Laura Leach ‘95 is working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uganda. She will be sending regular updates to KWConnect about her experiences in Africa. This is her second entry. Click here to read her story from the beginning.

High Cholesterol? Really?
It wasn’t easy getting into the Peace Corps, and as you can imagine, I was pretty excited when the time came to leave. Actually, it took over a year from the time I applied to when I left for my service. The culprit that delayed the process is a little thing called high cholesterol.

I completed the application, got three people to write letters of recommendation for me, went through the interview, and then went in for my medical and dental appointments. When everything was said and done, the U.S. government decided that I needed to lower my cholesterol and sustain it at a lower level for six months before I left for Uganda.

This amuses me in retrospect only because once I arrived and had my medical review with the medical staff here, they said my beloved Crestor pills were not listed on my medical chart, and I haven’t taken one since I arrived in country.

Technology
The fact that there are high medical standards that have to be met before you can leave for service didn’t surprise me, but what did surprise me is that I never had a single face-to-face encounter with anyone from the Peace Corps throughout the entire application process. The interview was via phone. Updates came via email. My acceptance letter came through the US Postal Service, and conversations about placements and delays took place via the phone.

I’m curious what the application process was like back when Peace Corps first started up in the 60s before the World Wide Web came along. One thing that has become increasingly clear throughout this entire experience is that this is NOT the same Peace Corps of the ‘60s. Sure, some of the problems that faced developing countries back then are the same problems we are still working on today, but today’s villagers come equipped with cell phones (at least some of them do) and better access to news and information from around the world.

In fact, one of the initiatives taking place in Peace Corps is called TAP (technology against poverty). The mere fact that I am sitting here in my office in Uganda typing on a laptop is a sign of how things have changed over time since the Peace Corps began 49 years ago.  I would have had to send my blog on an airgram back then. ;)

One of the nice things about technology is that I got to meet some of the fellow volunteers from my volunteer class via Facebook before we met at staging in Philadelphia. There were originally 35 volunteers scheduled to go to Uganda with my group – 10 economic development volunteers and 25 education volunteers. Two volunteers didn’t show up in Philadelphia, and one volunteer got some bad news from home the day before he left for staging and decided to turn around and go home rather than continue on to Uganda.

Staging
Staging is mostly a blur to me now – partly because it is a very short process, and partly because I was teetering between excitement and totally freaking out the entire time. The main event at staging was completing paperwork and making sure all the i’s were dotted and all the t’s were crossed. Staging was also a good glimpse at what to expect during the next 10 weeks of pre-service training…group activities, flipchart paper and magic markers, and skits. I don’t know how someone who was so involved in theater growing up could loathe having to perform skits so much as an adult, but if I ever have to perform another skit again it will be too soon.

After one night in Philadelphia, we were on our way to New York City to catch our flight to Uganda. When we arrived at Entebbe, there was this old guy wearing jeans, and a baseball cap. He looked like he could have easily fit in with the buddies that my Grandpa used to meet for coffee in Hartford, KY. I assumed he was an overly enthusiastic retiree volunteer who was heading up the welcome committee for the new volunteers. Turns out he was Larry Brown, the country director for Peace Corps Uganda. It was at the moment that I discovered that this was our fearless leader that I finally relaxed and decided that I might just fit in okay here.

Tune in next time to read about our first few days in Uganda.

Find about more about the Peace Corps.

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Laura Leach ’95 is working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uganda. She will be sending regular updates to KWConnect about her experiences in Africa. This is her first entry.

How in the world did I end up here? It seems like a fair question these days. Here is Tororo, Uganda. I am an economic development U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer just underway in my second year of service. To understand how I got from point A (Owensboro, KY) to point B (Tororo, Uganda) you have to go back to my college time spent at Kentucky Wesleyan College.

It was there that I met Rebecca Tincher (class of ’94) who joined the Peace Corps immediately following college. Rebecca served in Thailand, and she’s the one who sowed the seed, so to speak.

Back when I was still in college, I had never traveled abroad. In fact, no one in my family had, and I was certain that this was something “other people” do, and certainly not meant for me. It took me a while to debunk that myth, so here I am at age 37, living in a thatch-roofed house in Tororo, Uganda.

Joining the Peace Corps a little bit later than the average volunteer creates some unique challenges. I had been working for Follett Higher Education Group for ten years before I left. Try telling your boss that you are leaving your job because you are going to Africa. It sounded like a horribly fabricated story even to me, and I was the one going. 

Aside from wrapping things up at work, I had to figure out what to do with my stuff. Look around you – Americans can accumulate a lot of stuff in a 13-year span, which is how long it had been since I’d been away from home. My parents agreed to take care of the love of my life, Koko the cat, while I was away, so now I just needed to find a home for my furniture and lots and lots of cardboard boxes. 

I found a clean, reasonably-priced storage unit in Reo, IN, so after a four-hour U-Haul trip from Jackson, TN, where I was working and living, to my parents’ home in Owensboro, KY, followed by a short jaunt across the river, my life was neatly packed away – okay, precariously crammed away – for the next two years.

I made that trip in December 2008, right before Christmas. I spent the next month selling my car, visiting friends and family, writing a will (just in case Dad was right and I died over here) and figuring out what I absolutely needed to survive during two years in Africa.

Finally the big day arrived in February 2009. My parents took me, my carry-on and two over-stuffed suitcases (one of them literally taped shut with duct tape because none of us could get the zipper to close) to the Evansville airport. I was off to Philadelphia, PA, for my staging event.

In my next entry, I will share with you about staging and my first two months of training in Uganda.

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