Corps Values
UMW Spirit of Giving Serves Peace Corps Volunteers Well
By Edie Gross
For the sixth year in a row, the University of Mary Washington is one of the top producers of Peace Corps volunteers among schools of its size. This comes as no surprise to Courtney Weise Santonicola ’96, who has worked at the organization’s Washington, D.C., headquarters for six years.
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Courtney Weise Santonicola |
“The Peace Corps experience really does embody a lot of what UMW is about – serving others and a commitment to helping change the world and being committed to volunteerism,” she said. “I think it’s a wonderful thing.”
UMW has 20 alumni serving in the Peace Corps right now,
ranking it sixth nationally among colleges and universities
with fewer than 5,000 undergraduates. Since 1961, 184 UMW
alumni have joined the corps.
Austin Merrill ’91 was one of them, spending two years in Ivory Coast building latrines for markets, schools, and other public places. He was a history major at UMW, but his Peace Corps experience inspired him to earn a master’s degree in international affairs and later return to Africa as a reporter for The Associated Press.
“The part that was the most difficult ended up being the part that was the best about it. The foreignness ended up being what your education was all about,” said Merrill, now an editor at Vanity Fair magazine. “It’s the most eye-opening thing I’ve ever done.”
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Austin Merrill |
Volunteers provide a range of expertise, everything from teaching English to advising small businesses. Along the way, they help the communities they serve to see Americans in
a positive light, Santonicola said.
And the volunteers themselves – several of whom shared
their stories with UMW Magazine – often say the experience
is unparalleled.
“They’re not development workers living in the capital who go out periodically into the field to deliver aid. They work in the communities where they live,” Santonicola said. “They’re transforming lives. It’s a serious commitment and an amazing adventure.”
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LAURA HANKS – SAMOA
When Laura Hanks ’06 first arrived in Samoa as a special education teacher, no one spoke to Malaki, a 4-year-old boy who was hearing-impaired. He simply flitted around the classroom, unable to communicate with his teachers and classmates.
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Laura Hanks with Malaki, a child who is hearing-impaired |
“It was a real struggle to get teachers to include him,” said Hanks, whose love for children had blossomed while
she counseled summer
campers in Wisconsin.
By the time Hanks left
the island of Upolu two
years later, the youngster
with the contagious grin
had a hearing aid tucked
behind his right ear and
a pretty good handle on
sign language. What’s
more, Malaki’s classmates
had picked up the
language, too, meaning their fellow student was no longer an outcast.
“I still dream about him,” said Hanks, 26, who returned
from the South Pacific in December 2008.
Hanks, who majored in history at UMW, spent the fall of
her senior year studying in Brussels, Belgium, and working
for the European Union. She enjoyed her time in Europe –
including the rugby and the beer – but serving in the Peace
Corps held a certain thrill for her, she said.
“I wanted to not just live abroad and hang out, but go somewhere and help.”
Though helping Malaki was her primary objective, Hanks organized a number of projects to benefit her Samoan village. She created the school’s first computer lab with equipment donated by the father of a fellow UMW graduate. She also established a library there with new books. She applied for a grant that helped supply a local women’s club with sewing machines. And she persuaded her father, a surgeon at the University of Virginia, to visit twice and conduct health clinics.
The village even made him a chief.
A basketball player during her years at UMW, Hanks also
coached the children’s soccer team in her village.
It took a while, she said, for her neighbors to realize she was serious when she promised to provide things they needed.
“I really had to prove myself,” she said. “They have tons of people come and promise them things and never follow up on it. So I had to do a couple of projects on my own to prove I wasn’t going to leave.”
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Laura Hanks with
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She soaked up her surroundings, enjoying village barbecues on the beach, bicycling everywhere, and even surviving chance encounters with centipedes and lizards in her bed. Now a post-baccalaureate/pre-med student at the University of Virginia – she plans to become a surgeon like her father – Hanks describes the Peace Corps experience as nothing short of life-altering.
“It’ll be one of those things I’ll remember for the rest of my life,” she said. “You learn so much about yourself.”
Laura Hanks ’06 served in Samoa as a special-education teacher and bonded with Malaki, a child who is hearing-impaired. To read more about Laura Hanks’ experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer, see her blog, samoanadventure.blogspot.com.
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CARRIE WALLINGER – MONGOLIA
During Carrie Wallinger’s first week at UMW, shewandered into Cards & Cones in downtown Fredericksburg and overheard a customer talking about having just returned from Peace Corps service overseas. Wallinger ’02 said she carried that seed in the back of her mind throughout college and broached the topic with her professors, all of whom were supportive. Still, after graduating with degrees in English and political science, she worked as a newspaper reporter for two years in Lynchburg, Va., before taking the plunge.
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Carrie Wallinger with Mongolian students |
“I decided I wanted to do something different,” said Wallinger, 29. “I got to a point where I thought, ‘If I don’t go now, I never will.’”
