Reading Ethan Sklom's first few posts about his Peace Corps service in Malawi (see link on right) has brought up a discussion that Martha and I have often had about Peace Corps - Georgia: Why is service here hard? I mean, let's ask a simple question: How long/far will Ethan have to travel to purchase a 500g jar of Nutella? The answer to that is probably more than a 40-minute Georgian marshutka ride and 30km. So, in the realm of Nutella access, Georgia 1, Malawi 0.
However, the interesting and frustrating thing about service in Georgia is that very proximity to the familiar, while at the same time being so far from it. I hate to generalize about a country that I've never visited, but I'd venture to guess that Ethan doesn't wake up in his site, and instantly see something familiar to his previous life in the States. This, in turn, makes Ethan (and I'd love to get his comments on this the next time he's near a computer with internet) not expect anything familiar. I - conversely - constantly find myself being snapped back to the reality of life/work in Georgia, because I've let my guard drop due to being exposed to said Nutella, or some other very 'Western" thing that makes me think that I'm living in a place much more familiar than it actually is.
Additionally, Martha and I live about 3 hours' marsh ride (see how I used PCV slang? "Marsh = Marshutka) from Tbilisi, and our various secondary projects often require us to travel there on our weekends to conduct meetings and work in the Peace Corps office. Sometimes, we're lucky enough to be invited to spend the weekend with a member of the expatriate community and then our departure from our "Village Reality" really gets intense, as we are able to take hot showers and experience an almost-America/Europe for a couple days.
About 2 years ago, when Peace Corps service was a distant pipe-dream-that-might-not-happen, Martha and I spoke to a returned PCV who had served in the Caribbean, on some impoverished island (Haiti?) He mentioned that the hardest thing for him were the 'shifts,' or times when he could see the luxury resorts from an impoverished slum, or when he realized that he was less than an hour from Miami-Dade Airport. Now that I find myself in Peace Corps, I find myself agreeing with this notion, that most of my difficulties lie in forgetting where I am, and letting my expectations grow beyond what is possible. Rapidly shifting from Tbilisi's progress and big city mentality to that of "The Regions," and, in turn, trying to figure out how best to communicate new project details with reluctant community members still operating in a Soviet-Style mentality, all the while quietly noshing on Nutella, takes some getting used to.
-JK
1 comment:
I know exactly what you are talking about. Genna and I ate at MacDonald's today for the first time in 10 years because we wanted to feel the full intensity of said shift. In the village we were at just this morning they make jam from carrots and lemon because there is nothing else that comes close enough to the substance there. CRAZY.
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