I Can't Sleep

Thus ends the first day we are a part of the Peace Corps family: my mind simply will not stop. For once it is not due to stress or anxiety. Quite simply, I am thrilled and finally can allow myself to feel so. I feel like the luckiest girl in the world! That is what I used to tell Scott when we first got together. Cheesy, I know, but I am so happy and literally cannot stop smiling and thinking about how lucky we are to be going to Belize and to be going together. It is proving to be worth the wait, already.

Our Staging Director, in charge of our general introduction to the organization, told our training group of forty-five people we hit the jackpot in the Peace Corps lottery with Belize. Tropical paradise. The scary bugs are there only so we will have stories to tell people back at home.

We were prompted to create lists related to our anxieties and aspirations, with illustrations. I drew a scorpion at the request of someone in my group. Scott, in a different group, wrote about being able to use what he learned in school. Other examples were language learning, outhouses, malaria, host families, lack of vegetables, usefulness, the job, playing with children, gender roles, creative projects, acceptance, integration.

We talked about Maslow's hierarchy of needs and how the bottom of the pyramid consists of the most basic needs, which is the survival level and the place at which most people the Peace Corps serve exist. From there, in general, people graduate to increasing levels of awareness. Once the basic need for food is satisfied, people in turn try to satisfy the need for security, like shelter and bodily protection, and then the need for love, or belonging and becoming a part of a community, and then the need for dignity and self-respect, relating to the ego.

Finally, when all of the other needs have been satisfied, people can attain the top triangle of the pyramid which is self-actualization. The director asserted that each of us had reached the point of self-actualization by persevering in the process of becoming a Peace Corps trainee, but that each of us in the next few weeks would probably spring up and down among the levels of the hierarchy of needs. Reasons for this may vary from getting enough food to eat in a country unfamiliar to us to beginning meaningful and lasting personal relationships with hosts very different from us in custom and manner.

These are ideas and realities I discussed in college with classmates and experienced to some degree while working for a nonprofit and traveling a bit overseas. Even so, it is exciting to think of living with them as a reality in daily life again. Change can be exhilarating, as can challenges, especially when bolstered by lofty ideals. I can understand what our director means by this term self-actualization in that something as seemingly intangible and ethereal as reaching outside oneself to help someone else can be realized by something as simple as committing to learn and share. How elemental is that! It is something we did in kindergarten, learning and sharing with others, and yet it can contribute to the betterment of societies. I also can understand that an important facet of self-actualization is that it makes you feel good, and not just about yourself.