Loneliness, Libertinism, Anxiety: Recollections of a Peace Corps Volunteer

I’d been in the United States Peace Corps for all of 48 hours when I received my first bag of taxpayer-funded condoms.

In the Peace Corps, they don’t waste time with foreplay. This was in 2002, when I was stationed at a health sanatorium north of Tashkent, one of 50 Volunteers in training. After dinner on our second day, we were ordered to report to the clinic for the first of several rounds of vaccinations. First came the needles and then came the candy, but along with the sweets I was given a brown paper bag.

I looked. “Oh, thanks,” I said, “but I don’t need this.” I handed it back. “You should take them,” the nurse assured me. “Just in case.” I blinked.

I opened my mouth and closed it again. I set the bag on the table and left the room. “I’ll omit the slap this time,” I thought. “But consider yourself lucky.”

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Over my two years in the Peace Corps, I would get many more openings for that cinematic slap. It’s the only place I’ve ever worked where one steps up to a conference check-in desk expecting to receive a room key, welcome folder, and bag of condoms. There was, to be sure, a method to this madness. For the most part, the Peace Corps was a magnet for educated, unwed twenty-somethings with broadly left-leaning views. Our Washingtonian handlers wanted us to spread goodwill abroad, but in an Islamic society, a recent-college-graduate approach to the bodily appetites was likelier to spread resentment and venereal disease. Thus, an implicit compromise was struck. We were not technically forbidden to have sex with locals, but we were urged to be “culturally sensitive” at our assigned work sites.

Then, periodically, we were summoned to conferences at health sanatoriums deep in the mountains, where we were issued condoms and left largely to ourselves for a couple of days. Some Volunteers started referring to these scheduled get-togethers as “shore leave.” “Shore leave” was more or less what one would expect. The scheduled sessions mostly seemed like an inconsequential appendage to the (ahem) night life. Ironically, in establishments meant to restore health, the air seemed to be permeated by this raw, unmediated collision of appetite and loneliness. Both were intense.

The carousel of beds, bodies, and beer bottles precipitated a different kind of culture shock for a young religious conservative. I didn’t find it liberating; I found it foul. Even so, the chastity soapbox looks monstrously unappealing when you’re 22, a freakish ideological outlier, and 12,000 miles from home.

I settled into a pragmatic routine. Following my ritual refusal of the condoms, I would open a Peace Corps conference by quietly looking for a roommate agreeable to a no-sex-actually-in-the-room rule. (I wasn’t terrified of being raped, but I do prefer to have a wall between myself and the closest copulating couple.)

Books and solitary walks infused some sanity into the next few days, and I completed my term of service in 2004 without ever availing myself of the free condoms, free therapy, or free trip to Planned Parenthood. (Under George W. Bush’s administration, the Peace Corps couldn’t pick up that particular bill, but we were promised that we would be delivered directly to the doorstep should relevant circumstances arise.) I won’t betray personal secrets, except to say: Some fared worse.

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