The life of a volunteer can be utterly miserable. It can be frustrating, uncomfortable, and completely exhausting. And the truth of the matter is, most days we just get by.
Over our summer (or winter... we're south of the equator) holiday, a number of the volunteers in our group have shared stories of our Rwandese hometowns. We've talked about how things are run, how we don't understand about 75% of what is going on around us daily, who in the group has contracted worms (yum), and about how much we have to do before we leave the country. The last is probably most daunting. With the first term to adjust to living in Rwanda and the second term to fine-tune our teaching skills, it leaves just one term - three months - to tie together all the loose ends and finish all of the projects we began.
Everyone goes into a venture like this, no matter how realistic or grounded, thinking that we're here to "make a difference." Our dear friends and family have congratulated us on our dedication, our motivation, or our bravery. I don't pretend that it doesn't do my self-esteem good to hear these things, and I won't lie that such encouragement is sometimes the only thing that keeps me going.
But often, and probably more often than not, there's nothing brave about my day-to-day life. There are days that I get up and delay going to class as long as humanly (and professionally) possible. There are afternoons when I go to "La Palme," one of the nicer hotels in town, and get on the internet only to feel totally overwhelmed with everything I'm missing at home. There are weekends that I board a bus to Kigali to be with other volunteers because planning my lessons, working with my students, or looking at the piles of work that I have to do makes me want to collapse. I've been jealous of friends leaving for home, and I've been childishly angry when I'm not understood the first or second time I ask for something. And I'll admit, I've wanted to throw the towel in more than once.
With all of this said, though, I remember hearing once that if you get up in the morning thinking today's the day you'll save the world, you'll be perpetually disappointed. Likewise, if you get up every morning thinking that what you'll do today won't make the slightest change in that pile of work, or the crooked system, or the long-term lives of the hundreds of students I work with, then you'll never actually get out of bed. No one can live with that pressure.
Instead, I remember hearing that you have to be just naive, or conceited, enough to know that in some small way, you'll make a difference. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, or even this year. Maybe not in the next ten years, or even twenty. You have to be comfortable with not seeing the results of your work, and content with the knowledge that if you weren't doing it, who would be? And you have to be OK knowing that today, you won't save the world, but maybe, just maybe, the work you do today, with the work that your colleagues and friends are doing today, will amount to even the slightest positive change.
I was talking last night to a good friend who isn't a volunteer but is positioned in Kigali only temporarily and we likened working outside of your comfort zone and in a developing country as taking two steps forward, one step back. Or rather, twenty steps forward and nineteen steps back. But in the aggregate, the net movement is still going forward. And that's the whole idea, after all.
No. Most of my life is about getting by: getting to class, getting through the day, crossing one more thing off my list. And I've had to learn to be OK with that, because everyday I get through, I've done just a little more than was done the day before. And although I never believed we were here to save the world, I've lost the illusion that what we're here to do is to make a concrete change. No, rather we're here to plant hundreds of seeds, and hope one or two sprout one day. And to learn that's the most you can do, and to know that's OK.
Have courage,
Jen
No comments:
Post a Comment