Nick Spina is originally from Michigan. “I joined the PC immediately after graduating from Michigan State. I graduated in May and left the country in June.” As an economics and political science major, Spina had already engaged heavily in international studies: “I found out about the Peace Corps during my sophomore year, and it really seemed to fit into what I was studying.” Spina had also done a good deal of volunteering, “so it seemed like a good combination of several things that I enjoyed doing.” Moreover, Spina wanted to be able to speak another language. “That’s very difficult to do in a classroom,” he observed. “When you live in a country, you have a much better opportunity to learn the language fluently. I don’t think I ever got to that point, but I got pretty close.”

From 2004 to 2006, he worked in Armenia. “When I was told I was going to Armenia, I didn’t know where it was, so I had to get a map and look,” admits Spina, who was assigned to be a community development volunteer with a local non-governmental organization on human rights issues. Spina worked on a range of different projects. “We tried to educate the community members on everything from human trafficking, and how to write a business plan, to English.”

“A community development volunteer spends a lot of his/her time planning different projects based on what the community needs,” Spina explains. “So we do a lot talking, have a lot of meetings to figure out what the community needs and how to go about addressing those needs.”

While Spina worked on a number of different projects, he feels especially good about one, which involved organizing and implementing a summer camp for 10- to 15-year-old Armenian boys. As he explains, “we had a plan to teach them about things they weren’t being taught in schools, such as health, hygiene, nutrition—things they are not going to get from a traditional Armenian education, but that are absolutely crucial to quality of life issues. We talked about HIV/AIDS, sexual health, things that they need to hear early on…[but are] taboo topics in Armenia, so we were having very frank conversations about how to live a healthy lifestyle. And I was pretty proud of that because I know those boys have an advantage over their peers because they received information that is very useful and important,” he says.

Those young boys were, however, not the only ones who benefited from the summer camp. “My language got a lot better over that period of time because in order to communicate with teenage boys, you talk a lot and you learn to have a sense of humor with them,” he notes. “That always stands out in my mind as a really good experience for everybody involved.” While the teachers were Americans, they were paired with an Armenian teacher, “so the boys were not just getting a one-sided view from an American.” That was important, explains Spina, because “the whole point of Peace Corps, of course, is to learn from each other. Americans learn from Armenians, and Armenians learn from Americans. This was a great opportunity to fulfill those goals.”

Spina employed a particular strategy to help him become integrated into the community, a city of 60,000 people. “I wanted to meet people my age. And the best way I could figure out how to do that was to join the local youth basketball team,” he explains. “We practiced every day, and we had games all around the city and other cities. It was a really unique experience to be the foreigner on a sports team.”

When they think about the Peace Corps prior to going, many volunteer trainees have basic questions and fears about such things as bathrooms and living conditions, and many expectations get shattered. “I had a really idealized vision of what the country would look like and the language that people would speak,” Julie Feeney recalls. “All these preconceived notions that you come with, I think they are your biggest obstacles.” For example, ahe chuckles when remembering how she had expected it to be “like a fairy tale, where everything is green and beautiful,” only to discover that Paraguay’s industrialized cities do not fit that image. Likewise, Nick Spina had imaged that he “would be living in a hut in the middle of nowhere.” Instead, he was assigned to an Armenian city of 60,000 people.

Many Peace Corps volunteers discover that they have underestimated the language barrier or the technical assignment. For instance, Feeney expected that she would use Spanish principally, but soon discovered that people in the countryside in Paraguay speak Guarny instead. “It was a struggle,” she says. “I hadn’t expected to feel that kind of dependency on others for communication…. I didn’t expect to be a child again. So there were many different things that I had to reevaluate.”

Having already volunteered, worked with non-profit groups, and traveled abroad, Kate Fjell felt prepared for certain aspects of her assignment in Malawi. Yet, she remembers; “it totally blew me away. It was nothing like my expectations. It was so much harder, so much more rewarding, so much more challenging. It was just more. Everything was ramped up by a power of ten, I’d say, or maybe even a power of 100!”

Moreover, Fjell adds, she hadn’t expected to feel so socially isolated and awkward: “Peace Corps volunteers will always talk about it being like living in a fish bowl. I was the only white person for forty miles, so I definitely stood out…and that was really hard. People were so fascinated. People would follow me to the bathroom, you know, because they wanted to know if I went to the bathroom the same way…. I wasn’t used to being watched all the time, and it took me a long time to get used to it.”

Because of these kinds of experiences, Spina reached an interesting conclusion: “I think the most successful Peace Corps volunteers are those who don’t set high expectations. You have to be flexible. Those who go in, saying ‘I want to do this, I want to do it there, and I only want to do that’, end up having a really hard time. The fun of it, the adventure of it, is in the randomness, the unknown, the difficult stuff that you face.” Beyond flexibility, one of the most important bits of advice for anybody considering the Peace Corps, according to these Peace Corps, is re-evaluating the meaning of success. “It’s not always tangible,” Feeney cautions, “it’s not always quick, it’s not always something that you can expect, so we learn to appreciate little victories.” Agreeing, Matt Rysavy adds: “You really think that you can go and make these humongous changes. In reality, they are just small dents,… but it’s still positive change. That’s what you have to remind yourself of when it’s all said and done.”