In this interview, you’ll hear from Ryan Eberman and Morgan Begin, a Peace Corps Education volunteer couple in Colombia. They share what daily life looks like, the work being done, and how service has shaped their personal and professional growth. You’ll learn about housing, cultural differences, project work, language learning, and what it’s like to live and work in a new country as a couple. This interview offers a real look into Peace Corps service and what future volunteers can expect.
Volunteer Experience and Motivation
1. What do you do as Peace Corps Education volunteers in Colombia?
Hello everyone, we are Morgan and Ryan, a couple serving together in the interior of Colombia. We are both English Teachers here in public colegios, working with students from primary school to 11th grade. We work in different schools but in the same community. We primarily work as co-teachers in the classroom, increasing the listening, speaking, and cultural aspects of English learning. We have led conversational groups with students and have also introduced new teaching and classroom management strategies to teachers.
Outside of the school setting, we run community English classes together in our town’s library, teaching both basic and advanced classes on a semester-based schedule. We also have two weekly conversation clubs for both children and adults where we meet up with the intention to improve conversational English skills in a relaxed environment.
In addition to the work that we have done together, we have also created our own projects. For example, Morgan has started an English book club where she and a small group meet every week to discuss the book they are currently reading. Oftentimes it is paired with a movie at the end. Ryan, on the other hand, has created a chess club for teaching students how to play, which eventually evolved into having weekly tournaments.
2. Why did you decide to join the Peace Corps and serve in Colombia?
We were initially inspired by the idea of living and working abroad because of our study abroad experiences in college. We realized that we wanted to continue this lifestyle of learning about another culture through living the experiences of daily life in another place. We both have degrees in Education and knew we’d want to be teachers wherever we went, and so we began looking into options of how to make this dream a reality.
Through research, we discovered what the Peace Corps is. From conversations with family and friends, we learned the true impact a Peace Corps Volunteer could have not only on a community but on that PCV. Almost everyone we spoke to who was an RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) said that their service was one of the most memorable times of their entire life. So, we knew this was going to be the best option for what we were looking for.
When it comes to location, we did not originally apply to Colombia. We applied to go to Panama. We knew we wanted to go to a Spanish-speaking country because we had a foundation in Spanish and saw the value of becoming fluent for our futures as teachers. But because the Peace Corps medical process can be complicated and lengthy at times, we ended up getting an offer to go serve in Colombia. And we couldn’t be happier to be here!
Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
3. What is your housing like in Colombia?
We are currently living in a house in a small residential neighborhood connected to the center of our town. We have no host family, which made settling in initially hard, but after a few months we began to feel comfortable and now are very well connected in our community. We have daily comforts like having fresh and local products within 2 minutes of our home, including a bakery, butcher, and grocery stores. In our home, we are fortunate to have electricity, running water, a hot water heater, gas hookup for our stove and oven, wifi, and even a washing machine.
4. What moments or interactions stand out during your service?
There have been countless valuable moments and interactions throughout our service, and honestly, some of the most valuable are the small moments. The interactions with people in the streets, the hugs from primary students, the time when you can finally be funny in your second language. But as these are sometimes hard to explain explicitly, here are some of our favorite more explicit memories:
- Spending Christmas at our friends’ finca. We got to be a part of Amigos secretos, share wonderful meals, sing traditional Christmas songs, go horseback riding, play soccer, and more importantly, bond with our friends and their family.
- A lot of our travels have been extremely memorable. One trip in particular to Minca stood out to us because it felt as if we were in a very beautiful, more touristy area of Colombia, and we had still managed to meet many locals, share meals and drinks with them, talk late into the night, and get a feel for what it’s really like to live there. Our PC experience, more than anything, allowed us to have this ease in communication and comfort getting to know locals.
- The most valuable thing Morgan has done is join the local dance company. Here, she’s gotten the chance to make amazing friends, work hard towards personal goals, and has had the opportunity to perform locally and internationally. Morgan has done many performances in our town and surrounding towns, and in August she joined her dance team on their Gira Internacional to Portugal.
- English days are always such a wonderful opportunity to get to know a volunteer’s town, school, home, and daily life. Hosting and traveling to other places for English days has been such a wonderful and memorable part of our service.
- Our town wouldn’t be the same without the friendly dogs that occupy our neighborhood streets. We are both always going out of our way to get to know local dogs and even have named them all!
