Mid Service Training
One year after you officially swore to make the world better you return to the city that welcomed you, for Mid-Service Training, you and your batch of Peace Corps volunteers. The Manila-gray sky hovers above you, threatening to break open. Tore up paving blocks litter the baywalk along Roxas Blvd, the aftermath of Typhoon Pedring. Street children huddle near you, still plying their one-hand-in-your-face-one-in-your-pocket game, GROs still stalk the streets day and night, the national poverty rate is stuck at 40%, and HIV/AIDS continues to spread at epidemic rates.
145 of you arrived 15 months ago, flew the 21 hours from one martyred leader to another, from JFK International to Ninoy Aquino International, flew because you all joined up for 3 months of pre-service training and 2 years of voluntary service to make the world better. Fifteen months later there are 117. Which is it, 80.7% retention or 19.3% attrition? Is your Peace Corps volunteer glass four-fifths full or one-fifth empty? It makes a difference the way you look at it.
You see faces you haven't seen for a year. You see 30 pounds lost, just as many gained, you see beards galore, unshaven lady legs. There are hugs from people you actually really barely know, people you've only spoken to a handful of times, if that, but the funny thing is they're sincere hugs, they're right, appropriate, because you're joined in common cause and united by circumstance.
You think about what's changed and what hasn't.
For one, there is less talk about the weather, about the smell of cowshit rolling over the landscape, more or less the same amount of talk about food, about what we miss and what we have. It is the great equalizer, food, the tried-and-true smalltalk that everyone can talk, the thing that fills the empty silences when you have nothing to talk about, because talking about what your living situation is has become passe.
There is almost no talk about what's going on at site, except by the ones who don't get it, who didn't get the memo, the unspoken memo about You don't ask whatchoove been doing at site and You don't ask whatchool be doing after Peace Corps. That's verboten, or bad form at the very least.
The ones who had too earnest smiles too eager to impress, they've faded, calmed. Maybe you were one of them. You couldn't stand an awkward silence. You wanted so much to be interesting and for everyone to be passionate, burning with the 50 year-old flame of activism. But now a quiet conversation is okay. It's not complacency that has set in but acceptance. Endurance. Patience.
And others--the misfits the loners the odballs, the otherwise socially awkward--they seem to have become less so, responding more or less normally in conversation. Absent are those awkward silences you cringed at a year ago. Or at least that's how it appears to you. Maybe you've gotten used to it.
Is your Peace Corps glass full or empty?
Many will go home for the holidays. Small droves. Some are worried they won't want to come back but most of them are just counting the days and thinking they'll come back energized and motivated for the next year. But some have been denied Advanced Annual Leave and, because they're already short on vacation days, won't be able to travel. Some already bought tickets and which are now sunk, non-negotiable. Some shake their fists. There's a two-hour "fireside chat" with the Country Director which is somewhere between civility and civil disobedience, where you discuss his current interpretation of Advanced Annual Leave, which is (and always has been, as he reminds everyone) "at the discretion of the Country Director."
It makes you think. At the bar, you talk it over with the Country Director, mano y mano: Today, volunteers are only a Skype call or FB chat or email away from loved ones. They are inarguably more connected than ever before. And yet the idea of travelling home for Christmas is seen as a right, not an exceptionality. 50 years ago Americans signed up to spend 2 years serving the world away from family and friends. Today volunteers take precisely the same pledge but with a different cathection. You wonder why. Is travel simply more affordable? Or is it something about the "Me" Generation?
80.7% or 19.3%?
Regardless, general consensus is, if you've lasted this long you'll probably last all the goddamn glorious way. Unless there's some Early Termination unforesmelled event like Med. Sep. or Ad. Sep. But general consensus is.
Some are thinking--you can see it written behind their eyeballs--are thinking about life after service, ruminating words like Non Competitive Eligibility or Foreign Service or the Graduate Records Exam. But most of you are thinking about the coming year, about what you can do, about how little time a year is to change the world. And that's how it's always been and, you think as you board the plane back for your adopted hometown--excited to get out of the Manila gray and be "home"--you think that's how it should be.
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