Over twenty-five years ago, I joined the Peace Corps in Nicaragua. It was billed as the “toughest job you’ll ever love.” Getting used to bucket baths, isolation, and eating rice and beans for three meals a day was an adjustment, but I adapted. What was harder was navigating an entirely different way of understanding the world: the customs and unspoken rules. I learned them, but I never fully internalized them.
For example, as a community health volunteer in the Peace Corps, I often arranged meetings with Mothers’ Groups and other community members on nutrition, hygiene, and recognizing child illness. No matter what time I scheduled them, people arrived late. At first, I read that as a problem to solve. If I wanted a meeting to start at 10:00, I announced it for 9:30.
People still arrived late. I decided to get there late too, and everyone else was still later. Eventually, I realized people were not looking at a clock to decide when to arrive. They looked out their window, saw me walking by, and knew the meeting was about to start.
What I experienced as lateness reflected different concepts of time, priorities, and social cues. Over two years in Nicaragua, I learned to navigate such differences, appreciate them, and even admire some.
My Peace Corps experience prepared me for a career in Global Health and International Development. Like many in this field, I thought working across cultures was one of my core professional skills. I built a career around it.
But the dissolution of USAID and the upheaval of the past year and a half has made me realize something I missed: while I spent two decades working across cultures, I was also deeply embedded within one. USAID wasn't just my employer. It was my professional culture. I built an identity around working across missions and countries, public health professionals and clinical staff, USAID budget officers and Congressional appropriators. I was good at it because I understood the culture underneath it.
Reflecting on the meaning of a “cultural home” becomes clearer when I compare my own experience of adaptation with my husband’s. While I learned the customs and rules of etiquette in Nicaragua, I still operate from a different cultural framework. After 25 years married to a Nicaraguan, I still miss jokes and idioms. My husband will explain the words, the wordplay, the reference, and I still find myself saying: “I understood the words. I just don’t get it.”
That gap between understanding and belonging is what I am struggling with most in the post-USAID era, even though I have been lucky enough to find a new professional home at ISPOR — the Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research.
In 2022, I chose to leave USAID for Abt Global to keep growing professionally, but I stayed in the same field with the same macro culture. USAID had been my professional home; it shaped how I viewed global health, collaboration, writing, communication, and my role in the world, and getting used to a new organization took some adaptation.
Reflecting on it now, my move to Abt was like moving to a new state but remaining in the same country.
The business model, language, relationships, and incentives were still deeply connected to USAID. We spoke the same professional dialect, used the same acronyms, understood the same references, lived by the same budget and procurement cycles, and shared many of the same assumptions.
What happened last year was different. After USAID was effectively dismantled in 2025, disrupting decades of international development work and displacing thousands of professionals, many of us, from USAID and the broader international development community, found ourselves navigating something far more profound than a career transition. This was not a chosen move into a new professional “state” or “country”. It was displacement.
Moving states, you mostly keep your language, references, and sense of how things are done. Finding yourself in a foreign environment, you are expected to become part of something new. But, displacement, when the move is forced, is not about erasing where you came from; it is about carrying part of home into the place where you are trying to belong.
In this new work environment, we interact with and find ourselves working in organizations where people do not automatically understand the meaning behind the language we speak. For over two decades, I could say something about impact, sustainability, or systems strengthening and be reasonably confident that the people in the room knew what I meant. Now I can use the same words and have no idea whether people really get it.
Understanding a culture and internalizing it are not the same thing. That was the lesson from Nicaragua, from twenty-five years of marriage to a Nicaraguan, and now, unexpectedly, from my post-USAID career.
I have integrated into my new organization, but I constantly wonder: Do people really understand me? Do I understand them?
That uncertainty is part of cultural adaptation. So is the longing for a familiar community. My husband has now lived in America longer than he lived in Nicaragua, but he is still most comfortable in a community of Latino immigrants. I feel the same way when I am with former USAID colleagues. It is just easier.
For many former colleagues, this compounds the challenge of finding new employment. Some are still searching. Others have transitioned. But almost all of us have experienced the disruption of a professional community that shaped our daily lives. And, for those still searching, the displacement analogy can feel sharper still: displaced from one professional country and not yet welcomed into another, not unlike many immigrants in the United States today.
We were not simply coworkers. We shared a mission, vocabulary, set of values, and a way of understanding why our work mattered. To me, the saddest and most traumatic part is not the loss of a job, but the loss of my professional culture and the realization that I have been displaced from a world I cannot return to.
I don’t yet know if I will ever feel that I have internalized my new culture. But I do know this: immigrants don’t just adapt to the places they enter. They change them. If enough of us carry forward what was best about USAID — the country-first instinct, the comfort with complexity, the belief that systems matter — then the places we land will be changed by us too.
The Peace Corps slogan was about living in a new culture and struggling through the gap between understanding and belonging. I understand that gap differently now. Maybe what never fully assimilates is exactly what we have to offer.