Winter 2004

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Mustafa Rafique ’05, Pakistan, with Nancy and Ken Anderson

It was the Iranian crisis of the late 1970s. Ken and Nancy Anderson had just joined Wooster’s host family program and were matched with Faranak Tutunchi ’82 from Iran.

"Our oldest daughter was in second grade," says Nancy Anderson, a nurse and director of the Longbrake Student Wellness Center. "One day she came home and asked if she could bring Faranak in for show-and-tell. She told us, ‘People are saying that Iranians are bad, and Faranak is really nice.’

"We’re always going to do this program," Nancy remembers telling Ken.

Wooster’s Friends of International Students program offers local families and foreign students just what the Andersons experienced: a chance to understand another culture on a personal level. By involving students in everyday activities such as visiting a shopping mall or cooking dinner at home, host families offer students up-close slices of American family life. In return, the students give a name and a face to different cultures.

"We learn so much from these students – it helps us realize that we live on a pretty small planet. And they learn about us. We live in a house in the country with no TV – that changes many of their stereotypes about Americans.

Different students have different needs. We have helped them find winter coats and given them rides to and from the airport. We just sort of include them in what we do.

We walked down the aisle in the wedding of our student from Colombia as her godparents, a Colombian custom. That was a real honor." – Nancy Anderson

Nghia "Neo" Tran ’04, Vietnam, with Tracy and Dave Hoag and Helen, 2 (Missing from picture: Will Hoag, 4)

"It’s fun to learn about American culture and what American families are like. Every year we’ve gone together to get a Christmas tree, then brought it home and decorated it. That’s an awesome experience for me.

It’s been interesting to see Will grow up. When I first met him he was just one. So I’ve watched him learn to walk, then run, and talk. And Helen is super cute. They’ve become my family in the U.S." – Nghia Tran

Adoley Mensa-Bonsu ’05, Ghana, with Margaret Sander (Missing from picture: Larry Sander)

"Adoley and I like going to movies. You do the same old things that you do with your own families. I don’t think host parenting is really about the big things you do – it’s about the little things.

March Dadzie ’96 [another student hosted by the Sanders] came for dinner one night and offered to help set the table. That was our daughter’s job – she was in second grade. She told March that he was doing it the wrong way. ‘No, Melanie, it’s not the wrong way,’ he told her, ‘it’s just different from how you do it.’ That’s what host parenting teaches us: every family, every culture is different.

My son was in the U.S. Capitol building on September 11. The only people he knew in Washington, D.C. were March and Jeremy Dadzie ’98, so he went to stay with them. When I wrote to their mother to tell her how grateful I was, she wrote back, ‘That’s just God’s plan. You were there when my sons needed you, and now they were there when your son needed them.’" – Margaret Sander

A former Peace Corps volunteer reflects on how her experience in Africa forty years ago forever changed her perspective.

Angene Hopkins Wilson and Jack Wilson, ’61s, were Peace Corps volunteers in Liberia from 1962 to 1964. They taught social studies and English at Suehn Industrial Academy, about twenty-five miles outside of the capital of Monrovia. Angene later taught teachers in Sierra Leone, Fiji, and Ghana. For the last twenty-eight years she has been a professor of teacher education at the University of Kentucky.

Because of her Peace Corps and other experiences overseas, she began to research the impact of international experience on students, teachers, and schools. In her book, The Meaning of International Experience for Schools (Praeger, 1993), she identifies five dimensions of the impact of international experience: substantive knowledge, perceptual understanding, personal growth, interpersonal connections, and cultural mediation, or bridging cultures.

Here Wilson shares how her Peace Corps experience illustrates those dimensions.

Even forty years later, Liberia is still in the center of my world, not on the periphery. I can’t explain Liberia or its fourteen-year war in a few sentences, and Africa means far more to me than an AIDS pandemic.

One of the wonderful things about being a Peace Corps volunteer is that you get to learn so much yourself. As a young secondary school teacher, I found students who were hungry for information about their own nation and continent. I was excited to find and share the 1880 inaugural speech of Edward Blyden, president of Liberia College, on the "African Personality." I began looking for other materials and discovered Basil Davidson’s Black Mother at a Muslim bookstore in Monrovia and his articles on the Sudanic empires in West Africa magazine. On vacation in Nigeria, we went to the University of Ibadan bookstore and returned to our teaching with a big box of books written by Africans.

