In 1995, my husband Colin Rule ’93 and I locked our belongings in storage, waved goodbye to friends and family, and embarked on a multi-year journey to Eritrea, a newly-independent East African nation about which I knew embarrassingly little. I spent a good portion of the 15-hour flight in a state of nervous disbelief. We had joined the Peace Corps.

Since March 1, 1961, 138 Haverford alumni have served in 64 developing countries as Peace Corps Volunteers. According to Nathan Arnold, a Peace Corps spokesman in Washington, D.C., Haverford is in the top 10 percent of the over 2,800 colleges and universities whose alumni have volunteered. As this ranking does not take into account the size of the student bodies, Haverford’s high placement, given its small alumni base, is impressive.

In addition to the Peace Corps, countless Haverford alumni have pursued service opportunities both at home and abroad with a host of other organizations: WorldTeach, AmeriCorps, Teach For America, the American Friends Service Committee, and the like. Each organization has a different mission and philosophy, but all offer men and women the opportunity to share their skills, challenge their assumptions, and make human connections in some of the most underserved communities across the nation and the globe.

These pages examine the lives of six alumni who have had a connection to the Peace Corps in one form or another—as volunteers, employees, and one as a student of Peace Corps teachers. Their experiences—and the forces that led them so far from their comfort zones—defy neat categorization, but all six acknowledge the profound impact their time overseas had on their views of themselves and the world.

Here are their stories, across the decades.

George G.C. Parker ’60

George Parker served in 1962, during what he terms the “glamour days of the Peace Corps.” Part of the third group to head overseas, Parker was in the first Peace Corps group in Peru. Whereas many former volunteers romanticize their reasons for joining the organization, Parker’s decision was a practical one: to obtain a deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War. “As a committed Quaker and conscientious objector, I suppose I could have done alternate service by being a noncombatant or working in a hospital, but the Peace Corps held a great deal of appeal,” he says.

Freshly minted with the Stanford M.B.A. he earned post-Haverford, Parker and his wife, serving together high in the Andes, inherited a credit union from a Catholic priest. “It was in huge disarray. I went in as the general manager, and we pulled it together and got it to grow.”

While proud of his accomplishments, Parker insists on keeping his success in perspective. “For the most part, the Peace Corps positively impacts the lives of its volunteers, who return to the United States as citizens who have vastly more interest in and commitment to the world than they did before leaving. The open, stated agenda is to impact development abroad. But the hidden agenda is to make the volunteers compassionate citizens of the world.” Parker considers himself primarily a citizen of the world and, secondarily, a citizen of the United States. “We are changed people, in a better way,” he reflects.

After his service, Parker returned to Stanford to pursue a Ph.D. in finance and to run a Peace Corps training program. “While I was running this program I thought it was important for the volunteers to learn how to play soccer before they headed overseas.” A friend knew a young Peruvian soccer player living in San Francisco; his name was Alejandro Toledo. Parker and his friend recruited Toledo—at $11 an hour—to teach the new trainees the ins and outs of the game.

Three and a half decades later, Parker was invited to accompany former President Jimmy Carter to Peru to certify the results of presidential election. While there, he met the candidates, one of whom was Toledo. “You helped me teach soccer at Stanford in 1967,” Parker reminded him, unsure whether the Peruvian recalled their interactions years earlier. “I remember you,” Toledo replied, “You paid me $11 an hour!” Toledo is the current president of Peru.

For his part, Parker, who is the Dean Witter Professor of Finance and Management, has been a fixture at Stanford Business School since 1973 and has played a key role in administering Stanford’s honor code. In 2002, he was honored by the Business School faculty with the Robert T. Davis Award for extraordinary lifetime contributions to the School. His expertise in executive teaching has taken him to over 30 countries, including Ethiopia, Dubai, Kuwait, and numerous countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He has returned to Peru several times as well.
Parker served on the Haverford Board of Managers from 1977 to 1989. Though proud of all his affiliations—with Haverford, with Stanford, and with the Peace Corps—Parker believes his path in life stems from a deeper place. “It is my Quakerism,” he says, “that has shaped the person I have become.”

