I’m rereading my journal to get in the reflective spirit, and I thought I’d tell the tale of my first two days of Peace Corps (starting with Philadelphia and ending with going to bed in Cotonou).
First, you have to start things off on the right foot. The stagiers have to trust each other from the beginning or everything is going to get harder than it needs to be. Therefore, the first thing PSL 23 ever heard as a coherent unit was that Dave Skorski from Hershey, PA was terrified of having his penis stolen on the streets of Cotonou by a Vouduin (Voodoo) witch-woman. Nervous people laugh. People who laugh together are friends. Friends support each other. Supported people don’t ET.
Next, when shipping out with your stage class for Peace Corps, the most important thing is that there is no chaperone. When you leave the hotel, there are the peer leaders that were chosen the previous day to make sure that their spheres of responsibility are taken care of. The idea is one leader keeps wraps on 9 other stagiers and stops anyone from getting left behind. I was one of the leaders in charge of the airport scene, where there were some worries about over-packing that took two languages and the combined work of 5 stagiers to sort out. My unique style of management was readily apparent to the other stagiers, who claim that the combination of my tendency to run my hands through my hair when stressed and my garden hat produced the best Ranger Rick impression they’d ever seen.
The third is that you will speak words that you will not remember understand or remember hours later. When under incredible stress, such as leaving your homeland for years, you blather about nothing just to have something in common to talk about. I talked with the stagier next to me for nearly three hours and neither of us remembers any of the conversation.
As a side note, I would like to educate those of you who are considering a flight through De Gaulle Airport on improper security line procedure as the result of keeping a culturally appropriate drinking schedule. The French will have no equal when it comes to airport security. So, if you discover that you’ve placed your bottle of red wine from the flight in your pants pocket either chug it in-front of the security personnel or at least swig it before and then hand them the bottle. Trashing is unwise as France has killed for lesser slights to her honor. DO NOT mainline red wine and then put the bottle back in your pants to be forgotten and then found by security after your third failure to pass through the metal detector. They will laugh so hard that a different security team from the other line will have to be brought over to pat you down.
The last thing I want to impart is how utterly vital the established volunteers are. I might have learned more about being a volunteer in a few hours at the hotel bar in Cotonou after being awake for nearly 40 hours than in all my experiences since. I would probably not have written “I’m going to like it here” as the last line of my journal entry that night without being accepted by them. This does not always happen, and I am grateful to the members of PSL 22 and 21 who were so open. I believe the same will be true for 24.
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