This post is basically that…except for being quasi-controversial or classic. I started writing this in probably June of 2014, as my service in Cambodia was coming to a close. My intent was to have it finished and published by the time I flew home, which happened on July 3. It turns out, tying up loose ends in a foreign country when you work for a federal agency is a time-consuming process. Once I got home roughly a year ago, my attention shifted to other things, things that I hope to reflect upon in a future post called Coming Home. For now, you get this: an explanation of why I joined the Peace Corps, the foundation of which was built after two years of service, filtered through an additional year of perspective and hindsight on (at least some of) the aftermath.
I’d wrapped up all of my projects, finally gathering summative data on my effectiveness as a teacher trainer these past two years. While I haven’t been known for my relationship-building skills (ever), the trainees invited me to a kind of joint farewell party and my school director organized a formal ceremony in my honor, giving some indication that my efforts have been appreciated and that I’ve been somewhat liked by those around me. In addition to my normal teaching load, I needed to complete several tasks required by Peace Corps before a final check out. This included a fourth and final VRF report, an additional report on my site for the next Volunteer placed there [1], and a “Description of Service,” the only official document Peace Corps will release to potential employers and schools on my behalf.
Meanwhile, there were things that needed to be done to ensure a relatively smooth transition to life in the United States. As a professional educator who put my career on hold for a period of three years [2], I was somewhat eager to get a new teaching job in the United States [3]. This required an updated resume and new letters of recommendation. Fortunately, I got the process started early, and was denied for two (2) post-Peace Corps positions while I was still in Cambodia. Good to get that out of the way early.
1. Come to find out, I was replaced by a K8. Because of the timing of things, we never met, but we have conversed via Facebook.
2. AFTER a two-year period of unemployment. 2+3=5.
3. The timing was tight, and I know how hard it is to rush into the school year. Modern Day Update: That's exactly what happened, and throughout the school year, I found myself repeatedly saying, "If I only had TWO more weeks to get ready before school started!"
4. Update, a couple weeks after the first draft: One piece of luggage ain’t happening. My new best case scenario is two (2) checked pieces of luggage and one carry-on, but even that is a bit of a moon shot. Update to the update, now that I’m home: two checked bags with a combined weight of just under 90 pounds, and the elusive single carry-on.
Peace Corps service is a singular opportunity, to be sure, and it’s sold as such to potential recruits. If you’ve seen the posters, you’ll know what I’m talking about:
“Life is calling...how far will you go?” [5]
“Make friends and influence villages. We can’t change the planet without you.”
“The corner office can wait. Some corners of the world can’t.”
“For dreamers who do.”
A lot of Volunteers who join the Peace Corps do so just out of college, looking for adventure and a chance to travel. Some Volunteers join the Peace Corps after a long, fulfilling career, bringing a lifetime of experience and expertise with them. I had my own reasons for volunteering, and I thought now might be a good time to share those reasons and evaluate how well my time in Cambodia fulfilled my expectations [6].
Before that happens, let’s establish a few baseline reasons that I believe are common to all Peace Corps Volunteers. First of all, we all want to help people. Strictly speaking, we’re helping people help themselves, but that's the very nature of the job. If you didn’t want to help people, then you came to the wrong place. To a lesser extent, I believe all Peace Corps Volunteers want to serve their country. Regardless of its existence in the zeitgeist as a magnet for hippies and leftists, the Peace Corps is an American government agency under the umbrella of the State Department. We’re out in the field, winning over the hearts and minds of those we come into contact with. We are officially separate from diplomatic missions; their work is slightly more political in nature when compared to our “not at all.” We have supporters in Congress on both sides of the aisle, and Volunteers come from a variety of backgrounds and belief systems [7].
6. Assuming I can remember them all. It’s been almost four years since I decided to travel down the path of grad school and Peace Corps service. As the recruitment poster says, “Why not both?”
7. We even had a Tea Party Republican and a girl who seemed like she’d be fine abolishing public schools in the name of capitalism.
It’s also important to acknowledge the reality that our reasons for volunteering are not entirely altruistic. I had expectations that completing Peace Corps service would ultimately help revive a teaching career that was more or less killed by economic catastrophe and vindictive administrators [8]. You receive a modest package of benefits upon your separation, including a “readjustment allowance” of roughly $8000 [9] and one year of Non-Competitive Eligibility (NCE) status when applying for federal jobs. Granted, no one signs up exclusively for those, but it’s a nice gesture.
