to cling to, like setting boundaries with one stranger and having one stranger respect them,
I would tell them: that is enough.
What you are feeling, is premature enlightenment.
