Peace Corps, Sustainablility and Me

I am sitting in a classroom in a private Catholic school waiting for the 19 students who signed up for my training program to show up.  Yesterday I waited for the students who had been trained by the volunteer I have replaced.  I am excited because I think it is a great project and by continuing what he started, I can add a component of sustainability to his work.  I have been in communication with him and he is excited that I am taking this on.  The school administration appears supportive and enthusiastic but where are the students?  The students Patrick worked with have told administration and me that they want to continue the project but they did not show up for the meeting yesterday.  The group of new students to be trained does not show up either.  What happened?  It was such a good idea and it didn’t work.

Sustainability is a recurring and important theme of all development work and Peace Corps is not exempt from that expectation.  What does sustainability mean?  During my first Peace Corps service I thought it meant that whatever project I was working on would continue without me at the end of my service and I struggled for months trying to figure out how to organize some work that would not be dependent on me.  I could not do it so I had a serious talk with myself and decided that I was either going to spend two years trying to figure out what sustainable project I could do, or I was going to do something, sustainable or not.  When I left Honduras, I felt good about the project I had done and I hoped that some part of it would stay with the people involved to fulfill my sustainability mandate. 

During our training here in Nicaragua we had many sessions about the Peace Corps approach to development which helped me sort out what I had done in Honduras.  We learned that there are 7 components to the Peace Corps approach to development:

1.     People-centered (Focus on people, not things)

2.     Process = Product (How we get from A to B is just as important as getting to B)

3.     Bottom-up (People defining their own development agenda)

4.     Long-term vision (No quick fixes or temporary solutions)

5.     Participatory and inclusive (Everyone has a voice and owns the process)

6.     Capacity building (The greatest resource is the human one)

7.     Sustainable (Ensuring the continuity of our work)

Our training staff emphasized that if we include 1 through 6 in the approach to our work, the sustainability part will naturally follow.  That was very eye opening and made me feel better about the work I had done in my previous service.

It is still a tricky process.  As foreigners, we can observe a system (health, education, small business, etc.) and easily see what is wrong and how to fix it, but that is not our job. We need to listen and hear how our host country nationals identify their problems and figure out with them how we can be a support in their efforts to resolve the issue.  In addition to that, we have to sort out what our own strengths and interests are so we are working on something that we are capable of doing and that we enjoy.  In the health sector in Nicaragua this is especially true because we do not have a clearly defined job.  To aid us in the process, we are required to do a serious of interviews with health leaders to identify specific areas needing help and then conduct a survey about our chosen topic to help us zero in where we want to be putting our energy. What I have realized is that this process also helps me identify my own needs as a volunteer as well as my own strengths and liabilities.

What happened that I ended up in an empty classroom with a dead end project? I think there were many factors.  Most importantly, no matter how you slice it, the Peace Corps volunteer is a major component of his/her projects. Patrick did this project with the kids in this school near the end of his two-year service.  Before he started it, he spent time in the school getting to know the administration and the students and getting them excited about his idea.  He is young and handsome and 19 adolescent girls were happy to spend 4 hours a week under his tutelage.  Enter his replacement, a 68-year old grandmother and the same exciting attraction just isn’t there.  There was no way I could fly on the coattails of the work that Patrick had done but I only know this now in hindsight. 

My biggest insight in this experiment was the realization that I really don’t like working with adolescents.  I find myself impatient with their desire to hang out and frustrated that they don’t think I am funny.  I know I am funny and all 8 kids in my neighborhood English class ages 7-11 think I'm a riot.  We laugh together all the time. Likewise, when I am at the maternity home working with the women there, I can really get them laughing just by doing silly things like pretending my back pack is really heavy and I can hardly lift it.  When I do something like that around adolescents, I get the “what planet are you you from” look. 

So now what?  I will continue my interviews with a focus on work dealing with either primary school kids or adults and leave adolescents out of the picture for the time being.  I think everyone will be happier and when I identify the right project for me, hopefully we will have fun accomplishing our goals together.