Nicaragua: What I learned from my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer

Have you ever thought about packing up and living in another country? And have you ever wondered what it'd be like to be a Peace Corps Volunteer?

Well, in this Season 2 opener of Creating Your Happy Place, Rebecca West shares her experience serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nicaragua.

Spoiler alert, it wasn't exactly her cup of tea - she ended up leaving early. But even though it wasn't a great fit for her, she still thinks it was one of the most important things she could have done. In fact, she credits her success as a business woman and business coach to the lessons she learned from her time in the Peace Corps.

These days, Rebecca's a business coach for residential interior designers and design firms. She teaches all sorts of techniques, skills, and processes that help keep their projects on track and keep clients from getting in their own way. Her mission? To eliminate decision fatigue and set a new standard for communication in residential interior design!

🤓 Rebecca's coaching website: seriouslyhappy.com
😀 Rebecca's Instagram: @beseriouslyhappy
🤝 Rebecca's Linked In: linkedin.com/in/rebeccasusanwest
📕 Rebecca's book: Happy Starts at Home
 
-- About the host --

Rebecca West is a business coach for ambitious residential interior designers who are determined to become the only designer their clients and contractors call.

She's also obsessed with creating happy homes, so if you need some advice for your home you can check out her book Happy Starts at Home or sign up for a via-Zoom Design Helpline. 

She can't resist a costume party or a cat video, and has a weakness for Oreos, Taco Bell, and Scotch whiskey. 😁

🙏 If you like this podcast, make sure to review, subscribe, or share! 

Transcript

  📍  Welcome to Creating Your Happy Place, a podcast that explores what it takes to create your happy place, and then empowers you to do whatever it takes to make sure your home makes you seriously happy™. I'm Rebecca West host of Creating Your Happy Place and author of the book Happy Starts at Home, and I'm so glad you're here! 

This season, we're going to have fun exploring the idea of becoming an ex-pat and setting up a home outside of the United States. It might sound like a great adventure to leave the United States and set up home in another country, but it comes with its own set of unique challenges. Here in the United States, we have not just a remarkable amount of choice when it comes to shopping and finding things that suit our personal style, but we're also used to being able to get pretty much whatever we want whenever we want it. It's not necessarily the same everywhere else in the world. 

Today, I'm sharing my own story of living abroad when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua. Spoiler alert. It actually wasn't a good fit for me. And I ended up leaving after nine months instead of staying the two full years. 

I'm going to tell you what it was like setting up a home there and also share with you what led to me leaving early. Before I dive into my experience living in Nicaragua as a Peace Corps volunteer, let me tell you why being an ex-pat is on my mind and why it's defining this season. In just about a year from this recording, around the start of 2024, my hubby and I plan to move to Paris so that he can pursue his dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu and learn to be a professional chef. It's a dream he's had since he was five years old, so we're selling everything and we're going for it. 

Ever since we decided to make this move, I've been thinking a lot about why my experience living in Nicaragua didn't really work out. If I can, I want to avoid the mistakes I made there so that my hubby and I can thrive in France. And that's why we'll be taking this podcast journey together this season, chatting with people who are ex-pats, have been ex-pats, or who have insight into living in a country that's not the United States.  I'll be taking notes too learning best practices, not just for living abroad, but for creating a happy life abroad. 

With that, let me tell you a little bit about my time in Nicaragua with the Peace Corps. 

For those of you who don't know the Peace Corps is a US government based volunteer organization. It was started in the 1960s by President Kennedy as a way to improve foreign relations. Basically they wanted to send a lot of eager, young, enthusiastic, friendly Americans to other countries so they could get to know us in a non-militaristic way and we could get to know them. 

After I graduated from college with my degrees in geology and community planning, I knew that I wanted to give back for a little while before I started my adult career and the Peace Corps seemed like a great way to do that. 

I interviewed for the job because you interview for a position in the Peace Corps just like you would any other job, and then I got assigned to Nicaragua. I'm pretty sure it was because I'd already studied Spanish in school and they tend to follow whatever language skills you already have when they're making their assignments. 

When it was time to leave, I packed up a giant duffel bag and I took my 23 year old self off for an adventure. 

Your first three months in the Peace Corps are like language summer camp. And I had so much fun. I joined a group of new volunteers in the capital city of Managua in Nicaragua and I moved in with my host family, and then I immersed myself in language and culture studies with my fellow volunteers. It was such fun getting to focus on learning another language and another culture alongside other people doing the same thing! 

After training, the Peace Corps gives you your long-term assignment based on your personality, how far your language skills have developed, and a whole bunch of other factors. 

