WorldView Magazine: Evacuation
Coming Home: Guatemala
Guatemala | Anna Zauner Home: Skillman, New Jersey Photo: Dressed in traditional Mayan traje, as is custom for Sunday Mass. Anna Zauner, left, with friend Jackelyn Saquic. We received the evacuation notice at 10 p.m., just hours after the Guatemalan government announced that all school would be canceled for 21 days. Forty-six minutes later I received the follow-up email with my departure date: Tuesday. A full day to say goodbyes and pack. I started Monday by telling my host family and what friends I could find the news. I ran into some of my students along the trail to school...
Coming Home: Ecuador
Ecuador | Becky Wandell Home: Portland, Oregon By 10:30 Sunday night, March 15, I had settled into bed and checked my phone. I scrolled past messages exploding: Start packing. We’re going home. Not me — I’m extending for a third year! Besides, we’re on a “standfast,” schools are closed. I’m safe with my host family here in Ibarra. The Ecuadorian government is already taking precautions! My phone rang — my supervisor. Two checked bags. Be ready to leave by midday. Upstairs I heard the TV in Margarita and Jose’s room so I knew they were still awake. I banged on...
Coming Home: Dominican Republic
Dominican Republic | Benjamin Rietmann Home: Condon, Oregon Photo: Build your dreams: Ben with two students who competed in the Peace Corps "Construye tus Sueños" competition, where they presented business plans trying to win seed money to start businesses. The young woman wants to make and sell yogurt, and the young man wants to start a hardware store. I’m from a small town in eastern Oregon. I was in the community economic development sector, working with an association of dairy farmers and teaching entrepreneurship to high school-age students. We held the Construye tus Sueños competition — Build Your Dreams — where they presented...
A Thousand Words: More Photos from Peace Corps Volunteers Evacuated from Around the World
Photos from Nepal, Timor Lesté, Guinea, and Jamaica Along with the dozens of stories we’ve shared from Peace Corps Volunteers evacuated from around the world, here are snapshots from more Volunteers. They capture the friendships and communities left behind. And they capture the heartbreak of leaving. Nepal | Eddie De La Fuente When Peace Corps announced the global evacuation, we were actually en route to visit our permanent sites a month early. I, and many of the other agriculture volunteers, never made it to our sites given the distance; I had just finished two all-day bus trips and was still another day-and-a-half away...
Coming Home: Zambia
Zambia | Amber Cohen Home: Washington, D.C. Area In the village of Itinti, a 15-hour bus ride from the capital, Amber Cohen assembled a meeting of the farmers with whom she’d built 27 fish ponds during almost two years. “It didn’t really hit me that this was the last meeting I’d be having.” Her work as an aquaculture Volunteer was small-scale, in-person, and hopefully long-lasting and sustainable. In training she learned to speak Bemba, one of Zambia’s 72 languages, and gathered resources to teach fish pond construction and management. She lived in the compound of the “head man” — a...
Coming Home: Togo
Togo | Sarah Bair Home: Bethesda, Maryland The village of Alibi II is in the center of the country. “It’s basically the Muslim capital of Togo,” Sarah Bair says. Working with a clinic, she focused on maternal and child health, serving some 3,000 people. “I went to mosque every Friday. I learned a lot about religion and how that affects health — and how to be conscious about health education through religion.” For attending mosque, she wore a headscarf; walking to work, not necessarily. That led to conversations with people in the village about personal choice. She coached two girls’ soccer teams,...
Coming Home: Cameroon
Sasha Kogan | Cameroon Home: New York City Photo: Unbridled joy: kids in the village. Photo by Sasha Kogan January 2020 In the earliest hours of the morning, when the air is still somewhat cool, the sun brings with it the sounds of roosters calling and the cries of baby goats, indistinguishable from the cries of baby humans. The mosquito net slightly filters the incoming light as I rise up from the rectangular piece of foam on which I sleep. Furniture here needs to be made by the village carpenter; I still don’t have a bed frame. Calvin the kitten...
Coming Home: Rwanda
Rwanda | Ana Santos Home: Atlanta, Georgia Ana Santos had been serving as a Volunteer teaching English since September 2018. After hearing about the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Rwanda, Santos started packing that Sunday, before getting the official evacuation order on Monday. And she began the emotionally taxing and logistically challenging process of saying goodbye. The government had banned large gatherings and had closed schools. Colleagues had returned to family homes; she couldn’t find many of her students. “I had to go to each of my teachers’ homes individually to greet them and tell them the news. They...
Coming Home: Namibia
Namibia | Charles Castillo Home: Medford, New Jersey Watch the video I put together about my unfinished business as a Volunteer and you’ll see and hear me speak a few different languages. The messages all begin: “How are you? My name is Charles Castillo.” First, in American Sign Language. In Namibian Sign Language. In Oshiwambo, a language spoken in my community in Northern Namibia — where the question “How are you?” changes depending on the time of day: “Wa lala po” (morning), “Wu uhala po” (afternoon), and “Wa tokelwa po (evening) amuhe?” Edhina lyandje oShali. My name is Charlie. And in Afrikaans, also spoken in Namibia: Hoe...
Coming Home: Malawi
Malawi | Danny Herres Home: Tryon, North Carolina Danny Herres found out about the evacuation at 4:30 a.m., via group chat on WhatsApp. Malawi is a landlocked nation split by the Great Rift Valley and the massive Lake Malawi, which nearly runs the length of the entire country. Herres had been serving as a community health specialist in a village of about 1,000 people near Lilongwe since June 2019. He was the first Volunteer in the area. “No one had ever come in as a foreigner, built relationships, been a community member,” he says, “and then found other motivated individuals...
