Behind every Peace Corps volunteer is an experience of a lifetime. For 40 years, many thousands of Americans have given up the relative comfort of home to help people in other countries and learn about the beauty of other cultures.
Since President Kennedy's call to action in 1961, more than 161,000 Americans have joined the corps and about 470 of them have been Cornellians. Here are four Cornell graduate students' stories from their Peace Corps experiences.
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| Rainer Assé, in striped shirt, in Kona, Mali, with Balla Dembele, a farmer from the village of Tintila. Dembele is wearing a typical Malian bogolan cloth. Assé served in the Peace Corps as an agroforestry volunteer. Courtesy of Rainer Assé |
SOMEWHERE NORTHWEST OF BAMAKO, MALI -- As the Sahelian night envelops the train, a cold wind from beyond the Sahara rushes into our cabin. There are no lights on the Bamako-Dakar Express. But now a burnt orange light streams in through the windows: We are speeding through a bush fire.
My cabin mates huddle under blankets, unconcerned about the tunnel of red and orange flames through which we speed. I look out the glassless window mesmerized by the bits of charred leaves gently floating in through its opening. The sharp sound of crackling leaves and branches fills the cabin.
Soon we are outside the tunnel of flames. I can see smaller bush fires spreading through the Malian savanna. The scent of burning acacia shrubs and burnt grasses drifts towards me. In the distance I see a towering baobab tree illuminated by red flames from behind. Its twisting branches seem to signify knowledge of some old truth beyond my understanding.
I prepare to join my cabin mates in their land of sleep. I huddle beneath a Puelar wedding blanket. Soft Bambara and Malinké voices from a nearby cabin mingle with the rolling rhythms of the train's wheels.
I drift into sleep, into images of charred leaves gently settling over the endless undulating savannas in the land of the Malinké, my new home. Soon I will reach the safe cocoon of my adopted village, Tintila, and I will be home where my friends and adopted family call me Issa. Soon I will be cradled again by the age-old rituals and rhythms of everyday life in the Bafing Valley.
Red angry flames fill my dreams. But soon after, a dream turns to reality. A monstrous bush fire is approaching our village. The men of the village are running past the mosque where only a few hours ago the muezzin sang the final call to prayer for the day. The village griot is running from concession to concession: "People of Tintila awake! Awake! Bush fire!"
Women and children fetch pails of water. The men dash to the blazing flames armed with hoes and axes. We must save our village from the flames. We must quickly encircle our village with a trench to keep the flames at bay. I bend down with my friends. Furiously I dig with the daba that Chambri, the blacksmith, made for me. The flames are closer and higher. An old man from the Dembele family recites an Arabic prayer: "Allah is great! Save Tintila!" We bend and dig. Trees are crackling and toppling. The flames are hot on our faces. We dig.
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| Nico Dauphine poses outside her residence in Micronesia, one of the four countries in which she has served in the Peace Corps. Courtesy of Nico Dauphine |
YAP, MICRONESIA -- During training out on Ulithi Atoll, I'd swim in the lagoon every day and afterward I would have a film of salt on my skin. On Yap Island, there is a barrier reef. For about a mile offshore, the water hardly became deeper than a bathtub. People sometimes stood offshore fishing -- far away, yet only knee deep in water -- or they would "pole by" on bamboo rafts.
A big Yapese passion is chewing betel nut, which young boys harvest by skillfully shinnying up the thin betel palms that grow all over the island. Chewing produces prolific quantities of red-stained saliva, causing chewers to spit copiously. The floors of many public buildings were painted red in deference to this almost ubiquitous pastime.
I worked in a crop extension project. With a Yapese partner, I'd go out and try to work with farmers on increasing and improving crop production. Among others, we worked with three old farmers -- two women and a man -- on developing a small cucumber plantation.
One of our main problems was their refusal to buy seeds, since their generation had grown used to government handouts during their time as a U.S. trust territory after World War II. The woman in charge pleaded poverty, but I knew she had enough money, because she came to my host family's house to buy beer all the time.
One night I sat up with a group of women drinking in a circle in our front yard. I went off to bed at some point, and they happily drank to my good night's sleep. I don't know how much longer they held out. The next morning when I left to go running at 6, they were all there in exactly the same spot, passed out beneath the mango tree. When I came back at 7, they were getting up to get more beer.