They assigned me to the mountains of Nicaragua in a place called Somoto, Madriz. I was really excited about that because it meant I wasn't going to be in the hottest and most humid parts of Nicaragua.  I've never really liked the heat or humidity, so that put a big smile on my face. I said goodbye to all my new Peace Corps volunteer friends then, about eight hours and three buses later, I made it to my assigned village. 

Officially, I was assigned to Somoto, Madriz, but that's actually a fairly significant town and there's still a couple hour bus ride from where Somoto is to where I was going to be living. By the way, when you picture me on these buses, remember that this is the main form of long distance transportation in these areas. So, yes, I was riding the bus with people and livestock, especially chickens. 

When I got to my new town, I was greeted by my host family and they showed me to my room, and I took in my new surroundings. So let me set the stage for you a little bit. 

This is a very, very, very small village in the mountains of Nicaragua. The houses there are built with either cinderblock or mud brick, and the roofs are mostly thatched, meaning, they're made with straw. And those roofs don't come all the way down to the walls, so there's a little bit of a gap between where the wall stops and where the roof starts. 

In case you're wondering. Yes. That lets in both the fresh air and critters like tarantulas.  

There was running water, but not in the way you might think. There was a cold water spigot out in the backyard where you could fill a bucket, and my host family had also run a pipe into kind of an indoor/outdoor shower, but it was all cold water. 

 I really remember that it was only cold water because of a funny cultural experience I had with my host mom. At the time I was going for morning runs, I would go for a run, get really hot and flushed and would come back and obviously wants to take a shower. 

But in that particular culture, my host mother was just horrified for me because she was convinced that if I took a cold shower after being hot from a run, I would have a stroke. Nothing I could do would convince her that, that wasn't going to cause a medical emergency. So in order to take my morning runs and not completely freak out my host mom, I would kind of rest for half an hour to cool down my body, then she would be comfortable with me taking a shower. Just one of many cultural exchanges where you're just operating on different information. 

Aside from the cold water to the spigot and the indoor/outdoor shower there wasn't any other running water and definitely no hot water. All of the toilets, of course, were outhouses. 

Inside the houses, you could see those thatched roofs, so there was no ceiling the way we know it in the United States.  Many of the houses had dirt floors, but some families, including my host family had poured concrete floors in their homes, which definitely made cleaning easier. 

When I moved in with my host family, they gave me a cot in a little alcove area of their home. The alcove gave me a sense of privacy, but it didn't actually have any doors. So it was semi-private but not super private. And certainly not to the extent that I was used to, not only as an American, but also as the only girl in my family. I'd always had a room to myself. So I lived with my host family for a few months, but I got really itchy to have a true sense of privacy back. 

Since the Peace Corps gives you a living allowance based on the cost of living in the village where you're staying, I used some of that money to rent my own little house right next door to my host family's. They thought I was strange for wanting to live alone, but since they thought I was strange for a lot of reasons, I just added that to the list of ways I was weird. 

My little house was about 15 feet wide, maybe 20 feet long. It was made a cinder block walls and had a straw thatched roof, just like the others in the village. So the first thing I did was I hired a guy to pour some concrete floors, and then I had to figure out furniture. I asked around and I found out that, while there were no stores where you could easily go buy a bed, not that I had the budget for fancy furniture anyway, I could have a local woodworker make what I needed. So I hired a guy and they made me a bed, a desk and sort of a kitchen island. And that was all the furniture I needed for my little house. It was all very rough hewn and very rustic, but it was very sturdy. 

Once I got my bed, the very next thing I did was to hang my mosquito net over my bed and tuck it around the mattress. 

Why? 

Because mosquito nets in countries with malaria are not decorative. They are literally there to protect you while you sleep from getting malaria because the malaria-carrying mosquitoes tend to bite you at night. Unfortunately, the dengue-carrying mosquitoes tend to bite you during the day. So the mosquito nets don't help with the dengue, but they definitely help you avoid malaria. 

By the way when you're getting into a mosquito-net-covered-bed, aside from having that mosquito net tucked in underneath your mattress, you also want to get in really quickly. Those couple of nights where a mosquito snuck into my little anti mosquito tent with me were very long nights, because you cannot find that mosquito, but boy, can you hear it buzzing around your head! 

 That net didn't just save me from mosquitoes though. Remember those straw thatched roofs? They don't come all the way down to the walls, so it's easy for any number of creepy crawlies to come into your home. 

I had bats living up in the rafters and those tarantulas that felt very comfortable making my home theirs. The bats I didn't really mind because I knew the net would keep them from snuggling up with me while I slept, and I actually kind of liked bats. 

