In Peace Corps, there are extracurricular opportunities for volunteers in the form of PCV committees. These committees are formed around issues like diversity, women and HIV/AIDS. Committees are purposed with helping PCVs increase their effectiveness in-country through all-vol programming, whether training or sports camps or even resource/fundraising. While committees can be refreshing because you’re working with other PCVs in which there is a common cultural literacy (your own and the host country’s), PCVs must ultimately learn how to derive the majority of their satisfaction from the communities they work for. Committees are only to be a supplement or enhancement to your tour.

For vistas, this is particularly important because the service corps is not meant to be an all-encompassing experience. It is a full experience in that some learn what living in poverty means for the first time, but the work itself is limited to 40 hours a week. As a rule of thumb, I believe it’s a good idea for vistas to invest heavily in something outside of their work, be it hobbies or volunteering with another organization. Although there are many vistas who are having a kick-ass time at their organizations, there are just as many who are wading through bureaucratic red tape, company culture and nonprofit identity crises (especially relevant in light of the economic downturn). At the end of the day, trying to sort out work issues at home is not only hard on you but also on friends and family–especially if they are ongoing, metastasizing issues. In a situation like any (and more) listed above, your satisfaction and validation is dependent on those you work with and under rather than being rooted in the mission and a shared approach toward that mission. This has the potential of being a roller coaster of a year.

Over the last several years, I’ve cobbled together my own declaration of what I want from work:

I want to work at a place where personal development is just as important as professional development. Where part of my take-home is satisfaction because let’s face it: No matter what people say, when you devote that much time to one thing, work becomes an integral part of your identity.

I still believe this and continue to work toward it. In the meantime, however, I’ve learned the importance of having something on the side because even when things are fantastic, we all need something to remind us that there are more flowers to smell than just roses.

Danielle Martin, former CTC VISTA leader

After serving as an AmeriCorps VISTA member for over two years, I wonder: have any other government departments or agencies considered a “trade community service for education or debt relief” model for accomplishing the tasks it’s set up to do? Why or why not? If so, are there other models that exist? Where? How?

Also, has anyone else thought it odd that “community service” is either seen as an altruistic act or a punishment? What else might community service be?

About Morgan: This is a brief guest post from Morgan Sully, former VISTA Leader for the CTC VISTA Project. Morgan served as a CTC VISTA with the San Diego Community Technology Coalition, San Diego LGBT Center and the National Alliance for Media Arts & Culture (NAMAC). When not contributing ideas to CTC VISTA, Morgan can be found meming it up at his personal site, Memeshift.com.

In theory, AmeriCorps Vistas should already have support for their directive. Their role is to expand upon or build up an organization’s resources, to leave sustainable programs in place.

On the other hand, Peace Corps volunteers don’t always have guaranteed support. Although PCVs are assigned to one hosting organization that must apply for a volunteer in the first place, PCVs have a lot of time on their hands and really end up as volunteers for the entire community rather than just the community-based organization. Because of this, they assess the need for and initiate many projects. Often times, though, community members will be excited about a project or initiative and, when it comes to shovel time, they won’t show up en masse. This can be incredibly frustrating for PCVs, who must do a lot of political gymnastics to really organize a supportive community. Preemptive actions for PCVs to take are to consult host country nationals to emphasize their part in the decision-making process and to identify respected community members and leaders who are willing to take the lead. This less-travelled road is a long and challenging one, which is why Peace Corps service lasts for two years. Your first year is spent building credibility and making connections. However, once you can cultivate enough support to translate positive murmurings into action, it will be incredibly rewarding.

Although you’re more likely to meet lack of support in Peace Corps initiatives, its absence is overwhelming for Vistas when it comes to capacity building. In the CTC Vista Project, I’ve found that having support before you arrive at the organization can mean everything. Technically, the purpose of your role at an organization–be it development work to social media strategy to database implementation–should already be supported or else the org would never have applied for a CTC Vista in the first place. However, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes, hosting a CTC Vista can be like paying lip service–the org recognizes the preeminence of a certain movement and its impending integration but has little time and resources to actually do anything about it except to commit a CTC Vista.

Problem solved, one would think. But not so because despite that the org now has a full-time employee to tackle the issue, it still requires education and buy-in from the rest of the organization to become a sustainable and living initiative. Many times, due to the organization’s structure, age differences and other factors, employees will have limits to how far they’re willing to go, a lack of proper understanding and little time to rectify both. Organizational culture is often the biggest hurdle to overcome. This will become incapacitating, and the only step I can think of thus far in such a situation is to ask the stakeholders who submitted the Vista application to sit down and come to a firm conclusion as to what they truly expect out of their CTC Vista and whether the org is ready to support the CTC Vista when those expectations need additional input to become a reality.

