Category Archives: Peace Corps

Happy new school year!

Another month later…

My internet situation has been a little more questionable than I’d hoped for — I’ve only gotten public internet access as of this week.

This post and the previous one backdate to when I thought I would have internet within the week.

Written for September 2nd, 2015

Yesterday, September 1st, was Mongolia’s national first day of school. The teachers greeted each other in Kazakh, clasping hands, and I leaned over to one of my counterparts and asked what the words meant. “Happy new school year!” she told me.

In Mongolia, every school year begins with an opening ceremony. I gave a speech in front of the whole school — in Kazakh, written with the kind help of one of my counterparts — and sang an American song. At least two of the kids recorded the event, so there is now a video somewhere of me mangling Kazakh words and forgetting the lyrics to “I Dont Wanna Miss a Thing”[1].

I am super excited about my placement. Here are some of the awesome things about my school:

  • My CPs have high fluency and good comprehension — meaning we can speak exclusively in English, because they understand what I say and can answer in an appropriate way. (This is not true of all English teachers in Mongolia, unfortunately.)
  • I’ve already gotten suggestions for four or five different projects, as well as individual requests for specific help (e.g. grammar, TOEFL, teaching the college-prep 11th and 12th grade classes) — and I haven’t even started work yet.
  • The school has had multiple PCVs in the past, so they know what to expect and how to work with me.
  • The kind of projects being requested of me are very much in line with Peace Corps values — so, while it’s true I’m likely to help tutor advanced students for the Olympiads[2], I am also being asked to run a weekly English club for disabled students and help design student-centered, inductive lessons[3].
  • My CPs are super excited to have me specifically because I am a woman, and the entire English faculty at my school — bar one — is female. Cross-gender friendships are not a thing in Mongolia, but the division between work and personal life is not as strong as it is in the ‘States. My CPs really, really want to get to know me as a person, not just as a teacher, which they couldn’t do before — their previous PCVs were all male.
  • Related to the last: I am super well cared for here, as PCVs often aren’t when they live in apartments. While I spend a lot of time alone at loose ends — a chronic problem in PC/Mongolia — I’ve made contacts. I already have somebody to buy dairy from (it’s a thing here to buy dairy fresh), and my nearest neighbor/landlady is a CP’s sister. (Also a huge sweetheart who is gradually lending me half of her kitchen cabinet.) Last Friday at lunch I told my CPs my phone number, and my phone immediately started ringing off the hook as my CPs made sure I had theirs. “So you can call us in the evening,” one of them told me.

There are, however, some challenges in store.

  • I have eleven CPs. All of them have been excited to meet me, and about half have already suggested projects they want to work on. Scheduling could get…interesting.
  • I’m at one of the bigger schools in the province — there can be as many as 35 students per class. I really don’t like big classes, as a student or as a teacher; a lot of the fun of teaching, for me, is in getting to know the students and adapting my lessons to their needs. The more students there are, the more difficult this becomes.
  • I don’t know Kazakh. I really, really don’t know Kazakh. I can buy food at the market and mumble through some pleasantries (though I’m not sure which of the five ways to say “hello” is appropriate at any given moment). Because my CPs speak good English, and my landlady and school personnel also speak Mongolian, I could theoretically get by without learning much — but that’s not, in my opinion, a good thing. Most of my CPs speak Kazakh to each other, and in meetings the faculty speak both Kazakh and Mongolian (sometimes switching within a single sentence). I need to learn the language if I want to know what’s going on, but it’s going to take a lot of initiative on my part, since I can almost always ask for a translation instead.

I’d say, though, that these problems are surmountable with a bit of attention and planning.

All said and done, while I was petrified when I first got the placement (“I have how many CPs? There are how many students in this school?” not to mention that bigger schools are usually higher ranked and have a better reputation), the more time I spend here, the happier I am about the time I have ahead. I’m really looking forward to getting back to work.


[1] The story behind me singing in front of a crowd of Kazakh children is a tale unto itself, too long for this humble post.
[2] English competition, about which I shall write another day.
[3] Teacher jargon, about which I probably will not write.

Aloneness in Mongolia

Another month later…

My internet situation has been a little more questionable than I’d hoped for — I’ve only gotten public internet access as of this week.

This post and the next backdate to when I thought I would have internet within the week.

Written for August 26, 2015

As a general rule of thumb, people don’t live alone in Mongolia.

Family is super important to Mongolians. During training, my host mom — who was theoretically the only one living on her хашаа — was visited almost every day by her sons and grandchildren, whether to help around the хашаа or just to hang out. Her elder sister visited once every few weeks with her family, and other extended family and friends came by on a regular basis. Twice while I was living there we had family from the capital come and stay for a week.

And then there’s the хашаа system. In the хашаа districts of soums and aimag centers, a person buys a plot of land and builds a fence, or хашаа, around it. Then that person can build whatever he or she wants within the fence. Relative to American houses, gers are quick and easy to assemble and don’t take up much space, so it’s easy for a relative to set up for a while in an empty part of the yard. Smallish living spaces for nuclear families within a larger communal yard — especially combined with the Mongolian emphasis on hospitality — create a sense that all space is shared space, and everyone is welcome. It was not uncommon, when I was living with my host family, for visitors and host family friends to wander right into my ger, inspect my belongings and the cleanliness of my surroundings, and make small talk in Monglish.