But the tarantulas? Not so much. 

I understand that tarantulas are harmless, but I did not want furry spiders, the size of a small rodent, in my personal space. I also didn't want to kill them. So I made the best of it. I remember writing my family letters of playing what I called 'spider hockey,' where I would take my broom and sweep the tarantulas out of my house, inviting them to go live somewhere else. 

That was pretty much it when it came to getting settled into my little house. For my everyday needs I had a water spigot in the backyard, just like my host family had, but I didn't have a shower, so I would just bring buckets of water in from the spigot for cooking, bathing, cleaning... anything I needed water for, being sure to add a little bit of bleach to the water that I used for brushing my teeth if I didn't have time to boil it. Is drinking a little bit of bleach healthy? Probably not. But it seemed better than the potential alternatives, which will leave you in the bathroom a lot more than you want. And remember, those bathrooms were outhouses, so it's just not a place you want to spend a lot of time. 

Once I got my house all settled up, then I settled in and started learning how to live as much like the locals as I could, learning new ways of doing old things. One of my favorite memories was that time I ended up with a fire ant infestation in the kitchenette corner of my little house. 

Weirdly, I've dealt with ants in nearly every home I've ever lived in from Michigan and Kentucky to California and Washington. At home I'd have grabbed a bottle of raid or some ant traps, but I didn't have any of that where I was living in Nicaragua. So I went over to my host mom and I said, 'what should I do?'

Well, she grabbed some lighter fluid and a match and hands it to me and says, 'just use these.' And I'm like, I have no idea what you want me to do with lighter fluid and a match. What exactly are you telling me to do? 

So she comes over to my little house,  pours lighter fluid directly onto the ant's nest  and lights it on fire. It was the craziest thing I'd seen. It seemed so weird. 

But when you think about it, my walls were made of cinder block and my floors were made of concrete. So there really wasn't anything that would catch fire. She solved the problem. No more ants. Done. 

 Looking back, I think it was actually more environmentally friendly than all the pesticides and chemicals that we use in the United States. But of course, if we tried that in the United States, we'd set our houses on fire, so I don't recommend trying this at home. 

 I really do have great memories from my time in the Peace Corps in Nicaragua. But like I said, I ended up leaving after nine months instead of the two years that I had volunteered to serve. So what happened? 

It was a combination of three things. 

First, I never felt a sense of purpose. The Peace Corps told me that my job would be teaching environmental education to third through sixth graders. 

I had my degree in geology and another in community planning, but zero experience teaching, much less teaching kids, much less doing that in a foreign language in classrooms that had walls made of plastic: picture black garbage bag plastic wrapping a couple of posts holding up a thatched roof. 

I didn't have a clue what I was doing and I didn't understand the culture that I was supposed to be helping. I was living in a community plagued with unemployment and alcoholism, especially among the young men. And the natural environment had been completely degraded in large part because of some of the choices that the United States had made back when we were taking advantage of the resources of some of these central American countries. 

At 23, I couldn't connect the dots between unemployment, alcoholism ,and having a degraded environment. Looking back with more than 20 years perspective and wisdom, I can now see that the people in Nicaragua lost their livelihoods and hid behind the comfort of alcohol because their environments had been so degraded. 

But, like I said, I couldn't connect those dots at 23. I just felt like I was supposed to be telling these people that trees matter when they're trying to figure out how to feed their families. 

So I felt this profound sense of uselessness while I was there. And as a Type A, driven personality, useless is not something that is ever going to make me feel good. 

If you want to join the Peace Corps, I recommend either being very self-directed and working with the community early on to figure out how you can actually be helpful. Or bring your type B personality and just enjoy two years of a pleasant, cultural exchange. I don't think I have a type B personality hiding in me anywhere, so that wasn't an option for me. 

The second thing that made living in Nicaragua hard for me was that I was very lonely. I spoke the language well enough to navigate everyday conversations, but not well enough to have an emotional, meaningful conversation. That, combined with the fact that no one shared my cultural touchstones or my childhood memories, and I only had letters for communicating with folks back home... I felt very isolated and really alone. 

But the thing that drove me over the edge and ultimately brought me home was that I felt like a circus animal trapped in my house.

I expected to be a bit of a curiosity as some random 23 year old white American girl living in the secluded mountains of Nicaragua, but I didn't expect to have my privacy invaded over and over again. But it was. By a group of little terrors in the shape of preteen boys. 

