Wellness: Why we have PSN
By Dan Serwon
Peace Corps service is really hard. It’s “The hardest job you’ll ever love.” How realistic is this slogan? What do I love about my job? Shouldn’t it be something more like – “The hardest job you’ll ever make it through with a fondness for what you accomplished and survived.” When I ask myself this I think a lot more about the things that I don’t love, like being stared at, getting cheated at the market, dysentery, and worst of all: travel policies. I could go on for a long time about the things I don’t love about this job depending on the day that you catch me. All of these things crush my spirit. This is exactly where most conversation goes to whenever I am with other volunteers.
We of course talk about a lot of things other than what we do love like where to get good pizza, what books and movies we have finished and the cool things that we have done at site and in Rwanda, but the things we don’t love are more prevalent and hard to avoid. When I have sat through a session or talked about the Peace Corps Rwanda Peer Support Network (PSN), I have had a lot of thoughts about what we are discussing. The main topics that have been discussed at trainings are stress and active listening. I tend to internalize these things; whenever we have had this I can get really upset, and I am likely to need to talk to someone more than when we started even though I was probably making a smartass comment about what we were discussing. I am also likely to tune out and think, “Who is ever going to call the PSN? I will probably just call my friends if I am going through something.” My friends and family back home know me really well, but they are really far away and don’t have the context to really support me. I am usually thinking about this when I say I will call my friends. It is easily forgotten in the mess of all of the acronyms that are thrown at us that the PSN includes all of the volunteers.
If you are a PCV, by default you are part of the PSN. Therefore, whenever you are talking to your friends that you met up with to get a Primus at a blue bar about all of the things that you don’t love about this job you are actually using the PSN. The PSN representatives are just another resource that are there for you to use. They are not professional counselors or anything like that, but many of them are fairly qualified (not me though so if that’s what you are looking for you can call PCV Kerianne Hendrickson or another one of the PSN reps). The only real difference between the PSN representative and all other volunteers is that they have been selected by the other PCVs to go learn how to better support them.
So that’s what we did this last weekend for our PSN workshop. It felt a lot like the other Peace Corps trainings I have been to except Mup wasn’t there and we had to buy all our own food, but I hear that you have to do that in PST now. I miss the days when they would pay for this kind of thing. We did get to stay at the Case de Passage, and I was able to put the cat puzzle back up on the wall. The showers there are so nice. For the workshop we discussed a variety of topics that included facilitating meetings, confidentiality, referrals and challenges PCVs face. Then we talked about what we want to make the PSN into for the future, hence my writing an article for SOMA. Even though the training manager wasn’t there, Dr. Laurent was present, and for once it wasn’t to give us shots. Dr. Laurent created the PSN because he thinks we can benefit from it. In his accent that we all love he couldn’t help but make another comment on Niger, “If you were in Niger you probably would always be sick, but if I asked you, ‘How are you?,’ you would say to me, ‘I am okay.’ In Rwanda you have better nutrition, but there are many more who have emotional problems.” I was a little surprised to hear this from him. Is there really something that is worse in Rwanda than the seemingly hardest place to live in the world? Haven’t I heard Peace Corps Rwanda referred to as Posh Corps?
Rwanda is unique. For some reason it was left off the list of post conflict countries that Brook published in the newsletter that told us that volunteers have refrigerators and 3G coverage in other African countries. Rwanda has come a long way since their collapse in 1994, but it hasn’t even been a generation yet and the victims and perpetrators never stopped living together as equals. That has never happened anywhere else in modern history. I am not going to pretend to know what that is like, but I can feel the effects of it as I constantly attempt to integrate into it.
The doctors are our best resources when it comes to our physical and emotional health, but they know that for situations that are affecting our emotional wellbeing we are not as likely to call them. We are far more likely to turn to each other, and if at that point we don’t know what to say we may refer you to the doctors. We are still trying to figure out how we can live in this country. The program is still very new, and our administration does their best to prepare us for whatever we may face but we still have to figure most of it out for ourselves. Our administration knows how to manage volunteers, but because this country is a special case they still need to figure it out too, even if they have been working for Peace Corps for their entire adult lives like Gordie. While we are all trying to figure things out we get discouraged by a dark cloud that seems to follow us wherever we go and what was important to us before doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
We are all still in Rwanda because we still believe in whatever it is that has gotten us this far. Our happiness is not determined by our external circumstances, but instead by how we view, process and address them. That is why we need to help lift up each other out of the valleys and back up on the mountaintops. Then we can love this job even if it is really hard.
