Hello and welcome to the best place to figure out what exactly it is that I'm doing for the next 27 months. I really can't say how often I'll update, but I have enough people to keep in the loop that it was either start a blog or start a weekly email newsletter for my family.
I leave in 1 week! January 2nd, I make my way to the LAX Crowne Plaza hotel to meet the other volunteers headed for Thailand, we spend a day doing paperwork and getting geared up, then on January 3rd I fly out of LAX with the entirety of group 131 to start Pre-Service Training (PST)-- 3 months of intensive language and technical training to prepare us for our 2-year postings at our final site. I do not know where I'm placed for my actual assignment, and I should know around March. If you'd like to know exactly what I'll be doing (although I don't entirely know myself), and a little bit about why I applied to work in Thailand, keep reading. If you're rolling your eyes at my blogging decision, I understand, me too, feel free to leave.
So! I am a Youth in Development (YinD) volunteer, which basically means I'll be doing life skills/leadership/health/English education with youth at a few different schools. I joined this sector because it is my long-term goal to work in direct service in nonprofit, especially with immigrant and incarcerated youth. I won't be working with either of those demographics in the Peace Corps (although I may have stateless or immigrant kids if I'm placed near a border or in an ethnic minority community), but I will be gaining valuable experience working directly with youth and community development in ways that I haven't been able to access here.
I applied to work in Thailand for a few reasons: I studied abroad there and enjoyed my experience, and made some valuable friends and connections in that region (shout out to the director of my program at CMU who wrote me a recommendation). I also already speak a minimal amount of Thai, which I figured would be helpful and would give me a little bit of a leg-up, application wise. I also really love the ecology of Thailand and the surrounding countries, and I'm excited to be able to explore nature a little more and skip winter for 2 years. Essentially, I applied because Thailand is somewhere I am already fairly comfortable (although I have no doubt I have much to learn and a lot of anxiety ahead), I thought my experience there would help me be more effective as a volunteer, and because I thought I would be more qualified to work there in the eyes of the Peace Corps.
I am not: going to "fix" my community or out of a misguided belief that I know best and to assert my own beliefs and opinions over my Thai counterparts. I am not going to "find myself" or because I am unsatisfied with my life in the US and need to find fulfillment through the faux-spiritualism that is so common in (white, western) foreigners in Thailand. I am doing my absolute best to avoid anything resembling a white savior complex and I gave this a lot of agonizing thought (shout out to all of my friends in New York and my mom for listening to me talk about this for literal hours) before I committed to it. I was called out by a friend for calling Thailand a "second home" and it was one of the (many many) moments when I remembered that I'm still learning and working on unlearning things, so I'm making an extra effort not to do anything a white person with dreadlocks would do. I'm not even going because I don't know what I'm doing with my life and I'm figuring two years in another country will give me time to work that out. I am going with the hope of learning more about participatory development, expanding my knowledge of a second language, and to gain real-world experience in the field I hope to work in while avoiding having to get an unpaid internship that I can't afford to take (we are paid a stipend- the moniker "volunteer" is slightly misleading).
My ultimate goal for my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) is to be the most effective volunteer I can be, in whatever capacity my community needs. I will be in a community that requested a foreign volunteer, and it will be my job to listen to and assess their needs and goals for me as a volunteer in their community. At worst, I hope to be a neutral impact. At best, I hope to help my community in the capacity they need and create sustainable change- no matter how subtle it may be. I know that the work ahead may be slow, frustrating, and confusing, but I'm (hopefully) prepared for the challenge.
I will be updating from time to time, sometimes with personal stuff, but I'm hoping to write from a more technical perspective as a way of keeping track of what I'm learning during my training and subsequent site placement. I haven't figured out contact info yet, but I should have internet/data access most of the time so you can do literally anything but text me after Jan 3rd. So uhhh... thanks for making it this far into my intro-to-PCV-Kath, see you later!
