Name: Stacy Abella '98
Position: Peace Corps volunteer
Location: Nicaragua
Major: Management
I was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic again, my Franklin planner balanced upon the steering wheel, pen poised over the planner at a date a week or so in advance, cell phone cradled on my shoulder, returning client calls and setting up appointments. I could be found in this exact position during any given day I spent as Territory Sales Manager for The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, managing a client base in Chicago, Rockford and the border cities of Wisconsin.
It is not that I disliked my job. I gained valuable experience and training that will serve me for the rest of my life. I made friendships with customers and colleagues that I plan on maintaining for years to come. I made more money than I knew had existed during college and had full use of a company car, a cell phone, a laptop and an expense account. Twice a year I went back to Akron, Ohio, for training on themes that made me more effective in my work.
Generally, life was good. But sometimes I heard a voice inside me that was becoming more insistent as the years went by. “Is there something else OUT THERE?” it would ask. I brushed the voice aside until May 8, 2001.
My passion for languages and foreign cultures started young. When I was seven, my parents participated in a hosting program for Europeans working as camp counselors at our local YMCA. I could never forget Ann, our first guest from Switzerland, who spent long hours with me talking about her country and its customs. Hearing her speaking to her parents on the phone in her native tongue fascinated me so much that I begged to take foreign language classes at a community college on Saturdays. I began taking French classes, dreaming of living in foreign lands and speaking the funny words I had been learning.
At Wittenberg, I took German to supplement my French classes and was blessed with two amazing experiences abroad. I spent the summer of 1995 in Wittenberg, Germany, and in 1997, I spent a semester in Freiburg, Germany. Through these experiences, I realized the power of language as fellow Wittenbergers told me stories of Communism days, stories that I would never have understood without speaking German. Traveling with my dear friend, Heather Ransom-Bodle ’98, I experienced different cultures and places, communicating with people we met in English, French and German.
Before returning to the United States in August 1997, I spent a couple of days with my host family in Wittenberg, Germany. My host father pumped me for details of my travels and enthusiastically asked questions. The last night I spent there, he told me with tears in his eyes that he would never have imagined that the world would liberate itself from the armed guards, ferocious dogs, imposing walls and barbed wire that had divided the east from the rest of the world. He said that his dream was for his son, like me, to have the opportunity to roam the world and learn of different cultures and languages. That night I began to realize how fortunate I am to be free, unencumbered by borders. I also realized that I had had an effect on a few peoples’ lives just from sharing my experiences.
From that point on, I knew that I wanted to do something to “give back,” to share my education and experiences with others in a way that might inspire something within them. In August 2000, I began researching volunteer abroad opportunities, a little more than two years after I graduated from Wittenberg. A brief trip to Barcelona, Spain, and a fascination with the predominantly Mexican migrant workers I encountered throughout Chicago fueled my desire to learn Spanish. Shortly after moving to Chicago, I began taking Spanish classes at night at the local college so that when I wrote “Latin America” as my choice region on the Peace Corps application, I met the language requirements.
I am now a Peace Corps volunteer in the small business sector in Jinotega, a community in the north-central mountains of Nicaragua. I remember the first month or so here, sweltering in the most intense heat I’d ever known and wondering how I’d ever accomplish anything when all I wanted to do was lie in the shade. I recall trying to turn on the faucet and, bewildered, thinking it was broken when no water came out of it. Now it is a shock if any water DOES come out of the pipe. And most of all, when I first arrived, I was completely lost trying to pick out even a word of what people might be saying to me. With time, though, came Spanish skills, then relationships with people based on limited understanding and gestures, then real conversations with substance and even workshops and seminars where I am now the teacher.
I have found my time here rich with experiences that have helped me to grow as a person. My Peace Corps experience has already changed my perspective for the rest of my life, and I maintain the hope that I can give back to the wonderful people I have met here at least some of what they have given me.
Many of us do not realize the effect experiences and other people have on us until later on in our lives. So many times during this past year I have drawn upon the knowledge I have gained from people who have influence me. Sometimes it is as simple as looking for a different way to relate something to someone or putting together something confusing in my own mind. To do this, I find myself drawing upon a conversation or an experience I had long buried in my memory and failed to think about, often for years. Many of the people who have influenced my life, I have lost touch with years ago, so they will probably never know that something they said or did sticks out in my memory even now.
That is one of the reasons why I believe in what I am doing here in Nicaragua. I often hear the criticism that Peace Corps volunteers take with them more than they give to the locals they are sent to teach. While this may be true, I have realized that the effects we have on others cannot be measured, identified, or sometimes even predicted.
I hope that somehow something I say or do during my time here will have a positive effect on someone, as others have had on me. However, like them, I may never know the impression I made on the person or the effect that came about because of it. Though it is sometimes frustrating because my results are so intangible, that is what keeps me motivated and full of hope as I work amidst the poor of Nicaragua.