Peace Corps's Shifting Sides: The Pursuit of Happiness

After ten full months serving in Peace Corps Namibia, I think it is fair to say that what a Peace Corps volunteer can find an exuberant happiness in is much simpler, much less demanding of the world, than the average American: a nice meal you cook for yourself, a television show you’ve seen a million times, the shade of a tree and a good book…Hell, even the sight of clean clothes hanging from the line can bring a smile to my face. In fact, with all the struggles of adapting to life in Peace Corps, it is nearly impossible to remember why the feeling of happiness seemed at times in the states such an elusive trophy.

In her October 5, 2009 op-ed for Newsweek Julia Baird notes that “last year 4,000 books were published on happiness, up from [just] 50 in 2000.” Four thousand books!? Are Americans really that desperately unhappy? If so, perhaps one of the goals in our mission of cross-cultural exchange is to bring Americans a new perspective on the issue.

Of course, my initial reaction to hearing of this American epidemic of feeling blue is why? What don’t we have? I look around myself, my village, and all I see is a large crop of people who have far less than ninety percent of Americans. People are poor. People are hungry. People are living in squalor.

Yet there is something profound happening in what I see: people are smiling. To watch one hour of international news in America, one would walk away thinking that a community like mine is teeming with long teary faces, crying babies and wretched figures in a swarm of flies and oppressive heat. Americans do no want to believe one very simple truth: there is no reason a starving African child cannot smile every bit as big as an American. And I can’t help but think that this somehow contributes to that pervasive American discontent. Perhaps Americans, in that relative wealth of goods and services – Wal-Marts, McDonalds and one-hour dry cleaners – feel some sense of entitlement to happiness; as if living in a developed country gives you some premium on good feelings. But “that’s the funny thing about the obsession with smiley-faced happiness:” Baird notes, “the more overtly we have studied and pursued it, the less happy we have become.” What I have learned from the children smiling in my community is that if you cannot find a sense of joy in the material vacuum of village life, then 4,000 books have little chance of changing your mood.

So what does such a joy entail? What is it that allows poor starving people to smile while Americans making frivolous purchases in the self-help aisle struggle to do the same? I think I am beginning to learn.

Every afternoon, usually as I am outside skipping rope, washing my clothes or reading a book, a stream of children in the same tattered articles as everyday before, carrying old buckets and empty jugs of motor oil, march behind my house to fetch their family’s water from the tap in my backyard. Everyday, like clockwork (as if they actually had a clock to go by), these kids come. To the average American this must seem like a tragic scene: threadbare garments, dirty containers, frail children carrying heavy quantities of water on their heads; to American eyes, this is a picture of suffering. But to these kids it is quite the opposite: they sing, play peek-a-boo, spray each other with water, make jokes with (and about) me; they gallop around my house, climb on the clothesline and roll in the sand laughing. And everyday they seem reluctant to let the water-fetching end. It is hard to imagine that an American child could find one-tenth the amount of joy in the same impoverished chore. In America, I’d envision this as nothing more than a scene of frowns, slumped shoulders and deep, dreadful sighs.

One fact seems very clear to me from this: happiness is not simply found in appreciating what you have, it’s learning to make the most of what you don’t have; and Americans seem hard-pressed to live with what they lack.

Fetching water can easily be seen as a grueling hardship, a daily reminder of the poverty that prevails around you. Or it can be a time of laughter and play. Likewise, sitting in the shade can be taken as a sign of how little else you have. Or it can be a chance to let the light of the day and the company of others soak in.

I think it is one of the most difficult adjustments for volunteers to make: to let go of that endless pursuit the Declaration of Independence imbibes us with, and learn to smile by what we live without. In that way, we find moving forms of happiness all around us. After all, Baird writes, “the most inspiring people are those least obsessed with their own happiness.” Like those kids fetching water. And as volunteers here we are in a unique position to carry that affectation home. Baird continues on about such inspirational figures, “those least obsessed with their own happiness…those who stride confidently across the globe to create, evoke change or wrest from life what they will.” Sound familiar?