Becoming Volunteers

BECOMING VOLUNTEERS

            Peace Corps, despite its name, has some things in common with the military.  It dispatches people around the world, all taking orders (at least for some bureaucratic issues) from Washington, DC. Then there are the endless acronyms for staff and programs.  Then there is the matter of rank.  We have been called “trainees”, a status equivalent to military recruits at boot camp.  When we got sworn in, 

we became “volunteers”, I guess the equivalent of private or seaman (I am showing my age here). 

            Having gone through ten weeks of training, all of us are ready to move on and get to our sites. Six days a week of schooling has been draining, and the concentrated Setswana lessons have been grueling.  Like a newly minted soldier, we are happy to have completed training, and we see it as a challenge successfully met.  Stephanie and I are particularly proud that we were able to learn a new language at our mature ages.  We each received scores in the advanced range in our final oral one-on-one exams.  They say that learning a language keeps our brain cells working, making new neural connections.  Hopefully this effort will be worth something in our dotage, as well as giving us a secret vocabulary that we can use when we don’t want others to know what we are saying.

            The swearing in ceremony on November 15^th was more meaningful to me than I could have imagined.  It took place in a hall at the Kanye Education Center, the site of our classes these past two months.  On stage were local politicians.  The US ambassador couldn’t make it, but we met with her privately the day before. 

Two of our classmates gave speeches in Setswana.  One of them quoted from Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Less Traveled”.  I memorized it in junior high school and understood its meaning. In high school, we studied Frost’s darker poems, and perhaps subconsciously I began to consider the fork in the road analogy from this other poem to be a bit lightweight.   Still, at swearing in, I teared up upon hearing the poem excerpt about taking the road less traveled -- and it having made all the difference.  At this point, as I depart for my site, I have no question but that I am taking a road a lot less traveled.  Let’s hope it makes all the difference, not just for me but for others.