Down the Sreet: Path to Here Wound Through Peace Corps
Read and comment on this story from the Santa Fe New Mexican on on Botswana RPCV Donna Stoner who spent two years teaching art in a village school to kids at a junior-high level. "It was a wonderful experience, and it taught me to be very patient and also that we are really so advanced in our culture, we just can’t expect people in other parts of the world to all be at the same level,” Stoner said, adding that she even had to teach them how to use scissors. Read the story at:
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Down the Street: Path to Here Wound Through Peace Corps
Candelora Versace | For The New Mexican 01/29/2003
Donna Stoner wasnt sure the Peace Corps needed artists. - Jane Phillips | The New Mexican Donna Stoner, a jewelry designer and coffee clerk at Las Chivas, Eldorado’s coffee shop, first thought about going into the Peace Corps when she lived in San Francisco and heard President Kennedy give a speech about the new program he was proposing.
“I thought it was the most fabulous thing I had ever heard, but I was in the arts and I was convinced they didn’t want artists for the program,” she recalled in her sunny living room in the Cerrado section of Eldorado.
Today, the 64-year-old is a member of the New Mexico chapter of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, but it was many years after that speech before she finally took the plunge.
Instead of joining the Peace Corps in the 1960s, she went to Germany after college to run a craft center for the military (and met her now-former husband, a military intelligence officer who coordinated a safe house for escapees from East Germany).
They returned to the United States and settled in Hawaii for several years, always saying some day they would relocate to Santa Fe. In the mid-1980s, she decided to return to graduate school for another degree, this one in jewelry design in San Diego, and embarked on a stint teaching at San Diego State University and several regional community colleges.
“It was a horrible way to make a living,” Stoner conceded. “They called us freeway flyers because all the artists drove from community college to community college just trying to stay alive. I did it for four years and knew things had to change.”
Meanwhile, the Peace Corps had resurfaced as a viable option while she was still in graduate school; a chance encounter with an undergrad opened her eyes to the opportunities even an artist could be part of.
“I told her, ‘They don’t want people like us,’” Stoner said, still thinking artists were somehow locked out of the program. “But she showed me this pamphlet and it had a list of jobs in the arts and suddenly it was back in my mind again as a possibility.”
But Stoner said she continued to put off a decision. When her mother died in the late 1980s and she found herself confronting her own mortality, she realized it would be “horrible to die having regretted not doing something you want to do.” She finally applied to the Peace Corps and in 1987 underwent training to go to Botswana.
“I spent two years teaching art in a village school to kids at a junior-high level. It was a wonderful experience, and it taught me to be very patient and also that we are really so advanced in our culture, we just can’t expect people in other parts of the world to all be at the same level,” Stoner said, adding that she even had to teach them how to use scissors.
Normally a two-year stint, Stoner said she was able to extend her Peace Corps stay another year by creating a job for herself at the National Museum in Gaborone, Botswana. Upon her return to America, she headed straight for Santa Fe and two years later, in 1995, moved to Eldorado.
“It’s a wonderful place for the arts, and I love the architecture, I love the space,” she said. Her neighbors on her cul-de-sac have all become good friends and they socialize together frequently. “It gives us all a nice sense of community. Most of us here are transients. We don’t have family here, and so your neighbors become your family. I can’t say I like all the rules and regulations in Eldorado, but I suppose that’s what keeps it what it is, keeps it pristine.”
She continues to indulge her wanderlust by traveling to Mexico frequently, and she rents her house out to The Santa Fe Opera in the summer and housesits for a change of scenery. Stoner’s been at Las Chivas since she moved to the neighborhood.
“I love working there. It’s like Cheers. You know everyone.”
She’s also looking forward to retiring next year and devoting her time to her artwork.
And she spends a lot of time with other Peace Corps alumni.
“The New Mexico chapter has more Returned Peace Corps Volunteers members than any other state,” she said. “Probably because many have served in South America, or maybe because this is the closest you can get to being in a Third World country and still be in the United States.”
More about Peace Corps Volunteers who have served in Botswana
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This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Botswana; Special Interests - Art
