In Lieu of An Introduction-How I Joined The Peace Corps

Everyone has their story about how and why they joined the Peace Corps. This is mine.

My name is Adrian Hugh Stover. I am twenty-two years old, and I am about to spend twenty-seven months in Cambodia on an English Instruction assignment with the Peace Corps. In searching for a way to begin this public diary, I am inspired by how Marlow begins the story of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Marlow explains to the reader how in order to understand Kurtz’s story, his own path must be examined. Thus, I seek to begin with this blog by saying that in order to understand the work I have set out to do in Cambodia, one must understand something of the man who writes it. It seems fitting that the first entry of this would be an explanation as to why I am going, and it precisely this testament that the following pages will describe. I cannot remember when I first imagined the Peace Corps as a fantastic opportunity, but I can tell why it was that this opportunity appealed to me for a long time.
Traveling to distant, foreign countries was something that I had grown up with. By the time I was sixteen, I had visited Denmark, Turkey, France, Spain, Iceland, and Japan with my family during our summer vacations. I saw much of the world as I grew up, and I appreciate these early experiences as a contributor to my character. However, the constraints of time and ambition to see as much of the country as possible during these excursions reduced the experience to a series of blurred images and memories. To this day, I can remember going to these places, but I have a rather dilettantish attitude towards them. This feeling was hard to shake, as I always wanted to do more than look at the country with the gaze of an ordinary tourist.
When I was fifteen, I participated in a month long excursion to China that was sponsored by the Asian Studies teacher at my high school. It was a fantastic voyage, and I almost expected this feeling to subside given the amount of time that I was spending there. Despite being fully immersed in Chinese culture and language, this feeling persisted. During my studies in France several years later, I began exploring and writing about the possibility to become fully immersed, “drowned” if you will in another culture’s customs to the point where you barely retained your own; to become a more extreme version of Lawrence of Arabia. I have always believed that this desire to go beyond the scratched surface came from what I saw and experienced in China.
From high school in Washington D.C., I attended Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut. I studied both French and Music, with a large area in the discipline of the latter devoted to the field of Ethnomusicology. During my junior year, I studied abroad in France with the center for the International Education of Students, and I worked as an intern for the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music in Fez, Morocco. My senior honor’s thesis bore the title of Worlds of Music Apart: An Alternative Narrative of the Fez Festival of Music, and was based largely on the fieldwork that I conducted abroad. In a nutshell, it discusses the impact that the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music brings to the city of Fez, and how local musicians and people are reacting to global forces on the local level. I greatly enjoyed being abroad and the kind of work that I was doing in Morocco as a fledgling ethnomusicologist. In particular, I know that simply having this experience of living on my own in a third world country will aid me greatly in adapting to the culture of Cambodia.
By the time I returned to the college for my senior year, the anxiety about what was going to happen to the senior class next year was already in full swing. The lassitude that I felt after coming back from Morocco made me realize that graduate school immediately after graduation would be a poor decision. The trouble was that I felt the zeal for adventure again, and I wanted to go abroad again. I applied for both the Watson and Mitchell scholarships, and subjected myself to the intense competition that comes only when free money is offered to people who want to pursue their interests. Neither of these scholarships worked out, but I’m very glad this happened. I think joining the Peace Corps was the best option all along.
Peace Corps was always something that was at the back of my mind, but I admit that a larger motivation for wanting to join up was more out a sense of adventure than a dedication to service in the community. I had participated in many service projects in high school and college, and while I enjoyed this kind of work it was ultimately for passion for music that led me to other activities that occupied much of my time. However, I do feel good about making a two-year commitment to service because I think Cambodia is a special case among those countries that are in dire need for aid.
The more that I read about the country, the better I feel about going there. I was tremendously nervous about my assigned country when I received the invitation, and my anxieties ranged from what my parents would say, and what living there would be like. To make matters worse, I found a music video on Youtube that featured the song “Cambodia” by Kim Wilde. It is possibly the worst song ever written, and it did not help me sleep that night. As I began to read a variety of materials about Cambodia that included Haing Ngor’s A Cambodian Odyssey, the chapter on Cambodian Music in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, and many other sources and articles, the amount of suffering that the country went through under the Khmer Rouge is astounding. Many aspects of Cambodian society are still reeling in an extended aftermath of the regime, and it is truly a nation that needs foreign aid. Simply put, the Peace Corps is there for a reason, and I am honored to be a part of their mission.

