One of the
challenges I’ve found as a Peace Corps Volunteer is balancing requests with
reality. I get asked to fund graduations,
install new toilets, and pay for new greenhouses. It’s difficult to say no, even when the
requests are way out of my league. Many
an NGO has rolled in, dropped some money or technology, and rolled out
again. There’s the perception that, as a
gringa, I have a lot of money to throw around.
It’s hard to explain that I’m just a human resource and find the sweet
spot between soliciting community funds and paying for things myself. Luckily, a lot of the things I do are
cheap.
Then there are other times when
folks ask me for things and I just don’t feel like it. Today, I was approached by a nurse from our
health post who is working on her master’s.
Her professor gave her an article to read in English. She approached me and asked me to translate
it for her. The nurse handed me a many
paged document titled, “A Treatise on Collective Unconsciousness” or something
equally obtuse. I skimmed the first few
paragraphs and immediately glazed over at the liberal sprinkling of five-dollar
words. Translating the document would
have taken me several hours that I’m sure I wouldn’t have enjoyed. So I said that I wasn’t confident that I
could do a good translation of that vocabulary.
It’s a half-truth, but I mostly didn’t want to do it.
I felt guilty after saying
no. I’m supposed to be here to serve and
do what my community asks me to do. But
I also have to be careful how I spread out my time and resources. There are volunteers who have been sucked
into only teaching English in schools or spending all their money on
projects. I don’t want to be known as
the girl that translates documents. It
sucks because I want to help, but there’s a certain amount of selfishness that
has to enter into the equation. I just
came back from an extended vacation and don’t have a lot of projects at the
moment, so it makes me feel like a super-jerk to say no. We’ll see if the guilt holds as I’m here
more.
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