At peace

Soon after the late John F. Kennedy spoke to University students about serving their nation in 1960, Congress established the Peace Corps, in which more than 150 University alumni have served over the years. Here are some of their tales.

By Laurie O’Reilly ’82

I am returning to the Nepali village of Sutari Gau to say goodbye. High in the mountains, steep walls of earth ascend to our left while the dramatic drop-off descends to the valley below on our right. The monsoon-soaked earth has shifted and blocked the single-lane dirt road. Our heavy-laden bus settles into the mud. It can go no further. We ease out of the packed vehicle. Goats and chickens, too. We set off on foot the final 45 kilometers to the district center. Dusk descends. Drizzle continues. We walk. I ponder. Rato mato, chiplo bato. Red earth, slippery path. The monsoon rains saturate the earth. Landslides intermittently block the road. We climb over these new hills, the shifting landscape.

As I walk, I remember my journey to this village two years earlier, and learning to say hello to my village family and to my colleagues on the faculty at the school. Hello and goodbye are the same word in Nepali, namaste: the spirit in me goes out to greet the spirit in you. Joy and sorrow, frustration and peace, hello and goodbye – the poles of my Peace Corps years here...

Some 150 University of Portland alumni have been accepted into Peace Corps service in Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Pacific islands, and, most recently, in central and eastern Europe. We have served in 65 countries. Sixty percent of us are women. A dozen alumni are serving as I write this, and others await word of their assignment to country of service. We have served in the fields of hygiene/sanitation, fisheries, forestry extension, English teaching, teacher training, primary education, health extension, industrial arts, community development, crop extension, cooperatives, business, nursing, youth development, environmental education, math and science teaching, water resources, poultry production, nongovernmental organization advising, agriculture, and computer science. We have served in Afghanistan, the Republic of Azerbaijan, Belize, Benin, Bolivia, Brazil, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, the Dominican Republic, Eastern Caribbean, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gabon, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, India, the Inter-America Region, Jamaica, the Republic of Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, the Federated States of Micronesia, Morocco, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Samoa, Senegal, Sierra Leone, the Slovak Republic, South Korea, Swaziland, Tanzania, Thailand, Tonga, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zaire. We have faced mountains and valleys, monsoons and droughts. We have lived in the altiplano and amid coral reefs, the Himalaya and the Serengeti.

On May 16, 1960, John Kennedy came to the University of Portland to speak to students in Howard Hall. The wear and tear of the rigorous presidential campaign had gotten the better of his voice, so U.S. Congresswoman Edith Green delivered the speech for him, but afterwards Kennedy ambled over to the Pilot House to talk to students about his pressing idea for young people: the Peace Corps.

Two of the University students who heard him that night, Patricia Roberts Guss ’62 and the late Phyllis Purcell ’62, were among the Peace Corps’ first applicants after it was established by Congress in March of 1961 to “help the people of interested countries by providing trained workers, to help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the people served, and to help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.” Purcell, who had covered JFK’s campaign for The Beacon as a staff writer, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador; Guss served two years in Honduras as a nurse in public health, and then volunteered as a Peace Corps recruiter at Oregon State University. She and her husband then served a second term in the Corps, in Tonga, where Patricia taught English.

Sue Dempsey Sievers ’63 went from The Bluff to the Peace Corps in Colombia, and among her sharpest memories of her time there was Friday, November 22, 1963, when an elderly Columbian woman approached her and said quietly, your papacito died – expressing, as Sue says, a feeling common to “Kennedy’s Kids” around the world.

Janice Harvey Hudanish ’62 was in northeastern Thailand, working for the Corps at a teacher training college, when she heard. “Some Thai students asked if we heard about President Kennedy. I asked if he was sick. They used the Thai word for gun. We immediately went over to the home of another Corps volunteer who had a short-wave radio. We turned on the Voice of America from the Philippines and sat in stunned silence listening to the news of the assassination. I remembered his visit to the University and seeing him at the Pilot House...”

“When he was shot I felt so alone,” says Guss. “I was the only American in my area. I found out during the afternoon siesta. I walked back to the health clinic and people stopped and embraced me. Then on the day of his funeral the bells of the Cathedral tolled and there was a memorial Mass concelebrated by thirteen priests and the church was packed...”

