A great question that we get when people learn of our impending Peace Corps service is inevitably, “Why?” That is a fantastic question, and we are glad you asked.
Yes, we realize that we are not going to “save Africa;” after all, Bill Gates and Bono, with all their riches, have barely made a dent in the poverty, corruption, and disease that plagues the continent. Many people guess that we volunteered 27 months of our lives for a few nice lines on our resumes and while yes, it does look good on a piece of paper, there is a deeper, albiet simpler, more altruistic reason that we signed up: we want to help, and Peace Corps provides a great avenue in which to do so. We are also young, recent college graduates, and have not yet started a family, so now is the best time that we will ever have to embark on this kind of adventure. Peace Corps does not simply provide funds to purchase mosquito nets or research into HIV/AIDS drugs, nor does it give a check to governments and then turns a blind eye to what they do with it. Rather, Peace Corps trains volunteers to go out into local communities and teach people to help themselves. It’s the whole “teaching a man to fish” idea, and it is not only good for local communities, but it also has a lasting impact on the volunteers’ lives and serves as a form of “soft power” for the U.S. government (as opposed to military might).
After the next two years we hope to come back knowing that we made a difference in Benin, though we are realistic enough to know that we will not have produced multimillionaires or saved the lives of thousands of people. We hope to have stories that we can look back on as a watershed moment in our lives when we sacrificed so much to help those who have so little. Nicholas Kristof once said that we have "won the lottery of life" simply by being born in the United States or in the Western world. Why not spread that wealth of skills and knowledge to those who have not had that opportunity and who can really benefit from it? Though we will definitely not succeed in wiping out all disease or all poverty, it’s still worth mitigating, and we like to think about a Hawaiian parable that was related in Half The Sky, a book written by Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl Wu Dunn in 2009 to illustrate this point:
A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back into the water.
"What are you doing, son?" the man asks. "You see how many starfish there are? You'll never make a difference."
The boy paused thoughtfully, and picked up another starfish and threw it into the ocean. "It sure made a difference to that one," he said.
