Home Alone?

Below is the piece I wrote for the Peace Corps newspaper. Hope you enjoy it! I would love to hear any feedback on it.

Home Alone?
On the gringo’s desire for privacy
By Elian Maritz

As he was leading me to my new house, my counterpart paused to assure me that I would be living with a family. The previous volunteers (a married couple), he explained, had been living in a house by themselves; they had become so lonely that they had left after only a month. As such, my counterpart had made a special effort to make sure that I would not be too solita by finding me a nice old couple to keep me company.

So it was understandable that when I started to hint that I might want to move into a house of my own, I was met by an array of negative reactions. My counterpart worried that no one would take care of me. Friends repeatedly expressed concern that I would be lonely, that men would harass me, that no one would watch out for me. My host mother’s daughter took me aside to tell me that her daughter, who was studying in San Miguel, didn’t live alone, and I should do likewise. Generally, people just seemed to think it was strange; why would a young woman, new to the community, want to live by herself?

The widespread skepticism made me think back to our swearing in day, when Carolina was carefully explaining our strange American need for “privacy” to our counterparts. It didn’t mean we were antisocial, she clarified, it was just part of our cultural differences. “In America,” she exclaimed, “children study in universities far away from their parents, often in differences cities all together!”

It hadn’t really occurred to me how odd this desire for personal space seemed until I watched the laughing faces of the alcaldes in the room. The fact that this trait of ours was so unusual that it necessitated repeated careful explanation and elicited laughter from the Salvadoran listeners took me aback. Where we really so strange? And moreover, if it was so unusual in this country, why did most Peace Corps volunteers continue to go against the grain and live alone?

I will take myself as a test case. As I am writing this (and would rather I were sleeping), my host mother is outside my room watching TV. As the wall does not go all the way up to the ceiling, she and the TV really may as well be in the room with me. On the whole, this culture does not seem to place the same type of value on peace and quiet that we norteamericanos do. It could very well be a matter of upbringing; while we Americans get a room to ourselves almost from the day we are born, here people share rooms (either with siblings, spouses, or children) their entire lives. And the preference for sleeping together doesn’t seem to be purely a matter of financial necessity – there are families in my community with large houses that have spare rooms, yet the children prefer to sleep together.

So why the discrepancy? Some would argue that our Anglo-Protestant heritage in the United States, with ideas such as personal salvation and the individual’s direct relationship with God, favored the empowerment of the individual at the expense of the group. The sociologist Max Weber argued this individualistic outlook (in addition to the value placed on accumulating wealth) was why we were such successful capitalists. But even if you aren’t Anglo-Protestant yourself (which I am not), in America, we are all taught to strive for individual excellence and differentiation. We place a high value on being competitive, a “go-getter,” and being your “own special self.” These merits all require an extremely clear sense of the individual, which is fostered by the strong boundaries we grow up with between others and ourselves. According to many anthropologists, variations in concepts of privacy are one of the defining differences between cultures. Deciding what determines the extent of one’s personal space, the boundaries between the public and private spheres, is the foundation of an individual’s relationship with society.

But beyond our habits of personal space, I think there’s something more to why we Peace Corps volunteers dream of having a little place of our own. For us specifically, privacy is more than just peace and quiet, it is the only opportunity we have to be one hundred percent ourselves for a couple of minutes each day. As we enter a new culture, we necessarily have to hold back or moderate parts of who we are. From the obvious things we have to change, like not drinking and smoking in public or eating pupusas every day, to the more subtle, such as becoming uncomfortably outgoing or developing a new interest in attending Catholic services, being someone new 24 hours a day takes it toll. Learning to divide our personalities between the person that boarded the plane in D.C. and the one that got off the bus in the pueblo is one of the most challenging parts of being a Peace Corps volunteer. Having a door we can shut (literally) between the two worlds empowers us with the ability to control when we play which role, allowing us to de-stress and keep sane. This more than anything, I think, explains why so many of us end up living alone, despite the fact it is so culturally uncommon here. Well, that and the fact that sometimes you just really want to come home and drink a cold beer.