The Foreign Service Journal, October 2008

Without a Net Beyond language and culture, I picked up regional history, economics and geography on the job. I also learned how to use public transportation in Central Asia (no mean feat for a suburban boy from Wisconsin), how to haggle when shopping, and more than I ever wanted to know about pit toilets. In sum, I learned to live over- seas “without a net,” which I can say really makes me appreciate the administrative support we get as Foreign Service members. By working and living in the local communities, with no embassy buffer against local red tape and suspicious officials, Peace Corps Volunteers develop the patience needed to work overseas without a continuous nervous breakdown. For Americans, accustomed to easy access to almost everything 24 hours a day, patience may not be a virtue. But in the small towns many volunteers inhab- it, things can move at a glacial pace. One of my Peace Corps colleagues never left the house without two items: a bag, in case he found some- thing that he wanted to buy (inventories fluctuated wild- ly at the bazaar) and a novel, for the inevitable wait he’d encounter at some time during the day. I remember one instance of waiting four hours to get our money when we went to collect our monthly stipends at the local bank — which, even by Uzbek standards, was a bit long. Hand in hand with the patience one develops in such situations comes a sense of what can reasonably be accomplished in a day — and if you guessed that it was a process of always lowering the bar, you’d be right. For me (and, I suspect, for other Returned Peace Corps Volunteers), my job as an English teacher at Gulistan State University represented a fairly small por- tion of my overall Peace Corps experience. But it pre- pared me well for life as an FSO. After a year of (seem- ingly) hundreds of students dropping by every day to ask me questions, the dubious claims to have finished home- work but forgotten the documentation at home, and the constant struggle to get stuff done in spite of my imperfect language skills, working on the visa line felt like home. F O C U S O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 37