Friendship

Friendship can be one of the most important supports anyone can have at their disposal. In both corps, you could be moving away from friends and familiarity. In Peace Corps, it’s one of those crucial factors for sanity.

Depending on the size of your Peace Corps country, you could eventually meet all the PCVs currently serving or else you’ll only know and visit those in your district. In bigger Peace Corps countries, Because of public transportation and rough terrain, visiting your district peers might still take a travel time of at least two hours. Friends in Peace Corps are especially important because, of all the people who will try to say “I understand what you’re going through” when you relate your difficulties, only those serving in the same country can really say it and mean it. And when you feel triumphant, only those PCVs can fully appreciate why. In so many ways, Peace Corps takes you back to such basic challenges (fetching water, working by candlelight, waking up to 36-degree rooms in winter, pee buckets) that all pretenses in the form of social rules are dropped: personal cleanliness, food rules, &c.

Peace Corps-Lesotho’s last several country directors and staff understood that, so they set up systems in which other PCVs act as security point people (always let your security person know where you are, even if you’re supposed to be on-site and are sneaking off), peer support for new PCVs and lots of peer-to-peer sessions during pre-service training.

If your Peace Corps class is particularly small, don’t feel distressed if you don’t find someone to connect with. There’s a lot of pressure from the very beginning, during Peace Corps staging, and I remember when I was split into my sector (we had three sectors in our class), I was thinking, wait–these are the people i’m being told I’ll need to depend on for the next two years? That’s it? Although it may not always seem like it, there will eventually be ample opportunity to meet many other PCVs both during and after training. If you don’t buddy up with someone, it’s really not the end.

Many people who are AmeriCorps Vistas, on the other hand, tend to stay in the area they’re from. For those who haven’t, they either want a change of scenery or are using AmeriCorps as an opportunity to relocate to the city they want. For some people, they move where their significant other will be, and AmeriCorps provides a one-year guarantee of job stability in the service sector. More likely than not, AmeriCorps volunteers will already know someone in the city they’re moving to. In some places, AmeriCorps volunteers end up hanging out together. For those who neither know anyone nor hang out with other AmeriCorps volunteers, they often meet friends through the workplace, their living arrangements or by volunteering with various groups that share their values and interests. But as far as I can tell, friends are very important, but not necessarily as vital as in Peace Corps. Pre-service orientation is far shorter than pre-service training, and although Vistas often enjoy one another’s company, three days is not necessarily enough time to cement permanent friendships, especially when there are 31 other people to meet.

Of course, the disadvantage of having to rely so much on friendship as the most immediate support structure is the rumor mill. Nothing is safe, and even if you don’t reveal anything, PCVs tend to make uncannily correct guesses about you. Everyone is friendly, but don’t forget there are always going to be rumors, and you’re going to get sucked into it. You will be the subject of deep analysis, and you will speculate about others as well. It’s not really a matter of being gossips as much as it is that when everyone’s situations are different and their friends on-site will always be blank faces to other PCVs, the only people everyone has in common is every other PCV. You will always have someone in your business; rumors are news where there is no Facebook, Twitter, email, reliable phone connections, parties and events to meet new people. Nobody indulges in it because they have bad taste but because everyone’s so isolated that they’re all necessarily concerned or curious about one another.

Although I don’t get to chat with my CTC Project friends too often, it’s always a party when we have a CTC Vista Project webinar training. We all enter the web conference and start going crazy on the chat feature, sharing jokes (most of them very corny) and speculating on recent news. As geeky as it sounds, it’s all a lot of digital fun. Ultimately, although we don’t get much time with one another, we all still hold those connections we made during orientation, and any CTC Vista in my class is welcome to couch-surf at my apartment anytime, just as I would be welcome at theirs.