Skills No One Told You that You’d get from the Peace Corps

There are any number of marketable skills that you can gain from any given job, and Peace Corps assignments are no exception. I am grateful for the opportunity to have a job abroad, and have learned much more about sustainable development, language, culture, teaching, and organization than I ever expected to gain from this experience. That aside, there are a few things that no one thinks to mention about living abroad in a rural location on a fairly limited budget. Here are some skills I wasn’t expecting to gain during the last couple of years:

Hoarding. Call it cheap, miserly, stringent, tacaña, or whatever else you want to call it, but when you find yourself counting your chocolate chips (to ration them out), bartering with the vegetable ladies to save the equivalent of five US cents, planning your school visits around specific snack schedules that you have memorized (chocolate atol with bananas on Thursdays at Las Mejoranas!), and taking everything that the volunteers who are leaving offer (be it used socks, dry pens, or moldy books), it is time to admit that you are a hoarding miser.

Pest removal. Lice, bedbugs, fleas, mice, rats, spiders, silver bugs, brown recluses, ants, giant ron-rones….nothing can stop you now!

A great appreciation for your own mortality. With this comes well-founded suspicion of any kind of transportation that is not your own two feet in a good pair of shoes.

A firm belief in all old-wives’ tales concerning the buying, preparation and consumption of food. “Cold” foods (anything that can’t be boiled) are not to be eaten in the morning or the night time, or on cloudy days. If it doesn’t have corn and beans, it’s not a meal. It’s good for your health to put spoonfuls of sugar in your coffee – didn’t you know that sugar is fortified with iron?

Sadness gives you diarrhea – bacterial infections and giardia are just the excuses we make for denying that we are sad about something.

Fear of the dark that borders on paranoia. “Leave my compound after six at night?! Are you CRAZY?” After all, the street dogs’ eyes turn a devilish yellow at night, and they rove throughout town, looking for what to devour.

A new appreciation for beauty. “Wow, it’s so cool that you have gold stars on your two front teeth! They really light up your smile!”

A broad sense of humor. Consider the following joke that I heard three weeks ago (that still makes me laugh out loud every time I retell it). You have to wait until someone complains about how hard it is to navigate in a particular city. Then you jump into the conversation with:

"Oh, well, you think it takes a long time to get anywhere in Esquipulas, huh? You should try driving in El Salvador. They say that back when they were first designing the roads, the engineers went to a farmer and asked him to let his cows loose. Everywhere the cows walked, they built a road."

Hahahaha. Also, it's so easy to please a crowd here with a joke. During the reforestation event, one of the brush-clearers found a snake that he thought would be cute to throw over where I was planting...luckily it was dead (and quite harmless), but he got his money's worth of scream out of me. I retorted with "The only way I like colebras is when they are rolled in sour sugar and sold alongside gum in the corner store." (like sour gummy worms, was the point) I swear that the teachers are STILL laughing about that one.