One of the benefits to service in the Peace Corps is that you find yourself during your service in a region of the world that you probably would not have visited otherwise with the opportunity and some time to take advantage of those adventures all around. In addition to my official post of Kankalabe in Guinea, where I spent most of my service, I had the opportunity to visit about half of the country of Guinea. While the country was small, travel was difficult, and so there can be quite a bit of satisfaction in getting to a place that not many other Americans have seen or will ever see. Catching glimpses of tropical gardens and orchards; steep, rocky cliff faces; dramatic waterfalls; river crossings; seeing and hearing multiple language and ethnic changes in short distances were all possible within a few hundred kilometers from my post. Combining that travel with the visits to a half dozen other volunteers nearby seeing their homes and local friends in different towns and villages is the basis for many of my good memories about my time in Guinea.
While other of my fellow volunteers took advantage of the travel opportunities more than I did, I was able to visit Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana with 3 of my volunteer math teacher colleagues around the time of the millennium celebration. The adjustment to the conditions of life as a Peace Corps volunteer does make travel much more affordable, I can say, so having a big bank balance was not required for our two-week trip.
From having the opportunity to see new places, and hear "white man" in a dozen new languages, my time from that trip is filled with stories that I continue to remember and recount to others. In addition to narrowly avoiding a coup d'etat in Cote d'Ivoire just as we passed through the capital, to spending time relaxing on the beach in Ghana and enjoying (tiny) lobster pulled out of the Gulf of Guinea, we got to participate in the memorable turn of the millennium celebration in Accra. Numerous other little excitements and parties and new acquaintances filled our time there, and we learned a great deal about each other and our own host country with the opportunity to contrast a former British colony in West Africa to our experience of a former French colony. Even away from our posting site, being Peace Corps volunteers opened doors for us into people's lives that we met, and garnered the occasional good deed at times when they were most welcome. [ad name="Peace Corps In Line Banner"] We took the opportunity to distract ourselves from the Christmas holiday period and get immersed into the hopeful new year in a culture different from our own. With all the traveling I have done in my life, these few times away from Guinea during my time as a volunteer were some of the most enlightening.
Tragically, while returning to our posts following that trip, two of my friends and fellow volunteers, Justin Bhansali and Jesse Thyne were killed in a car accident. We who knew them continue to remember and serve others in honor of their sacrifice.
This brings up a final point for this article about life in the Peace Corps. There are risks involved. Not the same ones that most Americans might stereotypically assume (like disease, crime, and civil unrest that are usually very low risks, sometimes even lower than certain American communities), as my story above outlines a risk we all face day to day in the United States, but nevertheless they exist. At the time of writing this article, 273 Peace Corps volunteers have died in service to their country out of a total of about 180,000 volunteers since 1961, most of whom served for two years. In all, the risks are about 2-3 times greater than living a mundane life in the United States. The risks are, I think, understood by the volunteers themselves, and of course, are faced daily by the people who continue to live in the host countries. And, those risks are small compared to the benefit and necessity of the work of the Peace Corps around the world, and should be supported by Americans for furtherance of that work.
There is a documentary movie focused on the lives of Jesse Thyne and Amadou Diallo.