Within the time I’ve been in both corps, I’ve realized where being a self-starter really works to one’s benefit and where it truly isn’t enough. If you’ve been warned that your role will be fairly unstructured ahead of time (*ahem* Peace Corps), then it’s not a big deal when you get to site. There are days where you’ll be out in the field talking to government officials, visiting your neighbors and entire days where you’ll be curled up with a good book, making appearances only when nature calls.

At first, this can seem like a rather unproductive way to spend your time in-country. But really, the heart of any successful and sustainable project is understanding the community’s capabilities and needs. This takes a good amount of time–anywhere from six months to a year–to really understand. And once that happens, you’ve got your work cut out for you.

On the other hand, with CTC Vista, I think it’s more luck of the draw. It’s a question of whether your organization has ever had anyone else in your particular CTC role, how big the organization is, and how much experience they’ve had in general with CTC Vistas.  If your organization is extremely small or has had a previous CTC Vista, chances are that you’ll have a fair amount of structure to your role. If it’s a bigger org or if the org doesn’t have much experience with CTC Vistas, then it’s very likely that your org doesn’t quite know what to do with you.

In both cases, being a self-starter is very important because you can invent your own activities. However, if you are in the latter situation, at some point the projects you initiate will come to an end, a standstill, or taper off, and that’s when you may have trouble. Since being a self-starter is very much like being a community organizer when it comes to sustainable projects, they aren’t necessarily easy to come by. When one project ends, another one doesn’t just appear; good ideas aren’t a dime a dozen. You start scrambling to fill your hours. This is a shortfall of the Vista role.

AmeriCorps VISTA seems to share many of the goals of Peace Corps on a domestic level, and the closest that the government could probably mimic this without breaking any labor laws was assigning Vistas to 40 hours a week. However, in situations that lack structure, this can be too much. Being a self-starter works out well where the individual isn’t constrained by a particular structure. The expectation is an oxymoron: To be able to work without structure when there is a very defined time structure that all your work must fall within.

Not being able to fill up eight hours a day, 40 hours a week with productivity can cause a lot of anxiety and guilt, regardless of whatever you’ve done so far as a CTC Vista. Worse than that, others may pick up on your relative lack of work and begin to assign inappropriate tasks instead of working with you to create relevant ones. This can cause a feeling of incompetency, and if this should happen, the best thing to do would be to approach your supervisor. Acknowledge that although everyone’s busy greasing the wheels of the organization, there should be serious and critical consideration for what your role is rather than being tossed quick-fix solutions that may work out worse in the long run.  It sucks to be given a project you can’t bolster with your skills just because others see you have the time to spend on it.

Also crossposted on the CTC Vista Project website.

From July onward, I’ve spent much of my time at Portland Community Media working on a proposal for a project that would allow immigrants and Millennials to create media at low-cost anywhere and at anytime. The goal was to create a project that addresses target groups for PCM, requires little operational resources, is sustainable and creates a new media service on behalf of PCM. To do this, we focused on the cell phone as a media creation device and the Internet as the primary distribution platform with the hope of television as a second one. The following is a recounting of how the idea began. If you’re a very interdisciplinary thinker, you’ll enjoy this.

After coming back from Africa, I have a deeper appreciation for the immigrant experience. As a minority, I could only superficially understand the immigrant struggle till my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho. In addition to this, there’s very little ethnic diversity in Portland, and I was curious why, out of the major West Coast cities, it had been excluded from the richness of cultural infusion.
My first day on the job as a CTC Vista, I had a talk with Jason, who manages the government production side of PCM. I was asking about immigrant representation on PCM channels and programming done by immigrants, of which Jason said there was very little. We talked about the lack of outreach by PCM to immigrant communities in the area even though it’s in line with the mission, and we discussed the need for their presence in community media in Portland.
Having come from print journalism, I have a penchant for paper. Bea, my supervisor, shares this as a bookbinder. We discussed what would be the most comfortable and familiar medium for immigrants. Despite my position as the New Media Vista, I really wanted to bring print into PCM. We decided that, of all forms of media, paper is the most familiar in the world and probably the most comfortable form of communication that anyone can opt for.
Since I was hired on to be the New Media Vista without really understanding what the buzzword of “New Media” and “Web 2.0” were, I was also researching heavily during my first couple of weeks on the job. I read a lot about social media and also came across this website focusing on the phone as an activist tool. It was incredibly interesting for me to learn how phones were being used for flash mobbing and information distribution in third world countries.
At the time, my boyfriend was also about to replace his shitty phone and was intently scouring the Internet for new cell phone technology and customer ratings. I asked him about transferring contacts, SMS’, and other forms of data from his old phone to a new one. I remembered how all my phones used to have a voice memo feature and the short amount of time it allowed for recording. I figured this was anywhere between 1-10 minutes because I used to accidentally hit the voice memo feature on my old cell phone while on calls. I realized how that might be a possibility for new media use for immigrants and thought it might be appropriate technology because of what I saw in Lesotho: Everyone has a cell phone regardless of how remote they are, and a lot of it is driven by the phone as a status symbol. “Everyone” is a bit of an exaggeration, but I later learned that the most familiar and bestselling communicative technology device in the world is the cell phone, which suggests that the phone is at least more familiar than other new communication media.
I started to test the technical side of this idea with phones that belonged to coworkers and friends. The goal was trying to figure out the average amount of time that the memo feature records, and that’s where I discovered that, in fact, not all phones have voice memo features, and phones range in recording time from a minute to whatever amount of memory is left on the phone.
It was around that time that Bea put Jacob and me together on a project to figure out how PCM could address the needs of both immigrant communities and Millennials. PCM has a very hard time retaining Millennials at the facility, and yet they are some of the most media active and social justice oriented people in Portland.
Eventually, I stumbled upon a social networking site called “Utterz,” (now known as Utterli), and although the hope of the voice memo feature was zero-cost media creation, it seemed that a system like Utterli (people dial in to record memos and interviews) was the best compromise between cell phone plans and incongruencies in cell phone features. Utterli, however, is a free form social media site, and Portland Speaks has more of a focus in the form of target groups.
However, following a group brainstorm and dissection, Jacob and I felt somewhat confused and disillusioned since our parameters were loose and our ideas were being scrambled, so I set out to define the original idea and it burgeoned into the attached proposal and illustrations. It was then decided that the idea would be submitted for the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge grant (our application can be found here).
All in all, this has been an incredible learning process with lots of creativity but also some incredibly devastating downs. Welcome to the real world, I guess.