In the late summer of 1964 four friends began their senior year at the University by reminiscing about the summer past and sharing plans for the future. To their amazement, Nancy Bigelow, Rita Vanoni, Jeanne Maher, and Joan Castricano discovered that each of them, unbeknownst to the others, had applied to the Peace Corps! Thus it was a year later that Nancy Bigelow Muktoyuk ’65 was in northwestern India, working with villagers to develop kitchen gardens; Jeanne Maher Schray ’65 was teaching math and science in Ghana; and Joan Castricano Galles ’65 and the late Rita Vanoni de Meyreles ’65 were serving in the Dominican Republic. A year later another alumna was in India – Patricia Day Jamison ’66, working in health and nutrition – and her friend Kathleen Fairwell Marks ’66 was in rural Thailand, teaching English in a secondary school. And after that the University sent alumni to the Peace Corps every year for decades – a remarkable act of continuous service noted, with public gratitude, by then-director of the Peace Corps Mark Gearan in 1997, when the University celebrated John Kennedy’s extraordinary idea with an honorary doctorate of public service to Gearan.

Erik Fryburg ’99 joined the Peace Corps for two reasons, he says: because he realized life was fragile and ideas should be acted upon and opportunities seized, and because he wanted to challenge himself. The first lesson, he says, was hammered home for him when his best friend died in a car crash when he was a junior; the second was much tempered when he actually began his Peace Corps stint teaching biology at a boarding school in Tanzania with nearly 600 students. No running water in the village, infrequent electricity, few school resources – only a chalkboard and a piece of chalk. So Erik taught biology by lecturing and field trips – one to Mount Kilimanjaro, where five of his students climbed to the peak of the continent’s tallest mountain.

There is a bigger, brooding mountain in Africa, however: AIDS. “Too many funerals,” says Fryburg bluntly. “Five teachers and thirty students died of AIDS while I was there. And no one would talk about it. There’s such a social stigma attached to AIDS. People would blame the deaths on anything other than AIDS. Typhoid. Malaria. Pneumonia. Anything except AIDS.” So Erik invented a curriculum focusing on HIV awareness, forms of transmission, and prevention, and he stayed an extra six months past his service to finish the academic year with his students, and when several of his students did so well on the national exams that they were accepted to medical school, their teacher was perhaps more delighted than they were. Their teacher is again a student now, back in the States and pursuing a graduate degree in public health.

Virginia Wallace ’84 found herself itching for a challenge too, ten years after earning her nursing degree on The Bluff, and soon she found herself working as a Peace Corps nurse with mothers and children in Morocco. Jon Harlan ’85 says his Peace Corps experience really began with University engineering professor Larry Simmons (himself a returned Peace Corps volunteer, who one day “outlined all the traditional engineering disciplines, and then added that we might also consider such non-traditional engineering careers as working with the disabled. Well, the University provided such a stimulating environment for education and personal and spiritual growth for me that I consider my Peace Corps experiences as an extension [of his education on The Bluff].”

Jon served in Sierre Leone, teaching math and science. His most powerful memory of his time in the Peace Corps is, as with so very many of us, a child.

“The woman who cooked for us had a daughter who was perhaps three years old. One day a neighbor came to me and asked if I would come see what was wrong with her. Everyone said that she was sick because a curse had been put on her mother. I picked up this fragile little girl. She was so light. She hardly weighed anything. I strapped her onto my motorbike and took her to the hospital. At the hospital they said that she had sickle cell anemia and malaria and parasites. So many things wrong with her. I stayed with her and when it looked like she was going to be all right I got up from her bedside. She didn’t know who I was – just some white guy who brought her to the hospital. Medical folks surrounded her. She was just lying there. She reached for my hand and held on tightly. Her eyes. That’s what I remember most. She just looked at me. I was touched to my core. And then I left to go teach my last classes of the day, and when I was finished teaching I went back to the hospital, and she had died.”

Upon returning to the States Jon earned a graduate degree in biomedical engineering and now works for a non-profit foundation that develops software for computer-aided design of prosthetic devices. As we were conversing for this article he learned that his foundation is opening a clinic in Sierre Leone to help tens of thousands of people whose limbs have been severed in the brutal civil war that tore the country apart in the 1990s.

Eleanor Dempsey Head ’69 went to Malawi to teach secondary school. Her first memories are children from the village bringing her eggs, and a gentle elderly woman who said mtendere to her – peace.

Robin Shea ’84 lived in a small Ecuadorian community accessible only by boat during the rainy season, and she remembers canoes so crowded that everyone stood up, and the two small boys who operated the ferry, “one rowing as fast as he could and the other bailing water, and all of us making the sign of the cross and praying that the boat would make it across the river...”

