2024 Peace Corps Week: Interview with former Peace Corps volunteer, UH Hilo Professor Misty Pacheco
During 2007-2008, Misty Pacheco was a public health volunteer in Kenya, where she headed two main projects: sexual reproductive health and HIV prevention.
By Susan Enright.
This story is the fifth and final 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.
Misty Pacheco
Misty Pacheco, a UH Hilo professor of kinesiology and exercise science who specializes in public health, applied to be a Peace Corps volunteer in 2006 during her final year of graduate school earning her master of science in health administration. She left for Kenya exactly one year later.
When asked, Pacheco says politics is not what motivated her to join the Peace Corps. She says that being born and raised in Hawaiʻi, helping community and ʻohana is “instilled in us. You’re going to help everyone, whenever you can.”
But interestingly enough, she says, when she was in the Peace Corps in Kenya, President Barack Obama was running for president.
“It became something very political. They knew Obama’s father was Kenyan and they were super excited. They were like, ‘Oh, if Obama wins, we’re gonna be brothers and sisters!’ Obama obviously did get elected and I ended up going to his inauguration.”
During 2007-2008, Pacheco was a public health volunteer in Wote, in the county of Makueni, Kenya, where she headed two main projects.
The first was a sexual reproductive health project for youth. “We went out to hospitals, clinics, dispensaries and tried to work with the staff to make it a place where youth would feel comfortable going for STD checks, HIV testing, even contraceptives,” she says.
The second project was HIV prevention, “mainly focusing on commercial sex workers, teaching them about what they can do to protect themselves in their line of work.”
She also did water and sanitation work, “digging wells and boreholes, going around the country looking at different ways and strategies that they were going to collect water.”
Pacheco was stationed in a rural part of the country where the closest Peace Corps colleagues were a four-hour bus ride away. She says she is social by nature, so she made friends with the local Kenyans that she worked with and in the local community. Lots of friends.
“There was dancing and some events that would happen in the village and I would always go to those,” she says. “Every day I would probably have dinner or lunch with someone. My neighbors took care of me. I lived in sort of a compound.” Sharing cooking chores and mealtime together soon made many of those friends become like family, “I spent a lot of time with them.”
Pacheco says she hopes that the information, education, and knowledge she imparted to program participants and other native Kenyans made a difference and saved somebody from getting HIV. “It’s hard to tell,” she says, because unfortunately, her time there was cut short.
“When I was in Kenya, the presidential election resulted in civil unrest. So we were actually evacuated. We didn’t have much notice. I think I had been there for almost a year and I had to tell everybody really quickly that I’m leaving. A Peace Corps service is 27 months. I thought I had over a year left.”
Later, back home, when Pacheco started her own family, she named her daughter after her counterpart in Kenya. She says she hopes one day to bring that daughter with her when she returns to the Kenyan village where she served.
She recommends college graduates apply for the Peace Corps.
“I think especially if you’re born and raised here in Hawaiʻi, we’re just so isolated. It’s difficult to imagine what lies beyond the Pacific. Peace Corps gives you an opportunity to not just explore and live and integrate into another country abroad, another culture, which those things are all great, but it is an opportunity to learn about yourself, to give back to humanity. I think we can go on trips and vacations, but it’s not the same when you’re serving.”
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 anthropologist Joe Genz
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.