ATTACHMENTS:

• PORTLAND SPEAKS PROPOSAL
• PORTLAND SPEAKS COMPLETE WEBSITE DUMMY

Depending on the size of your Peace Corps country, you could eventually meet all the PCVs currently serving or else you’ll only know and visit those in your district. In bigger Peace Corps countries, Because of public transportation and rough terrain, visiting your district peers might still take a travel time of at least two hours. Friends in Peace Corps are especially important because, of all the people who will try to say “I understand what you’re going through” when you relate your difficulties, only those serving in the same country can really say it and mean it. And when you feel triumphant, only those PCVs can fully appreciate why. In so many ways, Peace Corps takes you back to such basic challenges (fetching water, working by candlelight, waking up to 36-degree rooms in winter, pee buckets) that all pretenses in the form of social rules are dropped: personal cleanliness, food rules, &c.

Peace Corps-Lesotho‘s last several country directors and staff understood that, so they set up systems in which other PCVs act as security point people (always let your security person know where you are, even if you’re supposed to be on-site and are sneaking off), peer support for new PCVs and lots of peer-to-peer sessions during pre-service training.

If your Peace Corps class is particularly small, don’t feel distressed if you don’t find someone to connect with. There’s a lot of pressure from the very beginning, during Peace Corps staging, and I remember when I was split into my sector (we had three sectors in our class), I was thinking, wait–these are the people i’m being told I’ll need to depend on for the next two years? That’s it? Although it may not always seem like it, there will eventually be ample opportunity to meet many other PCVs both during and after training. If you don’t buddy up with someone, it’s really not the end.

Many people who are AmeriCorps Vistas, on the other hand, tend to stay in the area they’re from. For those who haven’t, they either want a change of scenery or are using AmeriCorps as an opportunity to relocate to the city they want. For some people, they move where their significant other will be, and AmeriCorps provides a one-year guarantee of job stability in the service sector. More likely than not, AmeriCorps volunteers will already know someone in the city they’re moving to. In some places, AmeriCorps volunteers end up hanging out together. For those who neither know anyone nor hang out with other AmeriCorps volunteers, they often meet friends through the workplace, their living arrangements or by volunteering with various groups that share their values and interests. But as far as I can tell, friends are very important, but not necessarily as vital as in Peace Corps. Pre-service orientation is far shorter than pre-service training, and although Vistas often enjoy one another’s company, three days is not necessarily enough time to cement permanent friendships, especially when there are 31 other people to meet.

Of course, the disadvantage of having to rely so much on friendship as the most immediate support structure is the rumor mill. Nothing is safe, and even if you don’t reveal anything, PCVs tend to make uncannily correct guesses about you. Everyone is friendly, but don’t forget there are always going to be rumors, and you’re going to get sucked into it. You will be the subject of deep analysis, and you will speculate about others as well. It’s not really a matter of being gossips as much as it is that when everyone’s situations are different and their friends on-site will always be blank faces to other PCVs, the only people everyone has in common is every other PCV. You will always have someone in your business; rumors are news where there is no Facebook, Twitter, email, reliable phone connections, parties and events to meet new people. Nobody indulges in it because they have bad taste but because everyone’s so isolated that they’re all necessarily concerned or curious about one another.

