I’m not sure how to best say this, so, no frills, here it is: I have decided to end my service with the Peace Corps.
Some may be shocked, while others may have seen this coming long before even I did. I promise you that I never saw myself quitting before my 27 months of service were up. If you had asked me if I’d even consider ending my service early before I came, I would have scoffed at the idea. I had never seen myself as a failure and, to me, quitting was failing. But, if there’s one thing I’ve learned for certain these past 12 months, it’s that you don’t get to plan your life or your experiences and, sometimes, quitting is the hardest and the right choice.
You can imagine your future down to the minute details. You can obsessively prepare for it. You can do your damnedest to make it work out the way you want it to. But, in the end, that’s not how life works. Life happens to you. And, after it happens, your agency exists in taking that experience and doing with it the best you can.
My past year in Ethiopia—with all its beauty and frustration and pain—happened to me. For the past year, the best thing for me was to stay and grow and learn and work through it all. I found value in the struggle and I continued to grow in ways that I didn’t imagine possible for a 23 year-old.
But now, the best thing for me is to say goodbye. I cannot tell you precisely when that shift happened—when it stopped empowering me to change for the better. I’m sure it was gradual until impact. But I can tell you that, for certain, it is time for me to say a difficult farewell to my students, colleagues, and friends and come home, heal, and strike out on a new path.
My reason for leaving consists of a kind of push and a pull—a push for leaving Ethiopia and a pull to come home. The pull is the simple part. The strongest pull comes from my family and friends. The inability to stay connected and to be with the people whom I define myself by has been an incredible challenge—one that makes my day-to-day difficulties all the more difficult. Anyone who has been far away from their family and friends knows the unbelievable strain that comes from not being a part of the daily lives of the ones you love, and I feel that pull to come back home every single day.
Another pull homeward is my career path. During my time here in Ethiopia, the happiest, most connected, and most fulfilled I’ve felt is when I’m working with my students. I’ve found that my heart is in education. And, while my English clubs and work with my students has been the most rewarding of my time here, my Peace Corps program in combination with the culture at government schools severely limits the time and the extent to which I can work with my students. I spend the majority of my time trying to get teachers to work with me and students to come consistently. Last semester, I was able to hold English Club at my government primary school only three times, including one impromptu session where I just opened my door and random kids came from their teacher-less classrooms to practice the alphabet. Not once did another teacher come to work with me or the students.
Working here is so much more than your time in the classroom. I would argue that, while it may seem like teaching is our main job, in actuality, we’re spending 85% of our time living and integrating into our communities. And while integrating into my community has been a great if incredibly challenging experience, I have so much more to give to my work and I can’t do that here. I’m constantly frustrated in my efforts to create and implement more programs, and I’ve found myself fantasizing about a 50+ hour work-week, where I see my students every single day and I’m exhausted and content by the weekend. My teaching style, work ethic, and need for mutually beneficial teamwork is much better suited for an American work environment.
This brings us to the more complicated of my reasons for leaving: the push.
I wish I could break “the push” down into a ton of little lists: A list of verbal, physical, and sexual harassment and assault, an inventory of people who love and respect me versus people who see and treat me as non-human or as a source for things, a collection of stories about day-to-day frustrations, programming failures, or illnesses. But, as I sit here and try to chart my pushes, I feel that they’re not quite enough—they’re not the whole story. It’s not so much these constant difficulties alone—it’s what I could do with them last year and what I don’t believe I can do with them for another year.
I believe that even the most traumatic experiences aren’t purely evil, aren’t purely damaging. Using my agency and the support of my friends, family, and community, I can take them and turn them into something positive. Maybe that awful experience could make me a better, stronger, and more understanding person. Maybe it could inspire me to work with others who have experienced similar trauma. Or maybe it’ll just keep me from putting myself in the same situation ever again. But the bottom line is, I get to decide what the outcome is for me, and I can make the most awful experience a little bit positive.
That being said, there comes a point when the trauma and the constant strain are too much. There comes a point when you get too tired to make another assault a learning and empowering experience. There comes a point when the more challenging path is not the right path: when choosing your health and well-being is more important than reaching the golden number of 27 months. This is, in a nutshell, my push: self-care.
All of this being said, I have to admit that I will never be 100% sure that coming home is the fail-safe, perfectly right-for-me decision. Life and experiences and people are too complicated and inconsistent for certainty. I know that I’m leaving things behind. I know that a part of my heart will break when I tell my students I won’t be at school next fall. I know it’s going to hurt when my friendships transform from faces to Facebook messages. But, I also know the relief I will feel living again in my own culture, with all its complications, nuance, and diversity. I know the true feeling of contentment at the end of a long and hard day of doing precisely the work I love. And I know how much joy I will feel being able to touch, hug, and properly annoy my family and friends with affection once again.
It’s not simple or straightforward. And it sure as hell isn’t easy. But, for me, quitting is the right choice. And it is from my struggle in Ethiopia that I cultivated the strength to make this choice.
As I prepare to leave, I can’t help but be thankful for everything Ethiopia has given me. Through all of the struggles, I know I’ve become a more loving, more understanding person. Through all of the adventure, I know I’ve become a more open, more daring woman. Through all of the beauty, I’ve found more appreciation for life and all that I’m blessed with. This experience has, in all honesty, changed me for the better. I can only hope that I’ve made some little bit of my own impact on my community, and that someone learned something from the English teacher with the long hair and funny accent.
I will be forever grateful to the incredible people that made this challenging year possible, and I hope that you know how important, well-loved, and treasured you are.
All my love and gratitude,
Theresa
Theresa in Ethiopia 