Two years ago, in August, 2013, I left my home, my friends, my family, my boyfriend, my job and my comfort zone to join the Peace Corps. Along with 60 other aspiring Americans of all shapes and sizes, I boarded a plane for Botswana. I was excited, eager, anxious, sad and terrified all at the same time, but I was ready to go. I had dreamed of being a Peace Corps Volunteer since I was 10 years old. At 10 I decided that once I graduated from University, I would join the Peace Corps right away. In a sense, even as a kid, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to help people. So little over a decade later, I submitted my application.
The premise of the Peace Corps is to send skilled American volunteers to countries in need around the world while also encouraging cross-cultural exchanges between Americans and host country nationals. As Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) we willingly leave our cozy and safe lives to go work and live in a strange country under potentially harsh conditions for 27 months. Also, as our title suggests, we’re VOLUNTEERS – so we don’t get paid. Joining the Peace Corps is often catagorized as “the toughest job you’ll ever love,” and that description is right on the money. It’s tough, but I love it.
For my service, I got assigned to Botswana as a Youth and HIV/AIDS Capacity Building Volunteer. Botswana is a small, rural, desert country in Southern Africa with a population of about two million people and is plagued with one of the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the world. Back in 2013, the count was 25 percent—one in four people had the virus. The damage? Catastrophic.
The first step I took in my service was training. I took a three-month crash course on everything I would need to know to survive my time in Botswana. In those three months, I learned A LOT but none of it came even close to what I would learn on my own over the next two years.
After completing my training, I swore in as an official Peace Corps volunteer and headed out to my new home, a very small village called Dutlwe. Population – 800. In Dutlwe, we have half a paved road, livestock roaming free everywhere, one elementary school, a lot of sand… and that’s about it. The nearest grocery store is two hours away. The nearest clinic is an hour away. The most common mode of transportation is a donkey cart. I love it. It’s home! Over the course of my service, I’ve learned how to adapt to lots of things. I’ve learned how to live without water or electricity. I’ve learned how to kill and skin an animal for meat. I’ve learned a new language. I’ve learned how to be very creative in a variety of different situations… and the list goes on. What I couldn’t get used to however was the unbalanced gender roles.
In Botswana, it often seems like the gender roles are set in stone. Men tend to the livestock and crops, while women take care of the home and children. Who deserves more respect? Men. Who matters more? Men. And what’s the bonus? OLD men. The elders. They reign supreme. As a PCV, I’m supposed to be patient, understanding and respectful of my new culture but as a tall, strong, independent, young woman, this was not easy for me. As a woman in Botswana, I always had to put men first. I had to serve men their food first. I had to sit on the floor so that men could take the chairs. I had to do all the cooking and cleaning. I could only wear skirts or dresses as a symbol of my femininity and I was nothing without a man in my life. These blatent examples of gender inequality coupled with the constant cat calls and sexual harrassment were a challenge for me, but what I found even harder was seeing the real life realities of what young Batswana girls have to face. As a PCV, I knew there was a light at the end of the tunnel for me. At the end of 27 months, I could leave. Unfortunately, this is not the case for Batswana women. This is their home and their culture and there’s no escape plan for them.
These troubling facts led me to undertake one of my favorite projects: a GLOW camp. GLOW stands for Girls Leading Our World. These camps focus on leadership, self-esteem, decision making, goal setting, HIV/AIDS education and much more. They are an excellent way to remove some at-risk kids from their daily struggles and introduce them to a positive, fun and interactive learning environment. At GLOW, the girls learn how special they are, how talented they are, how they matter and how they have the strength to take control of their own bodies and their own lives. Even though these concepts might seem like common knowledge to us Americans, they are practically unheard of to Batswana girls. It really shocked me at first, but after thinking about it and comparing my upbringing to theirs, it makes sense! As a kid, I grew up playing outside, learning from great teachers at awesome schools, eating yummy food, getting tons of hugs and kisses from my parents, eating cake and opening presents on my birthday and constantly updating what I wanted to be when I grew up. These girls have none of that. Playtime is limited when you have to take care of your family by yourself. Getting a good education is hard when the quality of schools is so low or if there’s not even a school in your village. Relying on crops in a desert environment with no stable income makes food in general hard to come by. Absent, deceased or negligent parents removes the entire idea of real familial love. Not knowing your own birthday means no cake or presents and all of this and more means never thinking of the future as more than tomorrow. Factoring in these living conditions, I was not at all surprised that most girls have low self-esteem or negative outlooks for the future. It broke my heart. Enter – GLOW Camp.
For my first GLOW Camp, I partnered with several other PCVs in my area and we brought together a collection of about 50 young girls from our respective village schools to the village of Takatokwane for their first trip away from home. During the camp, even though it was my goal to teach these girls how to be independent, safe, healthy, goal-oriented and happy, I ended up learning a lot about myself too. You know that phrase, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?” That’s what it felt like to work with these girls. Seeing how neglected they’ve been, how starved for love they are, how disrespected they’ve been, how little confidence they had in themselves and how strained their futures seemed, made me truly appreciate my life. Until I came to Botswana, I never really valued having two loving parents. I never appreciated my access to opportunities for a positive future. I never thought about what having access to good doctors and food meant and I never second guessed my own strength, independence, confidence or self-esteem.
At the beginning of the GLOW Camp, the girls didn’t know how to set a goal for themselves. They didn’t know what self-esteem was. They didn’t know about their own power and strength of being women and they didn’t know their own potential. After only a week of working with them, I felt so proud to see all of those things change. The girls were smiling, making friends, playing sports, talking about their futures, commenting on how beautiful they were and standing up just a little bit taller.
For a number of reasons, my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer has been rough. There have been a lot of ups and downs but through it all, I wouldn’t trade my time in Botswana for anything. In two years, separated from everyone and everything I held dear and abruptly confronted with more challenges and hardship than I could have imagined, I learned more about myself and the strength of others than I could ever have hoped for. If an HIV-positive 12 year old orphan girl in charge of her three younger siblings can smile and sing her heart out at a GLOW Camp talent show, then anything is possible. No matter where you’re from, or what you’ve been through, everyone deserves love and happiness and if you believe in yourself, you can accomplish anything. We are women, hear us ROAR!