Our Fearless Leader Has Arrived

Our new Country Director, Nina Hernandez, arrived last week and spent some time with us on Friday. None of us wanted her to come because we love Brian Dwyer (who has been filling in for her) so much. Now we love them both! Nina was a PCV 10 years ago, and she told us a story - a story like every "RPCV" has (that's Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, though no one ever really thinks of themself as returned - once a PCV, always a PCV!) She was in the first group to go to South Africa and her village had no running water or electricity. When she arrived, she soon found out that the village couldn't afford to buy bread to feed the children in school. So, Nina met with them to try to help them figure out what they could do. They vascilitated between cutting the teacher's salary or cutting back on the bread the children got. Then Nina asked if any of them knew how to make bread and they all laughed at her until one woman said that she knew of a village nearby where the women baked bread. So off the women went, on a field trip to the village where the women baked bread. Most had never been out of their village, so the trip itself was a major deal, but they headed out and walked to the neighboring village. Armed with their new knowledge, they returned and built an oven out of clay and began to make their own bread.

Fast forward ten years. Nina is married to a former Safety for the Houston Oilers and wanted to take him to Africa to see "her" village. She prepared him on the way, explaining what the village was like. As they disembarked from the plane, she was overwhelmed to see that the villagers had ventured all the way to the city to meet them at the airport - a far cry from that first adventure to the new village. And when they arrived in the village (that now has running water, electricity AND internet!), Nina found that much of the progress that had been made was a result of the oven! Not only were they able to feed the children with the bread they made, but they began selling it to other villages to fund bringing water and electricity to the village. Most returned Peace Corps volunteers don't have the good fortune to re-visit the place where they spent their volunteer years, but I imagine that if they could, most would find that the village is better off because of their presence there. These are the stories that reinforce my presence here.