Profiles in Service Now on Kindle

Profiles in Service: Peace Corps Roots in American Diplomacy is available in seconds on your Kindle.

What comes after Peace Corps service? For the lucky few its a chance to tell America’s story to the world as a U.S. diplomat.

Explore with me the Foreign Service path through the eyes of those volunteers who pivoted to successful careers as senior U.S. diplomats, accepting the challenge, adventure, and rewards that come with promoting American interests around the world.

Excerpt: Chasing the intangible

So, what does come after service?

You leave the Peace Corps a changed person. There is no discharge ceremony or graduation. Rather, you endure an anti-climax of bureaucratic motion: write an evaluation; see a dentist; sit for an exit interview.

What follows depends on the individual. For many, it’s a solitary thing, a sojourn into other countries creeping toward home. In my case, I flew from Lilongwe to Madrid, then backslid south. I told myself I was visiting Picasso’s home in Málaga, would see Gibraltar because the big rock was there.

Who was I kidding? All along I was headed back to Africa.

Only it wasn’t Africa I found, at least not the Africa I’d known for two years. I crossed by ferry to Tangier and wandered the crooked streets for a week, holed up in a cheap room shaping my journals into a novel, a chilly December defined by mint tea and loneliness.

How dare I return without becoming the thing I’d set out to become? I meant to be a writer.

Reckoning

I crept further south, deeper into Africa, by train to Casablanca and Marrakech. This brought me closer neither to home, nor to a novel, nor to the comforts of the Africa I’d come to know. Instead, it was taking me closer to a culmination of the experience: reckoning with what it had all meant.

I had fulfilled a role for Malawi’s Ministry of Education, given my share of lessons about Shakespeare and Anne Frank. Each year I taught 300 students in forms eleven and twelve at Providence Secondary School. I prepared them for the Malawi School Certificate Exam, though I’d never learn how many passed, or who.

As Wildlife Club patron I’d organized a game park trip in the boiling humidity of Malawi’s lower Nsanje. Our lorry, packed with 100 schoolgirls in bright zitenji cloth and louder, brighter laughter, had zero chance of sneaking up on anything, but we’d managed to escape campus for a weekend. I’d introduced Whiffle ball, danced kwasa-kwasa, camped out with fishermen on the lakeshore.

I thought when I first landed in Cameroun, ‘Alright, now I’m going to save this country!’ A few weeks later I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can improve my village.’ And a few weeks after that, ‘Well, maybe I can help a few people in my village.’ Of course, in the end, the people of my village saved me.

— Pamela White (PCV Cameroon 1971-73; U.S. Ambassador to The Gambia 2010-12 and Haiti 2012-15)

None of this was the purpose.

The purpose, in the end, was the change these experiences produced in me, the changes similar experiences produced in my fellow volunteers, and how we might apply those changes to better serve America. That purpose continues to this day, just as it continues in the lives of the first-generation volunteers featured in Profiles in Service and a quarter million other RPCVs.

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