Peace Corps - One year in country!

Seems it has been two months since my last post. Woah! Is the time flying or what?

As of September 23rd I have officially been in Lesotho for one year. And what a breathtaking year it has been. It doesn't feel remotely like it has been a year, given everything that has happened and all the change I have experienced internally and externally. I still haven't wrapped my head around being halfway through service in Lesotho... and may end up casually approaching the end to finally realize service being over when the time comes. But it has been easily the most interesting, eventful, and "best" non-calendar year of my life. So here's to making the next one even better, because the way I see it, the only way is up.

The last two months have been filled with mostly the same clinic routine I have talked about and grown accustomed to. I am still making edits to my water access grant proposal, but I am hoping by my next post it is approved and you will be able to donate! However, there has been some noteworthy unique events sprinkled along the way, as always.

For a week at the end of August, I took part in a training to become a Resource Volunteer. RVs help the next cohort of volunteers during their training. We will provide insight, answer questions, and help with instruction by giving PC staff and prospective volunteers a useful perspective. Currently, the next cohort (LS 94) are already in country and had their first full day of training today. I am slated to go for two weeks, once next week and then return again in the beginning of November to help them prepare for site visit week (just as I did before them).

I am super pumped to be an RV, because I remember how helpful they were for my cohort when we were training last year. So it's weird to think that I'm going to be the "veteran" now, answering questions and such, when not so long ago I was asking them. But I think I still maintain that fresh and novel glow that volunteers arrive with, before often being worn down by hardship and experience (which hasen't seemed happen to me), so perhaps I'll fit in with them quite well.

As it stands, the new cohort has 17 people; That's exciting because ours had 18, but we heard worrying info about Peace Corps applications being very low program-wide, so it's relieving to have a similarly sized cohort (hopefully it grows next year).

As to why Peace Corps applications are down, and have been down since COVID, the jury is out but the theories are plentiful. Some say COVID made people more isolationist, some say it's economical, others that Peace Corps isn't advertised well enough. And all these probably play a role, but I think there is another massive factor. Generally, the people who are capable of doing Peace Corps are fresh out of college, and in the past few years there seems to be a subtle increase in individualist thinking within my age group due to social media and outside pressures. The internet presents an image of what the "good life" looks like to young adults, and Peace Corps does not fit the bill. Additionally, this massive web of sharing gives every person instant access to the lives of the extreme outliers in their peer group (geniuses, influencers, highly successful young entrepreneurs); This creates expectation to do as they do, despite the often unfathomable gap in luck/skill/opportunity. The model of life that has been shoved down the throats of Gen Z is go to school, get a "good" job (regardless of your interest in it), make money, then post on social media. Peace Corps is so counter to that, that most people my age don't consider it, and, sadly, many that are interested think they could never do it!

In my senior year of university, when people asked me my plans post-grad, I told them about Peace Corps and they often thought it was so amazing; Then I'd tell them about the low enrollments and how easy it was get in, and they'd say "Oh, I could never do that". To me that is a self-fullfilling prophecy, and perhaps they couldn't. I can't honestly say this is for everyone. But I think a lot of my peers were saying they couldn't do it, not because they'd fail (or even because they wouldn't like it), but because it didn't align with the jobs they thought they HAD to get after graduation (working for big companies, stock options, career ladder, etc). It's like I was telling them after college I was going to be a full time traveller, sounds amazing but doesn't fit the idealized career model, and that's truly a shame. Salary is so forward in the minds of young adults that any position below $X per year is deemed unworthy of their time. So silly and wasteful to focus on maximizing a metric that doesn't need to be maximized (and often destroys people in their pursuit of increasing it).

Anyways, that's enough on that topic. Let me know if you have any questions or comments on it, because I'm curious what people older than me think about everything I just said.

I just got back from an amazing trip in South Africa with my close friend. We did a four day hike down the Wild Coast trail on the Eastern Cape. It was filled with hiking on beaches, through subtropical rainforests, and swimming across eight river mouths when necessary. The scenery was incredible, as we continuously switched between expansive flat beaches, coastal rock pools, barren grassy hills, and the depths of foliage in the rainforests. Not only scenery, but also wildlife! We saw monkeys jumping tree to tree in the canopies above us, zebras grazing on lush mountain grass overlooking the craggy coast, and whales and dolphins greeting us from our near-shore campsites each morning. The locals in the rural communities we passed spoke Xhosa, not Sesotho, but we were able to quickly learn some key phrases (as both are Bantu languages, they have many similarities). The few people we met who spoke Sesotho were so surprised we were living in Lesotho and could speak conversationally. It was a highly adventurous trip, that makes me excited to travel and explore more in the future.

That's about all for now. I have my resource volunteer duties on the near horizon, and an upcoming trip to Ghana/Togo/Benin in west Africa over Christmas and New Years to look forward to. Until then, it's more of the same for me, which usually means a combination of routine and random adventures that arise along the way.

All the best, and as always stay well,
Connor