Your Peace Corps Service Matters

At some point during your two years of Peace Corps service, you may wonder if your efforts matter. It might be during the mid-service slump. Or, it is on a random Tuesday afternoon during the rainy season.

Are you sitting in your hut swatting bugs and looking at a half-finished project proposal? Your host country counterparts are busy with their own lives. You think your language skills have plateaued.

Only three people showed up for your presentation. Your social media feeds show your friends back home climbing the corporate ladder or having new experiences without you.

Suddenly, the thought hits you like a physical blow. My service doesn’t matter. I am wasting my time.

If you are a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) wrestling with this feeling, welcome to the club. Imposter syndrome and existential doubt are not side effects of Peace Corps service.  They are a structural part of the experience. The agency sells “the toughest job you’ll ever love”.  But did they prepare you for all the different ways that make it tough like the weight of feeling irrelevant during service?

When you feel like your time in service isn’t worth it, reframe your reality. Combat the grassroots illusion. Reset your goals. There are “wins” all around you if you just notice them.

Deconstruct the Savior Marketing

Promotional materials often feature polished photos of volunteers building wells, leading massive health campaigns, or teaching a room of smiling attentive students. They have nothing but some tattered clothes. You will be cheered at every step. This marketing creates an illusion that you will be adored as you single-handedly revolutionize the entire community.

In reality, you might spend most of the day sipping tea and making small talk in your broken language. You may be the only person who shows up on time for that scheduled meeting. Progress is measured in weeks or months, not hours. There is little fanfare. Host country nationals (HCNs) may stare at you but do not engage.

Did you expect to be the hero of the story? In the USA, when you spend a couple of hours on a volunteer project, you are thanked for making an impact. So if you spend two years in volunteer service, you should expect to change the world, right? Unfortunately, the gap between expectations and reality could create a deep sense of failure.

How Do You Adapt?

See this as an opportunity for personal growth and learning. Shift your metric of success from macro-development to micro-relationship. The Peace Corps has three goals. Goal One is technical development. But Goals Two and Three are around cultural exchange.

If you spent the afternoon on a porch chatting with your neighbor and laughing at your grammar mistakes, you did not waste a day. They learned a little something more about you (Goal Two). And you absorbed it all to share with others when you go home to the USA (Goal Three). 

Separate Being Busy from Being Impactful

USA culture conditions us to equate our worth with productivity. We measure our days by inbox zeros, billable hours, and completed checklists. But in the Peace Corps, local communities often operate on relational time. Let go of thinking with transactional time.

Forcing a rigid, hyper-productive schedule may even alienate HCNs. This could also frustrate you. And, it could burn you out. Often times, they measure success by relationships. So, build those relationships. But do it genuinely, not as a task but as a friend.

The Micro Matters

Stop looking for large parade-worthy victories. Put away that checklist. Recognize those micro-indicators.

• Did a counterpart feel comfortable enough to confide in you about what they don’t know or need help with?
• Has a neighbor greeted you using your name instead of a generic label?
• Does your host family keep asking you for “one more story” about your life before Peace Corps?  
• Did the child next door visit just because they wanted to spend time with you and not for what you can buy them?
• Were you invited to a local celebration or wedding?
• When the USA is portrayed negatively in the news, did your host family separate you from the story?
• Did a counterpart start doing something they noticed you do often?

In development work, presence is a metric. You just being there means something to the community. By refusing to pack your bags when things get tough, you are shaping their cultural perceptions of you and other “Americans”. You may never know the impact you have on someone just by being there.

Burn the Timeline

It is understandable to look at your time in service and think, “I only have x months left and I haven’t changed anything.” This mindset turns your service into a race against the clock.

But, development work takes decades. You may be sowing seeds for trees you may never sit under. True systemic change in education, agriculture, or health requires generational shifts. You are a single link in a very long chain.

The volunteer who serves at your site five years from now might successfully finish the project you are currently struggling to fund. That isn’t a failure on your part. Your current struggle is the necessary groundwork they need to succeed. You are pulling weeds so the next PCV can plant the tree.

We Matter

Your service is not a movie or a Broadway play. There may be no cinematic breakthrough moment. The entire village might not gather to hoist you into the air on your last day. But you may get some hugs and teary good-byes. They may not let go of your hand as you try to leave.

And years from now, you will still remember the HCNs who accepted you into their lives. You will remember the stories you exchanged. To the global development index, your 27 months might look like a drop in the ocean. But to the HCNs who got to know you, some genuine real-world cross-cultural interaction occurred.

When terrorists changed our reality on September 11, 2001, many HCNs showed up to support the PCVs. It wasn’t a country-to-country political response. They comforted us as human beings. It wasn’t just another news story. Our presence connected them.

The PCVs and host family you served with may become lifelong friends. You may find new amazing friends among the RPCV groups who appreciate your service. But you may never learn that the project you started during service rippled into something legendary years later.

Peace Corps Volunteers Connected with HCNs

RPCV Sharon Alvarado didn’t remember the young boy in her village. But he didn’t forget her. After he became president of Sierra Leone and shared stories with the Peace Corps director, Carrie Hessler-Radelet reconnected them in a heartwarming reunion. President Ernest Bai Koroma and Sharon had not seen each other in fifty years. Ever so humble, Sharon said she didn’t do anything special during service. But to him, she did. Her devotion and genuine concern for them left a permanent impact on him. Sharon’s Peace Corps service matter “just” by being there.

Perhaps one of your students also grows up like Festus Mogae, the late former President of Botswana, who highly appreciated and actively praised PCVs. Maybe a future chief justice of your host country will publicly credit PCVs in helping to shape their analytical thinking like Justice Bart Katureebe of Uganda did.

Did you help make such an impression on your host country that they send every RPCV who served in-country a medical care package when supplies in the USA are slim, like South Korea did during the COVID-19 pandemic even though the Peace Corps program in South Korea officially closed forty years prior in 1981?

Will your host country’s prime minister express such admiration for Peace Corps Volunteers to the point where your Vice President jokingly asks the Peace Corps Director how much she paid him to give such a glowing testimonial like then-Vice President George Bush asked to then-Peace Corps Director, Loret Ruppe? Donna Shalala wouldn’t know her time in service as a PCV in Iran in the 1960s would be later recognized and respected by diplomats from Iran years later during her time with the Carter and Clinton administration.

Yes, Your Peace Corps Service Matters

You showed up and did your best. There were genuine connections. You represented your country and your culture. And, you learned about theirs. They remember us. We matter to them. They matter to us. That is why your Peace Corps service matters.