Starting Our Unofficial Community

The Unofficial Peace Corps Volunteer Handbook has been a long-running project that I began almost four years ago when I was applying to become a Peace Corps Volunteer. It is based on the idea that we (applicants, trainees, volunteers) all go through experiences that are shared around the world and make us part of the Peace Corps community. I kept track of my questions, as well as questions that other people have shared with me, and then wrote down answers to those questions a little bit every month. In August, the Unofficial Handbook was released as a paperback and hardcover book and there are already copies on several continents around the globe!

It took a lot of time and hard work, but it's been very rewarding and especially wonderful to connect with so many volunteers worldwide. We had an incredible team of people come together to share stories, advice and wisdom and we have received wonderful comments and support from dozens of readers. It's really been amazing to be in contact with so many great people all around the world including returned volunteers, experienced volunteers in the field, trainees leaving America, applicants getting their invitations in the mail from Peace Corps, and people just starting their applications. I feel very fortunate and humbled to have access to technology that allows us to share our experiences and reach out to help each other no matter where we are.

This really is only the beginning. We are raising hundreds of dollars for Peace Corps projects, starting great conversations about an incredible organization and sharing wonderful experiences with people all over the world.  I look forward to connecting more with incredible people in our Unofficial Peace Corps community for many months to come.

Unofficial Future

Originally I thought the ideal situation for a helpful Peace Corps guide was for it to be given to every Volunteer once they signed up for Peace Corps - maybe in their invitation packet or during their interview. It would provide advice on how to make it through Peace Corps and improve your quality of service, much like the A Few Minor Adjustments pamphlets Peace Corps has created and distributes each year. However, as I continued to collect questions and answers throughout my Peace Corps experience, I realized we needed more than a pamphlet and that people needed it before they even started interacting officially with Peace Corps. Being an Unofficial Peace Corps Volunteer Handbook allows us the freedom to do that and more:

• Help people interested in Peace Corps before and after they prepare, apply and serve
• Raise proceeds that can be given back to Peace Corps to fund projects worldwide
• Comment collectively on many areas of the Peace Corps experience as applicants, trainees, volunteers, returned volunteers and staff

It has been said that Peace Corps service starts when you become a Volunteer and ends with the rest of your life. This handbook can be an important part of that lifelong journey and community conversation. It will be an ever-changing handbook that grows with the organization, one that is updated every year by honest, reliable and knowledgeable PCVs and staff who want to help others enjoy years of happy, healthy and meaningful service. Peace Corps belongs to the world, to the millions of people whose lives it has changed, and this handbook is be part of that worldwide community. It starts the conversation with people who want to serve the world through Peace Corps and ends with people who have continued serving long after their 27 months are over.

In Dreams Awake

We can deny a lot of things, but I don’t think we can deny the fact that we can all become better. We can do a better job of living up to our ideals, living out our beliefs and being the kind of people we want other people to be. This is the central idea behind advancing humanity. It’s about all of us, collectively, being the best that we can be. We are already capable of it, we have everything we need to do it. It involves taking a breath, listening to something deep inside us, what we believe is most important in life, and then acting on that. It could be an idea you’ve always been afraid to turn into a reality, a dream that won’t go away, or maybe a feeling that what you spend most of our day doing just isn’t that important. Love and live without fear, live in your dreams awake, simply your life to only doing what you really believe is valuable. If you believe that serving other people is important, make that a priority in your job. Change your perspective. If you believe that kindness and love are important, be more helpful and give more easily. If you believe that integrity is valuable, be honest about who you are and what you think, especially when it’s difficult.

"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake."  Henry David Thoreau

Free Handbook Release

We have released the Unofficial Peace Corps Volunteer Handbook this week for open review in the Peace Corps community. It has been shared with close friends and Volunteers for several weeks, but we are very excited to see the thoughts of all our friends from around the world. As mentioned in the opening pages it is the purpose of this handbook to be physically in the hands of Volunteers around the world so we can all work together, write in it and make future editions even better. For the next month we will offer it as a PDF so we can make final improvements before it moves to paperback on Amazon.com this summer. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Very fun promotional video designed by

Definition of Success

One of my most vivid memories of preparing to leave for Peace Corps was when our trainers asked us to open up our handbooks and write down our definitions of success as Peace Corps Volunteers. I think we were given 5 to 10 minutes. I thought to myself then that I wanted more time. I wrote for as long as they let me and I have continued to write for two years. I still want more time.

