Looking back on the Peace Corps

December 31, 2012 and Jan. 1, 2013 Looking back on the Peace Corps

We all get busy, but not, I hope, too busy to look back and reflect. The Peace Corps, right out of college, was a life changing experience for me. “The toughest job you’ll ever love,” tv ads ran. For me, living in a rural village in the Himalayas, learning a little-known language, and teaching in that language were formative experiences. Learning to navigate in a different culture—and making plenty of cultural mistakes, such as walking into a kitchen with my shoes on—was challenging and expanding. Having just finished four years at Univ. of California Santa Barbara surrounded by young people, I found myself, the only foreigner, in an isolated village having to rely on myself alone, even for personal support. I wrote journals, I went to teashops and became an extrovert in a foreign tongue, and I frequented late nights of people singing folksongs and wrote them down, eventually publishing my translations in an obscure American journal.

Two years with no return flight home allowed me total immersion into Nepal’s culture, which is what I craved, despite constant homesickness at first. I signed up for an adventure outside my comfort zone, and I didn’t care about creature comforts, though I did buy from China a Double-Happiness pressure cooker for my kerosene stove to cook vegetables faster. I began to dream in Nepalese. I learned to play the drum (a madal) and dance all night long at weddings. I made friends, though the cultural gap was a grand canyon. I admired and liked the people I became closest too, no longer comparing them to my American friends.

Decades afterwards, traveling back on the Parent Association Fellowship was a true gift and miracle. I smelled familiar smells of woodfires and spices that triggered olfactory memories long forgotten. I stayed with the host family in the same village I had lived in before. Phal Kumari cooked for me and her nephew twice a day for weeks: rice, roti, lentils, potato curry, jalabi desserts, all the familiar foods I remembered, but this time even better. All the buses were on strike from Maoist and student protests, so I walked. I walked for hours and hours, as I had done years before, headed who knows where? Up, mostly, up the canyons, sometimes on one side of the river, sometimes on the other. The more rural, the more friendly. Peak experience: I stumbled upon a ecstatic celebration to Krishna, a Hindu god, and was invited in, the only foreigner, to sit smack in the middle of a small-ish temple with 200 villagers worshipping, playing drums, harmonium, and improvising songs about Krishna in a beautiful transcendent chanting style. Dancers whirled and whirled until they were inhabited by the spirit of Krishna and went into a trance, eyes closed, ecstatic, no longer apparently conscious of the physical room. I call such experiences ‘through the looking glass’ or ‘down the rabbit hole.’ Later, like Alice, I wondered if it was all a dream except that it was so intense, immersive, and vivid. Words fail to capture such personal perceptive experiences, though words are all I have, despite short video clips that can’t capture the felt experience.

I had other such immersive experiences, such as the endless open-air market in Canton (Gwangzhou) with live animals and strange smells and no other foreigners. Experience is different than reading, except for those who can have vivid vicarious experiences. I hope these words can do that for you, the reader. It’s a privilege to share.