Your success as a Peace Corps Volunteer is based on the trust and confidence you build by living in, and respectfully integrating yourself into, your host community and culture (Core Expectation #4).

Describe an experience you have had in living or working in a social or cultural environment different from your own.

What specific challenges did you face concerning trust, confidence, and/or integration?

What did you learn from this experience that you will bring with you to your Peace Corps service?

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I have experienced twice in my life the challenge of leaving home for an extended period of time.

When I chose to leave my home-state of Texas for school in Missouri, it was a culture shock going from a 79% Hispanic high school and one of the largest cities in the U.S. to a university and town that is less than 5% Hispanic. All of a sudden I was in a world where saying y’all was something people laughed at, bachata music was unheard of and the majority of my classmates had blonde hair and blue eyes. I was uncomfortably aware of how different I was from the clothes I wore to the color of my skin. In the beginning I was deeply depressed and lonely. I had no friends or family within a 12-hour drive. I considered transferring back to a school in Texas.

When I left for Peru, three years later, I was overwhelmed with excitement. Unlike when I left for Missouri, I had a small group of eight other students traveling with me, and loneliness was not on my mind. I immediately fell in love with my surroundings and felt that I fit in. Nonetheless, while I knew more about the Hispanic culture than my peers through my own upbringing, I am just as much of an American as any of them. There were times when my accent was mocked, and I had to force myself to clean my plate of our daily three-course meals our Mama served us. In the beginning, I was enchanted but shy. After the first two weeks, I was homesick and impatient with the language learning process. I felt incompetent and slow. But by the end, I was at home.

It was my first time being away from home when I left for Missouri, and I had a lot to learn about the world and about myself. Being in Missouri gave me my first real look at how diverse one nation can be, let alone the world. In the end I did not transfer because I knew what I signed up for, and I was willing to grow from it. In Peru, I had that knowledge of self-change before I went. I knew that my experience would change my perspective of the world and the way I want to grow as a human. By allowing myself to become a member of the community instead of resisting their differences, my confidence grew, and I felt like a part of my Peruvian host family.

I deeply understand that accepting the differences of a new place is not only good for my own personal growth but for my success as a Corps volunteer. Resisting differences like I did in the beginning of my freshman year at Missouri created a wall between the people I lived with and myself. I thought that opening up too much would change who I am. However allowing myself to have an open heart to those around me did not mean that I had to change my personality. It simply meant that I had to see where the person is coming from, be it their social background, their racial background or their upbringing.