I’ve yet to stop learning about Africa. Following my Peace Corps service, I earned a master’s in history/African studies. I featured Nigerian students in my doctoral dissertation on intercultural education. I took teachers to Nigeria, traveled in east Africa, finally saw the Great Zimbabwe ruins in Zimbabwe. Today I follow twice-weekly news from a listserv about Liberia, hosted by Indiana University, as well as several general Africa listservs. In retirement, I will teach an African history course.

Knowledge — the fact that Monrovia was named after our President James Monroe or that Mansa Musa was an important ruler of the Mali Empire – is not the only thing a Peace Corps volunteer gains. My letter home in September 1963 illustrates the impact of Liberia on my perceptions of race relations:

Well, we have heard since Monday the facts and the reactions to the story of the Sunday School murders in Birmingham. We would hope the reaction turns to action. I don’t think any of you can understand what it is like to be a white American in Africa and be constantly confronted with the puzzled, angry, bitter, and even pitying questions and remarks from black Africans. We meet face to face every day with adults and kids who have read the newspapers and magazines and listened to Voice of America. What would you say when someone asks, "Why do white people think we have tails?" "Aren’t [white] Americans shamed when we Africans treat them equally?" "Are Americans Christian?" One seventh-grader concluded we’d better pray for the whites in Birmingham.

In recent years I have thought and written about the relationship of the U.S. and the West with the rest of the world. There’s the image of benign interdependence that we teach children through the chocolate bar story – that all of the ingredients come from different places. That picture contrasts with an African perspective, seeing interdependence as a horse (Africa) and rider (the West), with the rider holding the reins of power in economic relations.

Peace Corps volunteers also experience personal growth. Jack and I learned things both practical and philosophical during our time in Africa. I learned to use a charcoal iron, for example, and to grade papers by Aladdin lamp light if the school generator failed. On vacation we traveled through seven other West African countries by crowded taxis, trucks, trains. (We tried once to get to Timbuctu, but the Niger River was too low for the boat.) Like many others who live overseas, our experiences made us more self-confident and independent, more flexible and accepting, and more tolerant of ambiguity and understanding of complexity.

We certainly learned that people are more important than things. As the Akan proverb says: "It is the human being that counts. I call gold; it does not answer. I call cloth; it does not answer. It is the human being that counts."

Our friendships with people are most important to us. We continue to be in touch with many Liberians, partly because the war there over the last fourteen years has created many refugees. Our teaching colleague, Bibi, left Liberia last July and lives in Kentucky with his son, who lived with us for a year after college. Another teaching colleague arrived in the U.S. in November. We talk monthly with a former student, Alfred, who lives in London after earning a master’s in agricultural economics at the University of Kentucky. Alfred still hopes to return home.

We enjoyed a memorable reconnection in 2002 when a former student, Joetta, visited our home. She headed straight for our Africa bookcase, a collection of several hundred volumes, and found her favorite short story in West African Narrative, the text Jack found in that University of Ibadan bookstore and taught to her junior English class forty years ago.

We spent Labor Day 2003 with another former student, Dorothy Davis Martin. In her 1963 valedictory address at Suehn Industrial Academy, Dorothy quoted from a Howard Lowry address (we had given her all our Alumni Bulletins). Dorothy, who recently retired as a professor of sociology at Lorain Community College, came to the United States and graduated from Wooster in 1967.

The third goal of Peace Corps work, after providing technical assistance and being ambassadors from the U.S., is to bring the world back home by becoming bridges between cultures, or cultural mediators. Because Liberia has been in the news, we have made several community presentations recently. This past fall I taught high school juniors who were interested in reading a letter from a freed slave who left Kentucky in 1852 to settle in Liberia along with a recent newspaper story about Bibi as a refugee. To help my education students learn how to teach about politics and economics, we researched how private profit and public policy connected in guns, blood diamonds (diamonds that have been linked to buying arms), and timber in Liberia.

Over the years, my cultural mediation has usually been more generalized to include the whole world. Two years ago, as the United States went to war in Afghanistan, I used one of my sister Fran’s letters from there (see "Reporting from Kabul," opposite page) to introduce a lesson on the country. My office door sports postcards from students from Cuba, Japan, Portugal, Ukraine, and more. I have cheered on students who go overseas to teach in Australia, Costa Rica, Egypt, Ireland, South Africa, and elsewhere. I write lesson plans to accompany articles in the National Peace Corps Association’s WorldView magazine about such topics as "the power of one" in making a difference in issues of child labor and the environment. Finally, I am honored when a former student writes that my influence resulted in his beginning service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand in this past January.

An African proverb says that the world is a journey. For most of us with international experience, the journey continues.