Then vs. Now: Peace Corps Training

In March of 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed the Peace Corps into executive action. By August of 1961, the first wave of Peace Corps Volunteers arrived at their new country of home for the next 2 years. Since its inception 60 years ago, the training that Volunteers go through to prepare them for their new life in the Peace Corps has changed dramatically. When the organization began, a few training camps were set up at the United States to prepare the Volunteers over the course of 2 months for the living conditions and the work they would be doing. After training was completed in the United States, the trainees became full-fledged Volunteers and were finally sent abroad. I began my Peace Corps service in January of 2016 and was sent to Ecuador. My training started with something called Staging. My entire Omnibus met in Miami, got to know each other, and received our official documents and passports over the course of two days. Then we all boarded a plane together and flew the 4 hours to Quito, where we were picked up at the airport by the Peace Corps Ecuador staff to lots of signs, posters, and fanfare. Once in Ecuador, our Pre-Service Training lasted 3 months. In the early days of the Peace Corps, the Volunteers would arrive in country already sworn it and would often be greeted by top national government officials. I was sworn in at the end of the 3 month in-country training in a ceremony at the United States’ Ambassador’s house led by the Ambassador himself.

One of the 1960’s training camps was in Hawaii, and it was the base for Volunteers who would be deployed to Asia. While at the camp, future Volunteers would live in huts and received language classes based on where they were going. The trainees were expected to practice conversing only in their new language. They would be taken to markets and were taught to haggle for food they had never seen before. Using the new foods, they were also taught to cook it with utensils they had never seen nor used before. The trainees also spent many days on long, difficult hikes through the mountains and hours wading through hip-deep swamps. Lastly, they learned Asian farming techniques using the only plow pulled by a water buffalo known to exist in the United States. It would have been nice to receive some training on how to use pressure cookers, which are used extensively in Ecuador. If we had, when my host mom during training left me in charge of the pressure cooker, maybe I wouldn’t have used it wrong and caused it to explode.

For those early Volunteers going to Latin American countries, their camps were in Puerto Rico and New Mexico. The trainees at these camps also participated in various physical challenges to prepare them for the rural sites they would be living in. Such challenges included obstacle courses, scaling a rock wall with climbing ropes, and rappelling down a dam. Those skills would have actually helped me at one point in my time in Ecuador. I was in Baños and had somehow gotten roped into going canyoning. This meant I spent literal hours using climbing ropes to navigate up waterfalls, and at the very end, jumping off a 75 foot waterfall and rappelling down. Instead of having those physical challenges, at one point during my in-country training, I was told to find my way by myself to an obscure market in Quito by navigating the catastrophic labyrinth that is their bus system, haggle for some bananas, and bring them back. I imagine the terror this activity caused me probably equaled the terror felt by the early trainees who had to practice rappelling.

During the early years of Peace Corps training, the trainees had the opportunity to be bound hand and foot and dive into 10 feet of water to retrieve an object with their teeth. During my training, I was taken to a very dangerous part of Quito at night, told not to get lost or mugged, and was tasked with finding a policeman to ask what information I would need to file a police report. Instead of spending time learning how to butcher chickens and deboning fresh fish like the early trainees were so proficiently taught to do, I was sent to Ecuador’s national 911 center with 4 other people in my Omnibus and had to watch actual footage of people being robbed, beaten up, stabbed, and shot. When I returned to the training center, and decompressed to one of the few males in the Omnibus, he gave me a hug and let me cry all over him. To this day, that hug has been the single most comforting point of physical contact I have ever had with someone in my life.

That being said, I would have much rather been taught to kill and butcher a chicken, especially when, a few months later, my host dad asked me to help prepare lunch while he minded the family store. Stepping into the sparse kitchen, I knew I was in trouble when I saw a whole chicken laying on the table waiting for me to debone it, gut it, and cut it up. After trying for 35 minutes, I only managed to saw one leg off, cut off bits of meat trying to get to the ribs, and cause the head and neck to sit at an unnatural angle. My host dad, seeing the mangled chicken on the table and my bloody hands, sent me to go fetch some bread instead.

