Peace Corps Week always brings me back to where so much of this journey began.
In 1997, I arrived in Paraguay as a beekeeping volunteer. I thought I was going to teach a skill. Instead, I learned how little I understood about place, community, and what it means to belong somewhere not my own.
Beekeeping taught me patience. It taught me to pay attention to systems I couldn’t control. It taught me that every hive is a community—fragile, interdependent, and shaped by forces far beyond what we can see.
But the deeper lesson wasn’t about bees. It was about listening.
It was about sitting with people, sharing tereré, and realizing that knowledge doesn’t arrive from the outside—it grows from within relationships. It was about understanding that development, like ecology, is not something you impose. It’s something you participate in.
Looking back, I can see how much of my work today traces back to that experience.
The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute. The World as a Village of 100 People. Global citizenship, human geography, civic imagination. And a love for daily walking!
All of it, in some way, began there—in a place where I first learned to see the world not as a map to understand, but as a community to be in relationship with.
Peace Corps didn’t just shape what I do. It shaped how I see. And maybe that’s the real work: Not to “help” the world. But to learn how to belong to it more responsibly.
To all those serving, those who have served, and to those who support(ed) us—thank you for being part of that ongoing lesson.
#PeaceCorpsWeek #GlobalCitizenship #Beekeeping #Interdependence #Service #GeographicalImagination
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