The Peace Corps website is full of success stories. All volunteers are. It can be intimidating until you realize that not everyone succeeds all of the time, and that you need to be able to look past the failures and focus on what DID go right, or you’ll lose your mind.

This is far, far easier said then done. As I learned the hard way this week.

Back story: The group I work with falls under the umbrella of the Jamaica Network of Rural Women Producers, which is a huge island-wide NGO. I have the privelige of working closely and often with the president of JNRWP, and I was really excited when she approached my supervisor and I with the opportunity to put together a domestic violence outreach event.

This was to be my first big event, my first big “thing” really since swearing in six months ago. I solicited donations, made posters when the graphics designer backed out at the last minute, enlisted my neighbor to help find bus drivers (to shuttle the women from the surrounding rural communities so they could attend) and a town crier (a guy with a PA system mounted on the roof of his car who makes the rounds and spreads the word).

Things fell through, they went wrong, but that is to be expected. I found myself feeling like I was the only one invested in seeing this thing happen, but I told myself that everyone feels this way in PC, it will all work out as the Jamaicans promise me it will.

So, as the big day approached, and I ran back and forth to the MP’s office with invoices and found back-up town criers for the back-up town crier, spent my own money so that we could be able to provide the refreshments promised, I was stressed out. Obviously.
But everyone told me to relax, it would work out just fine. I would see.

Tuesday arrived, and nothing went right. Nothing. The church hall we’d reserved wasn’t open. When finally reached, the care taker told me that someone had taken the key that morning and hadn’t brought it back. Righhht.

No one had procured a DVD player. Which was odd, because the movie we were scheduled to show was a big part of the event. Ice and an igloo for drinks were no where to be found. Some of the community outreach to schools had not been done. And my supervisor, who I had thought would be taking care of these small details was completely pre-occupied with her cookshop.

So Mildred (president of JNRWP) arrives and starts to call the leaders of the community groups who promised us they would be in attendance to get specific numbers and to find out where to send the buses. Every one of them had either “forgotten” or backed out. Every. One.

We were scheduled to start at 3. I had enlisted the help of FamPlan (Jamaica’s Planned Parenthood), where another PCV works, to come and do demonstrations and to hand out coupons for HIV tests. Mildred and I made the painful decision to call the PCV and to let her know that we proooobbbbbbablllllyyyyyyy weren’t going to have an event that afternoon. And then I look up to see Tina and her counterpart coming through the door with a huge box of condoms.

Having to apologize my friend and her co-worker for needlessly wasting trip from St Ann’s Bay to Claremont was hands down the worst part of my already shitty afternoon. The second worst part was having to leave a note on the door half an hour after we were supposed to start (and no one had showed up) that the event was postponed until further notice.

I’m not a Type A personality. A few ex-boyfriends just choked and sprayed FourLoko all over their laptop screens, but I would say I’m a B+. I hover on the brink of stressed-out neurosis pretty much constantly, although I’ve been told I do a good job of keeping the crazy under wraps. I guess what I’m saying is that while I’m not a super-high achiever, I do like results.

This was the first opportunity for me to put my name on something important in my community. I was the once pestering businesses for donations. I was the one putting up posters and spreading the word. So I’m worried that I’ve lost face in Claremont, just when I’d begun to feel really at home, a part of this place. I think a big part of the reason we got any donations at all is that I’m very visible in town, I talk to people, I shop locally, and I had really begun to “feel the love.”
Which is cool, but what now?
What do I do the next time anyone wants to put on something like this, with a community reluctant to honor commitments and to participate?
And will people think “That white girl can’t get anything done right?”

I’m also a more than a little frustrated with my supervisor who I don’t think quite grasps just how devastated and mortified I am. That’s a whole other Nissan Bluebird trunkfull of illegally-caught-in-a-sanctuary-parrotfish, and I’m not going there just yet.

I worried that it was something I did, but Mildred was ademant that it wasn’t.
She has another community who WANTS us to do hold the forum, but Retreat is in St Mary. And anyway, its’ not MY community, and I feel like I’ve been cheated a success story. I just feel like a failure.