So, what is it that draws someone to up to 27 months of voluntary poverty, gastrointestinal discomfort, separation from friends, family, and loved ones, and a litany of awkward social encounters? Here’s what did it for me [10].
8. Was it successful? Check back in two months to a year. Present-Day Update: It totally worked…or did it? I was fast tracked through the cattle-call interview process in a large Southern California school district precisely because of this experience. About 11 months later, I’m in pretty good shape to come back to the school that hired me, but still await a contract.
9. Most of mine went to pay interest on student loans as it accrued, and what remained was also funneled to the money-lenders.
10. Please note that I only speak for myself and from my own experiences.
To Serve
While all teachers make important contributions to the development of future citizens, passionate social studies teachers hone their content in ways that cover curriculum, teach democratic principles, require students to address essential questions, and promote global awareness.
To me, becoming a Peace Corps Volunteer was an extension of my active citizenship, not only doing my part to make the US a better place but pitching in to help the world become a better place. Some people serve their country in any one of our Armed Forces, and while I come from a long line of veterans on both sides of my family, that option petered out for me when I discovered that enrolling in the Naval Academy would’ve required success in additional years of math courses. I’m not equating the Peace Corps with military service; I recognize that those in the military must be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for our country while my sacrifice has been relatively minor in scope, but this was a productive way of serving my country that appealed to me. We use (a very small fraction of) American wealth, expertise, and influence in a positive way the world over. It certainly isn’t guarding a checkpoint in Fallujah or life aboard the USS Enterprise, but it’s what I can do to serve and represent my country. At the end of the day, I’ll take it [14].
11. And in California, that’s nearly a full-time job, what with our system of untenable and misguided direct democracy.
12. Other teachers also responsible for making “important contributions to the development of future citizens.”
13. Even if we are now forced to buy our own health insurance and prohibited from prohibiting people from getting married.
14. Even if it was not a popular decision with the guys around American Legion Post 291.
To Teach
15. Who knew all I needed was a few summers as a camp counselor?
The funny thing about life is that it usually doesn’t go according to plan. I managed to get my teaching career started, but by 2009, the great state of California was drowning in red ink and I found myself laid-off. I spent the next two years scratching out an existence on unemployment insurance, awarded the maximum amount of $1600 a month. But don’t kid yourselves: after I had watched Oprah and finished my Bon Bons every day, I was doing everything within my power to claw my way back into a teaching position. Summer 2009 was an abject failure; in the thirty-something school districts in Orange County, there were two (2) open positions for Social Studies teachers, each of which received 200-300 applications. We’re a dime a dozen down here, and unsurprisingly, I didn’t even garner an interview. That fall, as the school schedule resumed without me, I was thinking of ways to make myself more competitive in an over-saturated marketplace.
The answer was to diversify: don’t just teach Social Studies, find something else to teach. My first inclination was Physical Education, probably because I had worked as a baseball and softball coach, but those positions are even rarer than Social Studies positions. A math credential would’ve been the best choice, but I’m quite bad at math...and even if I could earn the credential, I dreaded being stuck somewhere teaching math and only math, which would inevitably make me hate teaching. The next best choice was English/Language Arts: not only do I enjoy (and excel in) reading and writing, but at junior high schools, Social Studies and Language Arts are often combined into one class called “core,” and teaching that class requires a teacher credentialed in both subjects [16]. This course of action required taking and passing four different tests, allowing me to prove my knowledge of literary analysis, poetry, dramatic effect, and English grammar. After acing those tests and paying a moderate fee to the Commission for Teacher Credentialing, I was all set to look for jobs in the summer of 2010.
16. Modern Day Update: The teaching position I was hired for in 2014/2015 was exactly that: a schedule split between 6th grade Ancient World History, and 6th grade English/Language Arts. I saw all the 6th graders twice a day -- it's a very, very small school.
In addition to the shiny new subject, I also widened my geographic scope: I was prepared to relocate anywhere within California for a teaching position. Local districts, attracted by my versatility, started nibbling around the edges and scheduling interviews. If the geographic expansion wasn’t as helpful, the increased subject flexibility was at least getting me in the door. The interviews seemed to be going well enough, and I felt like a couple of the districts were interested...but inevitably, there would be radio silence until I called up the school secretary to ask if a decision had been made, and she’d respond “Ooh, yes. They’ve filled that position. Sorry nobody called to tell you!” [17].
