When the pandemic swept around the world, Peace Corps was forced to evacuate all of their volunteers, nearly 7000, from the sites that they were serving in. Two years later Peace Corps has been slowly returning volunteers to these countries it once served. Madagascar, the country in which I served for 3 years, finally got its first volunteers since the evacuation. Having finished up 11 weeks of training in Mantasoa, Madagascar, the volunteers swore in yesterday to begin their journey as Peace Corps Volunteers in Madagascar.
While watching their swearing in I was reminded of my service, the amazing and life changing experience I had, and all of the work that was done and has continued to be done in Madagascar. This blog was started as a way to chronical my time in Madagascar; my life and work as a volunteer, the culture of the Malagasy people, and the Peace Corps experience as a whole. In light of the new volunteers starting their own service I wanted to share a post I wrote as a letter to future Peace Corps Volunteers.
This post was originally posted March 9, 2017 as part
of Blogging Abroad's 2017 New Years Blog Challenge, week four: Change and Hope.
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose
of life is to give it away.” ~ William Shakespeare
Dear Future Peace Corps Volunteer,
Peace Corps is truly a grassroots
organization. We work on sustainable
developmental projects to help better the lives of those in our community. We serve in towns and villages, learn the
local language, live in local housing, and in almost every way of life live
like those around us. Our communities'
way of life and their culture becomes our own and this place so far away from
what we were used to becomes our home.
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| Stage 45 Peace Corps Madagascar |
We say goodbye to our family and
friends and leave the life that we had created, with all of its luxuries and
ease, to venture out on what we will soon find to be the greatest adventure of
our lives. We travel out to a foreign
land, bright eyed and bushy tailed, to volunteer…, to serve…, to change the
world. Changes we will make, but
unbeknownst to us, many of these changes happen to ourselves. In ourselves we find the artist, the reader,
the writer. We find the farmer, the
nurse, the teacher. We find the selfless
server, the pragmatic optimist, the zen in self-dependence. Most importantly, we find ourselves. In our volunteerism abroad we see the world
and who we are in a whole new light. We
see the true potential in ourselves and little by little we make changes to
promote this potential. We come out of
our service a better person; more conscious of the world around us and our role
in it.
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| My host family and I in Mantasoa, Madagascar |
The changes in ourselves happen
over time and we hardly notice them happening, and so to are many of the
changes in our host communities. You will
ship off to change the world and find it much harder than just that. You’re not going to change the world, nor the
country you serve, and you may not even make the biggest changes in the
community you live, but you will make an impact. You will make a change in the people that you
interact with on a daily basis. They
will learn from you, imitate you, and make small changes in their lives that
benefit them and those around them. Sometimes
you are able to see these changes, in the harvest of rice from new farming
techniques in Madagascar or the regular use of new hand washing stations, but
often times the changes we make as volunteers are never seen by us; taking root
years after we have left. We hope that
these individuals go on to make changes in others and them in others as well. In a way, at the end with these small, often
unseen changes, we have and continue to change the world.
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| Malagasy students in Vondrozo planting trees. |
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| Malagasy student in Vondrozo planting a fruit tree. |
You can read the previous Blog Challenge 2017 posts here: Tried
Changing the World, but Changed Myself, I
Live in a Developing World and So Do You, In Death There is Life.
You are doing such a great and inspiring job! I believe that volunteering will bring a world of rewards you might never have expected. I've recently read this article http://www.agsinger.com/how-to-travel-and-help-people/ about various volunteer programs, which may allow you to travel around the world. What do you think about those programs? Which of them are worth trying?
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