June 12, 2005: Headlines: COS - Honduras: Water: Humor: Greensboro News & Record: After college, Sallie Lacy spent 27 months as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras. While there she built gravity-fed water systems, trained plumbers in maintenance and purification methods, and promoted watershed protection. That's when her family began to tease her about becoming the "latrine expert."
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June 12, 2005: Headlines: COS - Honduras: Water: Humor: Greensboro News & Record: After college, Sallie Lacy spent 27 months as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras. While there she built gravity-fed water systems, trained plumbers in maintenance and purification methods, and promoted watershed protection. That's when her family began to tease her about becoming the "latrine expert."
After college, Sallie Lacy spent 27 months as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras. While there she built gravity-fed water systems, trained plumbers in maintenance and purification methods, and promoted watershed protection. That's when her family began to tease her about becoming the "latrine expert."
After college, Sallie Lacy spent 27 months as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras. While there she built gravity-fed water systems, trained plumbers in maintenance and purification methods, and promoted watershed protection. That's when her family began to tease her about becoming the "latrine expert."
WORLD TRAVELER LEARNS TO APPRECIATE SIMPLE THINGS ; GREENSBORO DAY SCHOOL ALUMNA SALLIE LACY SPENDS YEARS IN UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRIES IN LATIN AMERICA.
Jun 12, 2005
Greensboro News & Record
Since her high school graduation 12 years ago, Sallie Lacy has returned home just long enough to snag a fellowship that will send her off to yet another country.
Lacy, who graduated from Greensboro Day School in 1993, has built latrines in Ecuador, a teacher's house in Costa Rica and helped farmers improve their economic status in Bolivia. And next year, she will study peace and conflict resolution in Queensland, Australia. This latest opportunity was made possible through a Rotary Club fellowship, which allows her to study at a Rotary Center for International Studies for two years.
Lacy, who majored in journalism and mass communications at UNC- Chapel Hill, interned at a Spanish newspaper in Madrid, Spain, her junior year. But it was her volunteer experience in Costa Rica earlier that had the most impact on her. She and two high school students helped build a house there. They lived on a farm with a poor family. They slept on cots surrounded by mosquito netting, used the bathroom in a makeshift latrine and pulled water from a well. Lacy even learned to milk a cow.
"I loved that experience so much that the next summer I moved up a rank in Ecuador," she said.
A seventh-grade social studies teacher at Greensboro Day School used to talk about her experiences with the Peace Corps in Africa. Her stories fascinated Lacy so much that she couldn't wait to do it, too. After college, Lacy returned to Costa Rica, then spent 27 months as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras. While there she built gravity-fed water systems, trained plumbers in maintenance and purification methods, and promoted watershed protection. That's when her family began to tease her about becoming the "latrine expert."
"You take stuff for granted. You pull a tap and see the water come out. But when you see people opening a tap of water for the first time in their lives, it's just an absolutely gratifying and amazing experience," Lacy said.
Some of the people she helped lived in mud huts without electricity. One elderly woman had carried buckets of water uphill her entire life. Tears came to her eyes when she pulled her first tap of water.
When it came time to find a job, Lacy wasn't sure how she would adjust to a corporate setting in Washington. But the consulting firm she worked for, Chemonics International, helps promote economic growth and higher living standards in developing countries. Lacy got the chance to work in Cochabamba, Bolivia, after a year. She oversaw funding for Bolivian coffee, raspberry and onion farmers trying to improve and market their crops.
But it wasn't all work and no play. In her down time, she hiked Machu Picchu, visited the world's largest salt flats in Bolivia and recorded her own music in a small studio.
"Work was challenging but rewarding. Life was relatively relaxed, and everything just seemed more laid back. But the drawback is that things don't always work the way they should," she said.
Lacy will spend this year studying environmental policy at Columbia University in New York before she heads to Australia. She's not sure what she'll do next. Her options include another international consulting job or work in the private sector.
For now, this globetrotter said it's enough that she has her immediate future planned: "I'm doing pretty good to know what I'm going to do for the next three years."
Contact Tina Firesheets at 373-3498 or tfiresheets@news- record.com
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Story Source: Greensboro News & Record
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Honduras; Water; Humor
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