17. Ironically, the same person that was so apologetic that no one had called me would be the same person whose job it was to inform interviewees about the result of the search. Education is a profession full of people who want to be called “professionals,” on par with the doctors, lawyers, and engineers of our society…yet who also don’t typically comport themselves in a professional manner.
Soon enough, it was September and the hope for finding a teaching job for the 2010-2011 school year had all but evaporated. I had a weighty decision to make: bail on my teaching career (like 50% of new teachers within their first three years) and go to culinary school (another line of work wrought with failure and broken dreams), or reinvest in my teaching career and find a way to get back into a classroom. Since I was working in Cambodia instead of manning a sauté station somewhere, I guess you know what I decided.
My carefully planned existence of a 35+ year teaching career followed by a run in the Peace Corps as a grizzled veteran pretty much imploded with a second year of unemployment looming. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense to get out of the country for a couple of years: I’d gain valuable experience, I’d develop a variety of skills, I’d give California a chance to get its shit together (for once), and I’d do something that I was hoping to do later in life anyway. I didn’t have a wife, I didn’t have a family, I didn’t have a house, I didn’t have a career, and my truck had just been paid off. In short, the gettin’ was good. Of course, once I started down the Peace Corps path, it wasn’t long before I ran across their Master’s International initiative, which is what I ended up pursuing.
Between earning a M. Ed. from the University of Virginia’s prestigious Curry School of Education and working as a teacher trainer in Cambodia, I deepened my knowledge about curriculum design while honing my own instructional skills. It was kind of like Star Wars: Luke learns a few things from Obi Wan Kenobi, but he isn’t a fully fledged Jedi warrior until he trains with Master Yoda and confronts a vision of Darth Vader in a Dagobah swamp [18]. Cambodia has been my Dagobah. Most importantly, I had an opportunity to do what I love to do for an audience that (hopefully) appreciated it.
18. I was reminded by a Season 10 Simpsons episode that Luke did not, in fact, finish Jedi school.
People have asked me if I’m glad I went. There’s an expectation, fueled by recruitment materials, that the Peace Corps will be a profound, life-changing experience, and I’m sure ultimately that it will be for me, too. Right now, it’s too soon to tell. But you know how they say the best way to learn something is to try to teach it to other people? Well, trying to teach other people how to teach has undoubtably made me a better teacher. If that and not coming home with malaria [19] are all I get out of this, then it’s been worth it. And whatever you do, it’d better be worth it.
19. My liver was lacking an enzyme required to take the malaria-eradicating medication post-return, so if I develop an out-of-context fever in the next two years, all signs point to Vivax malaria. Modern Day Update: We’re clear through the first 12 months of being home! Although I did suffer through a particularly nasty fever that had me thinking otherwise.
To Broaden
20. Which hardly counts because it’s a two and a half hour drive from my front door. Even then, I haven’t frequented it often, or since I was in 5th grade.
21. Do you like American music? I like American music.
22. Can’t people who like baseball also like classical guitar?
I just spent about 1100 words explaining that I was more or less destitute with no prospects for the future, so it wasn’t going to happen unless it happened on the government’s dime. I spent two years of my life in a country that I had only a passing familiarity with prior to moving there. I can honestly say that I never would’ve traveled there had it not been for Peace Corps placing me there, and in the extremely unlikely event that I had traveled there as a tourist, my experiences would’ve been radically different. And on the way over and back, I was in three additional countries [23]. Serving in the Peace Corps hasn’t turned me into Anthony Bourdain or anything and I probably “enjoyed the moment” far less than I could’ve and I more than likely lied when people asked and I said I’d come back to Cambodia within ten years. But Southeast Asia had never been on my radar and now I’m probably THE “Cambodia guy” of all the people you know [24]. I wish I had been able to spend more time in Thailand (civil disorder) and travel to Vietnam ($60 visa for Americans) while I had been in that part of the world, but all of my vacation efforts ended up focused on a) touring around Cambodia, or b) visiting the United States.
23. Japan (if you let me count airports), Thailand, and Korea (tour of Seoul during my 12-hour layover). Also, I flew over Canada and the Great Lakes. They were great.
24. Volunteers excluded.
Why did a “US guy” end up joining the Peace Corps? What better type of person to be a channel for the cultural exchange expected by Goal Two and Goal Three? I didn’t get to study abroad or backpack through Europe, this has been my big chance at international life.
The godfather of the Peace Corps, John F. Kennedy once said something like: Americans know far too little about the world, and the world knows far too little about Americans. I’m just doing what I can.
