Sidebar #89 - Regrets and Shortcomings of My Service

Peace Corps instructs us to not beat ourselves up about service. Probably no Peace Corps volunteer has ever accomplished everything in their given community that they had their sights on. I think it’s healthy to focus on the positives: the vast majority of Peace Corps Volunteers only get one chance at a Peace Corps service, so why dwell on what you didn’t accomplish instead of what you did? However, Peace Corps isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, and I’ve tried to be as transparent as possible with this blog. I also feel like it might be a helpful thought experiment to shed some things that maybe didn’t go as I’d imagined in my two years in Costa Rica. So, below are some items I regret and/or wish I could’ve accomplished in my service but didn’t.

Projects at the colegio (high school)

My time at the colegio is probably what leaves me the most disappointed in my Peace Corps service. As part of the country’s Youth Development model, like other volunteers in my cohort, I served at 2 different academic institutions: an elementary school with around 500 students and a high school of over 1000 students. The elementary school, or escuela, formally requested a volunteer while the high school later joined the application to receive a volunteer. My high school is incredibly high-functioning and all of the students and teachers are always busy. The Peace Corps model flourishes on volunteers and counterparts co-facilitating and co-teaching. The reality pretty early on was that all of my potential counterparts were stretched a little thin and didn’t really have the capacity to take on new projects with a gringo volunteer. Although I naturally gravitated towards work at the escuela, I am proud of the fact that I still showed my face at the colegio for 2 years and was able to find my niche in working with the community service project, Servicio Comunal Estudiantil, at the colegio.


Community-wide projects

As Youth Development volunteers, we are supposed to focus on our work inside the academic institutions. However, we both live and work in our host communities, which is by design. Volunteers are given latitude to facilitate community-based projects outside of school settings. My community is large (around 12,000 people), which made it a little bit harder to foster connections compared to smaller communities of hundreds where some of my peers served. However, I was able to create a running club with my high school students and we had a maximum of 30 attendees.


Community Race

Given my running background, interest in sports, and the growing interest in running in Costa Rica, there was mutual interest between me and community leaders in organizing some kind of youth race. However, there were some logistical hurdles that were really difficult to get over, especially as a foreigner, like acquiring police help, insurance, medical assistance, etc. So unfortunately this idea never really got off the ground.


Lack of Physical Evidence of my Service

This may be a selfish regret, but I would have loved to leave something in my community as evidence of my service. For example, other volunteers have had parks named after them or have built something physical for the community. I’m not artistic nor good with my hands and I work almost exclusively in the schools, so I haven’t had the bandwidth to put together something like that. I would’ve loved to have left something tangible in the community that I could come back and show my family some day and to ensure my students remember me. However, my hope is that hopefully I planted some seeds in the minds of my students and my impact, although not a physical one, will be felt for years to come. I am also grateful that I maintained this blog throughout my 2 years as it very much is evidence of my service too.


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