Preparing for the Next Twenty Seven Months

In my daily regiment of preparing for Cambodia, half of everything that I read is quite scary, and the other half seems very exciting. My head is a swirling cauldron of thoughts about what will happen to me over there. Each day that passes brings some new piece of excitement or fear about the new life I am taking on. Friends, parents of friends, and complete strangers have told me about the many different kinds of diseases that could fall ill too, or how they knew somebody who died in Cambodia, or variation upon these themes. If I began to tell you how many different things could go very wrong during my time there, you would think me a fool for even considering to go there.
I know that I am going to be living in a very dangerous country. I know that I will have to make many changes in my behavior, dress, language, and overall mental attitudes in order to return to the United States alive and in one piece in 2010. I have to trust that the training and guidance that the Peace Corps is going to give me while I am over there will be my salvation if it is followed properly. I plan to take the utmost caution with my health and safety while I am over there, but I also refuse to live in fear. That being said, I think I’ll be ok.

In planning the goals for the next two years, there are several things that I would like to do:

1. Be A Good English Teacher

Something that I have learned from returned Peace Corps Volunteers is that the people who burn out the quickest are those who go into the service and decide that they are going to change the entire country single handedly. I am sure that the missionary-like zeal is appreciated, but it is simply not realistic. The opposite of this is to be apathetic, which is not helpful either. Therefore, I am resolved to be the best English teacher that I can be. It may not make a difference in the larger scheme of things, but it may in the lives of the people that I interact with.

2. Master The Language (Khmer):

Mastering a language can be an onerous undertaking, but I find that there are several things that really help. The first is simply practice. When I first began to learn French in my freshman year of college, it really helped to go to the French table at lunch every day and see if I could practice what I had learned. The second thing that it is really crucial is simply having some quiet time alone to study and meditate over what I have learned. Learning Khmer will be a terrific hurdle because of the alphabet and pronunciation, among other things, but I think if I commit to a level of self-discipline I can begin the long road to mastering it.
Learning Khmer is something that I plan to take very seriously because I believe that one thing that is essential in adapting to a new culture is knowledge of the language. Without this bridge of communication, it is very difficult to understand how a culture is defined and why parts of it are the way they are. I want to make a firm goal for myself to be able to gain a significant amount of skill in Khmer. I understand that this will be extremely challenging, as I have never studied an eastern language, but I know that the rewards from my efforts will be equally rewarding. Having lived abroad in France and Morocco, and I have a keen sense of how knowledge of a language can be incredibly useful.

3. Do Something Musical

I do not know if this will have any impact on my Peace Corps assignment, but I am an active and enthusiastic player of the violin and viola. I have an inexpensive violin that I plan on bringing with me to Cambodia, and practicing it while I am there in my spare time. While my primary duties will be completely devoted to the instruction of English, I would like to use the education in music in some way as possibly a secondary project. These two things would not necessarily have to be separated. I have a small ambition of trying to organize some form of musical activity that would allow students to practice and use their English in a creative way outside of the classroom. Whether this would involve organizing a choir, or some other extra-curricular activity, I believe that this would be a way of combining the need for English instruction with the skills that I have developed at the undergraduate level.

4. French

I've been told that some French still exists over there, and I aim to find it.

For now, I am sitting comfortably in my house in Washington D.C., and thinking of the looming future that is ahead of me. First I have to take the GRE's on July 16th, and then leave on the 18th for the Cambodia orientation in San Francisco. Somewhere in between there, I will think about packing.

I hope that I can keep this blog updated regularly from time to time when I get over there. I doubt that I will have weekly access to the Internet, so I am not sure how regular this will be. Until next time,

-Adrian