Thai Fact Check is an ongoing series written by Morgan Shupsky who will use her personal experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer to fact check everything that you may or may not want to know about Thailand.
Morgan Shupsky, 134 YinD
For everyone who doesn’t know what the Peace Corps schedule is like, here’s a breakdown:
- First 10 days: super fun days at a hotel! Everyone stays at the same hotel and goes to sessions every day but they’re all pretty low-stakes and everything is pretty stress free until they hit you with two days of 8-hour language classes. Safety net is fully engaged, and you’re treated as roughly a 1–2-year-old.
- Next 10 weeks: pre-service training! All volunteers move in with host families in the chosen destination of training and bike to language classes and program training every day, so you still see your friends pretty much every day. Safety net loosens up here and you’re treated as maybe an 8-year-old.
- Month 3: you get your site placement and within ten days you take your language proficiency exam, graduate PST and are sworn-in. Then you’re shipped off to your site all alone. The safety net kind of gives way here but you’ve still got a few stray ropes to hold on to. You jump straight from being a 5th grader to being a full-blown adult.
- Months 3-6: adjustment, confusion, language mishaps, more confusion, lots of event going, meeting your entire town, and basically day-to-day survival. You’re an adult living with the language abilities of a toddler and the entire town becomes your overprotective parents.
- Month 6: reconnect! All volunteers come back together at a hotel for ten days and have language class, program training, and a counterpart/co-worker conference to figure out what it is you’re supposed to be doing at site. You’re still an adult, but now you’re like an adult who has been around the block and is a little worse for the wear.
- Months 6-27: back to site! Take everything you’ve learned the past six months and put it to practice. Still an adult, hopefully feeling a little more prepared. Hopefully language is approaching the elementary level.
For those first 3 months at site I was counting down the days to reconnect every day. I could not wait to see my friends again and visit my old host family and check how my Thai was improving with the people who hadn’t seen me in 12 weeks. It was the one thing keeping me going through a lot of the hard moments of adjustment. I also was simultaneously reading previous sticky rice articles where old PCV’s wrote about how it’s even harder to adjust to site after reconnect than it is when you first get there. This scared me. A lot. I found myself dreading coming back from reconnect before I’d even gotten on the train to go to it because I knew I only had ten days of reconnection before splitting up again and being right back where I was.
Fast-forward to reconnect. It was a really great 10 days. I love the structure of these trainings and not having to think about what we’re doing because it’s all scheduled for us – basically the antithesis to my life at site. The reality of returning to site set in when my counterpart came on day seven. I spent the last three days counting down: “Only three more days until I have to go back to site alone”. Then, “only two days until I don’t get to live in a hotel with all my friends”. Then, “only 24 hours until the TESS and YinD volunteers are split up until the mid-service conference that’s TEN months away.” I was bracing myself for the anxiety to hit me until the moment everyone left the hotel, throughout the whole time I was driving to Bangkok, waiting in the airport, sitting on the plane and being driven back to site.
Then I was back. I was promptly welcomed back into my home by my host family who had food prepared and waiting for me. I went to school the next day and was peppered with questions from every student and welcomed back by all my co-teachers. One week of being back on schedule passed and I realized that I forgot that I was even supposed to be unhappy. I was supposed to be miserable to be separated from all the volunteers again. I was supposed to hit with the reality of being back like a ton of bricks and be depressed. I was so sure all of this was coming, what the heck happened?
Instead, the realization I did have is that I’ve been living in the future instead of the present. I spent the first three months at site waiting for reconnect, then at reconnect I was only thinking about coming back, and all my plans for site take place a year from now. I’ve spent all my time looking wayyy into the future and I’m missing everything that is happening right now. I realized I need to stop counting down the days to what I think is supposed to happen, because nine times out of ten I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen anyways. And it’s not likely I’ll be a very good volunteer for my community if I’m planning my end of service camp when I should be doing things like learning my students’ names and what kind of camp they might like to have.
I know so many volunteers are concerned about what they’re going to do with their service and plan for what’s going to happen based on other volunteers’ experiences. But the reality is there are no two Peace Corps volunteers anywhere in the world who are having the same experience. This whole experience is so bizarre that it’s impossible to replicate anyone else’s and even if I did, who’s to say what they’re doing in their community will be a good thing to do in my own? The only thing that is sure to make me the best volunteer I can be is being here. One day at a time. On the hard days maybe one hour at a time.
I came back from reconnect feeling very content, but I’m sure there were other PCV’s in my cohort who are struggling being back, just like how some volunteers got to site and were happy to be there from the get-go while it took other people (aka me) three months at site and ten days of reconnect to get in a groove. No service is the same, but your service is whatever you have to show when you leave. Two years feels like a long time, but the day will come when I close service and go back to America, and I would hate to spend the drive to Bangkok, the 32-hour plane ride and the drive home filled with dread thinking about all the things I missed at site because I was too busy thinking about everything I wanted to get out of it.
THAI FACT CHECK – Should we all be scared of the post-reconnect blues? NO!
Sticky Rice 
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