Mid-service Crisis?

The start of mid-service training found me lying on the bathroom floor.

Luckily, it also found me surrounded by 10 other volunteers who swarmed to my rescue bringing damp towels, rehydration salts, water, anti nausea pills, anti diarrheal pills, and the best part–themselves. They just sat around me in this communal bathroom while I had a “moment”. If that’s not Peace Corps, I don’t know what is. It turns out that a 13h trip on the overnight bus + trip to the gym + walks in 100 degree weather + fries and a shake leads to extreme dehydration. Huh. In hindsight I don’t know why it took me for such a shock.

But thank goodness for these ladies! They were truly the best and distracted me with talks about the Camino, birds, trip plans… the best people for any kind of scrape or crisis.

So in a weird way, I couldn’t have asked for a better reconnect to some of the volunteers in Peace Corps. Your level of connection just goes that much deeper when you’re at a (slight) low point like that.

The rest of MST was crisis-free and really good for me. I didn’t realize I needed it.

Thinking back to pre-service training (PST) in August 2018, I started my service a bit closed off. I wasn’t super interested in making close friendships with other Americans (I mean, I wasn’t rude but I didn’t seek out a BFF). We were about to be shipped off to different parts of the country, and I felt like I didn’t need that support system. How haughty of me. I’ve since learned you can never have too big of a support system, you can never share an experience with too many people. So I’ve opened up, starting with volunteers in my region, and fortunately that’s expanded to my training group also. As most of you reading this post can probably attest, I suck at communicating over distances. But I also don’t get offended when I don’t hear from people that I don’t see. (If I haven’t talked to you since I left for Namibia–I still care about you and think of our relationship the same way I did when I left. Even if I can’t portray that over a text.) My best relationships are the ones where we can just pick up where we left off, and this is exactly what happened at my mid-service conference.

The week was much more relaxed than first our training period and subsequent week of “reconnect” last February. Our first two days were spent in Windhoek, getting our annual medical and dental checkups. Since those didn’t take long, the rest of the time was spent exploring different book stores, coffee shops, and picking up a few things I can’t get in Katima. Also for eating two lunches a day–why pick falafel or Indian or the bistro when you can eat falafel and Indian and at the bistro?? The last three days were spent talking about best practices in the classroom, challenging our current cultural mindset, sharing in our common struggles, and then just being together: for going on a nightly Magnum bar run, going on an actual morning run (ok, walk), going on and on about the best and worst parts of our first year.

In one of our sessions, we were given copies of our Peace Corps aspiration statements we wrote back in America and letters we wrote to ourselves one of our first weeks in Namibia. I wouldn’t say I’ve drastically changed, but I definitely approach things differently and still appreciated the advice from my past self. Then we were asked to stand around the room where there were different signs with phrases like “what an amazing experience”, “I’m giving just as much as I’m receiving”, “I’m dreading the next year”, “I’m doing exactly what I came here to do”, “I want to go home”, “I’m ready for whatever next year brings”, etc. The prompt: thinking of yourself today, how do you feel about your Peace Corps experience? A pretty raw question, especially because all 44 of our experiences are so different and even if they were the same, people react to situations differently. Where did I stand? That day, and lately, I feel like I’m doing exactly what I came here to do. I came to teach, and that’s what consumes my life. A lot of education volunteers also partake in “secondary” projects–things like clubs, school gardens, grants, camps, etc. It’s awesome and they are doing wonderful things. For me though, I already feel swamped from my “primary” project and the thought of piling on a secondary project gives me an anxious feeling in my gut. I know that would be overdoing it for me, and I would have to sacrifice my teaching. Sometimes that makes me feel guilty. I’ve always been an “over-committer”, someone who fills all my hours with activities and extra involvements. So I feel guilty and question that maybe I’m not doing “enough”. This exercise helped validate my feelings and my work; I’m doing what I came here to do, and I’m trying to do it the best I can. And for me, with my specific school and work load and needs, that means focusing my entire service on my math classes. And that’s ok.

I also liked the activity because there have been moments, hours, and even days where I’ve felt all of the other emotions. I’ve entertained thoughts of going home, I’ve dreaded the next year, I’ve been in awe of what an amazing opportunity this is. And sometimes I feel all of those in the same day. To see my peers also share in those feelings and hearing their perspectives validated so much of my own experience. My situation is unique; my emotions are not. This next year will fly, and I’m expecting to go through the same emotional swings. That’s fine and normal, and I would feel that whether I was in Namibia or America or somewhere else.

Mid-service was fun, relaxing, and powerful. The next time I’ll see my G48 training cohort is at our Close-of-Service conference sometime in July. It’s crazy to think that’s what’s next, that my service will already be winding down at that point. So when I came home from mid-service, I reset and reframed some goals for this year; I don’t want to get to the end and feel like I missed the opportunity to learn Sifwe, to share with my host family, to work closely with my learners, to see all the birds I possibly can… basically, to serve with no regrets.