In Which I Pause in Uploading Pictures of China to Complain about Peace Corps Bureaucracy

During my hitch in Peace Corps, one of the things I did was act as an administrator to the volunteer resource site that several of us built.  We tried to keep an up-to-date directory of current volunteers in country on the site.  This required us to actually get a directory out of Peace Corps staff, an annoying process in which all staff I talked to agreed it would be a wonderful thing and they'd see about getting it for me, and then this never happened without me spending a lot of time emailing people begging.  Today, one week shy of a year of when I was last begging their tech guy for directories, I received an email with the updated directory and a promise of receiving such regularly 2x/year.  Great, except this email was sent to me rather than the current administrators.

I'm no longer Peace Corps.  I've returned.  I've even returned from China and am sitting around my parents' house drinking coffee and watching Youtube (which streams at 360p as a minimum!).  I just had a pedicure to clean the last of the Africa out of my feet and marvel at US nail salons!  This is well known information, contained, for example, in the directory I just got mailed.  (Not the pedicure and youtube thing, but the me not being in Peace Corps.)  I think this may technically be a security breach, since staff isn't supposed to reveal contact information to anyone not in Peace Corps for any reason ever without express permission.  These are, after all, federal government employees, with information contained on federal government computers, so there are tons of rules about what you can and can't access.   Fortunately, I'm not evil, at least, not with people's contact information.

A 2 year turnover of volunteers is not a new problem for Peace Corps staff; they should be able to handle it.  It's not like we the ICT committee people don't do our part.  We genuinely try to have a nice hand off and let people know who to start contacting about the website as the older volunteers leave.

There's some 30 odd staff to 150-ish volunteers, one would think that would be high enough overhead for things to get done in a sensible and timely fashion.