Peace Corps opens door for volunteer

As a Peace Corps volunteer, she soon grew accustomed to the conditions and grew to adore the people in the small town of Soubeira, located in the West African nation of Burkina Faso.

“What I love about the Peace Corps,” said Hertzberg, the daughter of Michael and Della Hertzberg of Aiken, “is that the volunteers do have a positive effect on the community. It’s a cross-culture. The people get a new

perspective on the world and how to build their capacity. I personally appreciate that it makes Americans learn

about the rest of the world in ways we would never learn at home.”

An energetic and enthusiastic young woman, Hertzberg remains drawn to the third world within Africa. She currently works full-time for the Peace Corps, serving as the associate director for the program in Ethiopia. She provides technical and emotional support for 75 volunteers in that country and also coordinates an AIDS/HIV educational program.

Hertzberg grew up in Vermont, where her dad owned an engineering consulting firm. When she was 14, her

parents encouraged her to participate in a summer exchange program in France, staying with a host family in the countryside.

“I had never been anywhere,” she said, “and I learned all my French at that point. It started my desire to travel and I returned to France at 17, this time living other international students.”

At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Hertzberg chose the unusual major of social thought and political economics. Essentially, she was study systems of oppressions. It was a rather radical major on campus and shaped a lot of her decisions.

Following her graduation, Hertzberg traveled to California and did a variety of odd jobs for a while — working in a clothing store and serving as an executive assistant in a company’s public affairs department. Shortly

before joining the Peace Corps, she spent about four months in Santa Cruz as a house mother in a group home

for at-risk teenage girls. Some had involvement with gang members.

“I lived there and tried to keep them off the street,” said Hertzberg. “It was the hardest job and the most rewarding. The girls had to learn how to trust again and believe in themselves. They were angry a lot of the time, but I could see progress in these girls.”

Peace Corps executives assigned Hertzberg to Burkina Faso, formerly the Republic of Upper Volta and located north of Ghana in West Africa. She knew nothing about the country, but learned that the human indicators placed it as the world’s fourth-poorest country. Hertzberg struggled with communication at first; although French is the most prominent language, the people of Soubeira speak a regional language called More’.

Hertzberg lived in a 20-foot by 20-foot house. But it was the poverty that Hertzberg had to adjust to. There was one working water pump for the entire village. The closest light bulb was 11 miles away. The health issues were significant with concerns about HIV, polio and guinea worm disease then considered endemic.

Hertzberg assumed at the start that the Soubeira residents had to be miserable with their harsh existence. She found something else entirely.

“The people there are the most generous, warmest population I’ve ever lived with,” she said. “They have nothing, but did everything they could think of for their guests. The children might have nothing more than a tire and a stick to play with, but they were the happiest kids you’ll ever see.”

Yet she had to win the trust of everyone at the outset. She was the scary white lady, the first to live in the community. People would stay away initially, then 50 people would stand five feet away, staring at her.

Eventually, she won the villagers over and they did the same for her. When her parents and her sister visited her one time, Dee arranged to pick them up in car and drive to Soubeira.

“It was the most amazing trip,” said Michael Hertzberg. “We had driven between a bunch of villages and we were on the cow path about 14 miles out. Suddenly, we came upon a group of young men and boys — 50 of them from Dorothea’s village, all on bikes.”

They escorted the Hertzbergs to the town pavilion. Four chairs had been saved for them in the front row next to the village elders. Presents were given and speeches were offered, which Dee’s parents and sister couldn’t understand.

“My entire village was there,” Dee said, “and 800 people sang and danced in a performance that lasted two hours. I had no idea they had planned this.”

She worked with the Soubeiran citizens to educate them on the community’s health needs. At the end of her two-year stay, Hertzberg felt she had developed a greater compassion for others. She had learned about sharing to different people what it means to be an American and the value of traveling elsewhere to have that opportunity.

The challenges of Soubeira had become routine to her, but she tried to explain to the residents that the combination of suffering and knowledge is critical. With that struggle comes empowerment.

Actually, the experience of the Peace Corps empowered Hertzberg as well. She felt she could accomplish anything, but that gift had come at a cost.

“I felt overwhelmed when I left,” she said. “I had an ‘African mom,’ a sprightly lady of 65, and I was sobbing when I said goodbye. Culturally, you’re not supposed to cry there and she was making fun of me, trying to get me to stop.”

As it turned out, her work with the Peace Corps wasn’t over. Hertzberg got a job as a consultant, providing technical training to new volunteers and watching with pleasure as they went through the same progression as she had.

“I see how it makes them much better people in their lives,” Hertzberg said. “They learn and go out in communities and they teach and there’s a huge ripple effect. It’s an amazing thing to be part of that.”

She next went to work for the Atlanta-based Carter Center, the human rights advocacy organization founded

by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. The new position took her at times back to Burkina Faso for consulting efforts on worm eradication.

“I loved it there and couldn’t let it go,” Hertzberg said. “It really had made me who I am. I got off the plane and the first person who talked to me spoke in More’ and I said, ‘I’m home.’”

She returned to the U.S. in 2005-2007 to obtain a master’s degree in international development from Brandeis University. Hertzberg did an internship with UNIFEM, a United Nations development fund for women. That position took her to Ecuador to focus on HIV education and she returns every year. She’s learning Spanish now, Hertzberg said with a grin, “because I’ve become obsessed with Latin America, too.”

In 2007 she joined the Johns Hopkins Center for Communications in Ethiopia, pursuing health-related behavioral changes through communication and outreach. Her current work with the Peace Corps there is especially meaningful; the organization only recently re-established operations in Ethiopia after closing down for several years.

With just one full cycle of volunteers now on board, Hertzberg is enjoying the opportunity to build the system with a wonderful staff of 28 people, most of them local.

“Ethiopia is very diverse with many different ethnic groups,” she said. “It’s very prideful, a very old civilization, and people are proud of the history they have, such as Lucy, the oldest skeleton. The country is getting better in terms of indicators. There’s money coming in for construction, tons of development money. It’s an exciting process. I love my job and I would never have guessed I’d be doing this.”

One of her best days ever occurred Aug. 23, 2003. Hertzberg was back in Soubeira at the time but had to travel to the southern part of Burkina Faso for a three-month project. In 115-degree heat, she left the village on her 21-speed bicycle with a bag of clothes and a small bottle of water for the nine-mile ride in the desert to the main road to catch a bus.

The bike already had pedal problems and sure enough, about halfway to the road Hertzberg hit a bump and the pedals would work no more. She was in the middle of nowhere with almost no water and she berated herself being so foolish. Hertzberg could only hope that someone would show up and indeed, a man of about 60 appeared on his bike, riding toward Soubeira.

He tried to fix the bike, but could not. So he went to his bike and as Hertzberg looked on in amazement, connected a strap from his bike to hers, then told her to get on her bike.

“So there he is towing me through the desert,” Hertzberg said. “I have to pass him when we’re going down a hill and the strap is stretching and I’m sure it’s going to break, but it doesn’t and we make it to the main road. I will never forget this man’s face. He’s the rule there, not the exception. People do stuff like that every day.”

Contact Rob Novit at rnovit@aikenstandard.com or at 644-2391.