This week, I will be traveling to Lima for the Peru 12 Close of Service (COS) conference. This is a time when all of the volunteers who arrived to Peru with me in September, 2008, come together to reflect on the experiences that they have had over the past two years, and to prepare for re-adjusting to a ‘normal’ life back home. This is a rather surreal experience, if anything, because in two weeks it will have been two years since I set foot on American soil (or set foot anywhere outside of Peru for that matter). At the same time, I don’t believe I feel the same angst about starting over back home as other volunteers do, mostly because I am applying to stay for a third year of service in Lima, and so the next step, assuming I get the job, is a comparatively easy one.
Entering these final months of service in my community has also caused me to spend a significant amount of time reflecting on what exactly it is that I have been doing here in Peru for these past two years. Have I made any impact? Was it worth it for myself personally? These are hard questions to answer. Measuring the impact I’ve had here is difficult if not impossible just because of the nature of development work itself. It’s almost impossible to say with any degree of certainty if any of the work I’ve done is at all worthwhile, a difficult reality to face. And as for myself personally… well, I always have a hard time looking back and evaluating how I have grown and changed. As I develop a person, these developments become internalized and then it’s hard to say when and why I became the person I am. I’ve taken up journaling as a way to try to keep track of this better, but at the present I am just left with a faint optimism that, yes, I have grown from this experience, although the growth might not present itself until I am back home trying to re-adjust to my old life again.
Finally, with just a few months to go, I’ve become mildly anxious about the projects I have been working on. Although from a certain perspective, it seems as though I’ve been a fairly successful volunteer, I still look back and have a hard time pinpointing exactly what I’ve done. My hope is that I’ve done just enough… that is to say just enough to get the projects started and not so much that they are dependent on my presence to continue. I think that is ultimately the goal of good development work, but it’s so hard to know if I’ve done it right. And on top of all of this, the projects I am working on still have so far to go before I feel comfortable leaving them to run alone. These last few months will be quite busy, but hopefully this will bring my service’s end closer, I can’t wait to be home for Christmas.
BGP in Peru 