Shipping Lesson #1: Caring for Your Care Package

When you’re in a slump in your service, as I am now, it helps to remember the more meaningful things in Peace Corps life: the new cohort of volunteers who look up to you as they navigate the terrifying unknowns of early service; the smile of a child in your community who refuses to let you pass his intersection before you teach him a new English word; the old ladies at the marshrutka stop who jokingly chastise you for getting thin; the satisfaction derived from a hard days’ work making your site a better place; the immaterial satisfaction from knowing that these hardships in service of a greater good make you a better, happier person in the long term, which is what really matters; and, best of all, getting a big, bulky box of crap from America.

I speak of care packages—one of the great delights of service, and a topic that could fuel hours of conversation between volunteers, hours of tales and theories, opinions, and philosophies about the correlation between these mysterious boxes and our happiness. To be sure, there are volunteers who make do without care packages at all—then again, recognizing the saints among us doesn’t mean we have to live like them. Service teaches that you like American coffee too much to have high-minded principles.