- Colombia places a lot of emphasis on dance. Ryan’s school has a dance festival each year that kicks off with a parade through town, then a competition of each class in the town coliseum. This was an incredible experience for Ryan because his 11th-grade class really made him a part of the group and put him in the position of the queen during the parade through town.
Surprises and Challenges
5. What has surprised you most about living or working in Colombia?
- How many days off there are at school. There is always a holiday, parent meeting, mass, or something going on!
- Flexibility of work routines and schedules. With all those days off has come lots of flexibility.
- People tend to have a very relaxed, go-with-the-flow attitude. People are not typically in a rush.
- The difference in coffee culture here is apparent. There is great coffee and nice coffee, but very rarely will you find a bad cup of coffee, and you can always find coffee. Here, people drink coffee in the morning, afternoon, and night. You can get tinto campesino, which represents the everyday person’s coffee, and it will often have a touch of cinnamon, clove, and anise flavor to it. It costs about 1000 pesos (33 cents) to get. Then you can get a nicer tinto/americano, which is very delicious and offered with sugar. Finally, you can get cafe con leche, which is specifically a cup of milk with instant coffee. The days of bitter, strong coffee ended when we arrived here, but we are content. Though we miss iced coffee with strong seasonal flavors.
- Shopping is very different from what we are used to. Here you buy what you need when you need it – cilantro, 2 limes, and a tomato from the tienda across the street or a pound of meat from the carniceria. There’s one type of Oreos and then the knockoffs rather than 500 different flavors.
- Our town is full of local businesses, and we really only go to chains at large malls in bigger cities.
- Colombia is extremely diverse. Each region of Colombia is very distinct in language, food, dance, and general way of life.
- Community here is everything. The Alcaldía is strong and consistently plans festivals and events for the entire town. It has been wonderful to be a part of and to watch our friends or students be a part of.
6. What challenges have you faced in your Education work?
Adapting to schedule changes
One of the largest challenges we have faced in our Education work has been adapting to schedule changes. This came with lots of practice and patience. Here in Colombia, there are many holidays, celebrations, and religious affairs. This commonly comes with last-minute schedule changes for classes.
The way we overcame this was by taking a breath and accepting the reality of the school schedule being this way. The lesson you are hoping to do today can be saved for next class. Even though you wake up early to get to school on time (6 am for Ryan), sometimes there will be a random activity happening, and class doesn’t begin for another 2 hours. This creates lots of moments to observe different cultures, read, and/or whatever else you like to/have to do.
Collaborating with counterparts
Additionally, collaborating with counterparts when you have different visions or pedagogy can be a challenge. Morgan and Ryan both went to university to study education. Morgan also taught for a couple of years in the US before we came to Colombia. When we started teaching here, we recognized that there were different pedagogies in use in the classroom than what we were used to. Some things we have worked with teachers to improve include ways to increase student engagement or fair grading.
We always keep in mind that these aren’t our classes, nor our culture, and so we just try our best to add fun activities, creative projects, more opportunities for speaking and listening, and new pedagogy. The goal is to meet teachers and students where they are and help them get to where they want to be. We are not there to change the school culture.
One development we both have done is pull-outs for students to have informal conversation practice to help boost communicative ability amongst students, and this has been very successful and well-liked by the whole school community.
7. What secondary projects have you worked on during your service?
Community Classes
We started in a local cafe where the previous volunteer did community classes. We eventually grew out of the space and started facilitating our classes in the municipal public library. There we do 2 courses: a basic course where we lead lessons and activities to practice what we learn that day in class, and an advanced course where we focus on building off of background knowledge to complete more communicative activities. Some fun examples were: Shark Tank, fishbowl discussions, debates, mock job interviews, poetry, hypothetical situations (what would you do, an English survival guide, and an escape room.
Conversation Clubs
We do conversation clubs in local cafes or outside in general since we live near a beautiful lake. In these clubs, we bring our portable whiteboards, some markers, and games. Typically, we just talk and use the whiteboards to provide corrections, teach new phrases on the fly, and answer questions. Some days we have a themed topic of conversation or set games or activities in mind. We have a conversation for our adult students and a separate one for our students from school.
Book Club
Morgan hosts a weekly English book club where she meets with students to discuss the assigned reading for the week. They have deeper, in-depth discussions, as well as planned activities. Sometimes the book will have a movie, and they will all gather to watch the movie together as well.
