One Day, One Year, Ten Years, Fifty

This month marked four milestones.

September 24, 2011. The day the new group of Peace Corps Volunteers arrives in Baku. Their journey begins now, as they land in a strange new world. Who will these new people be? All we know about them, and all they know about us and about Azerbiajan is what they’ve read online, on Facebook, and in the Peace Corps electronic media. Now it’s real.

September 23, 2011. The one-year anniversary of my group’s departure from Philadelphia. A year ago, we spent the night in a hotel in Philadelphia, and said our painful goodbyes. We met each other for the very first time, and sat through our first of what would be many Peace Corps conferences. Buses carried us to New York, and we flew, through Germany, to our new homes.

We were all strangers then, unsure of each other, and of ourselves. Since then, we’ve lost people. Some right away, some were surprises, some foreseeable. They are missed, because even though they are gone now, they were and are part of our group identity.

And we’ve gained people. Not new volunteers (until now), but we’ve gained new staff members, new connections, and new friends.

I remember the first salty cheeses, the first plov (though we didn’t know to call it that then), the first PCVs I met at the hotel. Meeting our LCFs for the first time. We spent week in that hotel, only able to glimpse this new land over a wall and beyond a highway, before we were dropped at our host families’, completely unaware who would be dropped next. I remember the months of dolma sandwiches, the months of four-hour-a-day language lessons, mostly filled with venting and talking about certain movements inappropriate for polite conversation.

The past year has been a strange one. I’ve lived with two wonderful but very different families in two very different towns. Met some great kids. Met some real stinkers, too (I’m looking at you, snowball throwing brats). I’ve had wildly happy and fulfilling days, and other days when I wanted no one to talk to me or else I would snap. They say the highs are higher and the lows lower, and darn it, they mean it.

September 11, 2011. Ten years ago, you know what happened. Our generation’s JFK’s assassination: the event when everyone knows where they were. I had just gotten home from Boy Scouts. It was nighttime, which I enjoy telling people, since they’re always confused for a moment. It was nighttime, because we were in Jakarta, Indonesia. Ten years later, I am once more on the other side of the world (only nine hours difference in stead of 12 this time!). It is nighttime again. Ten years is a nice round number, but have ten years given us closure on the events of 9/11? I don’t feel particularly safer, or for that matter, in any more danger. I did not know anyone who died in those attacks. Instead, the attack that struck closer to home was a bombing at a nightclub on the island of Bali, in Indonesia in 2002. I flew out of the Bali airport the morning before the attack, and a teacher from the school I attended, JIS, was killed in the attack. That attack wasn’t targeting Americans, but Australians. But I still remember, instead of watching the memorial concert in New York (the soundtrack to which I do own), sitting in our school auditorium listening to John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and watching a montage of the lost teacher’s life.

September 22, 2011. Fifty years ago, Congress authorized JFK’s Executive Order 10924 which he had issued in March. It’s strange to realize that I wouldn’t be here without that event that happened twenty-six years before I was born. I would not have heard about Peace Corps from my parents, who both served, and would not be here in Azerbaijan myself.

Without a speech 50 years ago at a college on the campaign trail, the other milestones, milestones that have drastically influenced my life and where I am today, would not have happened. There would not be a group of PCVs preparing to return home, another gearing up for their second year in country, and another group starting out on a brand new journey in Azerbaijan. Without that speech, there wouldn't have been over 200,000 volunteers worldwide. Hooray for JFK encouraging all us draft dodgers and idealist hippies to go out into the world to try something new.