2024 Peace Corps Week: Interview with former Peace Corps volunteer, Hawaiʻi Island resident David Ikeda
David Ikeda served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, 1966-1968, where he was a teacher at an agricultural school called École Pratique D’agriculture et Sylviculture.
By Susan Enright.
This story is the fourth in a five-part series on Peace Corps volunteers who, after their service, settled down on Hawaiʻi Island. Each day this week, during 2024 Peace Corps Week, Feb. 26 through March 1, UH Hilo Stories features one former volunteer, with video and story.
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.
David Ikeda
Born in Hilo, David Ikeda grew up in Shinmachi or “New Town,” in Waiākea, Kaʻūmana. The town was later destroyed by tsunami in 1946, and then, after it was rebuilt, again destroyed by tsunami in 1960. It was never rebuilt. This is a significant piece of a Hawaiʻi Island resident’s biography, one who went out into the world after college as a Peace Corps volunteer in a landlocked country in Africa and then returned home to build a career in teaching.
Ikeda was educated at Waiakea Elementary School, Hilo Intermediate School, Mid Pacific Institute (a college prep high school in Honolulu), and then back home at Hilo College (the precursor to Hawaiʻi Community College and UH Hilo), where he studied agriculture. It was while he was a senior at the college he decided to explore joining the Peace Corps.
“Like most seniors, you decide, you think about, what am I going to do with my life?” he says. The Vietnam War was underway and it was almost certain that any able bodied young man would be drafted. He thought it would be a waste of his education to go to war, get hurt, and not be able to do anything worthwhile with his life. “So I looked at the Peace Corps as at least a way to contribute something to the world.”
Ikeda served as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1966 through 1968 in Niger, assigned to a school in Kolo, in the region of Tillaberi. The country had been part of French West Africa, the largest colonial federation on the continent, that existed from 1895 until 1958, completely collapsing in 1960, not too many years before Ikeda’s time in Niger. His major job was as a teacher at an agricultural school called École Pratique D’agriculture et Sylviculture.
It was “a third world country,” Ikeda says. “Everything was primitive, roads weren’t paved very well, the cattle going around, children running around the streets. It actually made me feel right at home there, because that’s how I grew up.”
He worked with fellow teachers to make sure everything at the school was coordinated. Language barriers were overcome.
“We tried going to villages, but again, unless you spoke the dialect, it was pretty difficult,” he explains. “They understood a little French, so we could barter or ask some directions, it was easy. Most of them spoke French, so we could do that. If we tried the local dialect, for myself, I couldn’t.”
Ikeda says the number one thing he accomplished as a Peace Corps volunteer was making the people realize all Americans aren’t white. “We were not demons and weren’t really mean people. We were just like everybody else.”
“By the way, I have to admit,” he adds, “I learned also that the Africans weren’t very mean people.”
He took that realization with him into the future.
“When 9/11 came around, I remember a lot of people were very anti-Muslim,” he says. “Since I worked with many Muslims there [while in Niger], they’re just like you and I. They were concerned about their family, they wanted the best for their children and their community. And war was the last thing anybody wanted. That was universal. So I’m rather surprised that we, United States, tend to glamorize it.”
Ikeda’s experience in the Peace Corps made him decide to change his profession.
“I wasn’t quite sure with a degree in agriculture where I’d be working, for a nursery or farm,” he says. “I learned overseas that I really liked teaching. So I came back and got a degree and became a teacher. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats forever. That’s one of the things that stuck with me even now.”
He earned bachelor and master degrees in tropical horticulture, plus a master in business administration, all from UH Mānoa.
With the new direction for his career, Ikeda went on to teach agriculture at Leeward Community College and then at Hawaiʻi Community College. He taught plant science, farm management, farm construction, and other agriculture production courses. “I enjoyed it. The years went by very quickly.”
He recommends seniors in college think about joining the Peace Corps
“They’ll all grow up a lot,” he says. “You’re going to learn how good you are, what you didn’t study correctly, and you’ll be given responsibilities that people who have been working for several years don’t have.”
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 anthropologist Joe Genz
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.
