I finally feel like a real volunteer

After a year of working 30-40 hour weeks (which is actually a lot for a Peace Corps Volunteer) I am starting to feel more like a “real” volunteer (whatever that means). Whereas some of my fellow volunteers had read 40 books within their first few months in site, I was busy waking up at 6 am and working eight hour days with Agua Pura and squeezing in other project when I could. Although I felt very useful working with Agua Pura it was often times stressful to deal with the local and international Rotary Clubs and doing administration and translating for an NGO is not exactly what I envisioned when I signed up for the Peace Corps. My boss with Peace Corps kept asking me to take on more leadership responsibility with the HIV initiatives and I kept telling him no because I was too busy already and couldn’t handle more work. The goal was always to work less and less with Agua Pura and more with HIV, but it never seemed to happen…until now! Starting in June I finally feel like I don’t need to work with Agua Pura as much. When this first happened I was a little bored, but then I got over it. The goal of a Peace Corps volunteer is to work themselves out of a job and I think that is almost what I have done. During my first year there were many administrative, educational and technical aspects of Agua Pura that needed to be addressed, so I worked a lot to get things up to speed and now that they are up to speed they don’t need me as much. It is a good feeling.

Now that I don’t work 8 hours a day with Agua Pura I have started working more on HIV projects, which is what I was actually interested in all along and it has been very fulfilling so far.