Although I don’t get to chat with my CTC Project friends too often, it’s always a party when we have a CTC Vista Project webinar training. We all enter the web conference and start going crazy on the chat feature, sharing jokes (most of them very corny) and speculating on recent news. As geeky as it sounds, it’s all a lot of digital fun. Ultimately, although we don’t get much time with one another, we all still hold those connections we made during orientation, and any CTC Vista in my class is welcome to couch-surf at my apartment anytime, just as I would be welcome at theirs.

Anyhow, Jessica posed a fantastic question about a week ago under the “Benefits” entry that I’ve given a lot of thought to and felt would make a great entry. She asked me, as far as I can see, whether there are professional advantages to joining one corps or the other.

This is a great question because it’s exactly what I was thinking when I came back from Peace Corps. I returned after eight months of service rather than two years, but as I mentioned to Jessica, I think it all has to do with attitude and how you interpret/what you get from your experience that job interviewers care about. One impression I did have, as did almost everyone else in Peace Corps, is that it gives you a leg up when you start your job hunt. This impression has been a motivator for PCVs who are at the height of their prolonged misery to stay in-country rather than come back and lose that prestige. However, because I find it incredibly difficult to lie or act, I presume this is true of everyone: As a general rule, if I can’t be proud of what I’ve done or speak well of it in depth, it won’t matter how long I stuck anything out.

Anyway, I wouldn’t say there was a clear and immediate advantage of being a PCV for me, but maybe it’s because I moved to Portland, Ore., the largest returned PCV location in the country. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, and here’s what I’ve come up with in terms of the professional benefits of each corps post-service.

Besides that mystique Peace Corps carries in the mind of the American public, it is a great character builder. This is instantly recognized by nearly everyone. Although Peace Corps experiences vary drastically, PCVs tend to face possible lack of structure, isolation, cultural integration, challenges in community organizing, and working with various community-based organizations (CBOs), government branches and local citizens (basically, various stakeholders on different levels that you might never have as easy access to in the States). It really is amazing what you can do in your time as a PCV, no matter how long you spend in-country. A great way to track this is to keep a weekly log of all the tasks you wanted to accomplish in the week, from little things like chatting up the shopkeeper across the street in the local language to helping community members delegate and volunteer for tasks to install a village water pump. On a micro-level, it gives you a sense of appreciation for just how much cultural integration and mutual understanding truly entails (especially when you’re in the country with the expectation that you’re there for a longer haul than most), and on the macro, it makes it much easier to write your “description of service” (DOS) at the close of your tour.

This is not to say that AmeriCorps is lagging in the professional benefits it offers. I’m certain that the AmeriCorps experience also differs widely, although I’d venture that within certain types of program–Teach for America, CTC Vista Project, &c.–there’s a smidge less variation than Peace Corps, but only because foreign and cultural integration isn’t as tall of an order (although still an order for many). What AmeriCorps offers and Peace Corps does not is the explicit presence of structure in the workplace. With Peace Corps, that can be a hit-or-miss situation, with it mostly being a miss; the only PCVs I’ve ever encountered with structure were those under the education sector, in which they are plugged into a school system. To elaborate on workplace structure, what I mean is in addition to organizational structure, there is a work flow and an output associated with every employee. This, of course, is driven by organizations’ need to perpetuate themselves by continually turning out a product in order to remain relevant to their consumers. It applies to both businesses and nonprofits.

The clear advantage of workplace structure post-AmeriCorps service is that, especially during economic downturns, companies get very jittery about hiring people with little experience in the workplace. In other words, they look at experience rather than promise, regardless of how easy it might be to gain experience. What I’ve observed thus far in my couple months on the job is that practical, technical experience is incredibly easy to pick up in contrast to character. Character is usually what you bring with you and develop through experience. I think most people know this already, but in an economic crunch, organizations seem to put this little detail on the back-burner.

Now a couple of paragraphs on creativity. Both corps offer the opportunity to be innovative, but perhaps in different senses of the word. If you pay attention very carefully, both corps are also about capacity building and relevant actions tailored to the organization/community and its needs. It’s basically a recipe for sustainable change.

If you want to make a change in your organization or within a community, everyone knows you don’t just barge in with a holier-than-thou attitude. I know this is a cliche example, but bear with me. We’ve all seen those people who come into community service thinking they have more to offer than the community they want to serve. They go in with plans, or lead their group on crazy fundraising missions that ultimately turn up massive quantities of things the community or group they’re serving do not have a need for, simply because they did not consult the community ahead of time or did not bother to spend enough time with the community to assess their needs. It’s very much like the person who says, “I like being the leader because I like telling people what to do” (true story from my first year of college) rather than viewing a leadership position as a listening and service role.

