Just a little bit on the “where am I going to end up?” question that, although we’re only three weeks in, has been the looming question on everyone’s minds.
On Thanksgiving day, Peace Corps will announce to us whether we will be spending the next two years of our lives in Barranquilla, Santa Marta, or Cartagena—in the city-proper or somewhere outside of it. Most placements are directly in the cities, but there are a few rural ones—there’s one on a mountainside outside of Santa Marta, and there are rumors of a placement on an island off of Cartagena. Even the Peace Corps folks haven’t made the final decisions of what schools will receive Peace Corps volunteers. (And just as a point of reference, these cities are all on the coast, 1-3 hours away from each other).
In order to decide where we’re placed, members of the staff interview us on our “strengths and weaknesses,” listen to our Spanish skills, watch our “field practicums,” or teaching examples, and evaluate us day by day. We can sort of voice, or at least hint at, our hopes and desires as well, although the Peace Corps does everything with the injunction to its volunteers to “be flexible.” After all of this, they make like a sorority and vote on where we’ll end up.
Needless to say, there’s been a great deal of hullabaloo over the process, as well as over where people want to be. Barranquilla is traditionally the least popular destination, since it’s really an industrial city without the history or beauty of Cartagena or Santa Marta. And yet, everything has its pros and cons—Cartagena, outside its historical center, is dirty, hot, and mostly urban sprawl. Santa Marta is a tourist resort destination, filled with beautiful beaches and scenery, yes, but without any real cultural activities and with the transiency of a tourist town. Barranquilla is blocky and plain, but with the best resources both Peace Corps and otherwise. And then to compound the basic destination thing, there’s the fact that although most spots will be urban, there are a handful “peri-urban,” or more rural school placements out there, and there are quite a few people in the group ready to fight tooth and nail over them.
And of course, under everything is a rumbling of disquiet from many in the group, since the fact that most of us will be in highly urban city settings for the next two years is really starting to sink in; most of, if not all of us, were basically expecting to spend a couple years of our lives doing the classic living-in-a-hut-pumping-water-never-shaving-and-loving-it Peace Corps thing. In Colombia, however, our placements will almost all be completely urban. We’re talking, high-heels, full makeup, skirts, tourists, and discotecs sort of urban.
Awesome, some might say…but after eschewing city life as often as possible, for me it’s a little odd to be in this scene, living in the biggest city I’ve ever been in, in an extremely odd mix of poverty and development—of unheated showers and streets without sewers, cinder-block schools and huge shopping malls and American prices. And even after packing basic professional clothes, I really did not come close to being prepared on the fashion wardrobe front, which is really just another issue entirely.
It’s not just the supplies/city living aspect, either. Ensconced in this city atmosphere is an important, totally different aspect to our jobs and lives, and that is fundamental role that Peace Corps has in this country; Peace Corps is in Colombia to do a specific task as set by the Colombian government—to improve the quality of its English education. Unlike the classic Peace Corps routine of reaching out to towns and villages that otherwise might never hear a word of English or have an English teacher, or might never been connected to other countries or even bigger cities, our job is much more corporate, and potentially much more governmentally shaped. ( I don’t know enough about all posts to completely generalize this way, but I haven’t heard much to the contrary)
My job in the Peace Corps is going to involve fitting myself into an established school hierarchy, working with teachers to help them improve. I am not a lone bringer of English—I am a status-laden classroom aide, a tremendous resource armed with materials and knowledge and native speaking abilities to help bring the English level of this country up.
I am certainly not saying we shouldn’t be here. I’m absolutely not saying that this country, with its incredible dichotomy of rich and poor, of children who take English from teachers who can’t speak it, but can only dictate grammar, of people so poor they don’t have running water and live in classic squalor because half of this country is at or below poverty level, should not have the Peace Corps presence. I’m simply saying that this is much different than I ever expected, from way back when I first contemplated the idea of doing Peace Corps after college…a decade ago at least!...and I am still trying to wrap my head around it.
