Resisting the urge (written Oct 5)

When asked how her Peace Corps experience has changed her, one of our second year Environment/Natural Resources volunteers responded with the following: "I've realized how patient we really are and the importance of patience in our work. Because for a lot of what we do, it's so much easier to just go and do it...go plant that live fence, write that grant, or just do things yourself. But that's not what we're here for. And even if it's going to take another week to get other people involved, it's worth it in the end, so communities have ownership over the projects." So true! What she was getting a there is one of the most challenging and frustrating, but at the same time, the most important aspects of a volunteer's service. It's a little hard to explain, but let me give you a brief example:

This morning I spent close to two hours helping a counterpart type up a two-page handwritten latter that would probably have taken me 10-15 minutes to type up and edit myself. Was it frustrating? Naturally. Did I have to actively fight the urge to take over and do it for him every minute of it? Absolutely. So why didn't I give in to that urge? Because over the course of those two hours, my counterpart learned how to do countless simple new things on the computer (formatting, using the SHIFT key instead of CAPS LOCK, how to use Word's dictionary, etc), got a valuable English grammar lesson, realized he was consistently spelling certain words wrong and learned how to spell them correctly, and improved his typing skills, just to name a few.

If I had typed up the letter for him, he would not have learned any of that. Down the road, those lessons learned and skills gained will be infinitely more valuable to him than an extra hour and a half on a Tuesday morning in October.