As I write this, it’s hard to believe that I have been living in the smallest mainland African country for well over a year now (my anniversary being October 4th). Assuming that I leave service next November, that puts me at just under 12 months left. While it’s odd to think that that much time has already passed, it also doesn’t surprise me for how much I’ve gained in personal growth. With that, I’ll jump into my reflections for the year! This post is going to be a bit of a doozy, so feel free to jump around 😉
Accomplishments
With my first 2 months spent training, the next 3 months spent integrating into my permanent site, and then another month spent finishing training, half of the first year went to something akin to onboarding. However, I feel like my counterpart and I are now hitting stride, albeit we are still limited significantly by the local context, and these past 8 months have seen movement on a number of fronts. Here are my top highlights for the year (hopefully proving that the Peace Corps can be a strongly positive force for development, even at a small scale):
Swearing-in after 2 months of pre-service training (a necessity to include!);
Completing an Environmental Baseline Assessment;
Building and maintaining a host family garden (with notable successes in growing cucumbers, eggplant, okra, intensive moringa beds, orange-flesh sweet potato vines, and trees for village distribution);
Building a host family chicken coop;
Researching, writing, submitting, executing, and closing a Peace Corps grant to fix a ~500 m community garden fence (soon to be fully completed);
Submitting a second grant for the second, ~375 m community garden fence (with hopes to receive funding and complete it by early next year);
Hosting a workshop on the nutritional and agroforestry benefits of moringa and planting 511 moringa seeds across the village’s 65+ compounds, 60 of which made it to tree-hood;
Hosting a workshop on the nutritional benefits of orange-flesh sweet potato and distributing vines to every compound for multiplication, about half of which still have them;
Starting a Green Club at the village’s lower basic school;
Running workshops on garden bed preparation best practices at 3 different schools (my own and 2 other PCV sites);
Outplanting 16 cashew, 32 Leucaena, 1 jackfruit, 1 pomegranate, and 6 moringa seedlings across the village, as well as distributing 15 papaya seedlings to villagers;
Raising money and creating a budget and implementation plan for a local market project (with hopes to begin work early next year);
Receiving a prototype portable soil analyzer device from a J-term program I did in Peru in early 2019 and beginning experimentation with it; and
Making great friends with the dog in my compound!
Left to right: leading a garden bed preparation workshop at a school, our finished chicken coop, Ska taking a nap under my desk.
Challenges
It would be foolish to join the Peace Corps without expecting that significant and potentially life-changing challenges await. Indeed, that’s why many of us join at all! However, I’ll be the first to admit that while individual challenges can be expected, it’s the layering of challenges that truly tests one’s adaptability and resilience. And I’ll further admit that for about 2 months there (July & August), I fully expected to early terminate my service. I became overwhelmed with the slow pace of work and life, the complete lack of high-quality social interactions (self-defined, of course), the isolation of my site from other PCV sites/enjoyable destinations, and the constant wrestling with my own inner monologue (or demons, if you will). The result was a dearth of fulfillment and a flagging morale.
Luckily for me, my central motivation for joining was a sense of duty to development, and I could not fathom leaving before I had at least given my village the 2 community garden fences they so desperately needed and that Peace Corps grants could easily provide. This pushed my timeframe for leaving to at least January 2024, giving ample time for things to improve. And improve they did! The winds of change started blowing sometime in September, and they haven’t stopped since. I was able to renew an inner commitment to service and find new ways to adapt to the situation.
My adaptive strategies have become:
Significant amounts of work – this includes projects at site, work I picked up on behalf of my sector, blogging, cooking up new ideas and activities, helping other PCVs with their projects, beginning a set of science experiments on soil quality with an old professor, and more.
In-country relationships – my girlfriend and I try to see each other every 1-2 weeks, ideally in novel places in order to make the most of the in-country experience, and I try to meet up with other PCVs regularly as well.
Running at site – I try to hit 150 minutes of running per week (or 2 30-minute and 2 45-minute runs), which is the minimum bound of the threshold for topped-out happiness benefits from exercise.
Virtual relationships– calls with friends and family back home are particularly rewarding, as well as a standing, weekly call with another PCV that often lasts longer than 3 hours.
Meditation – as my friend once said, “there’s gold in them hills!” The journey of meditation is well-worth it, even as I struggle with consistency. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend trying guided metta, or loving-kindness, meditations.
Reading (in moderation) – I’ve now read my 34th book of service (The Count of Monte Cristo), and I can say with certainty that reading helps. That said, too much of it, like in the beginning of my time at site, was overwhelming and prevented me from establishing more adaptive measures, such as increased workload or communicating with friends.
Coffee/Enjoyable drinks – every day, I make ample time for having coffee (caffeinated and decaffeinated), a hot chocolate drink I’ve concocted, and tea in my room, both for the ample health and happiness benefits and to provide something to look forward to daily.
People who make me happy: other PCVs and staff, my girlfriend Isabelle and my first guest from the States (shoutout, Kat!), and our up-country Thanksgiving delegation!
That said, I left behind a few things that weren’t serving me. I include this list to fill in gaps you might see above, as well as to encourage any future PCVs reading this to find what works for them, even if it’s somewhat counter to what they’re told or what they expect.
Prioritizing host family relationships – perhaps it’s because I’m in a host family of predominately women and children who might be less predisposed to accepting an unmarried foreigner with open arms into their compound, but I have not found my host family relationships to be as rewarding as I has hoped. I’ve thus given myself permission to do my own thing, including spending much of the middle of my days in my room working on projects or myself (and in front of my fan), even though that’s completely counter to Gambian culture. By reframing those relationships to be more of a tenant-landlord situation and by being as self-sufficient as possible (excepting lunch/dinner and laundry), I have found significant reprieve from cultural expectations and pressure and much-needed space and freedom to be myself and pursue my own goals.
Football (or soccer, for you back home 😉) – one of the items I bought before arriving in village was a pair of football cleats with an expectation that I would be playing as much as possible, using it as a primary mode of integrating into my village. While that was a successful technique, I found myself to be largely outmatched by the local Gambian players. Of course, it was a great humbling experience, but once even stronger boys came back to the village during the rainy season, players on the field began to express frustration with my lack of speed/skill, and I realized that I didn’t need extra harassment in my life. Turning to running instead, a sport in which I excel and can’t really get injured doing, and letting go of a need to embed myself in village life in that manner, has been a godsend.
Guitar/singing – while I found much fulfillment doing this early in service, the fishbowl of Peace Corps means that even casual playing becomes a crowded, potentially critical affair. While there are always supportive folks, children often interfere with me while I’m playing, and they have been known to mock. While I had hoped to improve on my skills while here, it looks like this is one thing that I will have to come back to in the States.
Looking Ahead
With less than 12 months left, I have started feeling a bit of a pinch in terms of projects. My main project goals for this next year include the following:
Finishing the first community garden fence (ideally next month);
Receiving money for and executing on the second community garden fence;
Building a local market in my village;
Establishing a large tree nursery (>1500 trees) and outplanting the trees across the village (within the gardens, in compounds, on the roadside, in the woodlot, etc.); and
Hosting workshops on a variety of topics, including small-scale poultry, farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR), agroforestry, and gardening best practices.
But having just had another virtual visit home on yet another holiday, I look forward more than anything to the progression of my final goal: returning home (safely) next fall. The date marches ever closer, and I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel… But until then, there is work to do and blogs to write—so with that, fo waati do (until next time)!