The хашаа setup can be frustrating for Americans, who are used to privacy, but ultimately it helps with integration — if a Mongolian is liable to wander into your space at any moment, it behooves you to learn as much about the language and customs as you can (and to keep your ger clean).

At my new site, I’m living in an apartment, and the atmosphere is very different. I’ve only met a few neighbors on the stairwell, and everyone keeps their doors locked, even when they’re home. I share an entry hall with the sister of one of my coworkers, so I do have a neighbor who can wander in at will, but it’s still got a different feel from when I was on a хашаа — I don’t like to go into my neighbor’s apartment without an invitation.

Being alone is not a good thing in Mongolia. While short periods of solitude are recognized as valuable, a person who lives alone is believed to be isolated and unhappy. This isn’t usually the case for me — I relish my alone time — but here, after two months on a хашаа, moving to a place where I don’t speak the language and don’t have a teacher, where there’s only a few other Americans within two hours’ drive, where my only cultural contacts are my coworkers…well, it gets a little lonely.

As I meet my counterparts, I’m making it well known that I live alone and I’d like visitors, and that I’m very happy to trade English for Kazakh lessons with anybody who has the time to spare. My counterparts seem super excited to get to know me, and I’ve heard again and again that they specifically requested a female Volunteer so that they could spend time outside of work with her[1]. Hopefully I won’t be lonely long.

A lot of Volunteers in apartments — especially in the Kazakh region, because of the language barrier — move onto хашааs their second year. It’s certainly something to consider, but, well…I also like centralized heat and running water. We’ll see how this winter goes.


[1] In a later post, I’ll write more on relationships, cross-gender friendships (or the lack thereof), and the fun of being a single American in Mongolia.

Eleven weeks later

One week ago, I learned where I would live and work for the next two years. Two days ago, I was officially sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Tomorrow, I will be going to my permanent site.[1]

My time is once again my own — at least more than it was during my training — so I intend to resume blogging. I’m especially excited to blog now that I know my experience is going to be unusual even for a PCV (see the bottom section of this post). Expect posts once a week on Wednesday as often as I have reliable internet.

Note that this is a super brief summary of my experience; I hope I have opportunities to expand on it in the coming months. This blog cannot be complete until it houses my demon goat story.

PST wrap-up

So, what was it like?

For two months, I lived in a ger inside my host family’s хашаа (hashaa), or fenced property, beside my host mom’s one-room house. My host mom was retired, kept four cows, and sold frozen тараг (tarak, yogurt) out her window to the neighbors. One of her sons lived down the street, and his two daughters came over almost every day to hang out and help with chores.

IMG_1130[1]The view from my ger door. From near to far: хашаа, neighbor’s ger, hill with Buddhist stupa and prayer wheels, and (on the right) the town’s sacred mountain.

Two granddaughters means my host mom was an эмээ (emee), and as such she was a force of nature. She was steadfastly determined that I learn to understand her Mongolian, cook traditional Mongolian foods in a hot pot, wash my clothes in a түмпэн (tumpin, a plastic basin that vaguely resembles a very small swimming pool), and light a cow-dung fire. While she was very understanding of my need for sleep, she insisted that I participate in cooking, washing-up, and family chores.

My work day began at 9am with a four-hour Mongolian lesson. I was at the largest training site and had thirteen American classmates; we were divided into three language groups by learning speed and style. Our teachers (aka LCFs) were native Mongolian speakers who lived in the area and had been trained by the Peace Corps. They were our cultural liasons and our advocates within the community; we relied on them as much as, if not more than, our host families.

IMG_0279[1]The western half of my ger. The only picture anyone got of the inside, complete with my underwear hung to dry — go figure. Not shown: my plastic dresser, my bed, and the door to the south.

Lunch was an hour and a half long. I had the option of either making a twenty-minute trek uphill in ninety-degree weather to my хашаа, where my host mom would feed me hot soup (Mongolians don’t really serve cold food or drinks), or of spending my limited funds on a lunch from the local дэлгүүр (delguur, small shop). I mostly ate with my mom, because I wanted to spend time with her and because I’m cheap.

After lunch, one of the smaller training sites joined us for a methodology lesson that lasted until 5:30. As training went on, however, we spent more and more days practicing instead of studying. Our teachers recruited local kids to take classes from us; in pairs, for a total of twelve days, we taught three forty-minute lessons to students aged 6 to 28.

IMG_1118[1]
The sacred mountain, as seen from the town’s Naadam stadium.

Then I went home, stumbled through a few broken sentences of Mongolian with my host mom, ate hot бууз or хуушуур (buuz, khuushuur, composed of flour and meat), and planned yet another lesson.

What I’m saying is, I did a lot of things and didn’t sleep nearly enough, and I’m pretty glad it’s over. But the relationships I forged — with both Mongolians and my fellow American trainees — motivated me and kept me sane, and I’m going to rely on those relationships for those next two years. (Huj huj, Хөтөл.)

What’s next?

Our formal site announcements happened a week ago, on the 10th. But I knew where I was going four days in advance, because I had an extra day of language training.

