The revolving door of peace corps

Peace Corps is a unique and interesting organization for innumerable reasons, though the one I'd like to look at now is how it affects the relationships between people.

I thought of this pretty early on after I arrived in country but Peace Corps really is like a revolving door of people. When we first got here, most of the volunteers we met and got to know left before we even finished training because their two years of service were up. After that, a few people I got to be good friends with left again back in June-July, with a new group in to replace them. Throw in the people who have to randomly go home due to family illnesses or other reasons and you can see how there's constantly people filtering in and out of my life around here. Now, a good number of my friends and volunteers around me are going to be leaving in November and December and I think that's going to be pretty tough on me. Sure, I've still got some friends around me, as well as the rest of my training mates who I'll see when I come down to Yaounde, but I feel like I slipped in pretty well to the health/agro stage before mine and it's going to be a sad day for me when they're all leaving and off to bigger and better things. I know that might sound like an egotistical thing for me to say but I guess I'm just saying that I'm going to miss everyone when they leave.

Peace Corps also does an interesting number on personal relationships. During training, friendships and relationships are on a hyper-accelerated pace as we spend 8+ hours a day together. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as you get to know people pretty well in those short 11 weeks. Since training, though, I haven't really seen much of the others from my training group as I am pretty far away from them all, so many of these friendships have kind of fallen to the side. Somebody warned me that it would be hard to stay involved with their lives being, at the least, a 2 day journey from 90% of them. With a few exceptions, it's turned out to be pretty true. So I became good friends with the people around me in the North region, a good number of who are leaving in the next 3 months.

Another volunteer nearby me who has been here for close to 3.5 years now has said it's hard seeing people you trained with go, and while I didn't train with the people leaving soon, I definitely became good friends with them. I might take a couple days of vacation and go hang out with him in the Extreme North in December before the new volunteers arrive, to get away from all the empty posts.

Maybe this blog has been a bit of a downer. I hope not, but it's been something on my mind a lot lately.