How Structure Helped My Peace Corps Experience
Love it or hate it, we all have some sort of structure in our lives. I happen to thrive in a structured environment. I like having a plan, knowing where I am going, how I will get there and what to expect - even when life is filled with unknowns and things we can’t plan for. Perhaps that is when I appreciate structure more than any other time!
I will give you an example and a snippet of my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco back in 2004. Who goes into the Peace Corps with their daily planner in hand? I did!
Rarely will people put the words Peace Corps and structure into the same sentence, but I will say that structure is something that helps me stay focused, handle stress and take control of whatever life throws at me.
Peace Corps taught me many things, but in terms of my personal development, some things I still strive to maintain on a daily basis are to:
Practice patience
Embrace flexibility
Listen to your intuition
Use structure as a tool
Having structure in your life doesn’t mean that you can’t slow down or be intentional about how you go about your day. It simply means that you build some parameters and try to stick to them with the understanding that things may get moved around.
I had decided early on in my Peace Corps experience that part of my daily routine was going to center around observing my environment and the people around me. On any given day I would pick a few families to visit in the village I was living in. These visits would go right into my daily planner along with my weekly visits to the market, sessions at the cyber café, meetings with counterparts in the closest city and all the other activities I did during my two years of service.
There were multiple reasons I used a daily planner. First of all, I didn’t want to lose track of the days! Second, I wanted to build structure into my daily life. It helped ensure that I was staying on track with what my purpose and objectives were so that I could make the best of the limited time I had - both on a professional and personal level. Third, I wanted to journal my activities so that I could look back and see what I had done.
While I had different responsibilities and obligations throughout my time as a Peace Corps volunteer, I found that one of the most important things to me was to get to know the people in my community and for people in the community to get to know me. Part of that process included sitting for hours (many, many hours) where we would drink several cups of tea. I would observe and talk to people as they baked bread over the fire, prepared couscous from scratch, separated and dried olives, and made handicrafts.
The rituals and rhythms of daily life moved at a much slower pace than I was used to. Putting aside the time to visit with people and learning through my experiences made it possible for me to sit, interact, observe and really take in each moment.
During my time living in this village, I had the opportunity to slow down and really use all five of my senses as I went through many of my daily activities. I was able to focus just on what was happening in front of me at that moment in time.
To this day there are certain smells, sounds and tastes that make me appreciate sweet hot tea, fresh-baked bread, fluffy couscous, cured black olives and brightly colored handmade rugs more than anything in the world.
I think what all this demonstrated to me is that you can have structure and still enjoy spontaneous, unexpected events. It also helped me understand that you can build structure into your life in a way that fits your needs at any point in time.
Does structure help you thrive? I would like to know your thoughts, success stories or challenges about having or not having structure in your life. Email me at dani@danichoicoaching.com I would love to hear from you!