Tom Kessinger ’63 / ’65

Everyone who attended Haverford during the years 1988 to 1996 knew that President Tom Kessinger had served as a Peace Corps volunteer in India. Though he took his job at Haverford very seriously, Kessinger was well-known for his casual, approachable style. He peppered his addresses to the student body with anecdotes from his many years overseas and imparted his considerable knowledge through the class he taught during seven of his eight years at the College, Contemporary South Asia in Historical Perspective.

Kessinger spent his early years in northern New Jersey, a proud alumnus of the Ridgewood public school system. In 10th grade, his college counselor advised him to consider Haverford. “Kessinger, you’re the Quaker, you should go to Haverford—we have not had anyone go there for years,” he recalls hearing. Kessinger heeded this advice, applied, and was accepted. This was the first time Kessinger chose Haverford, something he would do twice more in the coming years.

Kessinger played football and baseball during his first two years, was class president, and took part in organizational meetings of CORE, the Congress on Racial Equality at Haverford/Bryn Mawr. He also worked as an assistant football coach at The Haverford School.

Then, in 1961, after completing his sophomore year, Kessinger look a leave of absence from Haverford to join the Peace Corps. “When I entered Haverford in 1959 I had a clear but not specific idea of doing some sort of ‘voluntary’ work after graduating—probably with the American Friends Service Committee,” he says. Two factors changed the timing of his plan: the first was JFK’s call to service during his January 20, 1961, inaugural address, the second the establishment of the Peace Corps a few weeks later.

On October 1, 1961, Kessinger joined the ninth Peace Corps group to head overseas and the first to go to India. He was posted, with three other volunteers, just outside the market town of Nabha (population 35,000) in Punjab State in the northern part of the country.

While other volunteers worked in rural development, low-cost housing, or vocational education, Kessinger’s position was more difficult to describe. “I was a bit of a misfit because I had no background in any of the fields either by education, training, or life experience, as did the rest of the group. But I had done very well in the training program at Ohio State University, which was more liberal arts in content than technical, so was selected anyway.” He was ultimately assigned to work with rural youth clubs, leading meetings with students and biking to15 different villages to work directly with youths on many facets of institutional life, including athletics and musical programs. He and his co-volunteers also helped introduce modern poultry breeds and management methods in small villages.

It was also during this time that Kessinger met Varyam Chawla, one of four female faculty at the training institute that served as Kessinger’s home base. They married on a hot day in 1962 and have been together for more than four decades.

In the spring of 1963, Kessinger began thinking about completing his undergraduate education. Seeking to focus on India and South Asia and the broad process of social and economic change over time, he researched institutions that offered appropriate courses—all of them universities, some very large. He discovered the University of Pennsylvania’s South Asian Regional Studies Program; the cooperative agreement with Haverford (still in its infancy at the time) meant he could return to his alma mater. “I realized that I still wanted what Haverford could offer educationally and as a community, and do the work I wanted to do at Penn.” This was the second time Kessinger chose Haverford.
Returning to the States, the newlyweds were determined to pay for Tom’s remaining years of college themselves. Varyam worked full-time job as a dietician at Bryn Mawr Hospital and the two did everything to make ends meet, from babysitting to painting houses to life-guarding at the faculty pool. Kessinger graduated from Haverford with the Class of 1965.

After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1970, he spent the next six years teaching South Asian History, first at the University of Virginia, and, later, at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1977, he began an 11-year tenure with the Ford Foundation in New Delhi, Jakarta, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. In 1988, he chose Haverford for the third time, resigning his post at Ford to become Haverford’s 11th president, a position he held until 1996.

Tom and Varyam Kessinger now live in Geneva, where he serves as general manager of the Aga Khan Foundation. His colleagues include two former Peace Corps volunteers and a fellow Haverford alumnus, John Tomaro ’64. The Foundation, part of the Aga Khan Development Network, focuses on rural development, basic education, community health, and the development of civil society organizations in the Muslim world. His work takes him frequently to countries in which the Network is active, including Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Kenya, Mozambique, and Syria.

