Hard Boiled Eggs and Leaping Frogs

Tuesday, May 02, 2006: The Analogy of the Hard-Boiled Egg

The Peace Corps experience is like boiling an egg. If you put a raw egg in boiling water, it will rupture. You have to place the egg in cold water and allow the water to heat at a moderate pace. Informing the egg or trying to prep it in any way to prevent it from cracking so you can cook it quicker is not possible.

The temperature of water represents the degree of complexity of an environment. The egg is you. No matter how much brain-knowledge is imparted to you before beginning your service, you will still have to deal with a new culture, new foods, new relationships, confusing local issues, and a very different way of working bit by bit. Everything all at once might break your sanity. At first, just being able to tell your host mom that you do not want any more white bread wears one out. Then building relationships …if you make thirty friends in the first week, then you have thirty families expecting you for tea, which means you might actually want to speak to them while you are visiting them (which, remember, is exhausting at first), and once you have established a relationship, you will be expected to return promptly. Then, as your friendships deepen, a sense of mutual-dependence is expected and the layers of guilt at failing to meeting those mutual responsibilities of each member in those thirty families could be fatal.

Let’s consider the work aspect. If you get a list of everything the community needs, and who needs them, then you may think it a very straightforward assignment. Here are the items to be tasked. Put them on a list and check them off one, by one. The problem, you will not realize at first, is that nothing is as it appears at first appraisal. Usually, due to the fact that this is a developing country, there will be so many factors rendering your tasks inoperable that you would never have considered. You would just assume. That is based on how your country works. Grasping the gravity of a million little nuances in a community (i.e. cultural, religious, political, bureaucratic, social, or environmental) take time. In fact, every interaction, every attempt to initiate something, every day observing how your community members interact … each of those is a little clue.

If you try to be the clever volunteer that pulls off his first project successfully in week one, (or month .. or first six months ;) you will rupture. And egg yolks will start bleeding from your shell. Not very attractive.

Let’s try a similar analogy … cooking frogs. If you stick them in hot water they will jump out. If you stick them in cold water and slowly heat it, they will never know what happened to them until they’re …dead and cooked. So we’re all froggies about to leap out of the pot. Warn your boss to turn up the heat slowly so you can end up the centerpiece of some Kentucky back porch repast.

P.S. I'm allowed to knock my own state, right?