I think that is the single most important question any Peace Corps Volunteer can ask themselves. What is success? What is happiness? How will you know you are successful? Everyone, likely with their best intentions, will tell you their answer. Friends. Family. Fellow Volunteers. Peace Corps Staff. Even dead people will tell you. Thoreau. Spiritual Icons. World Leaders. Irrelevant. Your own definition takes time, your heart, your service, and whole your life to write.

Greatness and Roots

I find that often my frustration lies not in what is happening, but in my own inability to react to it properly. This could mean my perspective, or more often my management of projects and activities. I want to be a kind and effective person, engaged in healthy and meaningful work. This means avoiding the easy trap of doing what is urgent but not valuable, or immediate but not lasting.

Before Peace Corps, all the way back to high school, my friends knew me to carry around my planner all the time. It changed shape over the years, but always accompanied me so I would be on task. I was effective at what I did in large part because of the amount of time I put into planning, organizing and prioritizing things. However over the course of my service here I've had the chance to live in a culture much more lenient about time, and this has been a great opportunity for me to learn about the differences between greatness and effectiveness.

If effectiveness is doing things right, greatness is doing the right things. It requires value judgment, vision and having a clear idea of why you do what you do. It requires that you ask yourself what the ultimate reason is behind it all? How does your life purpose live out through doing this thing? It might seem unreasonable at first, to ask yourself how buying this thing or filing out this form or sealing this deal helps you live out your life purpose, but I submit that it is of utmost importance to consider it. Either that or get to the end of your life and wonder what the point of it all was.

One of the greatest things I've learned here in Mongolia has been that, between all of the pleasure and the pain, we are all after a deep happiness in life. We pursue it through our relationships, our professions, our projects, and most of all through our day-to-day interactions with the people we bump into. It's beautiful in a small town to see people helping each other and truly not leaving anyone out in the cold. I have never heard of a homeless shelter, orphanage or retirement home in our province. They don't need them. People open their homes to their siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents and relatives year after year. It's very likely, in fact, that we 5 Peace Corps Volunteer are the only people living alone in this population of 50,000 people.

When speaking about my life in Peace Corps, I have often said to my friends and family that I spend most of my time just trying to be a good person. I try to treat every interaction, every choice, every moment, as a chance to make a good decision. This is a lot harder than I thought it would be. At first, I thought it meant showing up to work at exactly 9am and leaving at exactly 6pm. It doesn't. Then I thought it meant working really hard on projects and getting lots of money for proposals and seminars. That wasn't it either. That was my efficient mind trying to quantify what I am going through. When my mind opened up to the idea of quality instead, the whole situation changed. I have often thought about what Thoreau, "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." The difference between an effective project and a great project, or an effective person and a great person, is the difference between roots and branches.

It's still a daily challenge to do well and do good, but I think I'm getting better.

Consistency

"I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it. "  Thomas Jefferson

Consistency is key in life. In fitness, in projects, in raising children, in character, in leadership, in learning a new language, in sports, in everything. It doesn't matter how fancy things look one day a week, it's every day that matters. Do you workout once a week like crazy or exercise every day? Do you play basketball like crazy right before a tournament or do you practice every day? Excellence is not an act, it is a lifestyle. It isn't reasonable to expect greatness after a little work. It's craziness for me to think I can achieve any greatness in way except little by little, day by day, every day. My Peace Corps experience has demonstrated that to me like nothing else in my life.

I have to expect the same thing from myself as I do my students and my colleagues, daily effort in meaningful work. That is how projects get done, how Tunga is learning English, how I am completing work: stitch by stitch, word by word and activity after activity. There is no magic and no luck to it, success will come to those who work hardest for it often behind the scenes when no one is looking.

Published This Year

One of my dreams this year is to finish writing the Unofficial Peace Corps Volunteer Handbook. I have been writing for 3 years, covering everything from the application, to training, to making the most of your service. To my knowledge this would be the first book on Peace Corps which helps a Volunteer by answering questions and sharing advice throughout the entire process of service. I read and enjoyed "So You Want to Join the Peace Corps" but this handbook goes beyond an interest in Peace Corps, discussing the challenges that we all face as Volunteers and the lessons we've learned so that not everyone has to learn them the hard way.

I am fortunate to have a talented and wise team of people around me, including some of my best friends and the best Volunteers that I know, to share their advice and experiences. I'm not sure what the future of this handbook will be, it might make it's way into the Invitation packets or the digital shelves of Amazon.com, but whatever the case the goal will always be helping Peace Corps Volunteers to have a happier and more successful experience starting right from the very beginning. I am very excited and look forward to writing the next 10,000 words this year.