23 Months In/Today's Question: Why did i join the Peace Corps?

May 11th 2011. UB Guesthouse, Mongolia.
“So wait, you only have one God? He’s all alone?!? He doesn’t even have a Goddess wife to #&*$?!? No wonder he is so vengeful!” –A pagan centurion arguing religion with a Jewish mercenary at a tavern.

Month 23 of Peace Corps service…. Yehaw! Mile 24 of a marathon so to speak… A month left. A time to run, drink, write, read and reflect.

ABC wrote another railroaded piece on rape in the Peace Corps. They told the story of a woman raped by a staff member and how she had to either have an abortion or quit Peace Corps. Lots more covered in the story, all of it once again one sided and making it sound like Peace Corps throws us to the wolves. Again, i would like to remark that i never realized just how powerful the media can be in influencing people until they started attacking an organization i am a part of. So many things to talk about, but the only thing im going to comment on is the issue of the abortion decision and who pays for it. Were the government, and yes, the government cant pay for abortions. (I can give you the names of the people who are responsible for that btw!) That is NOT a Peace Corps administration decision. Actually im pretty sure based on the personalities i have met that the overwhelming majority of the people working for the Peace Corps were very opposed to not being able to fund that, but that's the way it is. ABC is digging up the most tragic and awkward cases of 200,000 stories and only listens and reports on one side of the story. Listening to it and imagining what people who have no prequisite knowledge of the Peace Corps and how they must feel about this amazing organization that i not only served once and enjoyed but plan to do so again is an infuriating prospect!

You may have noticed that I am no longer giving a blow by blow daily description of my comings and goings here in Mongolia. Putting aside that the overwhelming majority of them are boring as all hell (as is much of what you come across when you do research in history btw)
Since I last punched in on this blog it snowed like mad….in the month of MAY!!!! Today my town is without power understandably given that the wind is howling by at around 35 mph and snow…well naturally snow doesn’t fall at that speed but rather shreds by. I guess this is payback for the pleasant and mild winter. Tomorrow its supposed to be sunny and 60 degrees outside. I love Mongolia.
I also brewed up some wine, taught classes half their usual size (some kids are being called away for countryside work at this point, others just don’t care,) and I also got my first couchsurfer request from a woman from New York tearing it up through India, Russia, and by the end of this week also Mongolia! She must have some amazing stories to tell!!! In essence, just another week in Mongolia, one of many I have chronicled, so I am skipping the long date by date blog this month so far.
I have also just decided to provide for the final few months some great in depth pieces instead. After all, this blog actually served more as a defense mechanism of losing myself in exile and required me to jot down things that I would later use when I wrote my book (currently in progress) but at this point, yea lets just take it one day at a time.