At this point, you’re probably wondering how this applies to the two corps. PCVs have more of an explicit role in sustainable progress than AmeriCorps volunteers, although I would wager they have equal opportunity for that. The reason PCVs as change agents is so explicit is because of the stark contrast between Third World countries and the Western world. Not to say that what PCVs should be doing is to bring Third World countries up to First World standards (note that I didn’t use the term “developing” countries). But it is simple things like finding a local solution that becomes a grassroots movement for clean drinking water or helping community leaders develop a program to bust myths on HIV/AIDS and sex. It’s empowering community members to come up with solutions to local problems instead. In the case of PCVs, they really and truly are the resource. Everything should be approached from the idea that the PCV won’t be there in two years, and presuming that there will be no PCV after, how will the community initiate change on its own? It really isn’t that locals aren’t creative enough to come up with this on their own, but that they may have never been empowered to think beyond what’s directly in front of them. Ben Sheldon put it this way:

I personally feel like the value of Peace Corps is the provisioning of someone who grew up with a good education, a high caloric diet, adequate health care and (for the most part), freedom from abject want—and continues to receive those benefits from abroad (or the safety net of them) once placed. I give these reasons NOT because that person intrinsically *has* better solutions, but because that person is better-suited to *create* better solutions. To put it crudely, there is less baggage. I believe that is the driver behind the mythical American innovation and ingenuity.

I totally agree with this. Since PCVs have had the privilege of growing up in what I’ve heard of described as a “post-scarcity society” (disclaimer: I do have problems with that term), their time spent abroad should be as a catalyst for speeding up what are ultimately organic, community initiatives. It is truly a humbling experience.

Both corps offer the opportunity to be creative, but in my opinion, because many basic needs are already regulated to some degree with government laws and/or funding to enforce them, AmeriCorps actually offers much more innovation in the workplace.

AmeriCorps volunteers can be in very awkward positions in that their hosting organization might look at them as a way to pawn off their workload (a.k.a. the intern). However it seems that most organizations can appreciate that at the salary AmeriCorps volunteers receive, they could make more money being a part-time server at any restaurant, and that as AmeriCorps volunteers, they are not allowed to work outside of the 40 hours/week their hosting organizations hoard.

The possibility for innovation is made possible first by the fact that the AmeriCorps position is not necessarily as incorporated into the organization as a salaried, full-time job. Why? Because organizations are not necessarily granted a volunteer every year, they can’t rely too heavily on the position; to maximize the advantage of having a volunteer, every job function must be formed with the purpose of having a sustainable outcome once the volunteer leaves. In addition, there’s no financial incentive to stay should another opportunity come up. Not to give the impression that this is a one-way street. The AmeriCorps Vista program is an easy foot-in-the-door. There are countless AmeriCorps programs for applicants to choose from; thus you’re more likely to end up in a field of your affinity than with Peace Corps, which offers a handful of programs that vary from country-to-country.

I don’t know if this is true for all Vistas, but I was the first volunteer in the position I’m currently filling, so my first several weeks on the job were boring. They were filled with self-directed training on social media and refresher courses on computer programs. After a while, I was running out of ways to train myself. Now that I’m three months in, I can appreciate all the time I had because I also spent it learning about the technical aspects of the organization as well as the narratives that long-time employees have attached to the group. I’ve listened to various people debate the mission of the organization till my ears bled, learned of desired target groups and researched demographic trends in Portland. At first, I was jealous of all the people who seemed to have something to do, who didn’t feel frantic about coming up with ways to fill their hours. Now I realize that it’s an advantage not to have your position mired in the organization. Nearly every person working for a nonprofit holds a college degree, so it’s not a question of smarts; it’s a question of time. Assuming that your organization doesn’t look at you as a long-term intern and is very supportive of you, you have a lot of time to really listen, and when you do, you can get very innovative in a field that interests you.

Each corps offers different experiences that can be applied to professional life. If professional advantage is a big question for you, then keep in mind that people sign up for Peace Corps with the expectation of a cultural rather than a job experience. AmeriCorps can be both, and AmeriCorps Vista is a much more explicitly career-oriented program in social service. Both corps are great at proving potential. Peace Corps can be a hiring advantage depending on where you are. AmeriCorps is an advantage where employers need a certain threshold of workplace experience in order to feel comfortable with potential. Really though, the ultimate asset you can hone for yourself in any situation is flexibility and application. In all interviewing, qualitative skills, experience and character can be worded to the point of a good fit.

Happy job hunting!

As for AmeriCorps, it is a real job: 40 hours per week with the same holidays and vacation accrual that all other employees have. You are an employee of the organization, you fill out time sheets. You just don’t get paid by your host organization. During your pre-service orientation, you are given the work plan that your organization submitted in applying for a Vista. This may alter somewhat when you actually start working, but for the most part there are solid outcomes that the organization wants achieved each quarter of the year. And of course, as you are in an American workplace, you are protected under federal laws such as compliance with ADA and freedom from sexual harassment and intimidation.

