Opening the Door

While “training” is over—I swore in as a Volunteer May 21^st and left for my site—my learning and discovery has just begun. I had to settle into my site, get to know my host family, find my own house, buy furniture and things for my house, keep learning the language (and the dialect specific to my community), and figure out my role here as a Volunteer.

I began my in-country posts trying to structure them around my three months of training. I assumed I would be writing more during PST. I did write periodically about my life here in general at my personal blog: http://radicaljosh.blogspot.com. Part of the reason I didn’t write is I have no regular access to the internet and the time I do have is spent on Peace Corps work and politics and keeping in touch with my friends and family.

Yet, these ten months and six months of actual service have been a journey to say the least. Have I been doing “work”? Yes. But you ask that question to any currently serving Volunteer and you’ll get varying degrees of the same tentative “well, yes…sort of”.

Ourselves, work, and our relations to that work are the all-consuming issues we face out here. During training we are bombarded with what we will be doing; how to do our job; what will go wrong; how horrible we will feel at times; how great we will feel at times; and how to handle isolation, loneliness, slow work progress, fatigue, and thoughts of Early-Termination. Then we head to our sites and have to live and work and get rid of our expectations.

With five hours a day language sessions; technical training on how to build latrines, work on family planning, talk about HIV/AIDS, etc; learning about Arab and Berber culture; being told how to not offend people; and how to live successful as an American in rural Morocco, we felt that we were learning how to adjust to the Moroccans we would live with. We felt that our journey of self-discovery would start when we became members of the community. We are all people who value diversity and culture, after all. We have adjusted our mindset to living here; we are ready to be changed! It is true that living and working with the Berbers for two years will be a journey of self-discovery, but really the journey began when we arrived at our site and sat in our homes for six months alone, scared, apprehensive, nervous, and worried. We slowly learned that before we can do our job we must first develop ourselves.

This time here as made me realize that before I can go out and experience life with the Berbers and allow this experience to change me, I first have to change enough to not be afraid to live, not just stay, in my village.

Relationship with ourselves and with God is one of the components of developing vocation. I must figure that out before I can have a relationship with a community and properly navigate the tension of sacrifice and fulfillment. As I constantly worry about if I am doing and working “enough”, as I complain and cry about my site and my role here, I start to realize I need to understand myself and who I am before I can even, literally, walk out the door. Such is true in America: we are always apprehensive of going out in the world and the community—more so when we are unsure about what we will be doing there. As the year approaches its end and I slowly gain confidence with walking around my community, I realize that before I can begin my vocation journey, before I can even being to be changed by this experience, I need to come to terms with my own fears and issues of “self-worth” so I can open my door.

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.