Vogt returned to the United States after living and working in Sierra Leone for a decade. Soon afterward, civil war broke out in the country, resulting in atrocities against the people that Vogt compares in barbarity and scale to those committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Asked if she thought the violence had undone much of the good work done by herself and others, Vogt disagreed. "I feel that the lives I touched and the teachers I trained, those who could survive would carry on. And before I left, we had established a number of teacher training centers," she said.
Sierra Leone RPCV Joseen Vogt finds her path as Franciscan sister, continues today at age 88
Franciscan sister discovers her path, continues today at age 88
4/30/2010 2:05:02 PM
By Matthew Stolle
The Post-Bulletin, Rochester MN
For the first half of her working life, Sister Joseen Vogt was a highly regarded science educator who taught in schools that served the middle and upper class.
With a master's degree in biology, she was making good money and living a biology educator's dream: working in Australia with its unique plants and animals, many of which are found no place else in the world.
And then a photograph changed her life.
While on a vacation in Hong Kong, Vogt took a picture of one of the region's famous floating restaurants. Only later, when she looked at the picture, did she realize that her camera had inadvertently captured something else: A little girl, a beggar, staring up into the camera in the lower corner of the picture.
And it spoke to Vogt's heart.
"She was saying to me, 'what are you going to do for me?' That's where I learned that I must go to developing countries and help the poor," Vogt said. "God wanted me somewhere else."
New life begins
Vogt returned to Australia, completed her contract and within the next nine months, found work through the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone in West Africa, where she taught students how to become science teachers.
It would be the start of a more than three-decade-long odyssey, during which Vogt would live and teach and set up teacher training and English language schools in the some of the world's most troubled countries.
She established teacher training centers in villages across Sierra Leone. A strong proponent of hands-on learning, she was an innovator in the classroom, demonstrating concepts alien to many countries. In a refugee camp in the Philippine Islands, she crushed Styrofoam into fine pieces and, with the aid of a fan, illustrated swirling snow blizzards to her entranced students.
In Battambang, Cambodia, Vogt launched the COERR Language Skills Center with an inaugural class of 120 students in 1993. Today the school serves more than 3,000 students at two sites.
Her experiences also brought her in close contact with the poor and the kind of physical suffering she had not imagined possible. In Sierra Leone, she witnessed a child die of starvation and cared for a couple reduced to extreme poverty.
"It was an emotional experience, but a learning experience of seeing the face of Christ in the poor," she said.
The poverty intruded in the classroom. At the Makeni Teacher Training Center in Sierra Leone, Vogt's belief in the importance of hands-on learning was put to good use. In classrooms lacking such basic necessities as blackboards, the Franciscan sister had to be inventive. So she made her own props - abacuses, friction cars, pulleys - anything that would demonstrate the concept of physics.
Vogt returned to the United States after living and working in Sierra Leone for a decade. Soon afterward, civil war broke out in the country, resulting in atrocities against the people that Vogt compares in barbarity and scale to those committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Asked if she thought the violence had undone much of the good work done by herself and others, Vogt disagreed.
"I feel that the lives I touched and the teachers I trained, those who could survive would carry on. And before I left, we had established a number of teacher training centers," she said.
More travels
Vogt thought her foreign adventures were over, but soon her "itchy feet" returned.
While back in the United States, Vogt returned to college to work on a master's degree in English and art. During that time, she proposed and developed a unique thesis: That English could be taught through hands-on science. Before long, she was testing her theories in the field, in refugee camps in the Philippines.
"I just can't sit," she said.
That sense of restlessness is how she met Jhon Riascos, a former Colombia soldier who was blinded in an incident that left his face disfigured.
Vogt, now 88, was going through one of her few idle moments that drive her crazy. One day, a Franciscan sister told her about a blind man at Hawthorne Education Center for whom a tutor was being sought. Vogt was not completely unfamiliar with such challenges. She had taught two blind people in West Africa, and had been amazed at their progress using hands-on techniques.
"I thought if they can learn braille, why can't they learn English the same way," she said.
Vogt went for an interview and was soon hired at Hawthorne through Experience Works, an organization dedicated to improving the lives of older people through employment and community service.
Teaching at home
When she met Riascos, the Colombian man didn't even know the letter A. So Vogt's first task was to introduce him to the alphabet. With individual letters Vogt made with heavy cord and cardboard, Vogt soon had Riascos learning his ABCs by feeling each letter until he was familiar with its shape and sound.
Once familiar with the alphabet, Vogt moved on to words. One day, Vogt gave Riascos a pen to handle. She then spelled it with her hand-crafted letters. Feeling the object and then the letters, Riascos uttered the word: Pen. His expression brightened into joy, she said.
"He was so delighted," Vogt said.
Vogt and Riascos meet four days a week in a study room on Hawthorne's second floor. Nearly two months since they started, Riascos is now speaking full sentences. Vogt calls the progress he is making "marvelous."
Looking back, Vogt sees her life divided into two halves. The journals she kept about the first part of her life, she burned. About the later half, Vogt has written three volumes about her inspired globe-trotting experiences.
What separates them is a discrete moment in time when God's summons in the form of a photograph of a little girl with pleading eyes spoke to her. That's when, she says, she learned to humbly walk with God, wherever that might lead.
"I'm led wherever. That's my whole belief," she said. "There's no need for me to plan, because I'll be led."