To Appreciate
I’m from Southern California, where if you don’t have a car you’re in pretty big trouble. In Cambodia, relatively few people own cars. A lot of people have motos, but cars are a luxury item that most people can’t afford to purchase, let alone maintain and fuel.
It’s incredibly hot in Cambodia nearly the entire year [26], but almost nobody has air conditioning in their house. If you’re lucky, you’ve got a fan, and if you’re luckier, you’ve got access to the electricity to run it at all the times you’d like to. Sometimes the electricity is turned off at 5 PM, sometimes there never was any electricity to begin with and everything is run off of car batteries.
25. Although I admit that my experience was pretty lush, if not posh.
26. It’s bad and getting worse.
Most families in Cambodia don’t have refrigerators, a result of that pesky lack of electricity and the expense, which combines with a shaky understanding of food safety to create rampant problems with food-borne illnesses.
A middle school in a district in Orange County where I applied was discussing the upgrades and modernizations that had been added to their classrooms in the last five years: a digital projector, a document camera, a surround sound system with a microphone. At a high school in another district, each classroom had internet access for the teachers and the students. In Cambodia, the schools are simple places. They are what’s called “egg cartons” in the parlance of comparative international education: rooms filled with rows of desks facing the front of the classroom where the teacher will lecture, usually to many students more than what we’d prefer. “Classroom technology” means a blackboard, or if you’re lucky, a white board. My trainees made their lessons “more interesting” by rewriting the tables and questions from the less-than-stellar textbook on pieces of chart paper; if they’re really destined for great things, they copied or printed out or drew pictures to help elicit new vocabulary words. I’m not saying our schools are better because they have more technology, but the disparity was striking.
I won’t make the claim that people in developing countries, like Cambodia, are unconcerned about material possessions, because I don’t think it’s universally true or even true of most people here. My host family had running water, they had a washing machine, they had two refrigerators, a car, air conditioning and a television with cable in every bedroom but mine [27]. My trainees had iPhones and Galaxies and laptops, my co-teachers had iPads. The youngest son of my training host family had enough disposable income to order an Ab-Bench type device from an infomercial. These kinds of luxury products are available in Cambodia, and I think available to an increasing number of people; Cambodians aren’t quite ready to order out of SkyMall, and large swathes of the population struggle through life in gut-wrenching poverty, but these are the kinds of things that we take for granted in America.
27. My room had a cable hook-up, but I never felt compelled to find a TV for it. If I had, I would've been able to watch NXT my entire service.
Living in a country where almost nothing is easy spawned a newfound appreciation within me for the simplest of pleasures. One of the first things I did on my way home from the airport was to stop at a drive-thru for an iced tea...because in America, ice is readily available and isn’t made with water that will give you Giardia and there are lemons and there are drive-thrus. For the most part, life in the United States is easy, it’s convenient, it’s comfortable. Kids these days don’t know how good they’ve got it. Also, get off of my lawn!
Success…?
Did I get to serve my country? Hell yes, and I’m incredibly proud that I completed something that so few Americans have before me.
Did I get to teach? Hell yes, in a number of formal and informal settings and functions. My trainees were deviating from scripted lesson plans to better align things with their objectives, and I spoke to a room full of Cambodians about the meaning of Hanukkah.
Did I get to broaden myself? Let me answer that question with more questions: Have you eaten fried crickets or bitter melon or fire ant soup or boiled pig brain? Have you given offerings in a Buddhist temple? Have you been run over by a tuk-tuk because it nearly forced your bike wheel into the gutter ditch while your friend Roxy laughed at your injuries? I did all of those things, and I wouldn’t have ever done them without my Peace Corps service.
Did I develop a greater appreciation for life in the United States? In Southern California, an incredibly ego-centric society where people are often negative and often feel “put upon” by minor inconveniences, it’s very easy to lose sight of the fact that living here is great. Honestly, as I had become preoccupied with other things, I had lost sight of that myself in the past year. But as I sit in my apartment with the air conditioning on, listening to music streaming over my WiFi, and writing on my new MacBook, it’s worth remembering.
The mixed feelings I had and the struggles I faced while it was happening are nothing compared to the benefits that are only beginning to become apparent now that I’m back home. I’m a better teacher, I’m a better person, and it’s rare that a day goes by without me starting a story or making a comment that includes “In Cambodia…”
What more could I have wanted?
Until next time,
- N