Finding Purpose
MeghanMarie Fowler-Finn
Peace Corp Volunteer in Jamaica from 2007 to 2009 starting at age 21
At twenty-one I joined the Peace Corps. I knew I wanted to be a public servant but didn’t know what that looked like yet, so I chose an adventure where I could grow and contribute at the same time. They assigned me to Jamaica. I had never been to the Caribbean, so I had no idea what to expect. I almost tried to get a different post, one that would be “challenging,” or what my colleagues were calling “real” Peace Corps locations. As it turns out, Jamaica had the highest dropout rate in the world when I was there.
After training in Jamaican Patois, history, safety, and environmental practices, I was sent to live with a Jamaican family and work at a 4-H Clubs, where they farmed and taught youth agriculture and home skills. I was shy, young, and sheltered. I had majored in environmental studies and grew up picking tomatoes from my father’s garden. But my best skills were organizational and business acumen, excellent research abilities, and most of all, relatively impressive soccer skills. My Jamaican colleagues and neighbors were curious about me, both welcoming and guarded. I quickly realized that I had to be many different people, a different form of myself at work, with my housemate, on the “football” pitch, with my new friends, and with other Peace Corps volunteers. It was only later that I realized that not only could I be all those people, I was all those people. The experience was helping me realize I had so many more strengths than I had previously imagined.
If you live in another country and genuinely try to immerse yourself and contribute and learn, it is not easy. It’s also incredibly rewarding, hopefully for both you and the people you meet and bond with along the way. When I first started walking around town, people called me “white gyal”, then “football gyal”, and finally “footballer”. We would play every day, sometimes twice a day, in the small field in the center of the neighborhood. They taught me dominoes and hustled their friends, pretending to get stuck with me as their partner and then dominating the table, six-love. Those two years were almost two decades ago now, but I can still feel my eyes and mind opening like it was yesterday.
After Peace Corps, I went to grad school for a Master’s in Public Policy and to join city government. The power of community in Jamaica and building up your own neighborhood alongside your neighbors inspired me to want a lifetime of the same. Those two years changed how I viewed our responsibility to each other as humans, and our responsibility to ourselves to learn and grow and contribute. I wish everyone could have the opportunity to live abroad temporarily to understand how similar and different everywhere is at the same time. I will never be able to meet new people or travel the same way again. I’m too curious and too aware of how much more there is to learn. I’m writing this from an airport on my way to Mexico City, after cramming Spanish lessons for the past three months. I’ve never been there before, and I can’t wait to learn more.