I'm not sure what prompted this, but one day that old lady came to our house and, after buying some beer, gave me the rest of her money. She told me to use it for their seeds. Amazed, I did. Within a few months they had a bumper crop of cucumbers and peppers. I had never seen so many cucumbers in one place, before or since. Cucumbers still remind me of her.
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| Jennifer Fox sits on a camel on the shore of Lake Issyk-Kol in Kyrgyzstan, which is about 50 miles from the border of Kazakhstan. The Tien Shan Mountains, a range that separates the two former Soviet republics, can be seen in the background. Courtesy of Jennifer Fox |
ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN -- Kazakhstan was not yet on most maps. There were no former Peace Corps volunteers and very few foreigners who had been there. I only knew I would not have a "typical" Peace Corps experience -- I lived in a city of more than 1.5 million, wore business clothes to work, my office had computers, a photocopier, fax and e-mail and sometimes even electricity.
But my experience was typical in other ways -- like a Peace Corps volunteer anywhere in the world I worked and lived as the people in that country did and hoped that by being there I would have some positive effect on at least a few people.
I amassed a vast catalog of stories, indexed by topic: Strange Things I Ate or Drank; Kindness of Strangers; Potentially Disastrous but Ultimately Humorous Language Gaffs; Planes, Trains, and Automobiles; the KGB and Me; Postal and Visa Problems.
Most significant to me was the first day that not one single thing seemed strange or extraordinary. I woke at 6 a.m. to the tune of two women in the courtyard singing the list of dairy products they were selling. I boiled water on the stove to wash with. In the morning I met with students and faculty, answered the phone and waited for the electricity to come on. I was called down to the academy rector's office to drink vodka toasts in honor of a minor government official's visit.
I spent two hours unsuccessfully trying to renew my residence permit and spoke English for the first time when I met friends at an English club at 3 p.m.
After work I walked to the bazaar, pushing past old women selling family treasures to supplement their meager pensions and men selling meat from blankets spread in the sun to get to the truck of cabbage and the kiosks selling hot bread. I bought the only avocado for sale, because it was the first (and last) one I had seen in Kazakhstan.
I did the rest of my shopping while a techno version of the song "Hotel California" blared from a kiosk selling pirated cassette and video tapes. I fixed dinner with my Italian and Cambodian neighbors before watching the evening's installment of "Dallas" with my building's attendant. Before going to sleep, I read a brand new, three-month-old copy of Newsweek. And for the first time I realized that, for a while at least, this was home.
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| Evan Meyer hands a birthday present to Olga Lux (pronounced loosh) at her family's home in Aguacatan, Guatemala. Lux is wearing traditional village dress. Courtesy of Ricardo Lux |
AGUACATAN, GUATEMALA -- In Guatemala, strong Mayan culture exists to this day. The country has 11 million people with 23 spoken languages in addition to Spanish. Some of the Mayan languages such as Quiche, Kakchikel, Q'ekchi and Mam were widely spoken. Others were not.
Awakateko, the Mayan language spoken in Aguacatan, was only spoken in the municipality and had a total of 17,000 speakers. While Mam and Ixil were related to it, they were no more closely related to it as a language than Spanish or French are to each other.
I already arrived in Guatemala speaking Spanish and by the end of training, I had a pretty good grasp of the language. So when I arrived in Aguacatan after six months of being a volunteer, I set about to learn the local language. It was important for me to be able to greet people in their language and communicate with those people who only spoke Awakateko. Most of the people in town spoke Spanish, but in the outlying villages, this wasn't always the case, particularly with women and children.
Learning the language was a struggle. They defined bees as wunaq chuq' or "insect people" because they worked with each other. This definition explained the fact that they as a culture worked together and therefore defined insects that were also social as being similar to them. Awakateko is actually a word that was given to their language by Spanish-speaking Guatemalans, they referred to their language as qa' yol or "our word" in English. They also referred to each other as qatanum, which means "our people" as opposed to being called Awakateko by Spanish speakers.
During my free time I would spend time at the market with the old ladies practicing my Awakateko. In my first months, I hardly understood anything that was asked of me. I remember the first time that I responded correctly to a question. I had been away from the village for a couple of weeks and, upon my return, ran into a woman who I worked with. She asked me in Awakateko "ja pe kxul yaj" or "you've returned." When I answered "ja nu'ul" or "I've returned," she laughed. I really hadn't been certain that that is what she had asked but guessed. I asked her, "Did I not answer your question?"
She said: "No, I'm laughing because you answered it right."
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