Ego in Culture: Some thoughts on identity in Peace Corps

I remember my friend Yuan once commented that it was surprising I could maintain my identity after living in so many different places. The thing is I didn’t really stay all that long, so my internal descriptions (American culture is like X, Y, and Z. Costa Rican culture includes X, but also A and B. Mexico is only A, B, and C. ) weren’t hard at all to keep clear, including their misty borders. I could recognize and develop admiration for Mexican women’s hospitality, Costa Rican’s ideas of progress, and Latin American’s sense of family unity. That didn’t mean that I necessarily became a more hospitable, progressive, or family-orientated person, although for sure many of my perceptions and some small behaviours were changed by these trips. I was still was American-me after all.
In Namibia, in the beginning it was easy to distinguish between myself and Namibians. American-me would be dancing salsa at night, chatting for hours on the telephone with friends, going out to dinner with my Mom, shopping at Banana Republic, etc. American-me typed my lesson plans the night before and was given the syllabus to teach. Namibians on the other hand didn’t do anything at night, mostly sms-ed their friends and called for only a minute of two, and never went out to dinner (or very, very rarely at most). They wrote out their lesson plans for the week, only sometimes when they felt like it. They believed it was more important to make sure your binders were neatly covered with pretty paper than to have good planning inside.
We volunteers laughed at these differences, including their misguided expectations of us. But with time those distinctions ceased being funny. Having a child named “Moses" or “Monzella” in your class didn’t cause you to crack a grin anymore. It was just normality. Then those identity distinctions became even more subtle. You don’t remember America and all its little subtleties anymore, and you really have to think to remember how you used to think and be pre-Africa. You don’t laugh at those funny things Namibians do, because you do them too, and not just because the culture dictates it, but because you WANT to. You think binders should be covered with pretty paper first. The content will come later.
This is where I am now. I can no longer say Namibians are H, I, and J, while Americans are X, Y, and Z. Everything has become one fuzzy mass of which I’m a part. But I’ve been tested and I know where I stand: I may be H, J, X, Z, but not I or Y. Given enough time here, you figure out where you stand on everything and you develop your African-me. This is why ultimately Peace Corps can be a very annihilating experience. Removed from everyone who knew American-you, and all the “ruts” we fall in when being with people who know us, plus removed from all understandings of cultural behavior and language, you are given greater freedom than you have ever had. But you are not given complete freedom, because at some level Namibians expect that you live according to their rules too.
In this intermediate zone, we struggle to figure out what we really stand for and how we should act. Most of us stop keeping up appearances: we rarely bathe, only sometimes wear matching clothes, wear the same clothes several times before we wash them, etc. This is mostly because of our living conditions but also because our “otherness” puts us outside the borders of expected Namibian and American behaviour. Sometimes we start acting like crazy people and doing things that our American-selves would never do. Things I’ve done here (temporarily): become an atheist, cry in front of the whole school, be way rude, stare at people, cuss at my students, etc. There is a danger of losing oneself here for sure, which is to say of losing one’s “ego.” The things that helped to construct it are no more here. Completely losing everything you’ve ever known from something as simple as how to wash clothes to something as complex as your religious beliefs can be frightening. This is why so many volunteers leave early.
I think the real challenge, however, will be going back. I don’t remember much of my American-me anymore, but I know intimately well my African-me which is a strange conglomeration of personal, American, and African attributes. But African-me can’t live the same way in America. This is why so many volunteers never return to live in America again. Once you’ve successfully let go of your American-me, dismantled it, critiqued every portion, integrated Namibian cultural attributes and ignored others, you become an African-me. Two years of building another ego, only to go back and start over? Far too difficult and oppressive! Who will you be when you go back now? You can’t be American-me anymore because you’ve moved beyond that now, but you can’t be African-me either. Hitchhiking, covering your binders, and informality is simply not the way in America. So you must build your ego up from scratch, like being born again. Like Humpty dumpty, you fell off of your wall by going and staying in Africa, but once you break that identity there is no way to put it all back together again the way it was. And maybe that is not the point: What was Humpty after all? An empty shell that for a time was animated by the divine. So whatever face you choose for yourself in Africa or in America, it is not the face that is important. Ultimately, you are just an empty shell that for a time was animated by the divine, and that is meaning enough.