Not necessarily so in a Peace Corps country. Part of Peace Corps’ reasons for such rigorous medical screening is because their host communities cannot necessarily accommodate people with disabilities. Also, the US has several laws in place protecting Americans’ physical and mental safety that have been enforced for decades. Some countries may not have that or the laws may be recent developments that clash at least a bit with cultural priorities. Peace Corps Admin lend support and try to preempt where they can with policies and agreements made with the community. However, they can only do so much; that’s the bargain you’ve struck. Peace Corps is a more casual work environment where work hours and non-work hours bleed together, and that means your community may not have the same boundaries you do. This can apply to personal space, personal time and gender roles. A little grim, but the upside of this is that PCVs basically make their own hours, and they don’t necessarily always add up to eight per day. Since cultural immersion knows no schedule, work for PCVs is always a combination of cultural reconciliation and actual work. This is why the three Peace Corps goals are so important:

1. Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
2. Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3. Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

In my opinion, the only thing a PCV can definitely succeed at while in-country is the second goal. The first goal is secondary because that depends on variables outside of PCVs’ control. You can cobble together workshops, prioritize sustainability and capacity-building, but much of the long-term success of these things depend on host country nationals’ reception to them, awareness of your own intentions and how taxed your emotional reserves are.

This is where, from an American outlook, AmeriCorps volunteers can do more to set precedents than PCVs can. Back in January 2008, former country director Robert Strauss wrote a piece from the New York Times indicting Peace Corps for sending green volunteers abroad:

The Peace Corps has long shipped out well-meaning young people possessing little more than good intentions and a college diploma. What the agency should begin doing is recruiting only the best of recent graduates — as the top professional schools do — and only those older people whose skills and personal characteristics are a solid fit for the needs of the host country.

I wholeheartedly disagree with Mr. Strauss’ opinion but will say that for those who have exercised their organizing skills in college or professional skills in that sort of setting, be prepared to feel frustrated. In my belated response posted on my Peace Corps blog, I said:

Within my several months as a Peace Corps volunteer, I realized that as Americans, we like to do things big; we equivocate titles, status, and big machinery with legitimacy and effectiveness … The focus should be on empowering and equipping host country nationals to help their communities, not setting new precedents that cannot be met once PCVs no longer travel through.

What this means for PCVs is they must meet their communities where they are. This might mean that some of your powerful brainstorming skills are not used, or your connections to “rich westerners” and grant writing skills need to be placed on the backburner. In other words, you are not there to steal the show or run away with it once your two years are gone.

With AmeriCorps, the potential for doing something really exciting and having a project of your own is much more tangible. The work values of your organization are American, and so are you. The need to turn out results, to strategize and implement are inline with your own. So take advantage and see just how much you can surprise yourself.

One thing I will say that is an advantage or disadvantage depending on how you look at it stems from AmeriCorps policy about Vista sites. From what I learned during the CTC Project‘s orientation, an organization can have up to three volunteer tours and then that particular Vista position with the organization is retired. Peace Corps’ sites can go on on indefinitely.

AmeriCorps Vistas serving the first tour face the difficulty of being first. There is the opportunity to define the position, but there’s also the frustration of not knowing where to begin. You can find yourself feeling unproductive because your role is new and you may have few outcomes that anyone has to rely on immediately, so it hasn’t yet been fully integrated into the organization. The first Vista’s definition of the role becomes a model and launch pad for following Vistas.

PCVs must also create their own structure, but there is so much cultural adjustment going on that it rivals the lack of structure for mental stress. And although Peace Corps sites can have an indefinite number of volunteers following Peace Corps evaluations and community needs, each volunteer brings in his or her own focus and lens. For example, the PCV before me in Menkhoaneng focused on HIV/AIDS. I focused on agriculture and the environment. PCVs aren’t often expected to continue other PCVs’ projects (anyone who wants to pass down his/her projects should just extend their service), but PCVs should expect to encounter the following well-worn question: “Well, when PCV Alpha was here, s/he did this. Why don’t you?”