“My Peace Corps experience has, in a certain sense, shaped the specifics of my whole life. It enabled me to discover the interests and motivations that have shaped my entire working life, and to meet Varyam. In retrospect, it is clear that I gained so much from the experience that it certainly, and unfortunately, dwarfs anything I was able to contribute to those around me during the two years of service. My main solace in this regard is that I have been given many opportunities to draw directly on my Peace Corps experience in the positions and responsibilities I have been fortunate to have.”

To learn more about the activities of the Aga Khan Development Network, visit www.akdn.org.

Ghebre Selassie Mehreteab ’72

An immediate, unspoken kinship often exists between former Peace Corps volunteers and individuals they meet, later in life, who hail from their country of service. Such was the case when I discovered that a member of the Class of 1972 was born raised in Eritrea, the country where my husband and I served as volunteers in the mid-1990s. Ghebre Selassie Mehreteab also had a strong connection to the Peace Corps.

The second child in a family of five boys and four girls, Mehreteab was born and raised in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital city. From an early age, his parents emphasized the paramount importance of two things: education, and helping Eritrea in its struggle for independence from Ethiopia. (Eritrea gained independence in 1993.) Mehreteab pursued both with an unwavering passion and was arrested twice—the first time in sixth grade, the second time in ninth— for participating in pro-independence demonstrations.

In 1962, one year after President Kennedy established the Peace Corps, Mehreteab was a seventh grader and a voracious reader. “I had finished reading all the books written in Tigrinya (the local language) including the newly translated Bible. I felt I knew everything there was to know.”

Then he met a Peace Corps couple, Terry and Lois Shoemaker. Young Ghebre visited them one day at their apartment and was astounded by what he found: bookshelves filled with English language books. Having assumed that he’d already read all the books in the world, he couldn’t believe his good fortune. “I quickly discovered that unlike the Tigrinya books that I had completed reading, I may never get to read all the books in English. Learning English was a double-edged sword for me: on the one hand, it exposed me to a new world. On the other hand, it revealed my blissful ignorance.”

Later that year, Mehreteab met someone who would change the course of his life dramatically. He and three classmates were chosen to accompany Harris Wofford, then the Peace Corps’ special representative to Africa and director of operations in Ethiopia, on a visit to Debre Bizen, a male-only monastery located on top of a mountain outside Asmara. Mehreteab believes the four students were chosen because they had shoes that could handle the climb.

Wofford, who would later become associate director of the Peace Corps in the Johnson administration and, subsequently, U.S. senator of Pennsylvania, recalls their meeting: “I remember a little 12-year-old boy escorting us up a mountain to a monastery in Eritrea. He arrived—dressed in suit and tie—and was very respectful.” Wofford received word in the middle of the excursion that he needed to return to the capital immediately, so Mehreteab escorted him down alone. This was the beginning of a 40-year friendship, though neither of them knew it at the time. “Little did I know,” Mehreteab reflects, “that meeting Harris Wofford was going to change my life.”

In the mid-1960s, Mehreteab attended high school at Prince Maconnon Secondary School in Asmara, a hotbed of Eritrean politics. “We had Peace Corps teachers for four years who challenged our thinking,” he says. Mehreteab’s “best and worst” teachers during this period were Peace Corps volunteers. Many volunteers were sympathetic to Eritrea’s political plight and provided books to the students that may have otherwise been inaccessible.

After teaching at a Peace Corps language training program in St. Croix during the summer of 1968, Mehreteab renewed his acquaintance with Harris Wofford when he obtained a scholarship to study at the State University of New York at Old Westbury. Wofford was the University’s president at the time.

During his two years at Old Westbury, Mehreteab was selected to represent the student body at a celebration of the astronauts’ moon landing, which took place at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. University presidents and their spouses watched the affair from the balcony. At one point, Wofford recalls fondly, his wife tapped him urgently on the shoulder and whispered, “Look!” Mehreteab was on stage with Nelson Rockefeller, introducing himself and making the rounds of all the luminaries. “He’s been just as adventurous and self-confident since,” Wofford says.

