I’ve had too much coffee, I should admit that first and foremost. It’s easy to overdo it, however, when the first opportunity for strong, black, french-pressed coffee presents itself after a 6-month hiatus. I won’t pretend to have been 6 months coffee-sober.. ohhhh no… but the appeal of drip coffee over Moroccan espresso (often burnt) in its myriad forms is indisputable. Hence… overindulgence.

I recently inherited medium-roast Colombian coffee from a volunteer about to finish his service, and had (inexplicably) forgotten about it until tonight. Upon the rediscovery of my good fortune and excellent taste in volunteer friends (and, by extension, their excellent tastes in coffee) I made up for lost time with around 4 cups of the black stuff within, say… an hour?… and on as empty a stomach as possible in my village of neighbor ladies (read: not that empty, but still). In short- I’m pretty high on caffeine, which might explain why I’ve digressed before even beginning what I purported to write about- the book I just started and am already half-way through.

Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains about Dr. Paul Farmer. I know… BIG shocker… Peace Corps community health volunteer reading about the modern hero of public health as it concerns the most marginalized and under-served populations of the world. Just call me a Renaissance woman, what with my stark divergence from my job in my reading material. Additionally, we can ignore that i’m wayyyy ahead of the curve in finding this obscure little biography, quite esoteric, perhaps you’ve heard of it…. somewhere? I’d really rather not brag… so we’ll just move on. Feel free to be impressed, however.

My two aforementioned subjects, coffee and Dr. Farmer, converged tonight to open my eyes to something I haven’t been appreciating enough lately- the people around me (Dr. Farmer moreso than the coffee, though the latter definitely drove my marathon-reading of the book about the former). See, we have a week of meetings come up, called “in-service training”, which will mark 8 months in-country and 6 months as volunteers for my training group. It feels like a big milestone… but I find myself balking at that word: milestone. It implies having gotten somewhere… accomplished something… yet here I am having no concrete work or projects to my name, simply sitting on carpets around my town, drinking tea and chatting about the weather. Feeling unproductive and slightly lost… 0r perhaps more appropriately apprehensive that my ideas and plans will never come to fruition, I’ve felt myself withdraw slightly from my community in these days leading up to training. “I’ll kick start a super-productive routine… right after training” I say… or “I’ll have answers to this or that after training, which are the keys to moving forward.” I feel like I owe something to my neighbors by now, but I’m still just drinking their tea and saying “inshallah” (hopefully) after every phrase in the future tense.

But then, fueled by my absurd caffeine high and the lack of any outlet beside starting a new book, I opened Mountains Beyond Mountains, and found this quote from Farmer on page 25:

“You can’t sympathize with the staff too much, or you risk not sympathizing with the patients”

(He was referring to a nurse complaining to him that the destitute throng of patients waiting to see him in his rural Haitian clinic refused to listen, in their states of discomfort and distress, to her request for them to sit down).

There it is, in context, for you… but I took something more broad from it: an interesting and admirable perspective. Here is a man, Ph.D./M.D. from Harvard and ensconsed in the tricky balance among health care, politics and social work, who is able to function above the labyrinth of bureaucracy, expectation and achievement therein, in order to prioritize the least-glamorous, least-resume padding aspect of it all- human relationships.

Okay, so obviously Dr. Farmer is a saint-superhero hybrid, and thus dangersou territory to start drawing any kind of parallels with, so I wont. But, my point is this:

At least in the modern Peace Corps, any honest volunteer is going to tell you that they have a lot to gain, professionally and personally, from completing a 2 year service here. I think it’s definitely safe to say we all will walk away from our time here having gotten more than we gave. The  intangible benefits are innumberable, but the bureaucratic, professional ones are not; if we perform well here, it will help us accomplish our goals in the future. That’s the truth. Long after we’ve left our villages, however, life HERE will continue much the same. We’re only here for 2 years, and we have to learn the language before we can work… so that’s really not a whole lot of time to do something impressive. Crap! Better Hurry!

But that’s when I start “sympathizing too much with the staff”. Not seeing why I’m meant to be here. This isn’t a 2 year “to do” list, people aren’t pawns in some strategy to impress my boss… tea time isn’t irrelevant.

Our bosses here recognize this, telling us from the start that we won’t have “accomplished” anything in our first 6 months and that that’s okay. They get it… we have to build a relationship with our community if we’re going to do anything worthwhile or productive (from the point of view of the people served, at least). Being coughed straight out of the highly-structured, competition-driven, institutionalized atmosphere of most college campuses, however, the majority of us need to be humbled and reminded of that… a lot. We want “A’s” in community development, but that graded scale doesn’t exist here. We have to define “work” for ourselves and so far it’s a novel concept.  Novel, and scary in it’s lack of structure and guaranteed outcomes.

Americans, excellent capitalists, want to see tangible products and results from our work. We need them in order  to progress, succeed. That work ethic makes us great, but here we have to see that genuine investment in relationships with people is valuable work, even if it won’t go on a resume and get us that future job with the State Department or a Nonprofit.

“Competitive Volunteerism” doesn’t make sense. Or… more realistically, it shouldn’t make sense. Though… we are conditioned to do it. Food for thought.

I write this as a reminder to myself, above all. I don’t want to lose sight of the forest for the trees, as the saying goes, and I think it takes reading about the extremely compassionate and humble motivations of someone so much more impressive and talented than myself to bring me back to the task at hand, be it project development or tea time. Plus, there’s a high likelihood of productivity of SOME kind, what with all this coffee around… even if it’s only savagely tearing through a library of biographies.

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