Doris Rangel was just 20 when she went into the Peace Corps in 1962 with dreams of making a difference
While Meitzen was in Sri Lanka, fellow Texan Doris Rangel was settling into life in the Philippines. She grew up in Kingsville and was just 20 when she went into the Peace Corps in 1962 with dreams of making a difference. She was sent to a small town called Sinawingan in Mindanao - the largest of the Philippines' 7,000 islands.
She was a teaching assistant who helped elementary students with English.
"I went into the Peace Corps to save the world," Rangel said. "I wanted everybody to have the wonders and delights of the American lifestyle, and my biggest realization was the world and the people out there were just fine."
The experience changed Rangel's life and way of thinking in many ways. "It was a real wake-up experience. It was finding out how living in a place so very, very different from Kingsville, Texas, could be in many ways so similar," she said. "You always want to think a place where people live so close to the land, and are not as advanced (technologically), are somehow simpler. But people, regardless of their level of education, are never simple," Rangel said. "There was as much politicking in schools and as much gossip, and that came as a real shock to me.
"Those are the negatives, but you also find out people love their children as much, they want the best for their children, they want to be happy, they want enough food," she said. "Just because someone only has rice to eat doesn't mean that's all they want; it's just all they have."
Today, Rangel is a reading specialist at The Victoria College, and the diversity of the city and state is one of the things she appreciates most after her Peace Corps experience.
"It's totally impossible for me to live in a monoculture. If I lived somewhere where you only saw white faces and heard English, I couldn't do it," she said. "I can never think in terms of us and them ever again. I can never see myself as separate from the rest of the world. I learned acceptance."
