Doing My Peace Corps Happy Dance!

After nearly 10 months of Peace Corps service I am happy to report that I finally feel like I have 'contributed something'. Now, when you join the Peace Corps you are told to go in with an open mind, to begin to except you will have lots of 'free time', and above all... to be patient.

Well, like most red-blooded Americans I had lofty dreams of changing the world. Those dreams were quickly shot from the sky as I realized that 'getting things done' in the American sense of the meaning wasn't how things worked in other parts of the world. My hopes of changing the world, became hopes of changing Moldova, became hopes of changing my site, became hopes of changing my community, became an understanding that actually, the biggest changes I would be making would be to myself.

We were told early on in our service that in order to complete a successful project we would need to have a community member partnered with us to see the project through, and to make the project sustainable. At first this seemed like a nuisance to me, 'that will just slow me down' I thought.  But, like most volunteers, with time I realized that this was in fact the only way to ensure longevity of a project. I had many grand ideas, many ways to 'change Moldova', and many questioning looks when I explained my plans to people in the community. After my long parade of ideas were shot down I felt hugely defeated. What was I doing here if all I had to offer was a bunch of fruitless ideas that could never be accurately woven into the community?

Feeling rather useless, I began to wonder if all I would ever be in this community was 'the American'. I began to look through my letters from home. All the letters had the same theme; people telling me how proud they were of me, how brave I was to be living so far from home... blah blah blah... I felt like a fraud, like I wasn't living up to anyone's expectations, especially my own. But then I found an old fortune, from a fortune cookie I had eaten back in my University dining hall. It was exactly what I needed at the time it read: Sometimes the best thing to do is to just simply be. That was it, I needed to calm down, stop worrying about filling the big shoes I had stored in my minds 'peace corps closet' and start to just live.

So, that's what I did, I lived life, I met new people, I built new relationships, I went to work and stayed open to new ideas and new ways of living. Now, if you know me you know I am about as straight-edged a box as they come so, for me this was a true task. And so, after a few months of putting my pride aside and 'going with the flow' I came across what turned out to be a truly wonderful project.

I had been going to the Craftsman house to take needlepoint lessons, it was something to do during the long winter months. I met the director of the Craftsman house, and quickly learned that there was a project underway to finish construction and renovation of a space that was to be turned into a modern dance studio. I asked if there was anything I could to help them with this project, and they expressed that they were under funded and that the project would not be finished for many years. They asked if I knew of a way to get the extra funds to finish the space. Luckily enough, Peace Corps Moldova has a special grant fund through USAID to help volunteers finance local projects, this was the perfect solution for helping the Craftsman house. So, I put myself to work developing a proposal for the project, and after two months of hard work and revision we won funding for the Craftsman house's new modern dance studio.

No, this isn't 'my project'; it's better, it's my communities project. This is something that the people of Nisporeni want, this is something the young girls of Nisporeni will take joy in. I will not take ownership of this project, nor do I want to, this wasn't my idea, but, I couldn't be more elated to see the joy on the faces of the director and the girls when they learned they had won the needed funding. The real work has yet to begin, construction will commence next month, and when the doors to the studio open in September for the first ever modern dance classes in Nisporeni I will feel a sense of pride knowing that together we were able to make this happen.

This, as most aspects of Peace Corps are, was a lesson for me. I guess that is how grass roots development is done, not a just-graduated American with head-in-the-clouds dreams, but rather, a few dedicated people working hard toward a common attainable goal. To some this may seem like common sense, I guess for me I needed to see it to believe it.

Now, I need to go put my hard helmet on and see this thing through!