Why Service?

Recently, I had the distinct honor of hosting the Ambassador of the United States to The Gambia at my site in the Upper River Region (URR). It was a lovely visit in which she graciously spoke to my host mother and counterpart and toured my family compound (pics below). However, I think the best part of her visit was a question she posed to me halfway through: “what would you tell young Americans, stuck behind screens in remote jobs, about the reasons for service?”

Indeed, why serve? Undoubtedly, we live in an era of crises in the States, both real and imagined. In my answer, I picked three—the mental health crisis, the political polarization crisis, and the climate crisis—but you could add a whole number of other crises to that list. For each of these, I argue that while service is not THE solution, it certainly is A solution, especially at the individual level. Let me take each in turn.

The mental health crisis in America today is far beyond the historical baseline. Certainly, there will always be individuals in need of active and targeted interventions, including therapy and pharmaceuticals. However, within the skyrocketing population being diagnosed with mental health issues today, I think there are many folks that might be able to solve their own issues with the right change of perspective and environment. In service, you are forced away from the digital world (something that is intrinsically tied to the declining mental health of many, especially young Americans) and pushed to engage closely with your community face-to-face (an “environment” intrinsically tied to increased happiness and well-being). That’s not to mention the immense gratitude for one’s American life that wells up based on the comparison to the living conditions and lack of opportunities for the people you serve. You are given an opportunity to face your demons while doing good and important work, and inevitably, you will build resilience and inner strength. If you can do the Peace Corps, I imagine that there’s not a whole lot left that you cannot do. Service is not for everyone, that’s true, but its benefits for one’s short and long-term mental health cannot be understated.

On the crisis of political polarization, I think a defining feature of our country’s gridlock is the complete and utter lack of capacity to build relationships across the aisle. To me, that largely comes from the inability to fathom the idea that multiple ways of thinking and being can coexist peacefully and productively. When we retreat to our siloes, choosing to live with and listen to only those who agree with us, we create the foundation for hyper-partisanship, particularly at the federal level. Peace Corps service, meanwhile, requires full integration into a fundamentally different society, and it demonstrates how you can hold multiple competing identities at once in order to get the job done. I am living in a 100% Muslim community that has vastly different ideas on gender equality, biological evolution, and freedom, among other axes, yet my work can still advance my own values of women’s empowerment, ecological restoration, and economic opportunity within those constraints. The reason it works is because people are people. Regardless of belief system, people want the best for others in their community—it’s fundamental to our social nature. While there are challenges to working with different people, my experience here shows how silly us Americans are in catastrophizing over two competing ideologies. There is a middle way, and service shows how possible and feasible it is for well-meaning and open-minded individuals to walk it.

As for the climate crisis, there is no sugar-coating the dire predictions—systems will fail and people will suffer and die. Yet, for all that, I can’t help feeling hopeful as I successfully grow the restorative and highly nutritious moringa tree with relative ease in the 110⁰ daily heat and 100% sun of the Gambian URR using nothing but drawn well-water and hand tools. There are solutions out there that people at the frontlines of the crisis are employing to adapt and reduce vulnerability, and while we Americans absolutely have a moral imperative to support them, they will continue doing it on their own regardless of our help. It’s bad, and it will get much worse, but the hopelessness seen stateside is no solution. Indeed, it will only make those folks suffer more. Service allows us to work extensively on the defining issues of our time while simultaneously providing an abundance of hope—the same hope that propels the communities we serve forward.

In fact, if you ask me to summarize my answer to the Ambassador in one word, it’s exactly that: hope. Service to assist communities already taking care of themselves in highly underdeveloped regions of the world implants a rising feeling of hope to address the problems plaguing the minds of Americans today. People can make a living here, and working alongside them successfully makes it abundantly clear that most of our problems start with ourselves. Growing oneself in service for the sake of personal betterment, treating others better, and fulfillment of civic duty surely yields benefits to the peoples served. But more than that, it gives the tools, frameworks, and experiences needed to avert the terrible fate of despair stateside. I’d say that that makes service (Peace Corps or otherwise) a pretty great deal.

Photos from the Ambassador visit. Please ignore the fact that my eyes are closed in each shot...