Photo courtesy of Don Wise

It’s not every day that you travel barefoot for three hours on a narrow dirt road in South America in trail of an education. But for the people who inhabit the Republic of Colombia, this is an element of everyday life.

It wasn’t until the inception of the Peace Corps that Americans gained a better understanding of life outside of the United States.

Upon signing an executive order that established the Peace Corps on March 1, 1961, President John F. Kennedy stated that “Life in the Peace Corps will not be easy. But if the life will not be easy, it will be rich and satisfying.”

Nearly 200,000 Americans have served in 139 countries since””Fresno State Education Administration Program Coordinator Don Wise is one of them.

The following story is a first-hand narrative of life as a Peace Corps volunteer.

The Vietnam War had just ended. I was certainly a product of that. I ended up not having to go to the war. It was 1972. I was a 23-year-old student at Humboldt State University. I was just kind of a little bit lost. I thought, “What am I going to do with my life? I’m studying natural resources and conservation. Am I really going to be a park ranger?”

Very shortly afterwards, there was a Peace Corps recruiter on campus. I talked to this long-haired guy. But at Humboldt everybody had long hair, yah know. It was vastly different from Fresno State.

Within five minutes he handed me an application and we began to look through it together. The application asked my language level. I took four years of Spanish. I don’t speak a word of it.

He said to just tell the Peace Corps that I speak Spanish. I thought, “Really?” and checked off that I spoke Spanish.

Then they accepted me. And I said “Holy criminey, I told them I speak Spanish.” I ran down to the store and bought this box labeled four thousand words in Spanish. It cost me like $10.

Techo””ceiling, silla””chair. I’m like for two-months going straight. I’m not kidding you. I had a two-thousand disconnected word vocabulary. As long as people would ask me a one word question, I could answer it perfectly.

After about six-months I made that switch to Spanish. All of a sudden when people would speak to me, it wasn’t the words that came through, it was the whole culture that would come through.

People who don’t do a deep study of a foreign language don’t understand that people think in different ways. You learn about the Latino mind, the Latino way of thinking, the Latino way of doing things, and that is a richness in itself. So I always tell people: el lenguaje no viene solo””language doesn’t come by itself.

Peace Corps assigned volunteers to work in national parks around Colombia. I found out that none of these national parks actually existed, other than on paper. After the language training, I spent the next year going out to the area where the national park was supposed to be. I remember working with these people who illegally lived in the park. Just to get to their homes we had to get to the river, get off the horse, put the saddle in the canoe ”” the boat would take us across while we led the horses swimming, then we would get back on the horses and ride another hour or two.

These people had no roads. Nothing. Just little huts out in a village. I found that the agency I worked with was really trying to get rid of these people. It wasn’t their fault that they were there. So I was trying to help educate them about conserving resources and how living together would be a good idea.

It didn’t go very far. I got sick with malaria and bitten by mosquitoes. I took medication but got pretty sick. I had a relapse. What I learned was that the malaria virus goes inside your blood cells, like an infection. I got these terribly, terribly high fevers followed by these terrible, terrible chills.

After nine or ten months of that, you see life in all its aspects.

I saw a young lady. A farmer said she is very sick. So I asked, “What does she got?”

“It’s malaria,” said the farmer.

“Oh shoot, the pills I have don’t do any good for that. You have to get her the other pills, the pills for the cure.”

“I don’t have any money for that,” he said.

“How much money do you need?” I said. I gave him $20. His daughter died four days later. I remember him carrying her into town in his arms. It hit me pretty hard because that’s what I had. I remember that heat, those chills.

The Peace Corps said it was going to send me home. One guy who I knew from a business program told me of a job opening. He said the agency he was with is in need of someone who speaks Spanish, and you’ve been speaking Spanish every day for the last eight months. Maybe you could get a job with this agency and with me, and the Peace Corps would allow you to move over.

The agency set up homes on the edge of the cities. The kids that don’t have schools walk in, stay in these homes during the week, attend school, learn to cook, learn to tend the garden, and learn to do all these things.

Peace Corps allowed the transfer and gave me this little tiny motorcycle. I ended up being this visitor. I’m on this little Honda 90 driving out on these little tiny dirt roads to these homes where the kids would walk; one, two, three hours from these really, really rural, extreme poverty areas.

There would be 20 to 50 kids living in a common home. They would attend the school and get an education during the week. The children would sleep there, on bunk beds. Then on Friday night they would travel by foot back home. On Sunday night they would come back to the town. It was a pretty amazing program. There were 45 of these homes. I managed to visit 30 of them.

I ended up starting a handy crafts program. The kids would make arts and crafts and we would sell it for them. It gave them agricultural and home making skills. I loved it. I stayed in Colombia until the end of my year, then re-upped for another year and re-upped for another year. I stayed in the Peace Corps for four years.

My roommate was a Peace Corps volunteer who worked with small businesses. He introduced me to a woman. Her name was Luiz Benina. She worked at a paint store. She was the secretary. The paint store was one of those small businesses my roommate consulted. After he left the country, I went down to visit that wonderful young woman. Pretty soon I was going there every day. I ended up falling in love with her. I asked her to marry me. I have a Colombian wife!

After the Peace Corps I became a teacher. I decided to take a year’s leave of absence and went back to my wives country, her home in Medellin, Colombia. I extended that year of absence. Then I told the school district that I was quitting. I spent 18 consecutive years overseas as a teacher, school principal and superintendent. I got my masters degree and doctorate and would come back in the summer to study. I ended up working in five different countries.

My daughter Melissa was born in Panama and my son David in Colombia. We purposely choose names that would flow in both cultures. We consider ourselves not from here, nor there, but from both places. My kids are children of the world; third culture kids””not a child of anywhere, but a child of everywhere.

I went overseas idealistic. I came back with a view that, unfortunately, the U.S. is an extremely isolationist culture. Democracy is a good thing but materialism is not.

We can learn so much from the core values that I saw in the people of Colombia who are just making a very basic existence. I met some wonderful kids who will spend their lives tilling a field of corn with a little hoe and a wonderful nature and intelligence about them. And that’s going to be their life. They gave a lot to me. I never really could disconnect from Colombia.