Hilary Johnson has been to the Ukraine with the Peace Corps, been a missionary in Japan and spent a year as a U.S. Senate page in Washington, D.C.
Adventurous Roseburg High grad traverses the globe
Caption: Hilary Johnson, a 1996 Roseburg High School graduate, right, currently lives in Cairo, Egypt, where she’s studying Arabic. Here she is pictured with her mother, Gloria, at the Great Pyramids in Giza in September.
Courtesy photo
The world gets smaller and smaller for Hilary Johnson as the years go by.
The 1996 Roseburg High School graduate currently lives in Cairo, Egypt, where she's studying Arabic. She's been to the Ukraine with the Peace Corps, been a missionary in Japan and spent a year as a U.S. Senate page in Washington, D.C.
It doesn't mean there isn't still a lot of ground for the 26-year-old to cover.
"I would love to be and live everywhere," she said, while back in Roseburg during the holidays.
These aren't vacations she's taking. In fact, her travels are nearly the opposite.
The Middle East has always fascinated her, she says, and for more than just the pyramids. She would rather meet a local family and learn their traditions and customs than take a jeep ride through the desert.
Johnson admits that she couldn't afford to be a tourist even if she wanted to be. The truth is, however, she doesn't.
"It would break my heart to stay at a hotel," she said.
She hasn't attended a university during her six months in Cairo. Instead, she found a family to live with and spends more than six hours a day learning the language from a tutor.
With an infectious personality and warm demeanor, she's never had a problem finding people to take her in. She hasn't changed who she is, even though her name has been rewritten numerous times.
Other cultures have a difficult time pronouncing Hilary. Plus, there's always been her least-liked question in foreign countries: "Are you Hillary Clinton?"
So she takes on new names. In Cairo, she's known as Jamila, a name given to her years earlier while in Palestine. In East Africa, she was called Malaika, which is Swahili for "angel."
"If I want people to remember my name and be able to say it, I need a different name," she said.
It doesn't always make life easier, however. Johnson has introduced herself with the wrong name for the wrong country before.
It was also difficult for her mother to get used to. Gloria Johnson, the director of Umpqua Bank's Club Carefree 50, visited her daughter in Cairo in September.
"I pronounced her name about 10 different ways," Gloria Johnson said.
Hilary Johnson knows that her parents worry about her traversing the globe. Her mother said, though, they've gotten better about it over time.
A few years back, that was not the case as Hilary went on a cross-country backpacking and hitchhiking expedition from Cairo to Cape Town to Casablanca.
"I don't know if they've forgiven me for that still," she said. " ... I think they were terrified."
At the same time, much like all she's done, she wouldn't have done it any differently.
"It was the time of my life," she said.
Adventure has been in Johnson's blood since her first big trip 13 years ago. She went to Mexico with fellow Eastwood Elementary School students as part of the Talented and Gifted program.
She worked as a translator at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and has taught Japanese in Harlem, N.Y.
During college at Brigham Young University in Hawaii, she spent a semester abroad in Palestine. Her next big move might be back stateside attending Georgetown University, where she's applied to a graduate program in Arab studies.
Ideally, she would like to take that degree and transform it into a job where she can use her ability to speak in Arabic, as well as Japanese and Russian. That might be a job with the American government or it might be as a private translator.
"It has to be a job where I'm contributing to the welfare of others," she said.
Either way, she has no plans to stay in one place. She admits to being a "devoted fan" of the Pacific Northwest and could settle here with a family, but that isn't the plan for anytime soon.
"I love Cairo," she said. "I could stay there forever, but now a graduate degree is beckoning to me."
* You can reach reporter Paul Craig at 957-4211 or by e-mail at pcraig@newsreview.info.
