If time is the coin of our lives, being a Peace Corps Volunteer is like being given a two year blank-check. Iana, my investment banker ex, once told me she wouldn’t watch a movie a twice because she didn’t have the time; my life here is about finding ways to kill time (like blogging). Any whim which has the vaguest sense of organization is dubbed a “secondary project;” some of these are ludicrous, like feng shui classes on the beach in the Caribbean. Others are quite impressive indeed; I met one volunteer, an engineer placed in a town with dire water problems, who has taught her village how to calculate the amount of water flowing off roofs and how to control it and any other runoff once it gets to the ground. I’ve tried sponsoring projects in the last year, all with my students, but they were all buried by lack of interest and competing responsibilities.
At a meeting last week in Dar es Salaam I met a lot of other teachers and heard about their lives. All their stories made me feel sufficiently guilty to try helping out again, to become a “super volunteer,” and to start a health club with my students.
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