Were nearing the end of my service in the Peace Corps of Mongolia. Maybe it’s just that im 30 and things in my 20’s seem so utterly far away now, (even though I don’t feel old at all…you kinda had to know how I spent my 20’s) but yesterday I really tried to remember why I joined the Peace Corps. It wasn’t a defensive mechanism against current apathy, I just couldn’t quite remember why. Life can have that effect. You walk long enough and if your kept busy along the way you might forget why you were walking in the first place. A lifetime may feel like a blink of an eye but there’s periods of my life that feel as though they have gone on so long I sort of forgot how it all began. I think well outside my own head so I figure id use this entry to put some thoughts down as to maybe why.
The first REAL memory I can recall of the Peace Corps came when I had just turned 19 or 20. That’s just depressing as all hell now that I think about it. The Peace Corps should be the people that little 4th graders write letters to, not soldiers during Desert Storm. (okay, maybe they should write to both of us) When I was a kid in elementary school they gave us DAILY updates about that war, and at no point in 12 years of public school education did the words “Peace Corps” ever come up. Were the American government sponsored foreign volunteer program and unless you directly know someone you don’t find out about it until college I mean common!… I digress.
I remember watching “Six Feet Under” and hearing one of the characters dismiss someone’s noble idea in lieu of monetary gain by saying “If you want to help others, join the Peace Corps. If you want to help yourself you should sign with us then.” Yea…that really is the first time I remember hearing the word Peace Corps. I think I had heard of it before that but that’s the memory that really sticks for me. After I heard that I went online to read more about the Peace Corps. There wasn’t much to read. I was 19….this is….G.M. Chrysler…this is the year 2001!!! There was no such thing as blogs, hell at this point there was still no such thing as Google!!! Almost no one brought a computer to service, and the war stories to be told were in the form of books of reflection. So what I did have to read was the Peace Corps humble website. Back then you couldn’t even start your application process online; you had to call to request a packet. I put off making that call until I was 22. They sent the packet, and I came to terms for the first time with just how much this included. Luckily I was still WAY too immature to be thinking about going straight from College to Peace Corps and a Masters Degree was called for.
Two more years passed. There were some things that needed to happen if I was going to be a candidate for Peace Corps service. I needed to stop going to the therapist I had been seeing for so long. That was overdue anyway, the visits were monthly and a throwback to the teenage days when my ADHD was in hyper drive. A way to assure certain members of my family that I was perfectly fine. Additionally it was also time to get off the ADHD meds. (I took Ritalin before it was cool!) That also happened, and was for the best. It wasent like Garden State where I slowly “woke up” but instead I found myself refreshed that while I was still emotionally stuck around the age of 15, I lacked the previous degrees of obnoxiousness I once wielded. In fact this was the year that I started having difficulty forgiving myself for earlier acts of stupidity by myself. It was a growing moment for me, and one that if I had not been interested in Peace Corps Service I never would have gotten around to.
By the second year of my first Graduate school, that’s when I really started getting serious. My first time through Peace Corps medical clearance was quite stressful. Not the testing, in fact that was quite easy, but I remember the amount of work I was buried in at the time. I had just turned 25, and I was working an internship as a High School History teacher that I paid them to do! I was economically self sufficient at this point, but to make ends meet I was also working as a Resident Advisor to pay for my double wide (yes I lived in a trailer park as an RA, you can ask my friends David and Martha or my parents to verify that) Finally to pay for things like food and tuition, I was working in a computer lab at my University that I had been doing since I was a Senior in High School myself. Full time teacher, computer lab worker and RA…add to that that I had to pay for all the doctor bills for testing me and getting lab results and I remember what I was like in the Spring of 2006. I was absolutely stretched. I had grey hairs coming out of my head at the age of 25…I can still remember just how drained and burnt out I was, and I pray to the Sky Father that I never find myself like that ever again.
The graduation photos I have make me look like I had gone ten rounds with a UFC fighter on acid. My hair gray, my eyes dark and glazed, my skin pale and barren, and sore blisters broken out on myself. Even showered and shaved to look as good as I could every shot of me on my graduation day looked horrendous. I still look at that photo from time to time. It reminds me of how it can come to that, and how I must never let that happen to me ever again.
I went through the interview process and got cleared for a later Summer 2006 launch date. It all looked to be lining up very well…then something bad happened. Im not going into detail but let me tell you, it was bad. Like bad bad. I had never been the work hard, play hard type. I loved what I do and I did what I loved. At the start of the summer of 2006 I was hit by something so hard it shook me to my very core…I didn’t want to be a teacher anymore…. ever.
I told Peace Corps to put me on hold that summer for a little bit. I needed time to sort out how I felt. I asked them to consider me for a position some time the following year. That summer I also met the woman I love, which again complicated matters. Before I met her I had booked a trip to Thailand where I would train at a Muay Thai gym, meditate at a Buddhist Temple and try to put myself back together again. She broke off with her fiancée…and I flew for four months to the other side of the world...
I have made more mistakes in my life than I care to recall or count, but id make every last one of them a million times over if I could take that one back. I left the woman I loved. I remained devoted to her, I called her every second I could and I swore to the end of time that I would go straight to her when I got back in four months to be with her till the end of time

…and she went back to him…

In times of extreme drunkenness, when I have a hard time even telling up from down sometimes I can find a way to justify hatred of her for all of that. Like in some way that was actually her fault that the great love story of my life fell to pieces. The great tragedy is that I knew when I sober up ill be back to blaming the correct person for that, myself. Ill never forgive myself for that. Really I wont. I didn’t disappoint anyone but myself either. I didn’t know it at the time, but I loved her and I had chosen path that would lead to us splitting back apart. I write this a lot, and though I got the line of philosophy from a “Star Wars” book I still believe it.

“When you strip away the layers of your false illusions of assessment. When you stop caring about what all the unimportant people think (IE: Everyone but you) and you realize the only person you need to care about what they think about you is yourself…that was why it hurt so bad. I realized just how badly I let myself down.” I fucked up, I really…really fucked up.