I’ve been assigned to a school in the far western region of Mongolia. This part of the country is predominantly Kazakh — the people there speak the same language as the people of Kazakhstan, are mostly Muslim, and (according to almost every Mongolian I’ve spoken to) have very different cultural traditions. This means that my last two months were…well, I certainly won’t say they were useless, but my next two months are likely to resemble them very closely, as I learn to navigate a whole new language and cultural perspective.

I’m super excited for this experience and gratified that the Peace Corps staff thought I was up for the challenge. (I’m also working in a large school with no less than eight Mongolian counterparts, which is…a tad bit intimidating.) I will freely admit I have mixed feelings about the prospect — not only will I have to learn a third language on the job, but my atypical experience is going to set me apart from the support network I’ve only just built. But I also think it’s going to prove a valuable opportunity for growth.

I’ll tell you all about my new site next week!


[1] I wrote this on Monday the 17th, but set it to post on Wednesday so I could jump right into schedule. These days are accurate for Monday.

Staging and Let Girls Learn

Hi friends!

As I write this I’m staying in one of the cities[1] for in-country orientation, but by the time it posts I will have settled in with my PST host family. We don’t know for sure what the internet situation will be like. I’m taking advantage of jetlag to sketch out a post before my cohort wakes up and clogs the hotel internet connection.

Usually, Staging is a four-hour prefix to the long flight overseas — brief overview sessions on safety and security, Peace Corps goals and expectations, and cultural sensitivity (?) before we’re all packed like sardines to find out who objects to having their shoulder slept on and whether our overexcited sociability will aggravate the flight attendants to drastic action.

Our staging event was two days long. Peace Corps Mongolia is a pilot country for the Let Girls Learn initiative, which provides training and resources to Peace Corps volunteers (and USAID employees) so that they can actively work toward the empowerment of girls and young women through access to education. This year, eleven Peace Corps programs will host an extended staging event and extra PST sessions as made possible by the initiative.

So our staging event had a series of sessions on gender: an intro to the program and to the benefits of women’s education, followed by presentations and discussion on the definition of gender, gender identity, and how the concept/presentation of gender changes between cultures. Most of it was very familiar to me (hooray feminist theory and gender studies!), but I was glad for the extra two nights’ sleep — and there was one session in particular that I found fascinating for methodology reasons. But I can’t describe it here, as that would spoil the fun for future trainees 😉

Mongolia is…an extremely weird country to pilot the Let Girls Learn program, at least at first glance. Women’s education is the norm here rather than the exception.

It was explained to me like this: Men in Mongolia are expected to be the leaders, the decision-makers, the heads of their families and the breadwinners, whereas women are expected to work hard to further themselves, their homes, and their families in absence of the burden of leadership[2]. As a result of this, a very high value is placed on girls’ education, whereas boys are torn between education and early employment.

This is affected in turn by Mongolia’s economic landscape. Some of the most lucrative jobs are in herding and mining — hard labor work usually performed by younger men. Boys disengage in class or leave school early because higher education is not required for these jobs, but later in life they have few options if they choose (or must for health or economic reasons) to change professions. Women fill the majority of education-prerequisite positions and are often the primary breadwinner in the house, while men with less education struggle to find employment. However, those men who do pursue their education are almost always placed in the highest available role, because, again, men are expected to be decision-makers — so while employment and education are not a problem for women, their leadership opportunities are limited.

(All of this was told to me in the States by Americans, but it seems to hold true in-country: almost all of the PST staff are women, with the exception of a handful of people and all of our truck/bus drivers. I can’t speak to the men-in-leadership point, though, because (a) there aren’t enough leadership positions OR men for a decent sample size, and (b) this is a U.S. government program and the hiring was approved if not performed by the Peace Corps, so it’s skewed toward U.S. norms, and many leadership positions are filled by Americans or other highly qualified international citizens.)

So I suppose it’s “Let Boys Learn, Let Women Lead” for our initiative — or so our presenter indicated at Staging. But, well, that’s a much messier slogan than Let Girls Learn, and I guess the White House likes its titles clear and concise.


[1] Note that it’s a Peace Corps policy not to share my exact location publicly, because I’m highly visible as the only/one of few Americans in a relatively small community. I mean, in the current case it’s more like a huge group of loud and boisterous Americans flooded a relatively large city, but it’s still best practice not to share.
[2] If you are familiar with Mongolian gender roles and can correct or add nuance to my understanding of them, please do comment! I am yet a novice and an outsider.

Community, karate, PST

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons…

–“Desiderata,” Max Ehrmann

Apologies if this post is a little scattered: I wrote it during spare moments during Staging (about which I intend to blog, eventually) and didn’t have time for a proper revision before I lost internet connection. I probably won’t post again for a couple of months, since internet access is limited during the initial training.

This week is an orientation in Ulaanbaatar (Улаанваатар), the capital city; next week we begin our training, which is located around a city a few hours away. My Pre-Service Training will last eleven weeks (counting orientation) and the majority of it will take place in a small rural community; I will be studying with a half-dozen or dozen other TEFL volunteers.

But before I get into what (little) I know about that training, I want to talk karate.

In October, I signed up for a self defense workshop at an isshinryu karate dojo near my house. It was something I owed myself, I figured, if I was going to make choices that put me in risky situations. I wasn’t looking forward to it; I’ve spent my brief adult life rehabilitating from childhood abhorrence of physical activity, and I still wasn’t comfortable working out in front of people.

