My Peace Corps Experience

The Peace Corps likes to brag that it’s “the toughest job you’ll ever love.” I would amend this motto.

My cousin Holli served in Africa in the 1990s and told me this about the experience when I was considering joining: “You’ll get way more out of it than the people you’re supposed to be serving.”

She was right.

The Peace Corps is not for everyone. If you cannot go without your phone, friends, family, internet, running water, burgers, pizza and tacos for more than a day, the Peace Corps is not right for you.

If you cannot handle when things go off-script, the Peace Corps is not right for you.

If you cannot handle extreme temperatures, the Peace Corps is not right for you.

If you cannot handle being gawked at constantly, no, the Peace Corps is not right for you.

The Peace Corps was formed in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. His goal in creating the organization was to promote friendship and peace in sending American volunteers to developing countries. More than 240,000 people have volunteered, serving in such sectors as health, education, agriculture and the environment.

Since I last served in 2016, the Peace Corps has changed part of its selection process. No longer do they pick the country where you want to serve, you do. I applied in 2006. One of the questions they asked was what language you were interested in learning. I told them French, so they told me they were putting me in a “Francophone” country, Madagascar.

It was misleading. Once you get to Madagascar, you learn that while the country was a French colony for some time and the language was spoken by some Malagasies, it’s a language largely for the well-off and well-to-do. If you know anything about Peace Corps, it’s that they tend to put you in poor villages. They placed me in Maevatanana. No one in my village spoke French, only Malagasy, which I learned how to speak during the three-month training we volunteers must attend as a group, while living with host families, before being sent to the places where we’ll work.

Some trainees have the wrong idea of what they’re getting into. There’s the kid fresh out of college, often a private school, maybe Ivy League. Many of them are using the Peace Corps as a resume builder.

Some think the two-year commitment is going to be one, big, long party. One of the trainees in my group in Madagascar brought his surfboard to the island.

He lasted one week.

There’s a lot of down time as a volunteer and you’re often alone. Volunteers tend to read and drink. I was no exception.

But I like to think I joined for the right reasons. I was 35 when I applied and hadn’t seen the world. I had never left the country and was bored with my job as a sports reporter. My cousin told me to consider Peace Corps. She told me they’d pay for everything and that you might find a new career.

I served in Madagascar from 2007-09, teaching at an elementary school in my village. I’ve been a teacher ever since, including 2014-16 when I returned to Peace Corps in the Philippines.

Through Peace Corps, I had found a job with purpose and become the Meandering Maestro.

I do not regret the career move, and I’m deeply indebted to the Peace Corps.

My Madagascar experience much more mirrored the typical Peace Corps experience than the Philippines. Hell, they have McDonald’s, Krispy Kreme and KFCs scattered all over the Philippines. You won’t find any in Maevatanana. We didn’t even have running water and often no electricity. Rats everywhere. Big ones, too.

Whenever people ask me to tell them what the Peace Corps was like, I recall two stories, both set in Madagascar. I dedicated an entire chapter of my book to my experience in Madagascar (and another to the Philippines) and below I’m including the excerpt about these two fascinating occurrences on the continent of Africa.

May it blow your mind:

Story No. 1 — Dancing With the Dead

The most fascinating culture I’ve been a part of is the Malagasy, and it’s not even close.

I went to a party once, where everyone in the village was invited. It started at 9 in the morning. We all gathered in a hall and ate a rice and beef soup concoction that was terrible. The Malagasy loved it. You’d better eat it fast or else the grease will coagulate. We drank liquor. A brass band played.

And then we made our way to the graveyard.

With the umbrellas, the dancing and singing, you were reminded of a jazz funeral. At the graveyard, three bodies were exhumed from a crumbling mausoleum — a father, his wife and their baby daughter. The bodies were separately wrapped in plain white shrouds. The smell was unhinging. This party was thrown by the dead father’s brother, who the day earlier in a dream was told by his sibling to throw it on his behalf. The culmination of the party is to dance with the body and pass it on for someone else to.

The Malagasy call this ceremony Famadihana. The Peace Corps warns you that to not engage would be considered rude by the natives. So I wait my turn and do as the ‘gasy do and dance with the foul-smelling dead bodies, swatting away flies with my free hand.

Story No. 2 — The Penis Story

One of my 5th graders in Maevatanana went missing for more than a week. I thought the worst, fearing another death like Faly. Finally, I asked the class about him. They said he had been circumcised. Thinking like an American, I was confused. This is something we get done as babies. What gives, I asked? Never an expert of their language, I think the kids were telling me that it’s some kind of ritual for little boys, around my 5th grader’s age.

Like I said, my Malagasy was spotty, so to make sure I heard correctly, I asked my market friend Hery to explain. Hery got a kick out of talking to me, out of having an American friend, and he was kind to me from the first time I met him. I had been in Maevatanana just one day, knew no one except the principal, who in two years I rarely dealt with, and knew not where to shop. Hery would help. He spoke no English, so our conversations were all in Malagasy. It was lunch time and all the students at my school had gone home to eat. I had already eaten, so I thought I’d cruise the village to see what was what. I was sitting on a bench in front of his little store, sweating profusely under the midday sun. Hery saw me, offered me a drink of water and to come back to his bar in the shade.

We were cool ever since.

About this circumcision business, Hery sheepishly broke it down for me, for he, like many Malagasy, is embarrassed at this rite of passage. He said this is how it typically goes: A young boy is thrown a party, and all of his family attends. They stuff him with food and a live band plays. The party continues the next day. Only men are allowed. On the party’s second day, a healer arrives, knife in hand. Hery told me the boy reacts one of three ways. He knows the healer is coming and steels himself for the cutting, knows the healer is coming but is still aghast that this is actually going to happen, has no idea the healer is coming for him and once he finds out, becomes hysterical and must be held down. The band drowns out the screaming.

No anesthesia is used, not even local.

Mission accomplished. Whenever I tell this story, everyone is mouth-breathing.

“Now,” I’ll continue to my white dinner guests, “steel yourself like the young boy for the last part of the story. The foreskin is collected by the grandfather, who takes a shot of something strong and stuffs the fold in a banana. He then … proceeds to eat the banana!”

Hery said that several boys in various villages get it done on the same day. Soon thereafter, a parade is held where the boys walk, gingerly I assume, through town waving at cheering onlookers.

And there you have it.

What a country. What a culture.