Summer Project

July 1

The Peace Corps is an organization that operates under the following premises -  world peace is possible, communities have the capacity to develop indigenously, and every type of peoples regardless of nationality/origin can learn to appreciate their differences. And we all lived happily ever after. This isn't a criticism, I'm just pointing out that those goals are very idealistic.

During training, the people at our site are working on TEFL, the Mongolian language, and community development simultaneously. At this point I don't think anyone can actually be successful at one of these (let alone all three). I think that the hopeless optimism of the Peace Corps is telling us that if we try to do these impossible tasks, there is a slight chance we will be successful. Also, when we get to a site, the workload will become even more intense. We will be teaching for real, trying to become proficient at the language, and also making a difference within the community. I don't think the Peace Corps expects us to be perfect, but if we strive to succeed in all three areas, we might actually make a difference here.

I'll be straightforward, the community project that me and another PCV are trying to get going is not looking too good. Lesson number 1: Plans change most of the time. We had 2 weeks to get started, and nothing happened for about a week an a half. The day that we finally got some work done, we  didn't end up working on it until late that night. Lesson number 2: You can't force good ideas. We made some questions for the intention of figuring out what the people here value and what types problems they face. I don't know if there was a translation issue or if the questions were worded wrong, but the answers that they wrote down did not give us much to work off of.

So now what? I'm not sure. There's not much time for a project to happen this summer :( When I get to my site, I definitely want to be more thorough with the assessment phase. It will take some patience, but if I am persistent I could discover an idea that could really take off. Will there be roadblocks and dead ends along the way? Of course.