If I had been taught how to debone a fish or even just eat a cooked fish that was presented with ALL body parts still attached, I wouldn’t have had a meltdown in a restaurant after seeing the head, eyes, and fins still attached. I wouldn’t have grimaced when my host mom grabbed the body of a crab, added rice and ají to the brain, mixed it around with her finger to create a gelatinous yellow clump, and handed it back to me with a huge grin, excitedly waiting for me to eat the delicacy, which I did because it would have been extremely rude not to. My host family would always ask me what fish was like in the United States because it was weird to them I didn’t know how to eat fresh fish. Apparently telling them that, where I lived, fish came cut up in nice little squares in the frozen section of the supermarket was not the right thing to say.

A main component of my training as with training in 1961 was language instruction. I spent hours most day in Spanish classes. The main difference between then and now, however, is what languages the trainees are taught. Then, the trainees were taught the local languages, which may not have necessarily been the national languages. I was taught the national language, not the local language. During training, I didn’t consider this a big deal because I was learning really fun words like “el ataúd” for coffin and “las pantuflas” for slippers. Instead of receiving language classes in both Spanish and Quechua, I got Spanish language classes and an assignment to once again use the hellish bus system to go to a town 6 hours away, complete a random checklist of tasks like putting money on my phone over a period of 3 days, and come back and report how it went. Receiving lessons in Quechua, however, would have been more useful. I could have used it when I moved to my site in a more rural Andean location. I could have used it to ask the parents to leave the hoes, pitchforks, and scythes, which they had been using to tend the land before they came weekly to meet with their children’s teachers, outside the classroom. I could have used it with my host grandpa to make sure there was actually 7UP in the bottle instead of getting a mouthful of paint thinner.

During the early years, the Volunteers at the training camps would receive extensive first aid training. Back then, they didn’t have much access to reliable medical care once they were at their sites. I also received some first aid training and big tackle box with items like band-aids, antibiotic ointment, and rehydration salts. The early Volunteers learned how to deal with things like burns and boils. I learned how diseases like Chikungya and Zika could be contracted through sex and how those diseases could affect a pregnancy.

December of 2016 was a really lonely time for me. By then, I was living by myself and was really homesick. Around Christmas day, I went to Chimborazo, the farthest point from the center of the earth because it was situated right on the equator. Chimborazo was in my backyard, and I wanted to see snow. So I hiked up to this lake that never froze at around 16,000 feet. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and the whole mountain gleamed white in the snow. I took a special meal with me, which consisted of pancakes with sprinkles in them, hard-boiled eggs, and bacon. A Frenchman also on the mountain laughed at me when he saw my meal. After about 5 hours, I made my way down and back home. The next day, I woke up, and my entire face was burnt to a crisp because of the sun bouncing off the snow. Over the next few days, the skin on my face cracked apart, turned the color of tea, and felt like decades old crumbling tissue paper. My face audibly crinkled every time my mouth moved. We never really covered sunburns in training, and there was nothing in my medical kit that could help. So I spent some excruciating days in my apartment until it finally cleared.

If we had been taught about how to take care of and treat boils, I wouldn’t have panicked when I developed the first one I ever had on the side of my left foot from a bug bite. I probably wouldn’t have let my host aunt grab a massive thorn from her garden, soak my foot in chamomile tea, and drive the thorn right into the center of the boil. Or let her do it again the next day.

We were extensively trained, however, on the use and administration of rehydration salts. Those salts were my constant companion over the nigh on 2 years I spent there as I was constantly sick from something I ate. What they didn’t tell us is that rehydration salts should never be added to 7UP or Sprite. I found that one out the hard way when I was standing in the dirt-floored kitchen of my host family’s house during training. I added the salts, which immediately reacted with the fizzy pop and caused the bottle to shoot around the kitchen, spraying sticky liquid and chunks of the rehydration salts everywhere.

Here’s to 60 years of Peace Corps training, Peace Corps living and working, and Peace Corps misadventures. And here’s to another 60 years. Bring back the water buffalo and cliff diving!