Hail

This is a momentous day to be an American. It’s a momentous day to be an American of color. I’m sure for most African Americans, today’s emotion is too big to contain on virtual pages or in black and white print. I can’t articulate the feeling of my heart expanding in my chest thinking about how staggering this election has been; I can’t imagine the impact this has on those who lived through and participated during Dr. King’s civil rights era, people who never thought they would live to see today. But today is not about the color of our skin, or even civil rights, which, despite the optimism of the hour, remain issues unresolved. Today is about the United States redeeming itself, rebuilding its potential to be as it should be: a country of freedom and opportunity. It’s about becoming the best it can be and encouraging its citizens to do the same.

Before I began my Peace Corps application, I struggled with the moral dilemma of going abroad and representing a country whose recent governmental policies betrayed my personal ethics. Atrocities like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib as well as the slow but sure chipping away of the various rights of women, immigrants, people of color, the LGBT community and every other private citizen were too troubling to ignore in the decision to serve a country and government which had implemented such violations of human rights, even if that country was my country. In the end, I decided that the spirit of the Peace Corps itself is separate from the agendas of any current or past political policy. Despite its myriad flaws, the ideal Peace Corps nonetheless represents to me a vision of America’s place in the world as one of benevolence, aid and good will. To be a Peace Corps Volunteer at this moment in time, during the transition from despair to hope, is to be suddenly representing a country rising from the ruins of the past eight years.

I had a hard day today. Nothing in particular happened, but the weight of hundreds of the standard PCV frustrations weigh more heavily on some days than others. Today I thought I would burst from the pressure of it, but as I watch 2 million of my countrymen gather at our capital to celebrate a new hour in America’s history, while I am half a world away, serving her in my small way, and I cannot regret being a Peace Corps Volunteer, the daughter of a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, no matter how puffy the mosquito bites on my ankles get or how much my permanently sodden (only) pair of shoes smell.

On September 11th, 2001, I was in math class in tenth grade in Hamburg High School. I remember every subsequent period of the day, and I remember the immediate impact of our nation’s biggest open wound. There was fear and anger and anguish, not the quiet unity of devastation that the media reported. For so long, it seemed that was my place in history. Like my father remembered President Kennedy’s assassination, I remember the burning Twin Towers, and I and my peers were briefly called Generation 9/11 by magazines needing buzzwords. Then seven years later, with sixtysome of my fellow soon-to-be volunteers, I watched President Elect Barack Obama step onto the stage in Chicago to announce his victory, and I knew I would remember November 4th, 2008 with the vast world of difference in emotion than I remember September 11th, but with no less gravity. Today President Obama takes office against seemingly insurmountable odds and the rather unattainable expectations of an economically and emotionally devastated nation, and I’ll remember January 20th, 2009 too. Should my children and grandchildren ever ask which dates around which history and my life pivoted, I will not hesitate.

I went to bed and woke up a little past midnight to catch the inauguration ceremony and President Obama’s speech. I felt like when Aretha Franklin sang, she turned those unnamed and unnamable emotions into powerful music and projected it into world for everyone watching and listening to feel with her. And instead of waxing lyrical on a speech I am in awe of, I will just say hey! He referenced the Philippines!

Welcome, President Obama. We have been waiting for you for as long as American soil has had memory.