Peace Often Means "Salam"

One of my central goals as a Volunteer has been to develop ways to speak to the Peace Corps’ second goal: “to educate Azerbaijanis about the United States.” This venture has been less to proselytize American righteousness and more to increase understanding of a place whose complexities are so often misunderstood. This past Saturday, we at the Ganja American Center completed what I hope will be the first installment of a series of PCV discussion panels on “the American Experience.” This panel consisted of four Volunteers who represent groups not commonly found in the international media as representative of the American people. In honor of Black History Month, the topic focused on issues of diversity as value embraced by the American people as an important component of democratic society. Overall, the conversation went fairly well and participants were generally well received. We discussed the dangers of stereotyping as well as the importance of diversity for the purposes of supporting free and healthy communities. Questions from the audience seemed to coalesce around issues that have repeatedly come up in my own conversations: those of inter-faith relations—oftentimes predicated on the assumption that all Americans are radical Protestant Christians who bring war wherever they go—and inter-cultural education—that is, “why don’t American people know more about other countries?” While our participants fielded questions with exceptional candor and tact, I couldn’t help but ask myself: “is this really what the rest of the world thinks of us and if so, why?”

As many of my readers understand, the greatest challenge I have faced as a Peace Corps Azerbaijan Volunteer has been the widespread misunderstanding of what it means to be an American person. When I was a student, I would always observe that I had never felt my “Asian-Americanness” more pronounced than when I was studying abroad. I feel the same way now simply because I find myself regularly explaining the notion of America as “the world’s melting pot”—something I had once naively thought of as universally understood. In many ways, it is not the fault of those who espouse such statemnts as, “all Americans hate Muslims” and “yes, you say you are from the United States but where are you really from? You must be from China because your eyes are not American.” If we consider the stories that so often permeate the international news such as those of fringe groups wishing to desecrate a particular holy book for purposes of hate antithetical to Christian values or the hitherto homogeneity of those representing the United States within social, political, and cultural circles such questions may find a modicum of discernable context. As with reactions I observed in my time as a student abroad to Americans, the presence of such “facts” regarding the United States should give us cause for pause. How do we present ourselves as a country and a people that such stereotypes prevail even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary?...And what do we plan to do about it?

I have been thinking about the proposed budget cuts and the potential elimination of Americorps in order to make way for the preservation of more worthy endeavors not related to what a certain Minnesota Congresswoman regards as the undermining of capitalism. As a former a Americorps VISTA and current Peace Corps Volunteer, I resent the implication. Sure, there are days in which I spend an entire afternoon teaching Scrabble with a group of English language students or coaching softball with local people as the highlight of my work week. One of the bittersweet ironies of my life is the observation that most of my friends at home are heading off to graduate school and making strides in their career while I am teaching yoga at the local orphanage and leading discussions on O. Henry to a literature club at the local library. At the same time, I recently learned from my counterpart at the library that after attending a number of my free conversation clubs, a student has started his own courses saying that, “if Beth can volunteer for us, then why can’t I volunteer for my own community?” One of my colleagues has started a volunteer club in his site that completes community service work free of charge. He says that they are beginning to run the club without him and he couldn’t be happier. After our recent panel to which over 20 students attended, I watched many stay afterwards to ask panel participants further questions in the desire to learn more about America and its people from new American friends who they might not otherwise recognize as such. It is easy to discard the importance of domestic and international Volunteer development programs but I like to think of such projects as investments in the future of an increasingly interdependent global village which is starved for understanding as a path to “salam”—that is, peace.