In 1970, when Wofford left SUNY-Old Westbury to accept the presidency of Bryn Mawr College, Mehreteab left, too, transferring to Haverford to complete his final two undergraduate years. A double major in political science and economics, Mehreteab appreciated Haverford’s “excellent curriculum, Honor Code, Quaker tradition and charming president.” What he bemoaned was the lack of diversity in its student body and faculty. Not one to sit idly by, he led a black students’ uprising, boycotting all activities except class. “In typical Haverford tradition, it was nonviolent,” he says. “Unlike at many other colleges, Haverford refused to call law enforcement officials. In the end, we all felt we had gotten our concerns heard and the College was responsive in increasing the numbers of minority faculty and students.” Mehreteab became head of the Black Students’ League, a controversial selection since he was a foreign student. “But I am black,” he says. “I was living in America. I still perceive myself as a genuine African American both literally and figuratively.” Mehreteab graduated from the College in 1972 and has been an active alumnus ever since. He has served on the Board of Managers and, to this day, continues to spearhead alumni events in Washington, D.C.

[Ghebre is not the only member of the Mehreteab family with Haverford ties: his younger brother Efrem graduated from the College in 1977, and his older brother Ammanuel taught chemistry there in the late 1970s.]

After graduating in 1972, Mehreteab worked for the Health and Welfare Council, East Mount Airy Neighbors, and the Philadelphia YMCA. He became a community activist, registering many African Americans to vote. (He earned his own right to vote when he became a U.S. citizen in 1984.)

In 1978, he began working with the New World Foundation and, later, the Ford Foundation. While at Ford, several of his former Peace Corps teachers requested grants for their respective organizations, much to Mehreteab’s great pleasure. One grant-seeker was former Ethiopia Peace Corps volunteer Paul Tsongas. Wofford recalls, “When Tsongas went to apply for a grant from the Ford Foundation, there was Ghebre Selassie!” Apparently, both parties were equally surprised by the other’s presence in the office.

In 1987, Mehreteab accepted a job with the National Housing Partnership, a private real estate company located in Washington, D.C. He later established the NHP Foundation, one of the nation’s largest non-profit owners of affordable housing, and is currently its CEO. NHPF owns approximately 7,000 apartment units in 11 states. Haverford alumni Barry Zubrow ’75, the current chair of the Board of Managers, and Ralph Boyd ’79, executive vice president of Freddie Mac, are among the Foundation’s trustees.

Although Mehreteab and his wife of 17 years, Sally Jones, split their time between Washington, D.C., and New York, he remains closely connected with the affairs of his native land. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he also serves as an advisor to Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, with whom he enjoys a close friendship. “I serve as his advisor in fostering the relationship between my country of origin and country of citizenship,” Mehreteab says.

On June 11, 2005, Mehreteab flew to northern California to celebrate his nephew’s graduation from Stanford. Because he was in our neck of the woods, my husband and I had the pleasure of meeting him in person. Like the other Eritreans we met during our Peace Corps days, Ghebre Selassie Mehreteab exuded warmth, greeting us like long-lost friends. Our bond is three-fold: we understand fully when he says, “Nothing in my life has impacted me more than Eritrea, the Peace Corps, and Haverford.”

To learn more about the NHP Foundation, visit www.nhpfoundation.org.

Robert Strauss ’78

Robert Strauss’s dual perspective on the Peace Corps spans several decades. A young volunteer in Liberia in the late ’70s, he presently serves as a Peace Corps Country Director in Cameroon. Like a frustrated student who later becomes a teacher, Strauss can now implement the changes he sought as a volunteer.

Strauss’s reasons for joining the Peace Corps were twofold. Interested in medicine from living with his brother—a medical student in Mexico—Strauss joined the Peace Corps to obtain first-hand medical experience without spending years completing additional coursework. The second impetus, he jokes, was a charismatic Haverford hall mate. “My classmate and next-door-neighbor in Barclay, Damon Brandt, had expressed interest in the Peace Corps. Damon was fabulously handsome and very popular with Bryn Mawrters in a way I was not. I figured if he was interested in the Peace Corps, there must have been something to it. I wound up in Liberia. Damon wound up opening an art gallery in Manhattan.”

Strauss served as a health educator in the remote village of Yourpea (population 700), which was anywhere from 12 hours to two days’ distance from Liberia’s capital of Monrovia. (The season and road conditions determined how long the journey would take.) The Gio (Dan) and Krahn tribes coexisted peacefully in Yourpea; these tribes would later face off when civil war broke out in Liberia in1989.