As for the rigorous medical clearance that PCVs must go through, this is where it all pays off: Once you’re accepted to Peace Corps and have shipped off overseas, Peace Corps is completely responsible for your health coverage. In theory, it is the best medical coverage you’ll ever have because everything is free to you. You will have yearly checkups that run the medical gamut, replacement for glasses (not contacts) should they break, and access to lots of over-the-counter drugs (not that you should necessarily take advantage of this). One poster brought up the issue of preexisting medical conditions. Peace Corps medical clearance is a real bitch for anyone with preexisting conditions, but if you are cleared, trust that Peace Corps will take care of you. AmeriCorps, on the other hand, does not. For the entire length of your service, you are given limited health coverage–I believe they just termed it “health benefits”–that do not cover any preexisting conditions, dental, and no allergies. It’s a really bare bones sort of coverage, one that doesn’t even qualify as insurance, which is why some AmeriCorps volunteers opt to keep any other medical coverage they may already have if it is affordable. I haven’t had many medical issues that have me butting heads with Seven Corners, the benefits provider. One thing that I am extremely happy about is that since my prescriptions have no generic counterpart on the market, my prescriptions are completely free and I pay exactly nada.

All of this brings me back to Peace Corp’s medical fabu “in theory.” In theory, I had the best medical coverage I could ever have in my life. The doctors there told me so. When you suddenly relocate to a country thousands of miles away and with radically different climate, your body will go through a certain amount of shock. On top of this, you’re adjusting to a totally different culture and way of doing things. It’s natural to freak out when your body starts to go haywire, too. I went through the medical jitters, as did practically every PCV I met. However, I also had some real issues that were developing which did not resolve themselves. I tried everything I could think of to resolve before going to my Peace Corps Medical Officer (PCMO). He would dismiss all of my concerns and prescribe the same course of action I had already been taking as though it were a fresh idea. After half a year of complaining about one particular issue, multiple visits to Peace Corps Medical, and fretting because it was getting drastically worse, he finally sent me to see a specialist. There were several other issues I had as well, and I felt that instead of addressing the actual problems, the PCMO I saw most often would set red herrings for me. In what I believe was an effort to save a buck, he suggested (and sort of threatened medical separation, in my mind) that I was just emotionally stressed and it was physically manifesting itself. He asked me if I really wanted to be in Peace Corps. My PCMO was charming and knew how to give me the run-around when it came to wanting medical care. It is an awful feeling to cross your fingers and hope everyday that now you’re back in the States, those alarming health issues won’t recur. And then to be validated several months after you end your tour, when everything comes back to haunt and terrorize you. I cannot stress enough that it is different at every Peace Corps post, but of all my regrets about Peace Corps, the bulk of them come from the compromise to my health. This compromise was not due to a lack of resources that Peace Corps Medical had at its disposal, but to the poor execution of health coverage I received during service. In my mind, you are volunteering two years with hardly any financial gain. At the very least you shouldn’t feel guilty for worrying about the changes your body is going through, and you shouldn’t be manipulated into stifling your concerns.

During your service you also receive a living allowance from your Corps. Peace Corps’ living allowance is supposed to cover transportation, food, clothing and other basics. Some of this your host organization will try to shoulder. AmeriCorps Vista’s host organizations are also expected to cover public transportation costs and set aside a rent subsidy which should cover most–if not all–of your rent. Vistas qualify for food stamps because their “salary” is counted as a living stipened. It’s written in the books that social workers are to disregard the $11,000/year income.

Some advice: Don’t try to save your Peace Corps money. I was a huge penny pincher while I was there, trying to stretch my living stipend as far as it could go while adding to my stash every month I was at it. Since Peace Corps doesn’t necessarily give you enough to cover everything when you first get to country to get set up (the budget for house appliances, etc. is set a year in advance and cannot take inflation into account), many PCVs take out money of their own. By the time I left Peace Corps after seven months, I found that I had only broken even. It’s definitely foolish to try to save money on a Peace Corps salary, so just don’t worry about it and do take every opportunity to travel. Peace Corps is really only a financial “loss,” depending on how you look at it. Since your AmeriCorps allowance really doesn’t allow you to travel at all, consider relocating to another part of the States. AmeriCorps does offer a relocation allowance.

The feel for staging and PSO are very different. Staging is a sort of limbo, in which you’ve had to say goodbye to your friends and family already but haven’t yet left the States. After jam-packed days parceled in sessions about Peace Corps procedures and operations; emotional coping; saying no to alcohol in very depressed, isolated states (booze can become a problem beyond typical college drinking in Peace Corps); and seeing one another as resources, trainees are set loose to do as they please. On the first day, trainees are given temporary debit cards with a (IMHO, generously) set amount to cover all expenses including food and in-city transportation. Come evening, trainees will often gather in herds in the hotel lobby before roaming aimlessly for a place to eat.

Pre-service orientation is similar. Your roundtrip ticket and hotel room are also paid for, and more likely than not, you’ll have a roommate. You are also orientated to the history, procedures and mission of the particular program you’re under, and the setup is quite similar. Some of them I have mentioned in a past post, such as housing, transportation and supervisors. Both have goals of sustainability and capacity building. PSO also covers other items, such as in-service training and really seeing the CTC Vista class as a rainbow of skills, which are then pinned down and distributed. In addition, our class of 32 was split into two groups, each assigned to a Vista Leader (a CTC Vista who has already been in the CTC program for a year and had extended for another year with a host organization while also offering him/herself as a resource to incoming CTC Vistas).