Turns out it doesn’t much matter how comfortable you are when somebody grabs you from behind and says you’re not getting off the mat until you get free. Sometime in the middle of the session, when the endorphins had worn my anxiety away, I realized I was enjoying myself.

I can pin down the moment enjoyment changed to I want to do that. The head sensei was working with a woman from another dojo (I have no idea if she was a student or a blackbelt — they were wearing sweats for this class). He had her pinned on her back on the ground. She rolled over onto her stomach, and he got her in a headlock and said, “You’re dead. You were dead as soon as you rolled over.”

I waited for her to deny it, to take offense, to defend herself against the peremptory end to the demonstration. Instead, when he released her, she looked at him and asked, “How did you do that?”

I realized in that moment that this was a group that I could learn from: a community that valued learning and mutual respect over competition.

Six months is not long on a karateka’s timeline. It takes a couple of years to work up to the middle of the kyu (colored belt) ranks; longer than that to achieve a first-rank black belt. I told myself, when I started class, that this would be a low-commitment hobby, something I’d keep up with only as long as I enjoyed it and it didn’t increase my stress level.

I don’t do low-commitment very well.

The instructors knew that I was busy (at this point, I was working full-time, tutoring 3 evenings a week, writing every day, making intermittent Peace Corps preparations, and trying very hard to get adequate sleep and maintain some semblance of a healthy social life). They encouraged me to show up regularly, since it was the only way I could make consistent improvement, but didn’t criticize me or look askance when I missed a week or two. They welcomed me as part of the class and the community built around it, despite that I did not know a single person in the dojo when I walked in. They pushed me to learn as much as I could and perform to the best of my ability, and they made sure I left each class exhausted and armed with new techniques and strategies. I found myself looking forward to the classes I could attend as I looked forward to very few things in my day-to-day.

After a few weeks, I was given a sign-off sheet of items to learn as I progressed through the belt ranks. The list consisted of demonstrable techniques and historical/contextual knowledge specific to isshinryu, with around five items to learn per belt rank. The dojo was pretty small — the adult classes averaged around 3:1 student:sensei — so the class structure was fluid; what we worked on depended on which sensei was leading and how the students ranked. I was the only adult with a white (and, later, yellow) belt. In the younger classes, siblings and friends who had started at the same time tended to test together, but beyond that we worked at our own pace. The tests were not on a schedule or a set order within the belt rank. Whenever you practiced an item in class at an acceptable level, a sensei would ask for an official demonstration before signing off. Sometimes they were very informal: a sensei would sign off one of the major items, glance through the list, and ask, “Do you know the dojo rules and procedures?”

My interest did not wane. I began to practice at home — was frustrated, in fact, that it wasn’t logistically possible to work more than twenty or thirty minutes of practice into my day. I earned my first (and thus far only) belt. A new class opened that I could actually fit in my schedule.

The instructors knew I was busy, but they didn’t know I was leaving.

I hadn’t mentioned it when I started attending: it wasn’t relevant, because I wasn’t even sure I would stick around. I continued to not mention it as the months passed. This was partly because, working a steady-as-clockwork day job in the middle of the coldest February on record, I just couldn’t envision going somewhere even colder to do challenging and unusual things. But it was also because I valued this community I had half-accidentally wandered into, this group whose values I had adopted, and I was more than a little bit afraid that announcing my departure would ostracize me before I absolutely had to leave.

But, well, I quit my job in April and ran out of excuses to put off the announcement. I told just a few people — the head sensei, another that I’d worked with very closely. Word trickled down from one member of the dojo to another.

They were unanimously supportive of me taking a calculated risk to grow personally and professionally, and congratulated me at least as often as they expressed regret that I was leaving. Several senseis assured me that they would support my continued practice in whatever limited way they could — and that it was perfectly reasonable for me to set karate aside and return to it later. For the past few months, I had been struggling to explain my motives and to justify the risk I was taking to people whose goals and values did not overlap so neatly with mine. I couldn’t even begin to articulate the relief I felt at having my motivation so immediately comprehended and supported, and it made me sadder than ever to leave.

While I’m happy to wax eloquent about the dojo for pages unending, I do actually have a point here. There were two major reasons (among many) that this brief period of study was so meaningful to me: I was accepted into a tight-knit and supportive community, and the class curriculum was structured in a way that allowed me to progress at my own pace through in-context, varied practice.

Pre-Service Training in Mongolia takes what’s called a community based, competency based approach. “Community based” means that, instead of sitting in a classroom learning theory and practicing drills, I will be developing my language and technical skills in context; I will have to go out into the community and interact with my hosts in order to complete my class assignments. That way, I receive a multitude of opportunities to bond with community members, and I develop a context that will allow me to make more effective use of my skills. “Competency based” means that, instead of being measured by my ability to restate information in a final exam, I will be evaluated on individual “competencies” (concrete, specific skills) whenever I am able to demonstrate my practical ability to make use of them.

A couple of weeks ago I was changing after karate class, mulling over the best way to explain the training process. I was geeking out a little bit over it, because I LOVE non-traditional teaching methodologies, but I couldn’t think of a way to describe it that would interest people who aren’t invested in education. I pulled on my street clothes and started to put my checkoff sheet at the bottom of the bag, where it lived — and I stopped and looked at the handful of lines my sensei had just signed. I thought: That’s a perfect example of a competency-based system, right there.

