Margaret Pollack served as a community health worker, working with tuberculosis patients in a 178,000 populace rural, mountainous community smack dab in the middle of South Korea
Margaret Pollack ’78
I remember vividly as a child of the 1960s and the "boob-tube" generation, the famous Peace Corps commercial depicting a glass of water, with the question: Is the glass half empty or half full? If you think it's half empty, maybe the Peace Corps is not for you. If you think it's half full, you've got the first thing we look for in Peace Corps people. Optimism." I knew from age 10 that that's what I wanted to do—to be a Peace Corps Volunteer.
From September 1978 to August 1980, I served as a community health worker, working with tuberculosis patients in a 178,000 populace rural, mountainous community smack dab in the middle of South Korea. Did I cure my county of TB? No. But through the hard work and countless sputum tests, chest x-rays, counseling sessions, and home visits, my fellow volunteers and I are humbled by, yet proud of the fact that over the 15 years that Peace Corps volunteers worked side-by-side with our Korean counterparts, we significantly reduced the TB-rate in South Korea and enhanced public awareness of the disease a thousand-fold. Today, the Republic of Korea is virtually TB-free.
I will never forget the welcome I received from the family I lived with for my two years. Raw cow stomach and liver—true rural Korean delicacies. Not a fan of liver in any form (I had previously never tried the stomach of any red-blooded animal, so I was game), I was hard pressed not to take a few bites in real respect and joy for the welcoming I was receiving. Thank goodness for Korean red peppers: anything is palatable with enough hot sauce!
The memories are endless. I will never forget the baby I helped deliver (we did receive some basic training in this) or the old man (one of my patients) who died in my arms. Or my colleagues at my health center who taught me how to net fish along a river (and fry them over an open fire, with lots of singing and story telling), or villagers who taught me how to plant rice, and then, in the fall, how to cut it down. Or my Korean family who always seemed to understand everything I tried to say, or my Korean grandmother who took great pride in introducing me to her friends in the bathhouse (you've never been so humbled as to meet someone for the first time buck naked). Or the rural high school girl—Mi-suk—to whom I taught English in the evenings—only to return to South Korea five years later to find out she was now a graduate student at the most prestigious women's college in all of South Korea (Ewha University). Or the smell of burning rice paddies in the late fall after the harvest was in, when it was a time of "high skies and fat horses."
To this day, I still say, "There are two things in life that made a difference in who I am today: Pomona College and the Peace Corps." Pomona College taught me how to explore the possibilities. Peace Corps taught me how to serve. The two in combination taught me how to be a better global citizen.
