People Who Deserve It

There were a lot of reasons I joined the Peace Corps, and I’ve forgotten some of them. Like most people, my reasons were mixed. The one I told everybody, though, was that I wanted to help people, and particularly people who deserved it. The people I’d be working with were genuinely poor, and I believed their poverty was somehow righteous. In northern Ghana, where I was stationed, there were villages that drank out of mud puddles, and others where the women walked ten or fifteen miles to a river and carried back water full of larvae and disease. So I was proud. I was proud that I was doing something worthwhile, and I felt righteous in that pride. What I didn’t know was that my pride wasn’t righteous at all.