PSN Representatives that want to help you love this job:
Sera Muniz Nyanza Region 0782847376
Nicole Palmer Gisenyi Region 0784325688
AJ Bisesi Rusizi Region 0785364269
Anna Cowell Kigali Region 0722369668
Sally Dunst Huye Region 0722625184
Kerianne Hendrickson Musanze Region 0785657848
Caroline Lloyd Ruhango Region 0782847377
Annie Pexa Rwamagana Region 0782847356
Allison Radke Bugesera Region 0782848534
Emmett V. Reeb III Rusizi Region 0725034043
Brittany Elise Russell Kibuye Region 0782841013
Dan Serwon Gicumbi Region 0782848539
Allison Snyder Musanze Region 0782846648
Deanne Witzke Kibuye Region 0782848524
We of course talk about a lot of things other than what we do love like where to get good pizza, what books and movies we have finished and the cool things that we have done at site and in Rwanda, but the things we don’t love are more prevalent and hard to avoid. When I have sat through a session or talked about the Peace Corps Rwanda Peer Support Network (PSN), I have had a lot of thoughts about what we are discussing. The main topics that have been discussed at trainings are stress and active listening. I tend to internalize these things; whenever we have had this I can get really upset, and I am likely to need to talk to someone more than when we started even though I was probably making a smartass comment about what we were discussing. I am also likely to tune out and think, “Who is ever going to call the PSN? I will probably just call my friends if I am going through something.” My friends and family back home know me really well, but they are really far away and don’t have the context to really support me. I am usually thinking about this when I say I will call my friends. It is easily forgotten in the mess of all of the acronyms that are thrown at us that the PSN includes all of the volunteers.
If you are a PCV, by default you are part of the PSN. Therefore, whenever you are talking to your friends that you met up with to get a Primus at a blue bar about all of the things that you don’t love about this job you are actually using the PSN. The PSN representatives are just another resource that are there for you to use. They are not professional counselors or anything like that, but many of them are fairly qualified (not me though so if that’s what you are looking for you can call PCV Kerianne Hendrickson or another one of the PSN reps). The only real difference between the PSN representative and all other volunteers is that they have been selected by the other PCVs to go learn how to better support them.
So that’s what we did this last weekend for our PSN workshop. It felt a lot like the other Peace Corps trainings I have been to except Mup wasn’t there and we had to buy all our own food, but I hear that you have to do that in PST now. I miss the days when they would pay for this kind of thing. We did get to stay at the Case de Passage, and I was able to put the cat puzzle back up on the wall. The showers there are so nice. For the workshop we discussed a variety of topics that included facilitating meetings, confidentiality, referrals and challenges PCVs face. Then we talked about what we want to make the PSN into for the future, hence my writing an article for SOMA. Even though the training manager wasn’t there, Dr. Laurent was present, and for once it wasn’t to give us shots. Dr. Laurent created the PSN because he thinks we can benefit from it. In his accent that we all love he couldn’t help but make another comment on Niger, “If you were in Niger you probably would always be sick, but if I asked you, ‘How are you?,’ you would say to me, ‘I am okay.’ In Rwanda you have better nutrition, but there are many more who have emotional problems.” I was a little surprised to hear this from him. Is there really something that is worse in Rwanda than the seemingly hardest place to live in the world? Haven’t I heard Peace Corps Rwanda referred to as Posh Corps?
Rwanda is unique. For some reason it was left off the list of post conflict countries that Brook published in the newsletter that told us that volunteers have refrigerators and 3G coverage in other African countries. Rwanda has come a long way since their collapse in 1994, but it hasn’t even been a generation yet and the victims and perpetrators never stopped living together as equals. That has never happened anywhere else in modern history. I am not going to pretend to know what that is like, but I can feel the effects of it as I constantly attempt to integrate into it.
The doctors are our best resources when it comes to our physical and emotional health, but they know that for situations that are affecting our emotional wellbeing we are not as likely to call them. We are far more likely to turn to each other, and if at that point we don’t know what to say we may refer you to the doctors. We are still trying to figure out how we can live in this country. The program is still very new, and our administration does their best to prepare us for whatever we may face but we still have to figure most of it out for ourselves. Our administration knows how to manage volunteers, but because this country is a special case they still need to figure it out too, even if they have been working for Peace Corps for their entire adult lives like Gordie. While we are all trying to figure things out we get discouraged by a dark cloud that seems to follow us wherever we go and what was important to us before doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
We are all still in Rwanda because we still believe in whatever it is that has gotten us this far. Our happiness is not determined by our external circumstances, but instead by how we view, process and address them. That is why we need to help lift up each other out of the valleys and back up on the mountaintops. Then we can love this job even if it is really hard.
PSN Representatives that want to help you love this job:
Sera Muniz Nyanza Region 0782847376
Nicole Palmer Gisenyi Region 0784325688
AJ Bisesi Rusizi Region 0785364269
Anna Cowell Kigali Region 0722369668
Sally Dunst Huye Region 0722625184
Kerianne Hendrickson Musanze Region 0785657848
Caroline Lloyd Ruhango Region 0782847377
Annie Pexa Rwamagana Region 0782847356
Allison Radke Bugesera Region 0782848534
Emmett V. Reeb III Rusizi Region 0725034043
Brittany Elise Russell Kibuye Region 0782841013
Dan Serwon Gicumbi Region 0782848539
Allison Snyder Musanze Region 0782846648
Deanne Witzke Kibuye Region 0782848524