PCV Kate Montrose is training teachers in the tiny village of Thaba Tseka in the southern African nation of Lesotho
Peace Corps volunteer overcomes culture shock
Sat, Mar 1, 2003
KATE STEVENSON
Observer-Dispatch
Peace Corps volunteer Kate Montrose of Whitesboro poses for a picture in Lesotho, Africa.
Like many 23-year-olds, Kate Montrose is a chronic snooze alarm pusher. The alarm goes off, she smacks a button and is allowed to sleep a few more blissful minutes.
That is no longer the case. Now she wakes with the sun, the chickens and the cattle and goes to bed with the rest of her new community -- when the sun sets at 7:30 p.m.
Montrose, whose family lives in Whitesboro, is a few months into a two-year commitment to the Peace Corps. With an education major from Syracuse University, she is now training teachers in the tiny village of Thaba Tseka in the southern African nation of Lesotho. It's a country roughly the size of Maryland.
Today is National Peace Corps Day, and this year marks the 42nd anniversary of the organization, which began in March of 1961 with a volunteers' call to arms by former President John F. Kennedy.
The purpose of this day of recognition is for current and former corps members and their families to spread the word about what the organization does, said Kate's mother, Sue Montrose.
"The people in the Peace Corps are doing good things for other people -- that's the bottom line," said Kate's father, Steve, a social worker like his wife. "They're going without a lot of the things we take for granted. That helps our image as Americans."
In a letter to her parents in November, Kate commented on the culture shock of going without comforts: "How strange it is that we are coming from a culture that is so 'advanced,'" she wrote, " yet we need to be taught how to live without electricity, heat, running water and refrigeration."
The Montroses are putting together a scrapbook of Kate's time in the corps, adding to it photos and letters, such as the one that arrived mid-February. It was the eighth one, and Sue Montrose slit it open with a smile.
Like Kate had done on the other envelopes, this one too was scrawled with words such as "Jesus Save You!" and "God Bless!"-- supposedly to keep superstitious mail handlers from breaking into the correspondence from her heavily Christian host country.
"It's been an adjustment," Sue Montrose said of her daughter's absence. "But we're very proud of her. This is something she's been wanting to do for a long time. It's kind of scary at times, but the Peace Corps does a really nice job with security. They're very thorough and they take good care of their volunteers."
Stacey Martin, also a Whitesboro resident, returned to the United States at about the same time that Kate Montrose left. Martin worked with education and HIV/AIDS relief in South Africa from June 2000 to this past December, and said the experience she had was life-changing.
"It's one of those experiences that stays with you forever," said Martin, who now works for the United Way of Greater Utica. "You feel such a stronger connection to parts of the world that most people don't know very much about."
