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There are people who think of joining the Peace Corps. It's one of those vague ideas that flit through people's head like, one day I'd like to go on safari or one day I'll go to medical school. It's one of those things people regret not doing, but never actually planned to do in the first place. What the Peace Corps evokes is an image of adventure and exploits, a diversion from ordinary life. Maybe, to some people, it works better as a fantasy to relish as they go about what they believe to be a safe lifestyle at home in the ordinary world. Of course, there are plenty of people who actually do serve the United States by signing up as a volunteer. Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut has proposed it as an option of civic duty, and many others like him have made the choice to serve as a volunteer overseas. The popular travel writer Paul Theroux served in Africa, as did the writer Geraldine Kennedy. Ellen Urbani Hiltebrand joins the rank of Peace Corps writers with her book, "When I Was Elena", an account of her service in early nineties. From 1991 to 1993, Hiltebrand served as a volunteer in the war-torn country of Guatemala. Like many of her colleagues, she started with idealism to change the world, but mostly what she was looking for was what she called a "defining moment". The experiences she had in college were not enough for her to feel challenged, not enough for her to feel that she had some epiphany as to how to define herself in an individual way as an adult. By leaving the comfort zone of the United States, she felt she could better learn who she was in a place where she had to rely her on her own wits, and volunteering in the Peace Corps seemed like a way to give herself that kind of personal challenge. Hiltebrand's accounts of her life during this time is dark, harrowing, and yet somehow beautiful, With no one but herself to truly rely on, the wish that she had to separate herself out of her milieu is more than granted. Volunteering in the Third World may sound idealistic and virtuous, but the experiences that Hiltebrand reflects that this is not so rosy as it sounds. Hiltebrand had several choices in how she could have approached this memoir. She could have chosen what it was like to be just out of college and not knowing what to do with one's life. She could have taken a geopolitical perspective and focused on the civil war that was the backdrop to her experiences. She could have focused on what it was like to be American in another part of the world, or being obviously wealthy in comparison to the people around her. Additionally, she could have taken the perspective of a woman trying to survive in a machismo culture on her own wits. Although she touches on all of these perspectives at times, it is the last one which becomes her main focus. What it is like for her as a woman, and what it was for the other women around her, becomes the dominant focus of what this book is about. The author chooses an interesting way to lay out her book: she writes a chapter of her own experiences, which she crafts by depicting a relationship she has with another female. Whether she talks with Ladinas, indigenous women, girls, or her female American colleagues, Hiltebrand couches her experiences with these people in a way to show how she comes to define herself. Alternating with these chapters, Hiltebrand uses a unique craft by imagining what these perspective women were thinking, many times interjecting herself as a character in this imaginary profile. At first, I found these fictional diatribes threw me off track a little, as I was not expecting this kind of writing in the middle of a memoir, but her writing in these profiles is excellent. It comes off as a means of her creating empathy for those she encounters, and by developing this empathy, she in turn comes to define herself. "When I Was Elena" is a book of harrowing experiences that Hiltebrand survives. She doesn't sugarcoat what she went through, and many times it seems she survives not only because of her wits, but because she has the additional protection of a German shepherd named Cali. For anyone who thinks the Peace Corps is a volunteer "vacation", Hiltebrand certainly disabuses the reader of this notion. Her book is haunting, and watching the narrator develop as a woman and human being seems to be the ultimate triumph of the book. Honest and unflinching, "When I Was Elena" seems realistic in her depiction of being a stranger in a strange place. It is as the story develops that the stranger she is no longer is a stranger to herself. |