Oh good gods listen to me??? Poor upper middle class heterosexual white boy whose heart is broke and had one bad break at an important time in his life? I had health, youth, people who cared for me, and a masters degree and zero debt. Over half the population of America would trade places with me let alone the rest of the world. I have no delusions. I am no better than half the tales of woe, if that! I know I just have the… well for lack of a better word ill say the “privilege” of being me. Yet when it is who you are. When this happens to you and you find yourself in the position you are…well I guess much like beauty…. misery is in the eyes of the beholder right? Buddha, you have so much to say to me about that, but you would probably just smile, and ask me to sit with you for a while….
My life got shook up a lot of ways in 2006. It was the worst year of my life, but through all that I now realize that 2006 made me into whom I am today. Pain is the fuel in the engine of change, and that was an inferno…I see that now, but I didn’t then. Even into 2007 I was still too deep into shock and anger about both incidents to really do anything. I spent that Spring verifying that I could enlist in Peace Corps in the summer of 2007 and working as a substitute teacher. I wouldn’t sign up to be a teacher. I didn’t have it in me, not after what had happened to me only six months ago. I sort of went into an epic fall during that time. I lived in my Mom’s basement, drifting in thought and drinking myself into a coma, waiting for there to be some magical cure to both of the great tragedies that had somehow hit me.
I was pathetic….It was the tactic of an infant. I sat there, and did nothing. I cried and wailed and kicked my feet like a baby waiting for an adult to come and care for me. In the end it became clear just how pathetic that was… someone punch me or something next time please!
Neither would be resolved, but at the start of the summer of 2007, something good happened. Something I didn’t deserve in a million years. It was just one of those most freak of accidents in which I somehow found myself offered an amazing job with the opportunity to improve myself both academically and personally. Once again I found myself pledging to reenlist for Peace Corps service in two years, but for right now I had a job at Fordham University…and off I went.
Those two years brought no resolution to either of the foundation shakers I suffered from. Instead those two years gave me perspective and reasons for new direction. I honed my administrative skills, and found a job I loved very much. Helping people in a way I never could have been happier about. In essence I found out through living the reason all of us still exist after our tragedies…. life just goes on. Yet though I loved my new job in the Fall of 2008 the Peace Corps bug hit me again. One of my fellow colleagues at Fordham University was a former PCV, and I knew that if I did not join the Peace Corps in the coming year something yet again would come between me and my desire to do that.
Now or never, and at long last I was ready. I left a job I loved to go do another job here that I love….but I did one final thing before I left. Something to sort of close a book rather than just turn a page. I got my confidence in teaching back…more than that through an appeal that I won I got back my desire to teach… I was a teacher again… I never healed my broken heart, but I got my confidence to teach back…. would have taken the other option instead but we don’t get to pick and choose in life.
During those three years of intermission I had started to read some of the first blogs of Peace Corps I could find. Many of them were VERY old and had been some ones journal that they had decided to upload afterwards. Something about how they wrote about there experiences was touching me. It wasn’t them describing their work, which was rarely if ever in my line. It just seemed to me that they all seemed so very happy, especially when they talked about their difficulties and their hardships. The idea that they didn’t care how they felt, they cared how others were feeling instead. It all just seemed so original of a thought process. Just before I left for service someone had the good sense of creating an archive for all the various blogs written by Peace Corps volunteers…and that brings us to me leaving for service in the Summer of 2009.


So okay….weve covered the HOW….but WHY???? Why the hell did I need to join Peace Corps so much?



