By Judith L. Brown
Thirty years ago this month I became an R.P.C.V.—a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer.
I had thought off and on about serving in the Peace Corps ever since I had been listening to the radio one morning in March 1961, when I was 8 and had heard President Kennedy announce its founding. President Kennedy inspired me in a number of ways, that day being one of them. At the time I thought, “Maybe some day I’ll join the Peace Corps.”
It hadn’t been an overriding passion all the years between when I was 8 and when I was graduating from college, but it had been an idea I had returned to now and again. And then sometime in the fall of my senior year as an undergraduate, I walked into the student union and there they were: Peace Corps recruiters.
I was getting a bachelor’s degree in chemistry but would be doing graduate work in economics. I was also bone weary of the student grind, and liked the idea of a break before starting graduate school. The Peace Corps fit right into that opening in my life. I could teach chemistry (and math) for a couple of years before putting chemistry aside. It was an opportunity not just to see but to experience some part of the world I might otherwise never get to know. I decided to do it.
In June 1974, barely two weeks after graduating from college, I joined 65 other new recruits at JFK airport in New York City and boarded a Pan Am flight for Nairobi. Two and a half months later, after having spent one month learning Swahili and another month practice teaching, I was posted to a government high school in the little village of Kijabe, perched about two-thirds of the way up the Rift Valley escarpment and overlooking the valley’s floor.
The two years flew by. I returned home, went to graduate school, fell in love for keeps, and went about building a family and a career. Over the years, though, I found experiences and impressions and insights from those two years kept coming back to me. After about 10 or 15 years, other friends who had been in Kenya too would quietly ask, “Do you find that those two years have affected you beyond anything you would ever have expected?” I did find that.
Life in a Kenyan village changed the way I think about being a neighbor. Where I grew up, neighbors were people you barely knew. You would say hello over the backyard fence if you both happened to be hanging laundry on the clothesline at the same time. The relationship did not extend much beyond that.
In Kenya, your neighbor was someone with whom you had a well defined relationship, whether you wanted to or not. If you had something your neighbor needed, you were expected to give willingly, whether it was the loan of your only flashlight (which would not be returned until you asked to borrow it back), help searching for stray chickens, or 20 shillings (which would not be paid back). You also gladly provided a meal whenever your neighbor dropped in at mealtime, and on Sunday afternoons you visited one another.
It felt intrusive at first, but I grew to like it. Ever since, I’ve tried to get to know my neighbors as more than just the people across the fence.
I also became more aware of the many things we take for granted here. At the end of each term, students would quietly drop by my office and thank me for being their teacher. Never, in all my years of being a student, had it ever occurred to me to thank someone for teaching me. I took my education for granted.
It was eye-opening to live in a country where the press was not free, and in a one-party state where elections were not contested. Flawed and in need of improvement as our own government is — and let us never cease trying to improve it — I never forget that it could be a lot worse.
I got to climb Mount Kilimanjaro while it still had glaciers. My 17-year-old son lamented recently that he would probably never get to see the snows of Kilimanjaro. We are both sad about that.
I hope, however, that my son and his generation will find their own mountains to climb and their own eye-opening adventures to pursue.
* Judith L. Brown is an economist and director of the Idaho Center on Budget and Tax Policy. She lives in Moscow with her family and can be reached at jlbrown@turbonet.com.