Returning to a land where money is worth

I just got an e-mail from Peace Corps announcing the agenda of our Close of Service conference, the get-together with my training group that happens three months before we leave country to help us transition out of Peace Corps and back into American life.

The announcement is long anticipated by my friends and I, who have been thinking about that transition for months already. Many of us have applied for and even been accepted to graduate school. Others are researching jobs, planning post-service trips, or looking forward to spending some overdue time with family and friends.

For me planning for life after Peace Corps has been a rollercoaster, much like the rest of the experience. Some days I feel like I have it all figured out – the plan is graduate school for an MA in Communication in Washington, DC, in the fall, and Haiti in the meantime. Other days I question the entire foundation of what I think will be my future.

In these two years, we young Americans have been granted a sort of sabbatical from the rat race. Instead of playing our hand in the job market, we sat one out. Though many people look at Peace Corps with a skeptical eye, thinking it’s a waste of time or a free ride on the government’s tab for incompetent co-eds, over the years it has become publicly accepted as a valid, if a bit idealistic, option.

Now, the two years of not having to worry about money or mortgages or status are coming to an end. All those questions about What We Want To Do With Our Lives are coming back to nag us. And so are the American values of work, status, and money.

In the DR, poverty is an accepted reality. People know they are poor and openly acknowledge it. There’s no shame in asking for credit at the colmado or in being unemployed. Here there is no illusion of a meritocracy and so there’s no disdain for people who haven’t fared well in the economy. People judge each other more based on character and family. In the US, it’s a different story. Only by living here have I realized how much I have judged people’s value based on their efficiency at work, their job title, or their lifestyle. Years of increased productivity and glamorizing the corporate ladder have caused us to subconsciously think of people as machines – here for one purpose, to work, and extraneous if they’re not doing that well. After two years in the DR, I can see just how crazy a notion that is. Aren’t people inherently valuable? Isn’t it absurd to think of them as cogs in a machine? How much brainwashing have we undergone to think that way?

Still, learning how much culture shapes our thinking has taught me as well that you can never escape it because it is ingrained. I may have learned a lesson from Dominicans, but I can’t erase the fact that I was raised in an achievement-oriented middle-class society that taught me to earn my worth through work and competition and to value education, income, and status. Although I chose a career (journalism) that didn’t promise big paychecks but rather a sense of contributing to society, I still managed to feel a sense of achievement because I competed for and won prestigious positions. My dad noted that my salary as a staff reporter at the St. Petersburg Times would be equivalent to what my brother (an engineer) earned as an intern in college, but he also acknowledged that I had managed to get a job in a dying industry – showing that even if my bank account didn’t show it, I was a winner. I felt proud, even if I was turning down the promise of yachts and vacations on Nantucket.

Now, the question is even more pronounced as I head out of Peace Corps into a grim job market. I can see myself observing what other people are doing after Peace Corps – what graduate schools they got into, what kind of employment they found, if any – and comparing myself. It’s an ugly feeling, one I’d hoped the DR would have prevented in me. The best I can do is hope the master’s degree will qualify me for decent paying jobs that I find rewarding and enable me to pay off the student debt. I should be happy with that no matter what everyone else is doing.

The tradeoff for money is supposedly a greater sense of purpose in what we do. Still, I question why people like me choose the seemingly harder path, concerning ourselves with heady problems like social justice and poverty and neo-colonialism that don’t seem to cross anyone else’s mind, much less direct their life plans. Wouldn’t it be easier just to work whatever job for money, even if that job doesn’t seem to do anything of importance? Go to work, pay the bills, have hobbies and family fill in the void. The idea is beautiful in its simplicity. I don’t know what makes us Peace Corps types strive for something more, especially in a culture where hardly anyone congratulates us for that. But I do have a fatalistic sense that it’s a moot point. We probably won’t accept anything else.