Jeff Puryear (Colombia/51) has just published a memoir that includes a 50-page chapter on his Peace Corps service in the department of Antioquia:. The memoir (entitled Before I Forget) is available in ebook and paperback versions on Amazon at https://a.co/d/a1tykSt. You can also order the paperback at your favorite bookstore.

Here is an excerpt:

ON HOW DIFFERENT IT WAS: “The Peace Corps was the polar opposite of college. It was about fact rather than theory, people rather than books, the small picture rather than the big picture. It put you in the here and now. You were face-to-face with poverty, misfortune, incompetence, and evil. You were supposed to do something about them. Reading was over. It was time to act.

That made the Peace Corps serious. You left your culture behind and entered someone else’s. It was like jumping into the ocean for the first time and having to stay there for two years. A shock. You wondered whether you were crazy. Maybe you were.

One of the most important aspects of the Peace Corps was that it took you outside the United States, and therefore outside your comfort zone. You lost a support system you hadn’t realized you had. All the nice things you took for granted—friends, family, car, music, football, TV shows, cheeseburgers—were gone. The people you relied on for conversation, stimulus, identity, and approval were no longer there. Values were no longer shared. Words no longer meant what they used to. You had to speak Spanish. You couldn’t go home for Christmas. The orderly, comfortable life you had enjoyed had disappeared, making you realize that it had been orderly and comfortable—and that you had enjoyed it. For 20-something Americans who had grown up middle-class, relatively pampered, and at least sympathetic to the rebellion and counterculture of the ‘60s, that was a shock. Our lifestyles had been taken away. We came face-to-face with a truth that Joni Mitchell would point out a couple of years later in Big Yellow Taxi: Some things you have to lose in order to realize you had them. For many it was a profoundly subversive experience. Maybe the U.S. wasn’t so bad after all.

In fact it may be that the biggest impact the Peace Corps had on young Americans was to make them appreciate the United States. Many—perhaps most—of us assumed that the way we lived in the United States was normal. We learned that it was not, and that in fact we were extraordinarily privileged. That was a revelation and made many of us see life in the United States differently. We missed it.”

 

ON FIGURING OUT THE CULTURE: “I owe Joe [Joe Mitchell, my regional director] a great debt. He got me (and many others) to take culture seriously, showing us how to fit in and get things done. No one else did that. It was valuable. Here are some examples:

As I was preparing to take up my second post, in Granada, Joe told me I had to change my name. “You can’t tell people your name is Jeffrey” he said. “There’s no equivalent in Spanish. They won’t relate to it. They’ll see you as a foreigner. You need a name people can say comfortably. Tell them your name is Javier. They can relate to Javier.’” I did. I became ‘Javier’—a name that rolled easily off the tongues of campesinos and municipal officials alike. My new name fit the culture. I was “Don Javier” for the rest of my stay in Colombia, and it worked perfectly.

Later, Joe helped me solve a drinking problem. Colombia’s national alcoholic beverage is aguardiente (literally, “firewater”), an anise-flavored liquor made from sugar cane that Colombians usually drink straight, in shots, with a chaser. It was popular. As one observer put it: “You haven’t lived until you’ve witnessed a seventy-year-old couple polish off a bottle between them on the bus from Bogotá to Medellín.” Drinking aguardiente turned out to be an important part of the culture in the villages where we worked. Our professional peers (municipal officials, extension agents and other mid-level functionaries) tended to gather in the café after dinner, to talk and drink aguardiente. There wasn’t much else to do, after all. Since I needed to develop strong working relationships with these people, I joined them around the table and tried to make a good impression. That was how you became one of the guys.

The problem was that it was hard to avoid getting drunk. There was a ritual you had to follow. One of the guys (always guys, and usually three or more) would order a round and we would drink up. Aguardiente was not something you sipped. Sipping was bad form. You drank the entire shot in one gulp and followed it with a chaser, which might be diced mango, a slice of orange or maybe some soda water. And you did that in unison. Not keeping up with the group was also bad form. Then someone else would order a round, and you repeated the ritual. Since each round was paid for by the person who ordered it, you couldn’t just drink one shot and leave. You had to stay and buy a round when your turn came. After four rounds, I would be at the outer edge of my tolerance for alcohol. And the rounds would keep coming. Too often I drank too much.

Like a typical gringo, I thought I could simply get up, say goodnight, and go back to my room. I was wrong. When I tried, the guys responded with alarm. “No, no Don Javier, you can’t leave. We’ve got so much to talk about—eh, Ave Maria, hombre! You have to stay.” It turned out that leaving early was also bad form. The pressure was strong. I couldn’t say no. So I stayed, drank too much, and didn’t like it.

When I told Joe about the problem, he knew immediately what to do. “You’re behaving too much like a gringo—explaining how you feel and what you’re going to do. That challenges the group’s camaraderie, which is unacceptable and will never work. The way to deal with this is simply to get up, say you’re going to the bathroom, and then don’t come back. That way no one will have to acknowledge that you’ve left. They won’t feel uncomfortable or offended. They may not even notice you’ve gone.” I tried it, and it worked. No one said a word. I remained one of the guys. And I stopped getting drunk. Joe taught me that.”