Sangoma (traditional healer) celebrates with 'M'e Mampho, a Peace Corps language trainer

Immediately after landing in-country, Peace Corps Pre-Service Training (PST) begins. Depending on the country, training lasts 2-3 months. In my program, the regimen ran six days a week and included cultural training, language and skills training, acquaintance with government structures and NGOs, history and touring. In each of the programs that PC-Lesotho had to offer, both Community Health and Economic Development (CHED) and Education (ED) were broken down into smaller groups based on each trainee’s individual assignment and/or preferences. For CHED, this meant HIV/AIDS, Permaculture/Nutrition, Small Business/Youth. During Community-Based Training (CBT) each sector is assigned to a different village where every volunteer lives with a different host family as they situate to cultural/economic/living conditions in the country.

PST is extremely intensive. Depending on the program you’re assigned to, this might be the most structure you have in two years of service. It’s also the best chance to study up on language because picking up the language once you’re on your own goes much slower. For PC-Lesotho, In-Service Training (IST) for each program occurred at the three-month mark after “lockdown” (for the first and last three months of service, PCVs are restricted to their districts when traveling. PC-Lesotho eventually switched it out for the friendlier name of “immersion”). If your country director is really awesome, you might also have the opportunity to propose training options outside of PSO. For example, I wanted to learn more about permaculture and cultural implementation, so I proposed shadowing a permaculture volunteer who was in her second year of service several districts away. There is also a mandatory All-Volunteer conference (All-Vol) every year and an optional get-together for your program after your first year of service called Reconnect.

As for AmeriCorps, training doesn’t end when PSO does. With the CTC Vista Project, your host organization is also responsible for acquainting you to its history, providing in-house training, and laying aside a sizable chunk for a national conference that focuses on community technology. Although I’m not sure about the conference, other AmeriCorps Vista programs are probably similar. In addition, AmeriCorps provides up to $500 for in-service training, if you’re willing to do the paperwork tango. From what I understand, the CTC Vista Project is very rare in that it has an extremely active listserv. To date, I’ve received 160+ emails since service started a month ago. CTC Vistas really do use one another as resources and because of this, they are more likely to stay in touch than most other AmeriCorps Vista programs.

Both corps are relatively similar in structure, but how they play out is quite different. For me, it was mind-blowing to imagine how the same structure could have very different outcomes depending on the culture it’s set in.

The CTC Vista Robot

The awkward part of both trainings is being thrown in a room with perfect strangers. With our particular CTC Vista group, the awkwardness melted away pretty quickly and by the end, I felt very connected to several people. With staging, the awkwardness can remain. There are no pre-planned tours of the city in which trainees are forced to get to know one another, and it’s perfectly understandable for trainees to stay in for the night if, in the face of uncertainty, they want to get those last couple minutes of phone time in with loved ones. Part of the reason PSO was so conducive to bonding is probably because AmeriCorps volunteers are not carrying the emotional baggage of going overseas.

What also struck me was the diversity in the AmeriCorps crowd. For the CTC Vista Project, there are 32 people of all different socioeconomic backgrounds from poverty to wealth, some who didn’t go to college, some who are handicapped, a couple of older volunteers and various ethnicities.
Although there were a handful of us who were visible minorities, there was a certain homogeneity in our group of 21 PCVs. First, I will credit Peace Corps for its deviation from the Peace Corps stereotype: not everyone who is a PCV is a granola, outdoors type. There were definitely a couple of divas in PC-Lesotho, but that’s not an accurate measure of how successful a person will be as a PCV. It really does take all types to make a Peace Corps volunteer.

My thoughts on why PCVs tend to be cut from the same cloth is due to unequal access to wealth and familiarity with the Peace Corps name. In addition to the coveted medical clearance, the cost of applying and then gearing up for Peace Corps is huge. Not only is the medical app a financial undertaking, equipping yourself with camping equipment–a 60L pack, pack towels, headlamp, Therm-a-rest and sub-zero sleeping bag, possible solar panel, moisture wicking clothes–is hardly cheap. I really believe these two reasons combined stand in the way of many possible PCVs.

Peace Corps also has a problem recruiting minorities, and it only contributes to the impression that American = White. A considerable number of minorities in this country are children of immigrants, and are not raised with the idea of necessarily going to a Third World country and volunteering in “deprivation” when the majority of their parents came from a less-than-First World situation. This gets a bit touchy, but children of immigrants from more community-oriented cultures (versus the US, which focuses on the individual) can also be very strongly obligated to their family. When minorities do sign up for Peace Corps, it is likely they’ll have to quell many more anxieties and fears than, say a white, third generation PCV whose parents grew up with JFK.