She spent June 2004 to June 2006 in Mongolia, teaching English to fourth-through-eighth-graders. Her village had 1,200 people and one telephone. She drank river water and chopped wood in the winter, when temperatures fell to 40 below, to heat her ger, the tent-like structure she called home. In the summer, when the village’s electricity went out for three months, she cooked meals over an open fire.
“I got the real Peace Corps experience,” said Wallinger, now a graduate student in social justice and human rights at Arizona State University.
Being so isolated took some getting used to, she said. As a foreigner, she was viewed as an oddity. Kids would follow her around, and elders would occasionally talk about her – not realizing that she understood much of what they were saying. Still, she said, she warmed to the place – and the people warmed to her. Her students would sometimes clap for her when she entered the classroom. And a local family basically adopted her, treating her as their daughter.
While Wallinger experienced a good bit of culture shock
there, she said returning to the United States, with its traffic,
24-hour cable, and packed grocery aisles, was almost more
overwhelming.
“Paring your existence down to just the basics was amazing,”
she said. “I still miss that sometimes, the simplicity of it all.”
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ANDY CRAVER – KYRGYZSTAN
Andy Craver ’02 will celebrate his 30th birthday this summer in the eastern Kyrgyz village where
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Andy Craver |
he began charting his future nearly
five years ago.
These days, he is a graduate student and
a Peace Corps fellow at the University of Missouri, where
he is earning a master’s degree in rural sociology. During
his trip – his first back to Kyrgyzstan since ending his Peace
Corps service in 2006 – he’ll examine how state-owned
pasture land is divided for nomadic herders.
Some of those herders were students of his when he taught
English to children in the Central Asian country for two
years. Often, their attendance was spotty because they were
expected to help herd sheep, cattle, and yaks for their families.
“A lot of these kids had pressures in their lives I wouldn’t
have thought of,” Craver said. “A kid who’s 12 who has to
be housekeeper. Or they’d have to work in the fields with
their parents. I’d go hiking in the mountains and run into
my kids who were shepherding. ‘Oh, that’s why you weren’t
in school yesterday.’ ”
Craver, a cultural anthropology major at UMW, traveled a bit after graduation, eventually meeting up with a longtime friend in Panama who was volunteering to build water filtration systems for remote communities.
“I’d gotten the [Peace Corps] application and kind of
tinkered with it before I was in Panama,” said Craver, who
always had enjoyed volunteering. “It just kind of clicked.”
Though he learned to speak Kyrgyz, the Russian he
studied at UMW came in handy as well since it is one of
the country’s official languages.
The “fish-bowlish” life could be stressful at times; he was
singled out as “the American.” But the people were amazingly
friendly, and strangers regularly invited him for tea, he said.
And he found the emphasis on self-reliance refreshing. “Here, if we have a toaster and it breaks, we throw it away,” Craver said. “There, you unplug it, you sit down, and you fix it.”
He said he misses the taste of kabobs cooked over coals and
even the comforting scent of dried dung cakes being burned
in the winter. His time in the Peace Corps crystallized for
him what he wanted to do with his life, and he recommends
the experience to other UMW grads.
“I think a lot of people are just predisposed to it,” he said. “It’s vastly appealing to people of a certain mindset . . . if you want to see the world, experience otherness, and help people.”
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DAN ARCHIBALD – CAMEROON
Sports enthusiast Dan Archibald ’05 was thrilled to learn that pickup soccer matches were a daily occurrence in the northern Cameroon village where he is posted for two years. He even haggled for a pair of cleats at a nearby market. As it turns out, footwear is overrated among athletes in his village, Bogo, located in the West African country’s extreme north.
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Dan Archibald |
Most of Archibald’s teammates and opponents play barefoot. And the game itself more closely resembles “hand-to- hand combat” than American-style soccer, he wrote on his blog in February.
“Now prior to my soccer experience here, I considered myself to be a fairly fast individual. As it turns out, that is false,” wrote Archibald, who is scheduled to serve in Cameroon until December 2010. “When a Cameroonian wearing jelly sandals blows by you like you weren’t even there, it makes you reassess your athletic ability. Needless to say, I’ve had to adjust my game a bit.”
Archibald, 25, also had to adjust to 120-degree days and some persistent stomach bugs. But overall, he said, living and working in a community he might otherwise never be able to visit has been amazing.
“On a typical day, I’ll eat breakfast in the village center, converse with shopkeepers and friends around the village, and usually in the evening after work I’ll fit in a game of soccer with the local guys,” he wrote in an email. “These are activities that, when I did them in the U.S., I probably didn’t give a second thought. Yet in this setting, with people of a completely different background, every opportunity to connect on a personal level is always rewarding.”
As a Peace Corps volunteer in agroforestry, which uses the interactive benefits from combining trees and shrubs with crops and/or livestock, Archibald can focus on everything from establishing tree nurseries and reforesting land to building wells and diversifying crops. He is also expected to teach English.