I know I wanted to help. I still do. I probably always will. I like helping because the happiness you find in doing so is not overwhelming like taking a hot shower after two months without or drinking a glass of wine after so long without either. The happiness of that is so utterly temporary, and when you have running showers and two buck chuck at your disposal that which makes you happy suddenly wont do the trick anymore. When I teach or help a school club its not like I need to teach more or do more the next time to get that good feeling from it. Its like I am aware that right then and there I could be doing the exact same thing and thirty years from now it will bring me the same amount of joy that I get from it now. So yea, I like helping…but I could do that in a non-Peace Corps manner. Heck I left a job where I was helping to do this one. So while I think it’s a good reason to join the Peace Corps I don’t think it’s the reason I joined the Peace Corps.
I have a traveling streak in me for sure. There’s hundreds of countries and around seven billion people on the globe, and they all have amazing stories and interesting lives that are so unique that I could dedicate a lifetime to learning about only a few of them, and yet I want to meet as many as I possibly can. By joining the Peace Corps I certainly traveled to the other side of the world. As there is a 12 hour time zone difference between where my worldly possessions are in America and where I live now I was indeed taken to the other side of the world. During the two years I have lived here I have lived in a town of 2000 people who all shared with me their encounters in life and I learned much about many. Yet then again having moved to Mongolia I am about as stationary as I have ever been. I have walked into the rolling Russian steppes in every direction from my town and found only more space. There was only more vast emptiness of person and thing. I mentioned once that the world was built for beings much grander than us humans. A world of titans of sort, but for two years I in essence have lived in a small town. So no I didn’t join the Peace Corps to travel, even though I got to travel.
I definitely found something to believe in behind the goals of the Peace Corps. To assist those in need, to spread awareness of Americans to those throughout the globe, and to bring our experiences back to Americans. Very noble goals, and ones that I will say took me by surprise as to how much I have done of each.
Basketball courts are built. Over one hundred fifty kids are now in possession of laptops with access to the Internet. Meaning kids who don’t have textbooks now can Google Earth my address or read this blog or read news events about countries they had never even heard of. I helped to teach kids English. Not just amphoral memorized speeches either, by interacting with a native English speaker such as myself students are now able to better understand how English sentences sound and are formed, making future self study far more useful and productive. The various English clubs I managed subtle though it will be are of use to them in promoting both their understanding of language, and also the promotion of their careers. Most importantly, I think I demonstrated through living in my town and my community that Americans are not what they see on tv. Were not gun toting sexaholics with Hummers and buried in wealth. I demonstrated that not all tall white American men will travel to a country and instantly marry a pretty girl half her age (not all the time anyway) and just all around I showed that Americans are just like Mongolians, who do small crazy things slightly different like run recreationally and don’t always cut their hair…
Let alone all that I have learned about what it means to live off three dollars a day and the value of clean water and heat. I learned about just how truly little you actually need, and to enjoy just how much you actually have. I intend to take all this back with me to America, and those I interact with will benefit from it as well. So that could be a good thing, but when I think back to November 2008…wow that’s a long time ago. That one evening in the Office of Residence Life at Fordham University when I had just triple copied my incident report paperwork and I leaned over to a former volunteer named Anthony and asked “dude do you think I would do well in the Peace Corps?” the goals of the Peace Corps were not known to me. So while I think the goals of the Peace Corps were a good reason, I don’t think it’s the reason.

This also was an exile. Exile… there is something about that word that I am drawn to. Sometimes I think the reason that I live the way I do now is because its an exile. One that I can continue to promote….pretty much for as long as I choose. The idea that you reach a point in the society you live in that you understand or at least comprehend the way of things… and to give all of that up, and to forsake it for a part of the world filled with others who have their own society that differs so greatly from yours. I didn’t join specifically to go into exile but I knew entering Peace Corps that it would be something I looked forward to about it. I found the quietest, loneliest, emptiest corner of nowhere to live out a part of my life in a new way. Exile… a great thing about this experience, but not the reason why.


….i don’t remember. I have no specific reason why I joined the Peace Corps now that my service is nearly at an end. Come to think of it I am pretty sure I don’t know if I had an absolute reason why in the first place. Instead I look at my interest and desire to be a Peace Corps Volunteer as this. There are so many productive ways to live out your life. Some teach, some are doctors, some are civil engineers, some pick lemons on a kibbutz, some are poets, some help the meek, some are porn stars, some sell furniture, some work in offices, some are counselors…and we are all doing the things that we do because even after we realize that we don’t have a defining reason…we still want to do the things that we do.

I once wrote that helping is not a race. Your not supposed to be able to quantify help. It’s a process that never ends and has no real ultimate goal. The idea is that Peace Corps was formed at a time when we tried to create “The Great Society” which got thrown for a loop as time went on, but I think when you realize that “The Great Society” was not a reachable goal you find out the point. It’s ever sought for, never disappointed, and constantly changing. Contribute however you like, I spent two years of my life trying to help as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
I joined the Peace Corps because for two years of my life I found joy in what I was going to be doing during it. I might find the same happiness doing it again in another country or I might find it back in the states, or helping flood victims or who knows what. Theres no bad ways to live out your life, the great tragedy is that many live out lives they don’t want or wont be happy with. Everyone following?
Once you stop caring what everyone else thinks about you and you start to care about the opinion of the only person that matters (yourself) you come to terms with just how much you are meant to accomplish, and just how dedicated you need to be.

I joined the Peace Corps because if I had not done that when I did I would never have forgiven myself. I already don’t forgive myself for something else, and I don’t think I could take the burden of something else as well.

“Its far better to live with the regret of doing something you wish you hadn’t than living with the regret of having not done something you wish you had….”

…that’s a good original quote of mine. I am sure some who took the chance and ended up in a different set of circumstances might disagree but I still stand by that.