I rather doubt that, practically speaking, PST will have much in common with my karate classes. But they’ve got the same spirit behind them, and it’s one that’s already had a huge impact on my personal growth.

Final preparations

So what have I been up to these last few months?

Six weeks ago, I quit my day job. I’ve been traveling quite a bit since: one last weekend trip with two of my best friends; a visit to my mom’s family and my sister’s college, ostensibly to see my sister play rugby (I am doomed never to see my sister play rugby); a weeklong trip around New York State and Pennsylvania to visit a fellow writer and my scattered college friends; finally, last week, a relaxing family vacation with my father and brother. (Ask them how well I relaxed.)

I’ve also been shopping. Lots of shopping: I needed a professional mini-wardrobe that wouldn’t get dingy or destroyed by harsh washing, good quality long underwear, luggage I could carry over rough roads, and so on. It cost a lot more than I planned to spend, but that’s because I decided to splurge on quality stuff and a few things I don’t necessarily need to buy.

Then I had to gather together everything I bought with everything I already owned and planned to bring.

Bizarrely, everything fits into one bag:

Mind, I haven’t weighed anything yet. And there are some fairly bulky items I haven’t packed (pillows, a scrapbook, my winter coat). I get two bags that fall within airline restrictions (50 lbs. each, with combined dimensions of 107 linear inches) and my carry-ons. One of my checked bags goes into storage for PST, and I live out of the other bag and my carry-ons throughout the summer. I’m planning to check that duffle and a hiking backpack, and to use my beloved and battered grade-school backpack and a laptop bag as carry-ons.

I have also been working on two projects that will be very important during my early days in Mongolia: a gift for my host family, and a scrapbook of people and places in the U.S.

The host family gift should theoretically be the easier of the two. But I’m very picky about gifts, and I’ve had trouble finding something I’m satisfied with. So far I’ve considered maple syrup (would make an awesome gift, but might cause trouble in customs); maple candies (I plan on bringing some, but I have to find a good-sized box for the whole family); a coffee table book about Buffalo (theoretically nice to show more about my hometown, but I had trouble finding one that had a variety of pictures and not a lot of text). I’m still wavering between the coffee table book and a Buffalo mug full of maple candies.

The scrapbook isn’t as difficult to figure out, but it’s been pretty time-consuming. I’m doing a page for each family member, several for close friends, a few for my house and dog and hometown, and one for each of the community groups that have been important to me (my sorority; my oboe studio in college; my karate dojo). I’ve labeled each one in English and in the best mangled proto-Mongolian I can accomplish. I don’t want to put the whole thing online — it’s a bit personal for that — but here’s a sample spread, the one with my house and dog:

As I write this, about a week in advance, I still have to finish the scrapbook and actually pack; by the time it’s published, I should theoretically be all set for my imminent departure. On Tuesday, May 26th, I travel to San Fransisco, where I will meet my cohort and and attend a two days of orientation.

Then we fly to Mongolia.

Backstory: Paperwork

Peace Corps Volunteers are issued a special passport for business-related travel. There are two ways to apply for this: either mail in your current passport, if you have one, with the DS-82 (passport renewal) form; or fill out the DS-11 (new passport application) at a post office or other passport agency. If you complete the DS-82, the Peace Corps retains your passport and returns it when you arrive at Staging. Since I was planning to travel out of the country on one last family vacation, I decided to fill out the DS-11.

Now, government employees undergo a different process from other applicants — the mailing instructions are slightly altered, and they aren’t expected to pay the $110 passport fee. I checked online for a passport agency that would be open on a Saturday, since I had work, and found a nearby post office. I arrived at the post office around 9:30 to be informed that the passport office was closed on Saturdays (the mailwoman pointed to a closed door, beside which the hours “Saturday 9-11am” were clearly printed), and furthermore I had to have an appointment.

On Monday I started calling around to the nearby post offices. It turns out that government passports are not commonly issued: the first three offices I called had never heard of them, announced that they were not qualified to issue them, and were mightily suspicious by the phrase “no-fee” despite that I was quite literally quoting the DS-11. I attempted to call the Buffalo passport office, but got an automated line, a lot of being-on-hold, and the spectre of a $65 service fee independent of the passport fee itself.

Finally, I got hold of a very helpful passport agent, who said that she’d never done a no-fee passport, but she’d heard of them, and she was pretty sure it was in the manual — why didn’t we meet the Tuesday after Christmas, in about a week? She would do her research, and I could bring my instructions, and if for some reason she couldn’t do it she would give me a call. I thanked her slavishly before I hung up.

The actual application process was neither difficult nor especially different from the ordinary application, although it was terrifically awkward to tell a USPS employee that a U.S. government bureau does not allow its employee candidates to use USPS to mail their employment-related documents. (Something about a radioactive screening process that melts photo paper; I’m not sure why UPS and FedEx don’t have the same problem).

“I don’t know why the other offices said they couldn’t do it,” the agent told me cheerfully. “It’s all in the manual.”

Neither do I, I thought, and smiled at her.

In the beginning of December, my medical portal updated with the documentation required for clearance.

