Why Am I Here?

In nine days, I will be flying to Philadelphia to join the other fifty-odd members of my training group. Two days later we'll depart on the first leg of the 16 hour journey to Almaty, Kazakhstan. The last few weeks have been so jammed with traveling, shopping, packing, planning, and the Cyrillic alphabet (Я говорю по-русски? ...нет.) that I've found it easy to lose focus on the things that brought me to this place to begin with.

When I was five years old, my mom took me to the Met when we were visiting my aunt in New York. In the gift shop, there was a children's atlas that I decided really wanted, but she didn't have the cash for both the atlas and the subway fare home, and it was pouring rain. I decided to walk it anyway and I still have the dog-eared atlas. And I'm still fascinated with geography, foreign cultures, and obscure locales.

I started considering Peace Corps last summer, but I really can't pinpoint when I truly began to take it seriously. I was hoping for a sudden epiphany that would elucidate my thoughts, but instead I came to a very gradual realization that this is what I wanted to do. In truth, I find many aspects of Peace Corps to be very appealing. Over four years of college I took advantage of free time to travel and experience life abroad and as time went on, I wanted to explore off the beaten path more and more. PC then, is the motherlode: all I could ask for and more.

That isn't to say that adventure is the main reason why I am leaving, nor do I have fanciful expectations of what life will be like, but it was the first thing to catch my eye. What really drew me in was what I learned about myself when I contrasted the Peace Corps with the standard corporate recruiting fare. I don't want to end up in an office in New York or Boston for forty years and wonder if it could have been different. I'll probably make my way to that scene soon enough, but I'm 22. I'm young, I'm able, I'm willing, and I've decided that the best way to lay a solid foundation for my adult life is to serve abroad for 27 months, help people in whatever small ways I can, and when I return home, benefit from the experience in practical terms and in general life terms.

All of us in the Peace Corps are leaving a lot on the table, yet we've chosen this path nonetheless. I can't wait to get going.