Joe’s bitch

Written May 4, 2012

Our country director is here at the training center to prepare for swearing in tomorrow and he gave us a wonderful treat. He has been working for Peace Corps pretty much his whole life and he had a tape of a volunteer in Burkina Faso from 1974 called “Joe’s Bitch” where this volunteer has a 10 minute rant talking about how much being a Peace Corps volunteer sucks. Among his complaints was that he used to be “an articulate son of a bitch” followed by a minute or so of him trying to correctly pronounce articulate. But bar far my favorite concern of his was that his teeth were “flabby”. I am not exactly sure what that means but that is going to be my go to compliant whenever I feel the need to rant. He also hates on his dirty Canadian roommate and Nixon pretty hard. He sounds absolutely miserable and as soon as the speech ends our country director told us that he ended up extending a third year. We were told that it is completely normal and okay to have horrible days like that.

Then the country director told us that he had to gives an alcohol, drugs, and sex speech which consisted of “if I hear about it, then you have a problem”. Then we got to eat lots of delicious wine and cheese. He is pretty darn awesome.

Drugs are an absolute no-no in the Peace Corps but we have had a very relaxed attitude about alcohol and sex here. They have a bar for us that is opened for us every night and on a couple of occasions there has been free alcohol. We were given condoms in our med kit shortly after arriving and have free access to dental dams and lube from the med unit. Our last full weekend we were here we were told that it has historically been a big party night for the trainees and then a mysterious bag of 100+ condoms showed up in dining room. They prepare us well. One night two people who (will remain unnamed) got caught by the security guards having sex on a table. When we got a lecture the next day it wasn’t about having sex in a semi-public area, it was about how we really shouldn’t break tables (so far we have broken 2 tables, a sink, a toilet, about a billion glasses, and have damaged 2 beds with various bodily fluids). We have also had some group snuggle/sleeping parties that we thought we were being sneaky about but apparently they knew all along and were totally fine with it. We have been repeatedly told that we are a very calm, well-behaved group of trainees compared to previous years so make your judgments from there.