Swine Flu & Life as a Peace Corps Volunteer

Hi. It’s been a while. By “a while” I mean ages, and for that I apologize. Somehow, it seems that the longer I waited to get this update uploaded, the harder it was to get anything down on paper. Pixels. Pretend paper. There is no dearth of content to be sent, nor absence of anecdotes to be accounted, but one day’s delay lead to another, and before I knew it, weeks had wasted away. This is not to say that I haven’t been writing, just that I’ve been unable to make anything bloggable. Hence my asking the ever-facilitating webmaster Madelin to post the snippets that you find arrayed above and below. In an attempt to make up for lost time and posts, I’m going to copy and paste parts of a few e-mails that I’ve written to some friends while here. I extend the greatest of thanks to Damien, Jenn, Ben, Madelin, Amanda, and all the others who served as interlocutors and muses. I apologize to the very few of you who have already seen a lot of this material. Another post will be coming in the next few days with pictures abounding.

We are presently at the beginning of Week Three of at least four weeks of school closures, thanks to the H1N1 virus’s virulence in Mongolia. Inter-aimag public transport has been canceled in some contrived containment scheme, yet our hopes of returning to work are nonetheless dashed each Thursday when the announcement comes from the Ministries of Education and Health that school will be closed nationally for yet another week. The government is having public school lessons taught on television, a spectacle that I have yet to witness, but I admire their initiative. I am fortunate in that my school is continuing to have teachers come in day after day, sometimes to shovel snow, sometimes to write and rewrite curricula, and sometimes it seems, simply to socialize. Many less fortunate volunteers have been sent to their gers to “rest,” a valued pastime in Mongolia, and perhaps justly so given that they appear to work several times harder than we Westerners do at most things. These poor Peace Corps people are steadily chewing through every magazine and book in their gers, and every movie on their hard drives. It seems that the resources of intellectual entertainment have become scarce. I’m sure that some are slowly yet steadily spiraling into insanity. At the very least, I have working in the computer lab to keep me busy.

The students are using fairly modern Dell workstations that were donated by an initiative called DynEd two years ago.  DynEd had this idea where they would buy a bunch of Dell computers and donate labs of them to schools in developing countries.  They would then provide six months or a year of really good computer-based English learning with headphones and microphones and interactive phonics lessons and what-have-you for free! Unfortunately, the funding ran out, the Education Ministries in these countries couldn't afford to pay first-world tech support and subscription prices, and the whole thing got shut down.  It would have been more expensive for DynEd to recollect the computer labs, so here they stayed.  I don't think DynEd was nefarious or seeking to take advantage of places like Mongolia, they just get a C- for follow-through on an otherwise A- plan (A- because they didn’t install self-destruct mechanisms that would activate whenever a Mongolian teenager inserted his greasy grimy flash drive into one of the terminals.) In any case, now they're all pretty much Yahoo Messenger labs, where students message one another even as they're sitting next to each other.


I'm doing my best to salvage this resource, painstakingly spending 2 or 3 hours a day (or basically all my free time at school when I should be lesson planning) clearing off years of accumulated viruses and junk.  I have most of the terminals working beautifully, (i.e. my OCD level of computer fine-tuning,) and have made it so that each of the English teachers has a personalized account on one of them.  I now often come into the lab (also my work/prep room) to find all five English teachers at their stations, merrily Powerpointing away and printing resources with the printer that I brilliantly procured for them.  By that I mean that I casually asked the school Director, who is both resourceful and very eager to keep me happy, and she had a brand new in-box HP printer on my desk the very next morning.

On occasions like these, I realize what a good resource I am, not due to any special training or teaching ability, but just because I'm a native English speaker with an amazing support network.  One of my great coups thus far has been to write a short e-mail to an awesome charity called Darian Book Aid, which donates 30 pounds of books to any Peace Corps Volunteer who asks for them.  My books should be arriving in time for IST, which is the big Christmas-ish seminar that we attend with our counterparts.  Speaking of which, it is at that time that we have a sort of networking fair at which we meet various NGO's, charities, and what have you so that we can begin with our secondary projects.  We also receive grant-writing lessons then.


I'm coming to terms with the fact that we really are facilitators, not muscle.  If you joined Peace Corps to dig ditches or feed children, chances are excellent that there's a native who can do it better than you.  But if you want to spend some time IN those ditches (the trenches of “the great common cause of world development”?) or seeing how the children are fed and working out a better method, you can utilize Peace Corps' trusted brand name and amazing array of contacts to get some pretty well-directed aid sent in.  Corporations and governments and organizations want to be charitable, and they give money away to do so.  It's really up to us on the ground to direct it.

That's what volunteering in Peace Corps really is.  You schmooze, you spend months figuring out what the locals need, and you end up helping them out with the skills that are your best.  Beyond that, you're just the eyes and ears of the Development institution, and a young 20-something in search of some greater significance.

It's important to remember that Peace Corps volunteers are not out there to save the world.  Well, that may be why we volunteered, but it’s not what we’re accomplishing. We’re working to help people as best we can, build person-to-person bridges and find ourselves!  This last point is actually pretty important.  We're all on a journey of self-actualization out here.  We're out of our boxes, and after 3 or 4 months, we figure out how to meet our basic needs enough that we can get down to some pretty serious self-actualization. That’s the idea anyway.