The Limits of Service

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.