Former Peace Corps volunteer Besem Obenson will talk about "Healthy Promotion in Rural Paraguay: My Peace Corps Experience"
Talk to center on Peace Corps
By Stacy Trevenon--Half Moon Bay Review
This week's Friday Night at the Library event is made for anyone thinking of the Peace Corps.
"Healthy Promotion in Rural Paraguay: My Peace Corps Experience," will be given by former Peace Corps volunteer Besem Obenson at 7 p.m. at the library.
Obenson will discuss the Peace Corps from the perspective of one who had seen much of the world before she served in it. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Obenson grew up in Cameroon and Nigeria, returned to the United States for college and then signed up with Peace Corps.
In Paraguay from early 1992 to May, 1993, she was based in the village of San Carlos, about seven hours from the Brazil border.
She focused on health education and promotion with women and girls. She set up mothers' clubs and organizations like the Girl Scouts.
The women could participate in cooking classes, nutrition or CPR classes, self-esteem workshops and supporting each other.
Obenson also worked with the local village council in fund-raising efforts to build a secondary school and improve the primary school.
With the community's men, she helped raise funds for a microloan program for families interested in building a sanitary latrine.
After her volunteer service, she got her MBA and continued with the Peace Corps as a recruiter in the San Francisco office from 1993 to 1995. Now a Fremont resident, she has been working in Peru on a U.S. AID contract.
Her talk may inspire other Coastsiders to follow her example. They wouldn't be alone.
Ed Wilkinson, who with wife Linda owns Wilkinson School in El Granada, was among the first Peace Corps group to go to Korea. He taught fluency in
conversational English to students and teachers from 1966 to 1968.
Not content to rest and stay in the cities, he headed for the hills.
"I wanted to be down where the real hard-core Korean people lived their lives," he said.
He found he had to reinvent his own: in this new culture, he had to learn how to greet people, bow, eat rice, even how to use the local toilets. "I had to be transformed to a new identity," he said.
But he said it was worth it.
"It was life-changing," he said, noting that it took him years to re-acclimate to America.
"We don't have a sense of what people struggle with in contrast to the sidewalks, clean streets, cars TVs we're accustomed to," he said.
"We're self-centered. We don't understand that people from other countries have all the potential (that) people from our country have (in terms of) the full range of brilliance, goodness, intelligence" as people in this country.
La Honda resident Joanne Lehner, a special education teacher and resource specialist in Pescadero, served from 1977 to 1980 in Micronesia, as a "replacement teacher."
She also taught elementary-grade English and later, as her language fluency improved, other subjects.
Looking back, like Wilkin-son, she notices "how much 'stuff' we seem to have, (while they) get along with little."
But she sees the Peace Corps as a plus in her life.
"It was a very positive experience. It taught me what it was like to be totally different from everybody else. And a greater appreciation of what we have
as women in the U.S. compared to so many places in the world."
Her South Coast neighbor Meredith Reynolds was also a Peace Corps volunteer from 1964 to 1966, just after she graduated from college. In Columbia, she taught teachers how to teach, focusing on English as a second language.
Reynolds had felt that work in the helping professions with an emphasis on language was what she wanted to do in life. So, Peace Corps service in a Spanish-speaking culture was right for her.
Now, years later, using her fluent Spanish, she has been involved in the South Coast community in the Pescadero Conservation Alliance, the local History Project, the Pescadero Municipal Advisory Council and the South Coast Artists Alliance.
"I feel like I'm still in the Peace Corps in Pescadero," Reynolds laughed.
There is no admission fee to Friday's talk at the library. The library is located at 640 Correas St. in Half Moon Bay, and can be reached at
726-2316.