I am tremendously fortunate in that, being under 25, I’m still covered by my father’s insurance. (I could also have been insured through my document control job, but the coverage wasn’t as complete.) My medical expenses were minimal, though I know of people who had to shell out several thousand. I’ve seen a dentist and an optometrist regularly since early childhood and didn’t have to get much work done. I did, however, have to go through the intake process for an adult physician, since my pediatrician had politely and discreetly slipped me a transfer-of-care slip at my only visit as a college graduate.

My complete medical experience:

  • Personal Migraine History: I get migraine headaches and had to write a personal statement about how I’d deal with them abroad. Not a problem — migraines only rarely interfere with my day-to-day.
  • Dental: I’ve always had pretty good teeth and was due for a checkup around the time I received the forms. No problems.
  • Optometric: the Peace Corps replaces your glasses if they break during service, but doesn’t support the use of contacts. I dropped off the prescription form when I stopped by to pick up my last six months of contacts; this month, when the insurance turned over, I bought a backup pair of glasses.
  • Physical Part 1: I had to do an intake appointment with a new physician to establish my medical history and get my records transferred from the pediatrician. She issued me a script to get my bloodwork done.
  • Immunizations Part 1: I was up-to-date with everything except my TDaP and an adult polio. When I had my intake appointment, my new physician informed me that they could to the TDaP but that she would have to write me a prescription for the polio, since it’s no longer part of the routine for U.S. adults. “They’ll give you a vial,” she told me, “just keep it in the fridge until you come for your next appointment.” It turns out that regular pharmacies aren’t licensed to distribute vaccines (shocker, right?) so I had no way to get the prescription filled.
  • Bloodwork: I’d never gotten my blood drawn before and babbled inanely at the technician to hide my nerves. (It probably didn’t help that it was 6 a.m. and I hadn’t eaten.) Turns out six tubes of blood is significantly less than, say, the Red Cross asks for in a donation.
  • Physical Part 2: My new physician was both thorough and brisk, though she flatly refused to examine (and therefore would not check off) the sections that fell under the gynecologist’s purview, and she forgot about the TDaP. My bloodwork was clean.
  • Immunizations Part 2: I booked an appointment with a travel health organization to get my polio vaccine, and decided to do the TDaP while I was there. This cost me around $250, since the organization didn’t take my insurance.
  • Pap Smear/Physical Part 3: I had to do intake with a gynecologist as well, but that was a much quicker process — just a few forms at the same appointment. The gynecologist was happy to fill out the sections of the physical my primary had left blank.

All said and done, I had submitted all medical documents by February 7th and received my medical clearance on February 9th.

Backstory: the invitation

The summer passed slowly. In June, I took a TEFL certification course (through Oxford Seminars; seemed like a solid program, though I haven’t got any basis for comparison). This was partly to enhance the competitiveness of my application, and partly because I felt — still feel — thoroughly underqualified.

Actually, it may be helpful for me to list my qualifications here:

  • a Bachelor of the Arts in English/Creative Writing from a small SUNY (State University of New York) school.
  • one academic year as a peer tutor in my school’s College Writing Center (around five hours a week, ~80-100 hours total) — primarily one-on-one sessions working rhetorical structure, grammar, and citation — following a semester-long practicum including composition theory.
  • volunteering for a literacy organization, tutoring a student one-on-one and designing my own lesson plans/curriculum — at the time of my application I’d only just finished the month-long training, but I’ve since clocked about a year (another 80-100 hours) of weekly sessions.
  • TEFL certification — four sixteen-hour weekends learning some basic language-learning & education theory and best practices for teaching English to non-native speakers.

It looks pretty on paper, but: I’ve never been responsible for a whole classroom; I’ve never worked with students younger than I am; and I’m not certified to teach in my own state. Many of my friends — virtually all of teacher my friends — have a minimum of two years working toward an education degree. By that standard, I really am massively underqualified. I really hope this three-month Pre-Service Training beefs up my classroom management skills.

September arrived, and with it the year’s first cold winds. Buffalo, for those of you unfamiliar with New York State geography, is one of the snowiest cities in the U.S. — we get around eight feet a year. The past few years have been especially awful thanks to climate change. I began to joke with my friends and coworkers that of course I wasn’t going to Thailand — instead we’d have a horrible winter, and as soon as it started to warm up, they’d ship me off to one of the coldest countries in the world.

I shouldn’t have said anything. Sure enough, in the middle of September, I got an official email: As the Placement Officer for the Thailand program, I am writing to inform you that all positions for the program to this program have been filled. Your application will now be prioritized and considered for the next possible program for which you qualify. … Specifically at this time, we are looking at Mongolia which departs May 2015.

I replied that I was willing to wait until May to get into the Mongolian program. Less than two hours later, I got my formal invitation to join the Peace Corps as a Secondary English Teacher.

This, of course, meant that Buffalo had the coldest, snowiest winter I have ever experienced.

The invitation came with about a hundred pages of PDFs: a description of my responsibilities, notes on the history and culture of Mongolia, a safety and security primer. The email politely requested that I read these and respond within seven calendar days.

I flew through the readings over the course of a weekend (at that point I was working the document control job full-time) and accepted my invitation. I got an autoresponse informing me I would be contacted within few days. This was September 18th. On the 22nd my legal kit was mailed out — I had to find a place to get fingerprinted and return it through FedEx — and my medical portal was updated.

