The Peace Corps experience is unique for so many reasons. It truly is the hardest job we will ever love, this is for certain, as we have felt this for the past nine months of being in Ethiopia. We have had many struggles and many victories, but one things remains the same, we wouldn’t trade this time for anything. Teaching English in Ethiopia for academic purposes is quite a privilege and with it comes huge obstacles. When trying to instill the littlest amount of change or what we think is progress, may come with it huge bureaucratic processes, lots of push back and sometimes no progress. One the greatest lessons I have learned thus far in the Peace Corps is that we need to pick our ‘battles’. Ensuring that all students come to school on time just is not possible. Trying to encourage teachers to come to school on time is just not possible. Helping all of the students, all of the time is simply not possible. So what is it that we are doing here? What progress are we making?
Are we really helping at all?
Yes, yes we are. The Peace Corps model of sustainable development is happening and we are seeing the fruits of our labor, little by little. Miracles do not happen and the sometimes messed up education system is not going to change from my little village over the course of two years. But the successes come in seeing my students grow and seeing them become confident young adults. Seeing them go form timid students afraid to use their critical thinking skills, or developing them, into student leaders coming up with creative ideas. I have seen the most shy girls in my class begin to become engaged in the class, in ways that I didn’t think we possible. By building the confidence of our students and fellow teachers we are helping to change the education system, we are making a difference. There have been times where I have felt hopeless during our Peace Corps service, where I have felt like screaming. But, seeing my students grow over the past two semesters has been the greatest joy. The entire village greets us in English, before we were here English was not something you heard on the streets of Mayknetal, teachers have told me. Some young students drew in chalk on the way to Sylvia’s school, USA in huge letters. Many of the students in our town have never left this area, to see them see the World in a larger sense is really great.
Not only the students have impacted us and the change that we see in them, but also the cultural exchange and building friendships. The goal of the Peace Corps is to promote friendship and peace, I didn’t understand how that really happened until I came here. Last week I was feeling bad for myself, we did not have electricity, we did not have water and I was hot, dirty and tired. But it was the celebration of the local church in town called MedhaneAlem (medicine of the world). The holiday is called Koosmee and each church celebrates their respective holiday during the year. We had heard about this but this was our first time celebrating this week long festivity. We really did not know what was in store. Our good friend Birhan took us over to a friends house where we proceeded to eat an ungodly amount of food and drink a lot of the local brew.
After this, we were stuffed to the brim, but we had another house to go to, for this celebration. This continued for three days, each night, drinking, eating, laughing and trying to speak Tigrenya with our wonderful hosts. On the third night, as I was eating my second plate of injeera, halbut, shiro and silsi (pictured below), I looked around at my new friends as we sat in his garden under the stars due to the lack of electricity. It was late and we had had a very long day. I chuckled to myself and thought how beautiful this Peace Corps experience really is, and how lucky we are to be put in this place, in this small town, in this little piece of the World, which has become our new home. How normal it becomes to not have electricity, to not have hot showers, to have to carry water in a huge jug to your home and how amazing it is to eat my one thousandth plate of injeera and drink my ten-thousandth cup of homemade beer. It feels like home now. We may only understand half of the conversations going on around us and have cravings for tacos and good beer, but these are the days that I make it, that make me so thankful to be a part of this global community and really step back and appreciate this amazing opportunity for what it is.
Those days where is seems like nothing is going the way you plan, and nothing really works out are nothing compared to this rich cultural exchange and the amazing friends that we have made here. We are now a part of this community, we are loved by our new community and we feel happy to be here.....