At the health clinic where they worked, Strauss and his colleagues vaccinated children and treated patients with malaria, diarrhea, difficult pregnancies, skin infections, TB, leprosy, and those who believed they had been “witched.” One patient, a small child, had fallen into a pot of boiling oil and died at the clinic. Another young boy had meningitis. Strauss insisted they use all the ampicillin they had on hand to treat the child, but his Liberian counterpart refused. After an extended shouting match, Strauss prevailed, and the boy eventually recovered. Strauss received a ceremonial spoon from the boy’s family as a token of gratitude. “It is one of very few items I’ve kept from Liberia,” he says.

At the end of his Peace Corps service, Strauss pursued an M.B.A., which he earned from Stanford in 1984. (The business schools at both Stanford and Harvard had rejected his applications for admission straight out of Haverford; both accepted him following his Peace Corps service.) The M.B.A., he felt, would give him the skills “to help make a development outfit run better.”

Strauss spent the next 16 years as a consultant in the development field, working in such far-flung places as the Philippines, India, Botswana, Afghanistan, and Mali. These were largely frustrating years as Strauss witnessed widespread corruption and felt disillusioned by the ineffectiveness of the organizations for which he worked.

Rather than leave the field altogether—which he considered doing on several occasions—Strauss stayed the course. After 20 years of considering a return to the Peace Corps, he became Country Director in Cameroon in 2002; he now oversees 125 volunteers and a staff of 35. “Country Directors are invested with a tremendous amount of authority. Now that I am in the position, I have a clearer idea of my influence. I recall reading somewhere that the military Chief of Staff said that his ambition ‘was to change the military one percent.’ I thought that wasn’t very ambitious at the time, but I now see that it takes time and perseverance and repeatedly not taking no for an answer to institute change.”

He has been pleased with his progress in Cameroon, where the U.S. Embassy and the Cameroonian government are engaged in major campaigns against both corruption and the sexual exploitation of young girls by older men. Both of these initiatives stemmed from discussions Strauss had with the U.S. Ambassador and senior Cameroonian officials. “If Peace Corps had not been here for 43 years, I’m not sure we would have had the credibility to get people to listen and take action.”

”Personally, my goal is to see Peace Corps win the Nobel Prize for Peace. That requires that we be very serious as a development agency. Sometimes the decisions I make are not the most popular with volunteers—but my interest is to see us achieve our potential and do the most we can for Cameroon.”

Jenny Hamilton ’88

Jenny Hamilton’s early passion for foreign language may have foretold her future adventures in the Peace Corps. Every summer from her 10th year until she turned 16, she attended Lac du Bois, a Minnesota-based French camp and part of the Concordia Language Villages. “My parents always encouraged me to explore,” explains the Iowa native. The summer after her junior year of high school, she traveled to Normandy, France, with the Experiment in International Living.

Hamilton recalls February 23, 1984, vividly. It was her birthday, and the day she learned she was admitted to Haverford. “‘Happy birthday, Jenny,’ the admission letter read. ‘You’ve been accepted at Haverford College.’ It was so personal,” she remembers, “I just completely fell in love with the place and withdrew my other applications.” Hamilton’s love of travel continued in college, and she spent the spring semester of her junior year studying in Florence. A growth and structure of cities major at Bryn Mawr, she graduated from Haverford in 1988.

In 1990, Hamilton’s desire to live in a remote, exotic culture and make a difference in the world drew her to the Peace Corps, and she settled in the Gabonese mountain village of Mimongo. With only 2,000 inhabitants, Mimongo is home to 3 separate ethnic groups, each of which speaks its own language. (Since French is the only common language, Hamilton’s many summers attending French camp served her well.)

The small house in which she lived had been built for the school principal years earlier; feeling optimistic, the builders had laid water pipes, assuming that running water would soon come to the village. (It did not.) The house had electricity—sometimes, depending on how much power the generator had—and an indoor toilet Hamilton flushed with a bucket. Corner stores sold rice, onions, garlic, manioc, cassava, and peanuts, but Hamilton purchased meat directly from the hunters. “Hunters would go out and get bush meat. You’d buy them a box of bullets, and they would bring back their kill. The little boy across the way would prepare it, and I’d cook it in a stew and share it with a local family. My favorite meal was porcupine and antelope.”

