Without the wonderous access of information that Google and Wikipedia used to bring us before we stuck ourselves in the African bush, we volunteers must learn to problem solve, critically think, and pull up information from different sources. Often times this means simply experimenting an idea, or maybe just willing it to work. Or, like the olden days, we flip through books to answer questions and educate ourselves on our environment and the work we are trying to do. But most often, the information we come up with is from each other. We rely heavily upon our wise volunteer friends, all the information that they can relay to us in a single text message. For often we are not together when requesting ideas.
I find that I can recieve great informative support from my co-volunteers even in the scarely phone serviced town that I live in. I enjoy being in contact with those volunteers and feel that we offer each other a lot. It therefore only makes sense that when are together, a fountain of ideas and brainstorming comes about and we fly through projects and experiments in great success!
Except that what I have thus far neglected to relay is that often our shared ideas are just that: ideas. Someday I will write a blog about the inevitability of failure in the lives of a Peace Corps volunteer, but today is not that day so I will just note that our wild enthusiasm for projects often comes along with an awareness that it likely will not work out. Or at least not the way you expected. So when we go to each other for ideas and information it is always with great intention that we get responses, but those responses come from volunteers just like us. They are getting their information from the same places that you are. It might be well-informed but they too have little experience building a chicken coop, planted a pepiniere of moranga, or starting a garden club. They are likely in the same throngs of learning how to do it! However, with shared experiences we can enjoy ourselves all the more and force ourselves to brave through the uncertainty...almost together.
All this to say that when volunteers are actually together, say for a work project, that information and shared ideas becomes a waterfall, bubbling up each others' enthusiasm. However true the outcome of a conversation might be, it is easy to convince each other one way or another on a certain idea. Take for example a conversation I had with my buddy Katie last week when painting a mural in her town.
Katie- The paint I bought is pretty terrible, its oil-based and will be pretty thick
me- I think you're meant to thin out oil-based paint
Katie- Yeah I thought so too but I already tried adding water and it really didn't mix well
me- ohhh (idea accepted and moving on)
Yeah I know: paint thinner. Where in the states (or in any land of technology) we would have run to google paint and found out the appropriate way make that paint more usable, here we just had each other. And she made it sound so convincing that I did not think "of course water is not going to mix with oil paint!". She is very convincing!
Of course, the paint was hell to deal with. It was so thick and we had to wait hours and hours (often a full day) to do the different parts of the map. The whole time we are complaining about this shitty paint and why can't we get the brushes clean? and to this day I STILL have paint smears across my legs and arms that just will not wash off. But we perservered and really, no harm done. To me though, its so funny to think of how we come up with ideas and how, often times, we mislead each other into more work (but always hilarity!).
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