2024 Peace Corps Week: Interview with former Peace Corps volunteer, UH Hilo anthropologist Joe Genz
Associate Professor of Anthropology Joe Genz says the Peace Corps is the single defining experience that changed the trajectory of his life, including why he now teaches at UH Hilo.
By Susan Enright.
This story is the second in a five-part series on Peace Corps volunteers who, after their service, settled down on Hawaiʻi Island. One former volunteer, with video and story, will be featured each day here at UH Hilo Stories, during 2024 Peace Corps Week, Feb. 26 through March 1.
Timed for publication this week during 2024 Peace Corps Week, the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo has produced a series of five talk-story interviews, recorded on video, with members of the Hawaiʻi Island community who served in the Peace Corps and then settled down on the island.
Three in the series are UH Hilo faculty and two are members of the local community; some grew up on the island, and others found their way to the island following their Peace Corps service.
Joseph Genz
Joseph “Joe” Genz, an associate professor of anthropology at UH Hilo, started thinking about joining the Peace Corps when he was a senior at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, just after he returned from study abroad in Germany.
“I spent a year living in Germany and was really excited about the possibility of living somewhere new and different and learning another language,” says Genz. “I’d heard about the Peace Corps, applied during my senior year, graduated, and then a couple of months later got my acceptance letter that I was going to be heading to Samoa to be teaching high school math and science.”
Genz says he was excited about being somewhere new, not just for a year, but for more than two years. “At that time in my life, I was definitely charged with the sense of idealism, of like really wanting to make an impact,” he says. “I mean, that is what the Peace Corps is all about.”
Genz served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Samoa from 1997 to 1999, where he taught at several different schools in the village of Moamoa, about three miles southwest of the capital city of Apia (at the time Western Samoa).
Though he’d been a double major in zoology and German literature while at UW-Madison, he had no teaching experience prior to joining the Peace Corps. But there was a need for teachers in Samoa, and “the Peace Corps determined that I kind of fit that pretty well.” He taught mathematics, biology, chemistry, most of the sciences.
Genz feels his contributions to the Samoan communities he worked in were two-fold.
“In the very short, immediate term during those two years I was there, I would hope in some capacity I was able to influence a little bit of the trajectory in the lives of those students,” he says.
In the bigger picture, Genz says his was the first cohort of Peace Corps teachers in Samoa to be part of a program where the Peace Corps teachers replaced local teachers who then went to the university to take classes for two years to get “more command of the content under their belt and potentially earn a higher degree,” bringing long-term benefits from Genz and his colleagues’ Peace Corps service.
Genz says the Peace Corps “absolutely without hesitation” is the single defining experience that changed the trajectory of his life, including why he now teaches anthropology at UH Hilo.
“I’m an anthropologist,” explains Genz, who went on after the Peace Corps to receive his doctor of philosophy in anthropology from UH Mānoa. “I focus on anthropologies about our own humanity, but it’s about studying other cultures, and learning traditions and language, all of that. And it was that time in Samoa that really cemented the fact that I really enjoyed living with other people, learning other languages, becoming really immersed and engaged in the lifestyle of other people.”
Genz highly recommends the Peace Corps program to students graduating from UH Hilo.
“It could be for any kind of trajectory anyone might have,” he says. “There are so many possibilities, whether it’s teaching or jobs, whether it’s computer infrastructure or digital technologies. The needs have shifted over the years, (but) the Peace Corps program is about matching your skills and interests and experience with the needs of a host country. That’s the core part of it.”
The Return Peace Corps Volunteer project
This week’s series of video interviews is part of a larger project headed by Su-Mi Lee, an associate professor of political science and chair of the department at UH Hilo, who along with her poli-sci students and members of the local community are collecting biographical stories of former Peace Corps volunteers who have ties to Hawaiʻi Island. Last spring, Lee received funding from the College of Arts and Sciences, where the poli-sci department is located, to advance the project.
- Learn more about the Return Peace Corps Volunteer Project: UH Hilo political scientist Su-Mi Lee compiles biographies from Peace Corps volunteers with ties to Hawaiʻi Island.
This inquiry is significant to UH Hilo because Hawaiʻi Island was chosen as a primary training location for thousands of Peace Corps volunteers in the 1960s and the university’s precursor—University of Hawaiʻi-Hilo Branch—contributed greatly to that training. And many of those Peace Corps volunteers, who spent years forming connections abroad during their Peace Corps work, returned to Hawaiʻi Island, enriching local communities with their professional lives and service.
The Peace Corps stories Lee and others on the project are collecting are from 1) people who did their corps training on Hawaiʻi Island and came back to live, 2) staffers who trained Peace Corps volunteers on Hawaiʻi Island, 3) returning Peace Corps volunteers who are from Hawaiʻi Island where they did their Peace Corps training and may or may not currently live on the island, and 3) returning Peace Corps volunteers who chose to live on Hawaiʻi Island after their Peace Corps experience.
Lee’s goal is to document these stories for future generations to read and learn about the personal and professional value of direct engagement with people in other countries.
Related stories
2024 Peace Corps Week: Interview with former Peace Corps volunteer, UH Hilo biologist Pat Hart
2024 Peace Corps Week: Interview with former Peace Corps volunteer, UH Hilo Professor Misty Pacheco
Story by Susan Enright, a public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.
