|
|
About three years ago I decided to join the Peace Corps. It offered me a position teaching English in Madagascar, which I took. Some of my friends and relatives thought I was jumping off a cliff. Some thought I was devoting the next two years of my life to a higher calling. Some just thought it was a pretty cool idea.
A few people told me, “I always wanted to do that.” Some said, “I’ve been curious about that, but I just …” then let the thought trail off.
I used to say the same thing. In the late 1990s, a college friend became a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay. At the time I didn’t ever see myself in the Peace Corps.
It was too crazy, too much to handle.
I didn’t speak much Spanish, but in 2001 I decided to visit my friend. I saw how volunteers lived. Long bus rides with breakdowns. Language barriers. Lots of kids, cows and chickens in your yard.
When the visit ended, I was pretty sure the Peace Corps wasn’t for me. Living in a small town where almost no one speaks English and you have no friends? Odd bugs and diseases? Unadulterated heat? Hmmm. Maybe not.
During the next year, skeptical as I was, the idea of volunteering began to click.
At the end of high school, when everyone wrote a sentence in the school paper about their plans, I wrote, “To travel the world and write a book about it.” That, roughly, remains my goal. I’d been a newspaper reporter for six years, including four in Cincinnati, but never was able to live overseas and get to know a foreign country, its language and its people.
How else was I going to make the leap overseas? I didn’t see any other options. Africa was intimidating, but during my 2001 visit I traveled alone in Peru for a month with almost non-existent Spanish. How much tougher than that could the Peace Corps be? I could always come home.
In 2002 I turned in the application that began the yearlong process to make me a volunteer. I left in June 2003, finished my service in July 2005 and returned to Cincinnati in November.
I’ve had a lot of time to think about how I got to where I am. Long conversations with friends lead me to wonder a lot about how people decide to change their lives — to make bold or risky decisions — when, on the surface, they don’t have to.
How do people decide to become a home redeveloper or entrepreneur or to have radical surgery? I, along with friend and fellow writer Chris Kemp, asked Brian Mueller, Candy Federl and Toni Lynch why they’re doing these things.
— DOUG TRAPP
This article appears in Jan 4-10, 2006.