Cheryl King ’99 served in Slovakia and slowly learned the crucial importance of the home in Slovakian culture. Melinda Anderson ’80 helped Romanian women start small businesses. Jennifer Anthony ’99 taught English in a Polish public high school and learned to love students, even as she wondered what effect her work had – “it’s not like building bridges or digging wells where you get to see the immediate results of your labor.” In fact she realized that she so enjoyed young people that she ended up working at her alma mater, where she is today associate director of alumni relations.

Kiley Gustafson ’00, who worked as a rural health educator in Senegal, vividly remembers her time in Medina Baoussou, “a small Jaxanke village with clusters of mud and cement huts with thatched roofs. I lived in my adopted village father’s compound, a smattering of sixteen huts housing all the uncles, mothers, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, brother-in-laws, and grandparents of the extended family. My hut was fifteen feet in diameter with two four-feet-high tin doors front and rear and one small window, which looked out on my sister-in-law’s backyard kitchen.” Kiley had a metal chest made from Yotox (mosquito repellent) bottles, and a wooden bed, and a massive mosquito net, and a diet she remembers very well indeed: “Mano – flour porridge sweetened to taste – and rice with spicy peanut sauce thickened with ground okra, and cous cous with a mild peanut sauce, and corn meal grits with spicy peanut sauce...”

Sights and sounds and tastes. Everywhere has inherent rhythms. Kaleidoscopic cacophonies and quietude. In villages the pestle meeting mortar transforms husks of wheat into flour for roti or pita, tortillas or chapati. Give us this day our daily bread. Grain being ground long before the sun rises each morning. In towns and cities the gentle sound of footsteps as a neighbor goes to purchase the round loaves of bread. In Muslim sites the day begins with the beautiful sound of the call to prayer. The ubiquitous song of the rooster in villages and towns the world over slices through the silence of dawn. The tone and rhythm of the djembe, the badal, the wooden flute, and the sitar. In lands graced with monsoons, rain on corrugated roofs...

Laura Lewis Hahn ’99 remembers sleeping out under the stars in Niger. Steve Wascher ’71 remembers the extraordinary silence of his thatched hut overlooking an inlet on the island of Ponape in Micronesia. Jeanne Maher Schray ’65 remembers sitting on the veranda of her Ghanaian abode and watching the wind blow through the branches of a massive baobab tree and knock the fruit to the ground and being happy and awake and attentive and tranquil and realizing that her need to Hurry and to Do had washed away from her. Life in Ghana taught me to be still, she says.

Nancy Fahrenwald ’88 served in Malawi, in public health. “When I think of Africa I think of mangoes,” she says. She explains. “My Malawian counterpart and I worked together to plan and implement AIDS prevention and control programs for Zomba District, a mountainous area with rural villages and the community of Zomba itself. We focused on identifying high-risk populations for transmission of HIV, like prisoners, soldiers, and prostitutes. We focused on developing counseling and care programs for people with AIDS, and implementing primary prevention programs in schools throughout the district – a district of 650,000 people. Our challenge was in reaching the rural villagers. We had no transportation. The Peace Corps issued me a bicycle, which was helpful, but many villages were too remote to reach in a day’s bicycle ride...”

Once, she says, the local Malawi education coordinator for UNICEF loaned Nancy and her colleague a Land Rover, and they bounced across the mountains for two hot dusty hours to a rural village, where the village chief there told them his six sons and their wives were all dead from AIDS. He was left to care for his 17 grandchildren. He was too old to farm the soil. He could not grow enough food or pay for school for the children. The children had not eaten that day nor the day before. Other villagers were in the same situation.

“The crisis of AIDS was very real that day,” says Nancy Fahrenwald, “and I was overwhelmed. On the bumpy ride home I cried. I was hot and thirsty and hungry and homesick and discouraged and powerless. Suddenly my colleague burst forth with words I will never forget: Isn’t God wonderful? he shouted, pointing to a mango tree along the road. God has given us the mango!

“Those mangoes were blessings,” she concludes. “They were hope.”

Franz Schneider ’63 worked in schools in poor areas of Colombia. For a while he trained teachers in a leper colony. Jason Phillips ’95 worked in rural sanitation in Bolivia. For a while he worked on a gravity-flow water system that serviced ten families in a small village. Every day he rode his bike 14 kilometers and then hiked to a mountaintop with Bolivian campesinos whose wives hiked up daily with a huge black pot to cook the soup of the day. Amy Valdez ’98 served on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia and says what she learned most was the challenge of real commitment. Kate Hummel ’00 served in community health in Gabon in the town where Albert Schweitzer had his hospital. Ah, Schweitzer: One thing I know, the only ones among you who will really be happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.

