Squeaky Wheels

The Peace Corps encourages volunteers to look objectively at their adopted communities, look for assets and deficits, figure out what's needed, and make it happen in one way or another. Whether or not we're experts and know exactly what we're doing, part of our mission is to look around and make whatever place we end up in, better, at least in terms of socioeconomic development. My wife, Selena, took a decrepit library at the local school, got new books, good books, found good people to work with, talked and talked and talked with them about seemingly basic ideas, and turned it around. I looked at a declining environmental situation around the coastal community, and got a grant for a sustainable aquaculture project to help and sustain a struggling marine fishery. We did cleanups and camps and training events to get communities galvanized as well. There are probably many other things that could have been done, and maybe our projects could have been implemented better, in more 'sustainable' ways. However, the point is, that Peace Corps encourages its volunteers to be constant observers, critical of community situations, looking for ways to improve, with or without the specific skills that are necessary to push the improvement through.

As my counterparts and I return home from this life-changing experience, I've been thinking about how this will translate into our lives in California or Alaska or Pennsylvania or Virginia or North Carolina communities. I think we're going to be really annoying. Okay, fair enough, I'll speak for myself. I'm going to be really annoying, trying to organize projects and cleanups and gatherings and the like. I've already got this idea to do a stream cleanup on Dry River, the river where I used to fish and pick raspberries and wade my feet on hot summer afternoons and almost drown during maiden launches of my poorly conceived raft ideas. I wonder why I never thought to do a cleanup before? Because the Peace Corps did it. It has made me this hyper community development person, and I don't necessarily think it's such a great thing. If I were on the Dayton, Virginia Town Council, I wouldn't look forward to me coming back and going to meetings with Perot-style diagrams of my river cleanup ideas, but I think that might just be in my future. Anyways, that's what I was thinking about today.