I had planned to attend a science fiction/fantasy writing workshop the week of October 13th. Not yet having heard from anyone — not, in fact, having any points of contact known to me — I shot an email to my placement specialist to let her know I would not be able to respond to emails.

She responded that I now had four main points of contact: the Mongolia country desk, SATO, Medical, and Staging. I was supposed to have received an email with a checklist, and could I please “let us know” if I hadn’t received it.

Having no idea which of the contacts was applicable here, I replied to the placement specialist, CC’ing the country desk, and asked to have the checklist resent. I left for the workshop; it was an absolutely wonderful experience, andI developed an entirely new perspective of myself as a writer and a professional. I threw myself into my writing when I returned home, and two months flew by.

December: I still hadn’t heard anything from the Peace Corps. It was just over five months from my tentative departure date, and I was a bit worried. I checked my email history and realized the placement specialist had never gotten back to me. I sent an email to the country desk and received no response. The following week I sent an email to Staging, asking for the checklist or at least direction to the appropriate email — and, lo and behold, within twenty-four hours I had access to two new portals, fifteen Mongolian language lessons, two online classes, a series of forms, a new resume request — oh, and a passport and visa application I was supposed to have filled out within a week of receiving my invitation.

I was understandably rather panicked.

Backstory: the interview

I did my research.

The U.S. Peace Corps does not, in fact, participate primarily in house-building. There are six sectors, or categories of service, and a university degree with a minimum of related experience is required for each. A yearlong application/pre-departure process precedes the two-year service. You have to be in good physical condition. You have to go wherever and do whatever the Peace Corps tells you. You must be flexible and adaptable and aware that you are a highly visible representative of the U.S.A. in your host country. I discovered that my creative writing degree and peer-tutoring experience qualified me as a secondary English/TEFL teacher.

I completed my B.A. in December, came home from England, and spent four months working document control for a biomedical company and bouncing aroud my family’s empty house. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a poster child for the United States. As I read through the website, flexible and adaptable took on an uncomfortable ring of weed words — words that could be used to weed out those who failed to overlap with the Peace Corps model in some otherwise indefinable way, to bind the remainder together as a mark of pride and therefore potentially of shame and silence, and to enforce unreasonable standards as representative of an ‘adaptable’ model; words which, moreover, could be used to gloss over failures of planning on the part of the organization[1]. It was harder, too, to reconstruct the excitement of travel and my sense of myself as an independent adult when I was surrounded by the people and objects of a relatively sheltered childhood.

I drafted my application. I made two timid attempts to attend recruitment events in Buffalo, but couldn’t find the recruiter — one event was canceled; I have no idea what happened with the other one. I waffled about applying for graduate school, though I really wanted practical experience before I poured money I didn’t have into a degree I might not use. Finally, in May 2014, I bit the bullet and submitted my application.

Within two days I’d heard back from my local recruiter: When would I be available for an interview? Was I able to make the hour-and-a-half drive to Rochester, or would I prefer to Skype?

I decided to go to Rochester, because I wanted to demonstrate my dedication and because it seemed awkward to interview through a screen. We arranged to meet at a coffee place the following week, and she sent me an email with preparatory instructions.

I arrived at the interview about half an hour early — I’d been that nervous about running late. I huddled in my car for twenty minutes with a Tamora Pierce book and then wandered into the coffeeshop, hoping I looked more confident than I felt.

The interview itself was a surprisingly pleasant experience. (I generally expect interviews to feature glowering monsters in black-hooded robes who declare my total unfitness for any activity whatsoever, so they are usually surprisingly pleasant.) The interviewer, a RPCV from Cape Verde, asked a set of scripted questions that echoed the preliminary email: What experience did I have that would contribute to service? What were my concerns about serving? Did I have tattoos, or piercings, or a restricted diet, and what would I do if assigned somewhere that did not permit them? How did I feel about a situation where men would ignore or dismiss me simply because I was a young woman?

I answered as honestly as I could, and asked a few questions of the interviewer, who shared her experience in Cape Verde. While I’d met a few RPCVs abroad, this was my first opportunity to ask in-depth questions. She told me she thought I’d be a great fit as an English volunteer. Based on some work as treasurer in my college sorority, I was also marginally qualified to try for a community development position (a sort of catch-all for projects that don’t definitively fall under the other sectors), but as an English volunteer, she said, I would be “more competitive”. I agreed that I was more interested in teaching English anyway.

And then she asked the big question.

“Where do you want to go?”

Where did I want to go?

I stared at the interviewer, dumbfounded. I do believe I resembled a highly bewildered fish. Nobody had ever indicated that this question would come up. Everything I’d read suggested that my placement barely took into account my preferences[2]. I was under the impression that they had some elaborate system in place to determine my best fit. I had barely looked at the current programs — the sheer number had overwhelmed me.

I tentatively suggested volunteering in a Spanish-speaking country, since I had taken Spanish in high school; the interviewer looked it up. No English teaching programs fell within the appropriate time frame. I offered a bit more blank staring and stuttering. I can’t remember if I’d heard the names before, or if she recommended them now, but both Mongolia and Mozambique came up as established programs that Volunteers quite enjoyed.