Chess Club
Ryan created a chess club by collaborating with a local restaurant where an employee he was friends with who also likes chess works. There, he invited students and community members to play and learn. He would organize activities like learning an opening, doing different puzzles, and general teaching of how to play. Although the club only lasted about 6 months, Ryan plays every week or two with a group of Señores in that same place or in someone’s house.
Neighborhood English Class
We led neighborhood community English classes for about 5 children in our direct community. It allowed us to get to know our neighbors and provide kids who wanted to learn English with easy access to a class.
Oíste
Oíste is the Colombia volunteers blog on Substack.com. Morgan joined the team as an occasional writer and copy editor, and was a member of the content team.
Serving as a Couple
8. How has your experience as a Peace Corps couple differed from individual volunteers?
Serving as a Peace Corps couple is distinct from start to finish. First, you must apply as a couple. You have an individual interview and then an interview together. Your applications are essentially tied together, so if one person fails medical, for example, the other person also cannot continue the process.
In PST (Pre-Service Training) in Colombia, we lived in the same town but in different host families. We were only a street away and saw each other all the time, but we also got to have individual experiences and increase our language learning. We had separate language classes in PST, although this was just based on our level entering training, not on being a couple. We had the same general training every other day together.
At our site, we live in the same house together, working at different schools within the same community. We have no host family, which did make the initial integration to the site more difficult, but at this point we are very close to our neighbors and have made connections with many community members.
9. How has being a couple affected your integration into the community?
Due to the lack of a host family upon our initial arrival, it was harder to integrate into our community. It was harder to know the best grocery stores to go to, where to get our fruits or vegetables, the best restaurants in town, etc. But soon enough, we heard about the weekly fruit market, the lights festival in our town, and were soon introduced to traditional Boyacense food.
We got in contact with some friends from the past volunteers at site, which also allowed us to get to know some new people and sites in town. Soon enough, we were collaborating with a local cafe to begin our English classes and getting acquainted with our schools to start working with our counterparts and students.
10. What advice would you give to other couples considering Peace Corps service?
One of the most important things is to be clear and honest about your goals and expectations of service. It is very helpful to be on the same page from the start and equally want to join Peace Corps with the expectation of staying for the entirety of service. You have to be committed and willing to go through the ups and downs of service together, even when those ups and downs may be related to your relationship. You have to recognize that although you are together, you are going to have very different experiences and some moments that may be really good for one person, but may be really tough for the other.
Recognizing this and having open communication about it is the most important. Being honest with each other and your feelings. Additionally, be open to doing things together but also branching out into your own circles. For us both, it was really important to have a space that was also just our own.
Advice and Support
11. What advice would you give to future Education volunteers in Colombia?
The most beneficial thing you can do from day 1 at your school is set clear expectations and boundaries in both a written and spoken manner. Have a meeting with your counterpart/s and discuss your role as a volunteer, what your job is meant to be, how you can help, what you can offer, etc., and then also what you expect the working relationship to be. Indicate the importance of co-planning and working together, discuss different manners of co-teaching and how that looks in the classroom, and any other specific rules. Make sure that you are both starting on the same page with the same expectations, as this will help to prevent any future misunderstandings or problems.
Additionally, use this meeting time to set goals for the semester. We recommend doing this every semester with your counterpart or at least twice a year. Sit down, talk about what has been going well and what could be going better. Talk about goals for the students or classes, goals for working together, and personal goals. Continuously go back to these ideas to make sure you are both working towards your goals.
12. How did Peace Corps training prepare you for service?
PST (Pre-Service Training), more than anything, allowed us to get comfortable living in Colombia and, more than that, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Language class challenged us from day 1 when we had to introduce ourselves to every important member of the community by going to the school, the cultural center, the library, or the police station.
We were instantly forced to put ourselves out there into the community and take the leap. We talked to strangers in parks or restaurants and really had to see what communicating in our second language with locals was like. Almost always, we were pleasantly surprised by the warm welcome people gave or by their excitement to talk to someone even if it wasn’t perfect Spanish or it was short. This all allowed us both to have more confidence entering our site. Not feeling nervous to talk to community members, to schedule a meeting with the alcadía, or to present ourselves in Spanish to our entire schools day 1 without warning or time to plan.
