Contemplating Authentic Self

Soon I will be nearing the half-way mark of my training. It will happen while I am with four other health trainees at our CBT (Community Based Training) site. Currently I and the 31 other trainees are all together in the provincial capital for more technical training and so I have time to reflect (and I have access to a cyber-cafe!) on what such a marker means. It means on one hand soon I will be pushed out on my own into rural Morocco to begin my service. On the other it means I can start to think about what is the point of training, the role of a Peace Corps Volunteer, how Peace Corps as a development organization works, the cross-cultural issues which occur, and what it means to be an American living in Morocco. Vocation stuff galore!

Throughout the technical training in Azilal and the cultural and language training in our CBT sites the over-arching themes have been (besides gaining health related technical skills): integration and sustainability. Both of these words contain many concepts and can be elaborated on for hours, but I think it is easy to boil them down into Cardoner’s three approaches to community: relationship with oneself (and God); relationship with community; and the tensive relationship between individual fulfillment and personal sacrifice. I hope to elaborate on each of these in turn, but for this post I would like to focus on the first, the understanding of self.

A huge chunk of training was and is preparing us for immersion and integration into a Moroccan community. That is key to the PC experience; what makes the organization so different from every other development agency is that intimate human connection. In order to successfully do this we need to know the history, culture, religion, language, customs and laws of Morocco. But more importantly--the most important--is to understand the "who" we as Americans are. In other words, to know and understand what the assumptions, shared experiences, and the worldview we are bringing with us are. This causes us to engage with one another to come up with a shared understanding of “American culture”, yet at the same time causes us to look deeply into ourselves to grasp who we as individuals are. What assumptions am I working with? What conceptual scheme do I arrange my references points in?

Yet, such considerations do not happen just in the seminars or alone at night or when writing a blog entry; they occur in every interaction we have with Moroccans and with the other trainees. Devoid of a context and people who know us we can freely narrate a story about our identity, and in so doing can edit the persona we are constantly presenting. Trying to forge friendships with trainees and Host Country Nationals, or just deciding to wear a Jalaba or hijab, is done against a backdrop of such questions as “Is this congruent with who I really am?", "Is this who I want to present as the real Josh?", "Do I know the real Josh enough to enter this foreign community and integrate but not assimilate?”. However, such questions do not necessarily need to be asked by people living outside of the United States. They seem to be universal questions to understanding self hood.