He chats with others in both French and Fulfulde, a western African language. When he first arrived, locals called him nasarra, the Fulfulde word for “foreigner.” These days, he’s been upgraded to nasarra qui joue le ballon, or “the foreigner who plays ball.”
He majored in international affairs and political science at UMW and one day hopes to pursue a career in international development.
A Peace Corps post can be rewarding on some days and frustrating on others, he said. “But for someone who likes a good adventure, is eager to make a change in the world (or at least try), and doesn’t mind eating some pretty weird stuff from time to time, Peace Corps would probably be a great fit,” he wrote.
To read about Dan Archibald’s time as a volunteer in Cameroon, see his blog, cameroondan.blogspot.com.
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CHAD CHADBOURN – COSTA RICA
Chad Chadbourn’s Spanish language expertise might come as a surprise to the professors who taught him at UMW. “That was not my strongest course,” said Chadbourn ’06. “But I wanted to go to Latin America. Now I’m fluent.”
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Chad Chadbourn with Costa Rican children |
After being inspired by a fellow UMW alum who was
serving in the Peace Corps in Africa, Chadbourn joined the
volunteer organization and headed for Costa Rica a month
after graduation.
He’d already been there once during his senior year – with
geography Professor Dawn Bowen’s sustainable development
class, “so it was perfect timing,” he said.
He went originally to help local businesses with basic accounting and general organizational issues but added teaching English classes to teens and adults – many of whom worked in the local tourist industry. He also helped a high school recycling group show businesses how to be environmentally responsible.
An Eagle Scout, Chadbourn also helped establish a
Scouting group for boys and girls ages 7 to 10. The group
proved to be so popular that it later expanded to include
those up to 15.
Chadbourn, 25, said he ran into quite a few UMW graduates who were volunteering in Costa Rica. And he
enjoyed meeting with Bowen’s students when they visited
the country.
As for settling in, the language barrier was tough at first,
he said. Even more difficult, however, was convincing the
locals that he wasn’t a tourist just dropping in, but that he
was making a long-term investment in the community.
“Really being respected in the community and seen as
a resource for them was a challenging experience for me. It
took such a hard effort. That’s why it was such a positive
experience for me,” he said. “I got an email the other day from
the volunteer who’s in my community now, saying, ‘Thank
you for the relationships you established.’”
Those relationships have paid off for Chadbourn too.
An Arlington, Va., resident, he now works for a consulting
firm that contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he helps staff projects abroad, including
in Latin America.
For those considering the Peace Corps, the two-year
commitment might seem daunting, he said, but it’s worth it. “Two years sounds like a long time, but then you think , ‘How fast did four years at UMW go by?’ Joining the Peace
Corps was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made,” he said.
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MARIE ZEZULA – MOROCCO
Marie Zezula ’05 wasn’t sure she was Peace Corps material. “I think most of my life I felt that volunteers were people who were much braver than I was and who were fluent in at least four languages.
Marie Zezula
Upon further examination of the program, I realized that there were all sorts of people in the Peace Corps,” Zezula said in an email from France, where she has been teaching English
since wrapping up her Peace Corps duties in May 2008. “What was central to all volunteers was our commitment to the mission of service and cultural exchange.”
Zezula, who majored in psychology at UMW, spent two years working as a health and hygiene educator in southern Morocco. She said she worked with a lot of young families, educating them about everything from AIDS prevention to healthy diets. She never realized how much she enjoyed teaching until joining the Peace Corps, she said. Ultimately, she wants to teach English literature.
Zezula, 26, said she enjoyed learning a new language, and she believes her college experience at UMW helped her adjust to life in another country.
“I think that a liberal arts school naturally encourages students to think outside the box, and therefore maybe students are more willing to embrace the idea of adapting to another culture.
“Growth is sometimes difficult, but when you see how far you’ve come, you get a thrill rarely found elsewhere,” she said. “I will always be grateful to Moroccans for the opportunity they gave me and the new perspective I gained from being among them.”
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SAMANTHA BUNKER – NEW RECRUIT
By this time next year, Samantha Bunker ’09 will be advising businesses in South or Central America as a Peace Corps volunteer, possibly using the Spanish she studied at UMW. Bunker, who majored in psychology with a concentration in business, said there were many opportunities to join the Peace Corps during her four years on campus.
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Samantha Bunker |
She would run into friends who were joining, or she would receive emails from graduates who were writing blogs on their experiences abroad. Several times, she said, Peace Corps recruiters spoke to her and fellow members of the service-oriented club Intervarsity Christian Fellowship.
“I always felt like I wanted to do it, and it kept popping up everywhere for me,” said Bunker, 22. “I was finally like: I get it. I’m going.”
Bunker, who is working for UMW’s Residence Life this summer, reports for duty next May. She figures living abroad will take some getting used to, but she’s thrilled to join a cause that so many of her fellow grads have embraced.
“I want something that shakes your entire world so much,
it changes everything you’re going to be in the future.”
Can't make a longterm commitment to the Peace Corp but want to help? Learn more here