AMY STOCKLEIN
Kate Vieira served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Latvia from 1999-2001.
In 1997, when Mark Lydon arrived for his post in the highlands of Tanzania, paved roads, power lines, running water and cell phones were still on the horizon. “By night, I’d hear the howling of hyenas and in the morning I’d watch the ancient migration of nomadic goat herders,” Lydon tells the lively audience at the sixth annual Peace Corps story slam, March 4 at the Rigby.
Returned Peace Corps Volunteers — or RPCVs, as they call themselves — are out in force enjoying a boisterous night of reminiscing about their experiences of serving abroad.
Not all the stories — on the theme “The Tipping Point” — are polished, but many provide important insights into the nature of serving abroad with the 59-year-old agency. Some induce goosebumps.
Lydon was hired to teach chemistry and physics, but found himself negotiating with an NGO to place a well near the school. His story reveals the fraught nature of well-intended service projects: “This was Peace Corps gold. Who doesn’t love that neocolonialist image of the benevolent Peace Corps volunteer standing alongside their clean, uniformed students in front of a shiny new well?”
An elder urinated in the place where the well was begun, and Lydon soon realized the villagers didn’t want it. But the environmental club he started planted trees that are thriving today.
“I have no idea if the coefficients or the noble gases were ever useful information for anybody. I have no idea if the school ever got water,” says Lydon. “But 21 years later, there’s now a small forest surrounding the school that was not there in 1997.”
Another tree tale comes from Manuel Colón, a Peace Corps staffer visiting from Chicago. He was proud of leading an effort to plant a field full of native trees in Paraguay. But a week after a photo op with visiting dignitaries and representatives of the World Wildlife Fund, he revisited the site. “I walked up to the park and every tree that we planted was no longer there. They were just dirt holes, they’d been plucked up,” says Colón. He learned only then that his crew had planted the trees in the local soccer field. “I could not believe that I let the glitz and glamour get in the way of seeing how the community used that space,” says Colón. “They practiced soccer there; they did not need 30 native Paraguayan trees there.” Colón spent the rest of his service going house to house to involve the community in creating a management plan for a new national park.
Colón’s story ends with a plug for serving. “For those who are here and considering Peace Corps or reflecting on their own service, remember that the real investment that we make in Peace Corps is on that person level, one handshake, one friendship, one conversation at a time.”
Clare Boulanger, a former professor, was overconfident before arriving in China to teach English in 2014. Then she was overwhelmed, facing weekly gatherings of more than 150 students. By the end, her students wrote her a heartwarming poem, which she put on her refrigerator for the rest of the time. “The Peace Corps just recently cancelled the China mission,” says Boulanger. “They did so before COVID-19, and this is appalling because we were making good impressions, we were making friends, and as anyone in the Peace Corps should be doing, we were making peace.”
During intermission, a member of the audience, Tom Rutherford, introduces himself with an elbow bump. He is a professor of agricultural economics at UW-Madison who recalls his time in Nepal in the late 1970s. “I love this. This event is wonderful, it’s my third time,” he says. He and his brother, both graduates of Madison East, were the first two brothers to serve simultaneously in the same program. “We had grown up building treehouses and go-carts together. So when we went to Nepal, we were really into building bridges. The whole experience was fantastic.”
The evening’s most poetic story comes from Kate Vieira, who recounts a magical night of feasting and drinking during the summer solstice in Latvia. “We rouged lipstick onto our cheeks, put on our flower wreaths and gathered with about 10 other people around a long table spread with pork-fat pierogi,” she says. “The birch trees trembled, the pork fat filled a primal hunger. I began to feel woozy and stepped outside to get some air. Soon I heard the echoes of other families doing what one does on Līgo, which is to sway. I swayed. The moon was milk. I could drink it, and the stars began to splash across the sky. The night fell and the day dawned in one miraculous instant. And then summer solstice was over.”
Rank of UW-Madison among colleges and universities producing Peace Corps volunteers: 1
UW-Madison grads who have served around the world since the agency’s founding: 3,369
Wisconsinites who have served: 6,425
Wisconsinites currently serving: 79
