By Admin1 (admin) on Tuesday, July 03, 2001 - 9:03 pm: Edit Post |
Maison Monghidi, RPCV Gabon
Maison Monghidi, RPCV Gabon
For most, even those who went abroad in middle age or after retirement, their Peace Corps years marked a seminal life experience. It was the moment when each of them spun out from a known center of the earth and touched another. They lived at the touchpoints, immersed in the struggle to understand language and custom, how things worked, what they meant, all the while witnessing their own behavior and the values they took for granted reflected back to them as curiosities.
Most volunteers returned to the United States and continued their lives with mainstream American pursuits. They take care of their families, they work and play and organize, own cars and lots of other things. They eat well--every day.
But there is a profound difference. The returned volunteers know, in some deep place in their consciousness, that there is another center, another definition of life, another way. Much like immigrants, they live with the complexity and the richness of another vision, and they know that they will never again see with only one.
--Geraldine Kennedy