Time, work weeks and structure

One thing I have encountered in both Peace Corps and CTC Vista services is a lack of structure that can affect how time is spent. As I have mentioned before, lack of structure is not necessarily a bad thing. During interviewing, Peace Corps recruiters are scouring your responses for signs of a self-starter.

Within the time I’ve been in both corps, I’ve realized where being a self-starter really works to one’s benefit and where it truly isn’t enough. If you’ve been warned that your role will be fairly unstructured ahead of time (*ahem* Peace Corps), then it’s not a big deal when you get to site. There are days where you’ll be out in the field talking to government officials, visiting your neighbors and entire days where you’ll be curled up with a good book, making appearances only when nature calls.

At first, this can seem like a rather unproductive way to spend your time in-country. But really, the heart of any successful and sustainable project is understanding the community’s capabilities and needs. This takes a good amount of time–anywhere from six months to a year–to really understand. And once that happens, you’ve got your work cut out for you.

On the other hand, with CTC Vista, I think it’s more luck of the draw. It’s a question of whether your organization has ever had anyone else in your particular CTC role, how big the organization is, and how much experience they’ve had in general with CTC Vistas.  If your organization is extremely small or has had a previous CTC Vista, chances are that you’ll have a fair amount of structure to your role. If it’s a bigger org or if the org doesn’t have much experience with CTC Vistas, then it’s very likely that your org doesn’t quite know what to do with you.

In both cases, being a self-starter is very important because you can invent your own activities. However, if you are in the latter situation, at some point the projects you initiate will come to an end, a standstill, or taper off, and that’s when you may have trouble. Since being a self-starter is very much like being a community organizer when it comes to sustainable projects, they aren’t necessarily easy to come by. When one project ends, another one doesn’t just appear; good ideas aren’t a dime a dozen. You start scrambling to fill your hours. This is a shortfall of the Vista role.

AmeriCorps VISTA seems to share many of the goals of Peace Corps on a domestic level, and the closest that the government could probably mimic this without breaking any labor laws was assigning Vistas to 40 hours a week. However, in situations that lack structure, this can be too much. Being a self-starter works out well where the individual isn’t constrained by a particular structure. The expectation is an oxymoron: To be able to work without structure when there is a very defined time structure that all your work must fall within.

Not being able to fill up eight hours a day, 40 hours a week with productivity can cause a lot of anxiety and guilt, regardless of whatever you’ve done so far as a CTC Vista. Worse than that, others may pick up on your relative lack of work and begin to assign inappropriate tasks instead of working with you to create relevant ones. This can cause a feeling of incompetency, and if this should happen, the best thing to do would be to approach your supervisor. Acknowledge that although everyone’s busy greasing the wheels of the organization, there should be serious and critical consideration for what your role is rather than being tossed quick-fix solutions that may work out worse in the long run.  It sucks to be given a project you can’t bolster with your skills just because others see you have the time to spend on it.