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February 23, 2006

All invited to listen and learn at Peace Corps Day

UW News

Karisa Mayer

Every returned Peace Corps volunteer has a story to tell. And on Wednesday, March 1, the UW campus community can hear those stories and more in a special event to celebrate national Peace Corps Day, and the Corps’ 45th anniversary.


The event, scheduled for 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. in The Forum, 309 Parrington, also will spotlight the UW’s strong connection with the Peace Corps, both with alumni serving over the years and with the UW’s three Peace Corps Master’s International programs — in International Nongovernmental Organization Development, International Forestry and International Health — which use the service abroad as the foundation for world-class graduate degrees.


It will be noted, too, that this year the UW moved up to second place nationwide among large schools whose alumni serve in the Corps. Currently, 102 UW alumni are serving in the Peace Corps, and since the program’s inception in 1961, a total of 2,370 such alumni have served.


But those are just numbers; they can’t reflect the life lessons learned and challenges overcome during more than two years in a foreign culture. As visitors to the event on March 1 will likely learn, Peace Corps volunteers view their service in highly personal terms. Many say it was mind-expanding, even life-changing, and that they would do it again “in a heartbeat.”


For Jeff Carter, now UW recruitment manager for the Peace Corps Master’s International Program, serving in the poverty-ridden African country of Niger in the late 1980s was like being in a wholly different world.


“It was like stepping back in time,” Carter said. “There was no electricity, no running water, no latrines — it was a basic lifestyle. There was one solar-powered TV in the whole village.”


Such was not the case for Ivan Eastin, now a UW professor of forestry and director of the Center for International Trade in Forest Projects. Eastin had just earned his master’s degree in wood science in 1985 when he went to Liberia for his 27-month Peace Corps stint. After a lesser position fell through, Eastin ended up teaching college-level engineering mechanics and timber design.


Even in the area where he served, Eastin said, living conditions varied greatly. “It ranged from volunteers who had to walk to their sites and live in the middle of nowhere in mud huts with thatched roofs — to me, who was teaching at the University of Liberia in the College of Forestry. The university, in order to get me, gave me my own house.”


Elisabeth Mitchell, now director of International programs for the Evans School of Public Affairs, spent three years in and around the Sultanate of Oman as the 1970s turned to the 1980s. There, she said, as an American woman living and teaching elementary school in a Muslim world, she experienced living within the separate cultural hierarchies that existed for women and men. Her husband, David Fenner, now UW assistant vice provost for international education and director of the International Programs and Exchanges office, served in Oman with her.


The site locations and personal narratives vary, and often include funny stories about volunteers learning the customs and diet of their host countries. But most returned Peace Corps say they were treated warmly and hospitably and grew to bond with their host country and culture.


“They were very welcoming,” Carter of his hosts in Niger. “The tradition is, if you are a stranger they offer you food and water, first thing.” He said after “a couple of months stumbling along,” the locals began to accept him as one of their own, more or less. He knew it had become true one day, he said, “when they said there was a stranger in town — and it wasn’t me anymore.”


Eastin described a similar evolution in growing accustomed to Liberia. “When I walked off the plane into the blistering heat of the tropics I thought, ‘Oh my God, what did we get into?'” he said. “That first day they gave us the absolutely worst food — slimy green okra over rice, it looked like this mucous stuff.” But after six months, Eastin said, he came to love many of the foods of Liberia. And even if he never came to exactly love the okra dish, he said, “I came to — accept it.” He said he still makes Liberian food for his family, although not the okra dish.


Mitchell, who taught in a girls school in Oman and also worked on World Health Organization and United Nations Development Programme projects, said she learned that certain stereotypes she had in mind about the Arab world “didn’t hold water,” and that there was much she could learn from the culture. “Even though I had traveled before in other parts of the world, this was my first opportunity to get to know a culture more deeply and see that there can be many ways of living a wonderful, productive, meaningful life.”


Eastin said the March 1 gathering will be a chance for people interested in the Peace Corps to learn more from program veterans. “It gives them an opportunity to talk to people who aren’t related to the Peace Corps and find out if it’s the type of experience they want to get involved with,” he said.


The UW’s three master’s programs connected with the Peace Corps, Eastin said, are excellent ways for students to get experience abroad while working on a master’s degree. “This allows you to do it in three years rather than four,” he said. “And you’ll get that international experience under your belt.” He said more than ever, international employers need to know that their new hires can tolerate the cultural challenges of living abroad. “Now (students) can point to two years living in another country to show they can handle it.”


As many as 50 former Peace Corps volunteers will be on hand on Peace Corps day to talk about their experiences, which most do eagerly. Also featured for the event will be a keynote speech by Daniel Chang of the international health organization PATH (formerly the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health), on how his Peace Corps service helped launch his career in public health.


The UW’s Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs began its first Peace Corps-related master’s program in 2001; since then, similar programs in forestry and health have been added.


And as if to underscore the personal importance of Peace Corps work and how it can affect one’s later life, Mitchell — whose service ended a quarter-century ago across the globe, said, “I suspect Oman is with me every day.”