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A Reminder about the Importance of Goal Number Three
By Krystal Easthouse, Mak-8, Vinica
Goal number three
in the Peace Corps
mission is to "help
promote a better
understanding of
other peoples on
the part of the
American people."
DO NOT FEEL LIKE A
FAILURE! My goodness,
you are living in another
country, learning another
culture, language, and getting
up every day to work within a
political system that is challenging, to say the least. Remember, as humans, change
for us is slow and painful.
Not even close to a failure
sweetie, but an amazing individual who is plugging away
at a challenging situation.
Remember, Peace Corps is
not just your time in another
country, look what you have
done for the students at
Grand Canyon. There are 25
children who had never heard
of Macedonia before, and
now they have a wonderful
insight into this different
world, that is a gift YOU
have given them!
- Jillian Worssam, Teacher at
Grand Canyon Middle
School
I was recently in Athens, as a
cheerleader for a couple of
my fellow volunteers in the
Athens Marathon, when I got
into an interesting conversation with my friend Frank
who is serving in Peace
Corps Bulgaria. Peace Corps
Bulgaria, due to its size and
number of volunteers, has
developed a Peer Support
Network and Frank happens
to have been trained as a Peer
Counselor. He informed me
that during training he
learned that one of the quantitative statistics that was
correlated with being a
"problem area" for volunteers
was level of education. It
seems that those volunteers
with higher levels of education are more susceptible to
experiencing feelings of failure in relation to their service.
Whether or not there is any
validity to this statistic I think
that all volunteers, despite
age or education, at one time
or another experience selfdoubt related to the effectiveness of their activities as volunteers. This is understandable for a variety of reasons.
First, volunteers generally do
not have a large impact on
their host organizations or
communities in the first six
months or even the first year
of their service (if at all).
Second, volunteers generally
have very little to do at site if
they for example are unfamiliar with the host language, do
not have an English-speaking
counterpart, do not have a
very active host organization,
etc. Third, Peace Corps administration has volunteers
fill out quarterly reports regarding the quantitative impact of their service, thus not
highlighting the qualitative
activities that tend of make
up the majority of our days as
volunteers. You combine
these work-related factors
with the emotional and physical stress factors caused by
living in another country and
we're probably all repeating
the diatribe of Stuart Smalley
( to remind us of our selfworth.
Frank informed me that in
Bulgaria, one of the strategies
that was discussed to counter
the "feeling like a failure"
issue was for Peace Corps
Administration to make a
more concerted effort to em-
phasize the second and third
goals of the Peace Corps mission. Regardless of whether
administration does it, it is a
strategy that YOU as a volunteer can put into use to remind yourself that the activities you are engaged in, regardless of how unimportant
they seem, do have an impact, and do make your service extremely valuable. I
think that this point will be
more apparent with a little
reminder about goal number
three.
Goal number three in the
Peace Corps mission is to
"help promote a better understanding of other peoples on
the part of the American people." It is an easy goal to fulfill because it is achieved
simply by living here and
having friends and family in
the States. Every time we
have communication with our
loved ones back at home and
they ask us "How are you?"
our response ????????????????????????????????)M????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????)???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????)???]????]???M?????????????I??????????????????)??????????????????????????)??????????????????)??????????????????????)???????????????????)???????????????????)??????????????????????????????$??????????????)?????????????????????)????????????????????)???????????T?L???????????)???????????????????$((0