Mary Dever Manoussos ’76 worked in teacher education in Lesotho and remembers tumultuous political turmoil – the murder of Steven Biko, the escape of newspaper editor Donald Woods from South Africa into Lesotho, a massacre witnessed by a Peace Corps colleague, being yanked off the steps of the train station in Johannesburg because they were for blacks only...

Which reminds me of a book I read long ago in University professor Louis Masson’s literature of peace and justice class, Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country – “…But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret...”

Paul Griffin ’90 worked in sanitation and water resources in Honduras, and he remembers “amazing gentleness, warmness, and generosity in the face of crushing poverty. It seemed even more conspicuous as the campesinos there are living in the shadow of the United States, with our huge military presence and our wealth just out of reach...any time I was out in the campo I would be invited into a one-room house made of sticks and mud, and a cup of coffee would be offered, bean soup, tortillas. Even if the family only owned one bowl and one spoon I was expected to eat first. I was humbled. I was uncomfortable. It made me acutely aware of the privileges I enjoy due to the random fact of where I was born. Returning to the States was a much bigger culture shock and adjustment for me than going to Honduras was. I remember flying into Houston in the evening and thinking with complete awe that every building I saw had reliable water 24 hours a day.

“I try to use my experiences in Central America as a touchstone now, to remind me to focus on what is truly important, what I truly need, what is truly fulfilling.”

Quynh-Uyen Nguyen ’95 was born and raised in Vietnam before she and her family made it through refugee camps to the United States. After leaving The Bluff she joined the Peace Corps and was sent to teach in Namibia, “where I discovered I was not as open and flexible as I believed myself to be,” she says. “My Peace Corps journey taught me the most poignant life lesson – to work, live, and think from the heart! When confronted by all things new and foreign I learned that the best way to communicate is humbly with my heart...”

The most senior alumna to serve in the Peace Corps is Joyce Gillen Hickerson ’48 who worked in Fiji in the South Pacific from 1982-1984 as a clinical tutor at a hospital nursing school. Joyce’s husband came with her, also serving in the Corps. Peace Corps service is often a family affair: Janice Harvey Hudanish ’62 served in Thailand and her sister Julie Harvey Ostendorf ’66 served in Chile. Franz Schneider ’63 and his wife Mary both served in Colombia. Jeffrey Hammer ’71 and his wife both served in Grenada. Katherine Phillips Durham ’88 served in Thailand, and her brother Jason Phillips ’95 served in Bolivia. Lyn Dempsey Head ’69 served as a teacher in Malawi and married a returned Peace Corps volunteer who had served in Afghanistan; their twin daughters (one of whom is Lauren Dempsey Head ’04) are waiting for their Peace Corps assignments as I write. And Lyn’s brother, niece, nephew, and brother-in-law have also served in the Peace Corps. Oh yes, and her sister, Sue Dempsey Sievers ’63, served in Colombia.

Once, when I was in Nepal, the regional education officer and I were driving north to the district of Surkhet, and on the journey I said I am a bideshi [foreigner], and my friend said: You are not a bideshi. You are an international. Bideshis come from the moon or another planet. We are all internationals. We are citizens of the world.

“The Peace Corps opened up my mind, my ideas, my way of thinking, my life,” says Robin Shea ’84 of her years in Ecuador. “More than thirty years later,” says Donald Boos ’71, “I dream of Brazil and the way people in one of the poorest areas of the world gave me their time, their friendship, their help.” “My Peace Corps experience shrunk the world for me,” says Jason Phillips ’95, remembering Bolivia.

Amanda Richter ’00 was serving in Uzbekistan on September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of the murders, the Peace Corps evacuated volunteers from many countries. Amanda was given two days to say goodbye. The tears of her new friends pierced her to the core.

Which triggers my memories: If you wouldn’t have come here in the first place, we wouldn’t have to say goodbye, one friend said, sobbing.

I am changed for life because you have been in my life.

Could it be that the most apt and suitable and true words to use of the many University alumni who served their nation and their fellow citizens of the world through the Peace Corps is that they went in peace?

So to my kindred alumni who served, to all who served, to all who are serving, to all who will serve, I say kwaheri... adios... au revoir... doveedsenya... namaste... pheri betola... tsalani bwino... ndapital... Ah de kam... hayer... dasvidanya... hasta luego... mukhale ndi mtendere...

Let us go in peace.

Laurie O’Reilly ’82, who served in the Peace Corps as a teacher in Nepal and earned her doctorate when she returned to the States, is a hospital chaplain in San Diego.