"I was standing in the pickle and mustard aisle in the Kohl’s Store at Bayshore and it just overwhelmed me," says Albert Liu. Two years in the Peace Corps does that to people. The abundance of everything in America, including pickles and mustard, has made mute many a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV).
Spreading the peace
By JUDY STEININGER
March 30, 2005
Says Peace Corps volunteer Albert Liu, "I thought ‘I’m living in National Geographic.’"
"I was standing in the pickle and mustard aisle in the Kohl’s Store at Bayshore and it just overwhelmed me," says Albert Liu. Two years in the Peace Corps does that to people. The abundance of everything in America, including pickles and mustard, has made mute many a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV).
Liu learned as much about America as his host country, Bolivia, where he served from May 1998 to August 2000. Liu is one of a proud, select club in the United States. Since 1960, when John F. Kennedy gave a campaign speech at 2 a.m. at the University of Michigan and challenged young people to do something for their country by helping the developing world, more than 170,000 volunteers have served. The first week of March is National Peace Corps Week.
Liu now lives on Downer Avenue, but when he left his home after graduating from Marquette High School, his travels began in earnest. An expensive, high-powered education period followed: a B.S. in foreign service from Georgetown University, a year at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen in Munich, Germany, then back to Tufts University for an M.A. in urban and environmental policy.
During training, Liu recalls riding in a van to the home of his host family in a small village outside of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. "I was hanging out the windows of the van taking photos, especially when we came up behind a parade of villagers dressed in brightly colored clothes and headdresses. I thought ‘I’m living in National Geographic.’
"I think my job reflects the shifting nature of Peace Corps to more interdisciplinary work. The other unusual thing about my experience is that I lived in a city of over a million people." Liu’s job was originally defined as assisting in the development of ecotourism in a country that sees few American visitors and only slightly more Europeans and Australians.
Liu, who is proficient in German, knows conversational Mandarin Chinese and Portuguese, and is fluent in Spanish, learned improvisation quickly when his host family spoke only Quechua, the language of the Incas. Later, all of his language, communication and patience were tested by the maze of bureaucracies and political appointees he worked with to develop everything from butterfly farms to collecting handicrafts to sell at fairs in the U.S.
Liu traveled back and forth from the city of Santa Cruz to the countryside, where all vestiges of urbanity disappear in the high peaks of the Andes Mountains. Liu maintains a photo album of travels across a moonscape in the high (13,000 feet) plateau regions between mountain ranges across which the wind constantly howls. He’s been to the shores of Lake Titicaca, the largest, highest navigable lake in the world and across the border into Peru to see Machu Picchu. There are photos of him at roadside markets where the common mode of transportation is by donkey or perhaps llama.
Most volunteers learn something about themselves that without the overseas experience they might not have known. Liu wasn’t in the least bothered by the 5- to 6-inch long geckos that ran around his room, or the fact that in South America the seasons are opposite that of Wisconsin. What he considers among the most important learning points has to do with what an American is.
As the son of Chinese immigrants, Liu did not look like what a South American might expect. "The concept of a Chinese-American, the concept of all our hyphenations, is non-existent in South America. Coming out of the very politically correct university environments I had been in, I was also shocked by the way Bolivians make fun of themselves and everyone based on physical appearances — weight, a facial feature — anything like that is fair game. Somewhere along the way, I decided I am just an American."
Liu loves his current job with Alterra Coffee Roasters where he is director of culture and communications. In addition to projects like maintaining a Web site, creating a comprehensive training program and arranging special events at Alterra at the Lake, he manages the company’s Fair Trade program, corresponds with coffee growers throughout the world and, best of all, travels to exotic locations maintaining relationships with both estate and cooperative coffee producers, and setting up cultural events with ethnic communities as part of Alterra’s "World of Coffee" series. In any given year, he can be found winging off to places like Mexico, Kenya and Tanzania, the latter two providing an excuse for adding Swahili to his language repertoire. The Peace Corps was perfect training.
