When I graduated from Cal State Long Beach in 2009, things looked pretty bleak for me. I was walking away that spring with double degrees in journalism and geography, yet I had no job, no internship, and no grad school seat secured post-graduation. I was going right back to the restaurant I’d worked at all senior year, and I was wishing I had just stayed in college.
If that sounds like a familiar story, it’s because fewer than half of employers planned to hire new graduates in 2009 and 2010, according to CareerBuilder.com. The graduating class of 2011 may see a modest improvement.
The summer after my graduation couldn’t have been more dissatisfying. I worked at the restaurant day in and day out, and every once in awhile I checked the online status of my last crumb of hope — my application for the Peace Corps. There wasn’t a paycheck involved, but at this point I was starting to wonder if I’d ever find a “job” job. Even my application to volunteer was having trouble getting through.
I started the application in late 2008, but the backlog of applications meant it had been stalled at one phase or another for the past eight months. Although The National Conference on Citizenship found that volunteerism saw a general decrease during the recession, the number of applications for the Peace Corps had increased when Obama took office. My wait to serve in the Peace Corps, especially in those much sought-after countries and regions, had gone up dramatically.
Do you remember those 2009 headlines hinting that the recession was almost over? Well, they lied. By summer 2010 I had few leads and was still working my quintessential “dead-end job,” and there was still no end to the recession in sight — but one thing had changed. My application for the Peace Corps finally went through, and I was invited to serve as an education volunteer in Turkmenistan. After I found Turkmenistan on a map, I accepted. It’s at this post that I’ve been serving since September 2010.
This year is an important one for the Peace Corps; 2011 marks the 50th Anniversary of the creation of the Peace Corps on March 1st, 1961 and the first deployment of Peace Corps volunteers to Ghana and Tanzania in on August 28th of that year. Two-thousand eleven, sadly, also saw the death of Sergeant Shriver, the first Peace Corps Director, who is credited with cementing its vision, purpose and spirit in its earliest days.
To commemorate the anniversary, volunteers from all over the world have been sharing their experiences with people back home to honor Peace Corps and the people behind it. My personal experience looks something like this: I’m an English teacher in Gumdag, Turkmenistan. Gumdag is a little village outside of Nebitdag, which is a little city a couple hours inland of the east Caspian desert. I walk to school everyday, rain, snow or sandstorm, to teach kids English or really anything they want to learn. Turkmen students dress nice, boys in all-black suits and girls in forest-green dresses with comically big hair scrunchies, and both wearing round telpekler (traditional skullcaps). These same kids are absolute sharks in the classroom.
If a Turkmen kid knows an answer to a question, they won’t be content to raise their hand. They’ll jump out of their seat, shout ‘mugallym!’ at you (sounds like “mole’em,” means ‘teacher’) or even stand right in front of you while you’re teaching. I once took chalk to the ground in front of my board, drew a line, and told them Otur! — Stay seated! Or, if I catch them on a slow day, the ultimate wakeup button for Turkmen kids is competition in the form of “Olgan vs. Gyz” — “Boys vs. Girls.”
The language for that matter is exhausting. I mean, Turkmen? Really? I wouldn’t have guessed I’d ever learn Turkmen. It’s sort of like Turkish, although I never studied that either, with a little bit of Russian thrown in from their imperial days. I’ve mastered enough to be invited to weddings as sort of a novelty act (they love hearing me shout toasts after so many vodka shots), and while I don’t see much of a practical use for Turkmen in the future, if nothing else I’ll have a secret language to use when I meet up with returned Turkmenistan PCVs.
So as America sends another class of college graduates into an economy that won’t put them to work, I offer an alternative: put yourself to work. Volunteer. Don’t worry about making your life’s fortune just yet, or worry, but know that worrying in this economy is going to wear you out pretty quick.
Volunteering gave my life direction, applied the skills I learned in college (to help children! Who’d’ve thought?), and magically turned the “money” light in my brain off. Speaking from a post-graduate world where I feel like I didn’t get what I was promised, I quote John F. Kennedy, who of course was the originator of Peace Corps: “The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises — it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them.”
Andy Franks is a CSULB alumnus (’09), a former Daily 49er staffer and an education volunteer in the Peace Corps.
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