I don't think they really meant anything by it, but these little boys, who were maybe seven to 15 years old, would come and watch me through my window. At first, I figured I could deal with it. I started with an obvious solution: hanging curtains over the window. But then I had to deal with the front door to my little house. It was made of rough hewn wood that had gaps between the planks. If I was inside with the lights on at night, anyone standing in front of my door could see right into my little one room house. 

So I used some paper and some glue and I kind of wallpapered over the door to try and create some privacy. I thought my problem was solved. But one night I was sitting in my little house and one of those little terrors, probably thinking it was the most hilarious prank ever, used something sharp, like a little blade, and started cutting through the paper on my door so they could see me. 

I threw up in that door and I let them have it as much as I could in my Spanglish. And they ran away laughing. But I hit an emotional wall. I was already unhappy feeling isolated and useless. And now I was always being watched. 

Amazingly, I didn't immediately decide to leave, but I did take that eight hour bus ride back to Managua to visit the Peace Corps doctor. Her name was Anna. 

And to this day, I am so grateful to Anna. Because she helped me see that the Peace Corps is in fact, just a job. And I could quit and go home. And that permission was all I needed. Within a month, I'd find myself back in Seattle. 

Despite not finishing out my service. I'm really glad I joined the Peace Corps. I learned a lot about myself and what I need to create a happy home. And it's not just about having four walls and a roof. It's also about having people around you who share a story and understand where you're from and understand where you're going. 

And it's also about feeling safe, and thanks to that lack of privacy, I never truly felt safe. I think I always was safe. I just didn't feel safe. And so much about being happy is a psychology game. How do we feel about what's going on in our lives? Not just what is going on in our lives. 

So these are the lessons I'm trying to take with me to Paris. Not just questions about 'where am I going to live?' and 'how am I going to set up my house?' but questions about how am I going to make that house a home base for really settling into a different culture, and making it my own, at least temporarily. 

If you're wanting to join the Peace Corps, I hope that my story hasn't dissuaded you at all. I think the Peace Corps is a really cool organization that can do some real good in the world, and some real good for those who volunteer. In fact, I think it has the most profound impact on the volunteers, even more than on the communities, they help, because it helps us Americans think globally instead of just about what's happening within our own tiny circles. 

But I do think it takes a little bit of knowledge to know if the Peace Corps is going to be a fit, and if any of you are listening and you want to just chat with me about that, I am happy to have a conversation with you. You can DM me or email me and let's have a chat to make sure it's going to be a better experience for you than it was for me. 

I think it's about asking yourself questions. Like, 'are you more of an introvert or an extrovert?' If you're more of an introvert, how are you going to connect to this community in a way where you don't feel isolated? What are your privacy needs and how ready are you to feel deeply uncomfortable? 

As you see things that you don't understand, or you're feeling yourself judging this other culture, can you allow yourself to get really curious and ask 'why are things the way they are?', even if you don't like them? 

As I've traveled over the years, I've come to understand that the history of a people and a place goes back farther than outsiders ever realize, and at the same time, that history is more recent and raw and more painful than we can ever understand as outsiders. 

So we have to ask questions and learn if we want to be of any service. And we don't have to have the answers. I thought I was supposed to bring answers to Nicaragua, but I should have brought questions. 

I should have been asking questions the whole time I was there. 

But, like I said, I am grateful for the experience because without it, I wouldn't be good at the work I do now as a business owner of an interior design firm and coach to other entrepreneurs. Thanks to my failure to ask questions in Nicaragua I've learned to always ask questions. Silly questions, important questions, courageous questions. 

Ultimately failing to ask questions then taught me the importance of asking questions now. And it gave me the courage to do it even if I'm the only one raising my hand. 

So that's my experience as an ex-pat and Peace Corps volunteer. Hopefully that gives you some nuggets to think about as you create your happy place here or abroad. If nothing else, hopefully it encourages you to ask more questions the next time you're in an uncomfortable or unfamiliar situation. 

And hopefully you'll join me as I interview our guests and together we'll learn from those who have gone before us and we'll figure out ways to do it better the next time we put ourselves in uncomfortable situations. 

 📍 In the meantime, if you'd like to find me, you can find me online at SeriouslyHappy.com and on Instagram at @beseriouslyhappy. I hope you've enjoyed this intro episode to season two of Creating Your Happy Place and that you feel a little bit more encouraged and excited to make your home your happy place, no matter where in the world you're located. 

If you are feeling less than happy in your home, please remember that my book Happy Starts at Home is here as a resource for you. It's full of exercises that are meant to help you figure out how your home could work better for you and what changes might support the values you hold and the lifestyle you want to live.  

That's it for this episode of Creating Your Happy Place. Until next time!