At length we decided it would be best for me to go home, do some research, and email her with my top choices from those English programs that left between April and June 2015. I did so the following week, looking up unfamiliar names on Wikipedia and making an essentially arbitrary list of countries that seemed to have interesting programs and not a whole lot of political or environmental upheaval. Mozambique no longer had an English program, but Mongolia left in May; I put it at the top of the list.

Shortly after I sent this email, I received a call from my interviewer. She explained, sounding slightly harried, that I might be able to leave sooner; they were changing their application process and competitive candidates were now eligible for empty slots in earlier-departing programs. I sent another list for the January-March 2015 slot. Thailand, due to leave in January, was my first choice.


[1] I have not myself experienced any of this, and I think the Peace Corps’ revised application process cuts out a lot of this sentiment. Still, I think the potential for abuse — especially the potential for a psychologically toxic situation — is worth pointing out.
[2] It turns out my application period fell right smack in the middle of a revamp of the process. All of the language at the time I was doing the research suggested that I wouldn’t get to pick (it’s not a vacation, this will test your adaptability, the appropriate distribution of your skills is more important than your preference, etc.), but by the time I got through the interview, they were transitioning toward a speedier and more personalized system.

Backstory: Travel Bug

I met the couple from San Diego and their Welsh friends at a train station in Naples. I was on my way to Pompeii, not sure I’d found the right platform and confused by the lack of station maps. They were on a cruise and had taken the day to sightsee.

I knew families back home that went on cruises. I’d gone on one myself as a kid. I have vague memories of a February head cold, the book I was reading, jewel-green-blue ocean on all sides. Now I was into my last college semester, spending a week in Rome at a hostel near Termini. I wanted to see the ancient sites. I’d already done the Forum and the Coliseum, Ostia, the Appian Way: Pompeii was my last item before I took a plane back to Norwich and the University of East Anglia.

The cruise ship couples were also confused about the station. We muddled through and found the right tickets, the right platforms. They seemed concerned about my safety, a young woman all alone on a train in Italy. I thought about the women who’d shared a room with me in the hostel: groups, pairs, and, yes, several others alone, on gap year or backpacking through their monthlong vacation. I was paying twenty euros a night to share a six-person room. I’d set up my whole trip by Googling on a university computer.

On a cruise ship, I’d have a room to myself and everything would be taken care of for me. I realized I preferred to meet strangers in a cheap hostel and to spend my afternoons looking for the tastiest gelato in the neighborhood. I liked figuring out how to find exactly what I wanted to see. I wondered when that had changed.

Still in Rome: two nights before. Dinner at the restaurant around the corner, which the hostel had discounted. I had a book. Not long after I sat down, I heard someone nearby give her order in flat American English. I looked up and spotted a woman about my age, alone at her table, dishwater blonde and fair beneath her tan. We established, a bit awkwardly, that we were both American students abroad, both at this restaurant on the hostel’s recommendation. I joined her table. She was from Spokane and spending the semester in Florence. She’d never heard of my college town in northern New York. I told her about UEA in England, its seventies concrete-block architecture and the prestigious creative writing classes I hadn’t gotten into.

Talk turned, inevitably, to what we would do after this final glorious semester. She said she’d thought about applying to the Peace Corps. I’d never heard of it.

“Two years in another country,” she said, “you live like a local, and, you know, you build houses and stuff. I think they’ll take me, because I speak French, and there’s a lot of programs in French-speaking countries in Africa.”

I did not, just then, think to ask any of the usual questions: Do you get paid? Do you choose where you’ll go? Do you have internet, electricity, running water? It was just something she was thinking about — she hadn’t researched it much. A talking point, the same sort of interesting as the roommate who was a travel agent or the one who let strangers couch-surf in her London flat. Something you ended up with after the travel bug bit you.

Naples again, afternoon, hanging around for the train back to Rome. An idea had waited patiently in the back of my brain for two days. Now I was unoccupied, and it demanded my attention.

I could do that. That’s it. That’s what’s next.

I paced around the station for twenty minutes and then sat down to write in my travel journal.

I think I might join the Peace Corps.

I shouldn’t put this into writing — I don’t know enough about it; I might do a bit of research & consign the idea to oblivion.

I am often asked questions about beginnings — Where did you hear about this, when, why, how did you decide? The answer I give depends on how pragmatic I’m feeling. That first entry is full of a self-conscious idealism. I am not adventurous, I always thought, I am not in search of danger, and as for good deeds — well — this is not a feasible option for me so let’s leave the good deeds to people who are capable … And now I’m thinking, Damned if this lark in Rome isn’t an adventure. And, I need to get past this idea that anything is unfeasible just because it’s strange or daunting.

I don’t put it into those terms now. Adventure is a thoroughly impractical reason to dedicate oneself to two years of anything, and the ethics of government-sponsored foreign service projects aren’t as simple as they looked back then. But at the end of the day, this is the moment it began: at a train station in Naples with the aftermath of my undergraduate degree hurtling toward me and a stranger’s words alive in my brain. The sum total of a semester alone on a new continent. One of those moments when my narrative identity was laid out glass-clear and straight, and I was intensely aware of the constructed fragility of it all — that this story I tell myself, doing and being and becoming, is an illusion of coherence my brain imposes on a random and nonsensical world. No story I tell you can approach the complexity of truth.

But, well, it seems to be working out for me so far.