And, in addition to language, we also had similar experiences in school settings. Both of us have a degree in education and feel confident in schools and working with kids, but doing this in another country, of course, provides distinct challenges. Our training team helped to make sure we had strategies for the classroom and gave us hands-on teaching experiences in various school settings.
Packing Tips and Language Learning
13. What would you tell future volunteers to pack—or leave behind?
Specifically for Colombia, we would tell volunteers to pack a good inflatable pillow (or 2) and possibly an inflatable sleeping pad. The pillows have been great for bus rides, and the mattress for staying over at other PCV’s host family houses even if they don’t have extra beds (Morgan and I like camping, so we already had this). A Kindle is a must if you like reading at all. We also brought some snacks or food from the US, like boxed Mac and Cheese, candies, Parmesan cheese (more helpful on site), maple syrup, oyster sauce, and fish sauce.
Most things you need or want can easily be found here. Some items we bought before coming that we are glad we did are a chef’s knife, portable charger, solar lantern and nightlight, Teva sandals, multitool, a good reusable water bottle (most here are made from plastic that is not ideal to be drinking out of long term), an HDMI Cord and adapter if necessary, and a laptop or iPad. Though you can get almost all of those items in the cities, they aren’t available in our town and have proven to be very useful.
You may also consider bringing gifts for your host family or students in your future school. I brought a giant sticker pack that I use all the time for rewards for students, small souvenirs from our States for our host families, and US money is a great thing to bring to give or show to students.
Some helpful teaching tools/supplies include small, portable whiteboards, although you can get those here, and English games. We brought: cards, Uno, Bananagrams, Spot It, Monopoly Deal, Taco-Cat-Goat-Cheese-Pizza, Pick Up Sticks, word searches, and Sudokus. We also brought a book of conversation questions and icebreakers/games. All of these have been extremely useful in both community classes and in school.
14. How has language learning been for you in Colombia?
Morgan
Language learning is really different for everyone. In my personal experience, my progress and confidence have fluctuated a lot throughout service. In training, it was easy. We spoke Spanish all the time, and it felt like I was improving very quickly in my classes. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a very social host family, so I mostly found Spanish practice with friends and host families or with señoras hanging out in the streets. Regardless, I entered my site with confidence.
But, little by little, I felt like I kept finding new things that I didn’t know, and I felt as if I had reached a plateau in my language. I felt like there was so much I didn’t know that it made me unmotivated to continue my learning. This was one of the harder parts of service for me. In time, I realized I just have to put myself out there more and try to work on making closer friends in order to be surrounded by Spanish more.
When you serve as a couple, it’s easy to have your world in English because you can speak it with your partner, you teach it in school, and you teach it to the community. And a lot of those learners only want to speak in English. So, I had to branch out from my circle. Joining a dance company really changed this for me because I was consistently only listening to and speaking Spanish. Since then, my confidence and ability have increased tremendously, and I feel happy with my progress throughout service.
Ryan
My experience with learning Spanish didn’t begin for me in Colombia. I came with a B2 Spanish level, advanced low according to the Peace Corps. Since then, my Spanish has improved greatly. During training, I developed a lot, receiving constant feedback and always pushing myself. Though it really took off when I got to site.
I met many people and became good friends with a few. With those friends I spoke exclusively Spanish and in the past few years have developed a Colombian accent, roll my r’s perfectly, and achieved superior Spanish level. I always kept up with my practice by narrating Spanish to myself, practicing words that were difficult to say, keeping a running list of new vocabulary that I would read at least 1 time a day, and engaging myself in Colombian media.
Final Thoughts
15. What final advice would you share with future couples?
We would advise them to take the leap and do it. There have been many difficult parts throughout service that have helped us grow as a couple and individuals. We have had many opportunities to meet new people, work together, travel together, and have new experiences together. The difficult parts of Peace Corps service people talk about are usually isolation, language, and dealing with cultural differences. As a couple, we have always had each other, someone to speak our native language with, and our own home to make as Colombian or American as we want. Serving alone or serving as a couple both give you the full Peace Corps experience; doing it with your partner makes it even less unsettling.
Peace Corps truly is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and if you are even considering it, we recommend you do it. You will learn and grow in ways you cannot even imagine.
Are you thinking about joining the Peace Corps? If you’re curious about service and ready for something new, apply today. Like Ryan and Morgan, you can live abroad, work with communities, and grow in ways you didn’t expect. Apply to the Peace Corps and take the next step.
The content of this post does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or Colombia Government.
