“The toughest job you’ll ever love.” That was the original slogan for the Peace Corps, one that Christine Herbert found to be wholly true, as she shows in The Color of the Elephant, a journal of her time serving in Zambia from 2004 to 2006.
This is a story about the journey rather than the destination. After all, the destination of any posting with the Peace Corps is the place you first came from, hopefully leaving something positive behind, and having changed and been changed by the experience.
For the author, her experience was that of a muzungu, a word synonymous in southern, central, or eastern African countries with foreigners such as Peace Corps volunteers and Doctors without Borders.
Christine Herbert came to Zambia as a ‘stranger in a strange land’, with the intent to change herself – to break out of her identity as a self-described ‘goody-goody’.
She resisted her family’s best efforts to convince her to stay on a safe and sane path. Volunteering for the Peace Corps, going to Africa for 27 months in the immediate wake of 9/11 was neither.
In her early 30s, a bit older than the usual Peace Corps volunteer, she knew that she wasn’t there to save anyone or anything – except quite possibly herself. The reader walks beside Herbert as she is made and broken over and over again in a tale equal parts heartwarming and heartbreaking. Her experiences, for at least a little while, take her out of her white, privileged, American mindset and put her feet into the sandals of a world where community is everything.
Herbert does an excellent job of carrying readers on a startling, eye-opening, and life-changing journey.
The author did not undertake this journey for the adventure of it all, because the point was not to return to her old normal life. She sought to change her perspective on what normal can and should be.
Serving in the Peace Corps, that “toughest job you’ll ever love” has been a dream for many more people than have undertaken the actual journey. Any reader who dreamed that dream will be given a glimpse into the challenges of the job and just how much love – of friends, found family, newfound homes, and meaningful work – lay at its heart.
