Community News

Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Niger

By JoAnna Haugen on Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

BOTSWANA, LESOTHO, MALAWI

Mary Ann Camp (98-07) was honored at the World AIDS Day presentation held by the Peace Corps in early December 2008 for her commitment to HIV/AIDS while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Robert Foster (85-88) was recently appointed as the deputy chief of party for the USAID Afghanistan Water, Agriculture and Technology Transfer Program in Kabul. He is an associate director in the College of Agriculture at New Mexico State University and also a program manager at the Institute for Energy and Environment in the College of Engineering. Foster has more than 25 years of experience applying renewable energy technologies in more than 30 countries around the world while working with a number of organizations, including the Department of Energy, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, USAID, Winrock and World Bank. He is the co-founder of SolAqua El Paso. Foster has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree from NMSU.

ECUADOR

Former high school classmates Rob Meyer (05-07) and Ben Stone launched Papa Spuds Organics, a unique service that delivers local, fresh produce once a week to their growing list of clientele. They opened the company in February 2008. Meyer learned about alternative farming as a Peace Corps volunteer and has applied a simple business model he learned there to Papa Spuds Organics: grow and sell goods in the same community.

GUATEMALA

Todd Peterson (97-99) and his father founded Partner for Surgery in 2001 from the roots of a Peace Corps project that has continued to grow stronger through collaboration with many Peace Corps volunteers over the past ten years. Historically, due to numerous financial, cultural and geographic barriers, international medical teams volunteering their services in Guatemala cannot reach those populations most in need and end up serving middle and upper class families. Partner for Surgery is dedicated to bridging the gap between Guatemala’s most rural communities and sustainable access to medical and surgical care. The organization has three full-time staff members in Guatemala and has supplied medical care and education to more than 25,000 people as well as facilitated surgery for more than 5,000 Guatemalans.

HONDURAS

The Vogels may appear to be your average cyclists when they whiz by on their bikes, but this unique family of four is on a mission. Their goal? Pedal from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Argentina. It will take approximately 30 months and 20,000 miles for John Vogel, Nancy Sathre-Vogel (84-86) and their sons, Davy and Daryl to achieve this task. The family left in June 2008 and is currently in Texas. Sathre-Vogel and her husband have been teachers for several years, and now their boys are enjoying an education of a lifetime—as well as the title of “Youngest Person to Cycle the Pan-American Highway” when they reach their final goal.

NIGER

The 2008 Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition was won by Susan Rich (84-86) for her poem Different Places to Pray. Her poetry has been honored before, when she won the PEN USA Poetry Award and the Peace Corps Writers Poetry Award for The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the world. Rich has worked on the staff of Amnesty International, as an electoral supervisor in Bosnia and as a human rights trainer in Gaza. She also taught at the University of Cape Town on a Fulbright Fellowship.

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