Hamilton taught eight English classes at the local middle school. Many Africans from neighboring countries worked at the school because the salaries, at the time, were notably higher in Gabon than elsewhere in the region. Her nine colleagues—who quickly became close friends—hailed from six different countries, including Zaire, Togo, Benin, Mali, and Ghana. “I was a foreigner among foreigners,” she says.

Maman Mabe, a village woman, was Hamilton’s cultural touchstone, her “Gabonese mom.” Gabonese women, who are traditionally referred to as Maman (mother), form the heart of the matriarchal society. “The country is oriented around procreating,” Hamilton says, “so much so that the national stamp of Gabon depicts a woman breastfeeding a child.”

Hamilton extended her service in the Peace Corps beyond the traditional two years in order to work in the capital city of Libreville. She also indulged her love of travel by visiting Malawi, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. Of her time in Africa, she is notably nostalgic. “I’ve developed a love for Africa, a sense that the world is bigger than I am, and the ability to view issues from multiple perspectives and to understand better how people can disagree by seeing things from other points of view.” The urban Philadelphia neighborhood she lives in today “functions very much like my village in Africa. We sit on the stoops, we’re a community, and we look out for each other. I couldn’t handle the loneliness of the suburbs.”

Hamilton’s career since her Peace Corps days has focused on community-building and service. After a stint with PADCO (Planning and Development Collaborative International, a USAID contractor), Hamilton spent nearly 10 years with AmeriCorps, first with the National AIDS Fund, and later with City Year Greater Philadelphia. She now serves as executive director of ASAP (After School Activities Partnership), a Philadelphia-based non-profit that recruits volunteers to run after-school enrichment programs for inner city youth. An avid photographer, Hamilton continues to travel in her leisure time. “I miss the friendly chaos of the Third World,” she says.

To learn more about ASAP, please visit www.phillyasap.org.

Molly McCollom ’02

Molly McCollom was one of 9 Haverford alumni serving in the Peace Corps in 2005. Consider this Haverford reference from the March 4, 2002, entry of her Web log: “I come from a place where, when living as a college student, the house I shared had three TVs, two refrigerators, an oven, and five computers. More than likely the five of us had more appliances than the nine thousand inhabitants of Kankossa combined.”

Kankossa is a large village in southern Mauritania located between a sand dune and a lake. The population, which fluctuates seasonally, averages around 4,000. While there is no electricity, there are some public faucets for running water, but most villagers, including McCollom, use the well instead.

McCollom has been serving as a community health and water sanitation volunteer, spending her days alongside doctors and nurses at a feeding center at the regional hospital in Kankossa. While the hospital itself serves roughly 20,000 people in surrounding communities, the feeding center treats severely malnourished children under the age of five. McCollom has also planned seminars on AIDS and STDs, assisted with medical waste projects, and contributed to vaccination campaigns.

“The children in my site have been a constant source of inspiration and anguish,” she says. “They are able to be so happy, even in the face of abject poverty, and are remarkably honest with me. They have a spirit that never seems to waver. On the other hand, I watch these children get sick, and sometimes die (especially the starving children I see at my feeding center on a daily basis). At times, I feel completely powerless to help them, although I do what I can to spread basic nutrition and sanitation information. They remind me why I am here – to look past my petty difficulties and recognize my true priorities.”

McCollom’s experience has opened her eyes to Muslim culture, and her Web log is peppered with the phrase “Inshallah,” meaning “as God wills” in Arabic. She has extended her service for a third year, which she will spend in Mauritania’s capital city, Nouakchott, working on AIDS-related projects. “I simply feel that my work here is not yet finished. I have more to give my community, and it has valuable insights and experiences to give me as well.”

To learn more about McCollom’s Peace Corps experiences, visit her blog at http://mollytania.diaryland.com.

Cheryl Sternman Rule, Class of 1992, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Decamhare, Eritrea, with her husband Colin ’93. She is a freelance writer based in San Jose, California.

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