2025 Peace Corps Week: Patrick Bryan sparked his fisheries career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Palau
Many years later, Patrick Bryan wrote a colorful, entertaining, and enlightening memoir about life in the Peace Corps. “In 1960’s Palau, life was raucous, laughable, and harrowing.”
Each day this week — 2025 Peace Corps Week, Feb. 24-28 — UH Hilo Stories is featuring a former Peace Corps volunteer with ties to Hawaiʻi Island. This story on Hawaiʻi Island resident Patrick Bryan is written by UH Hilo political science major Makayla Carmer based on interviews by Peace Corps chronicler Bill Sakovich and information in Bryan’s own book.
By Makayla Cramer.
Patrick Bryan spent three years as a Peace Corps volunteer, from 1967 to 1970, assigned to a fisheries program in Palau, an archipelago of the Western Carolina Islands in Micronesia. Many years later — after a decades-long career of fisheries management in Palau, Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands, and then moving to Hawaiʻi — he wrote and published a book about his Peace Corps experience, The Fish & Rice Chronicles: My Extraordinary Adventures in Palau and Micronesia (2011, Xlibris), a colorful, entertaining, and enlightening story about his life in the Peace Corps.
Here’s a great review about the book, and here’s an excerpt from the book:
In 1960’s Palau, life was raucous, laughable, and harrowing. I lived with a Palauan family in a decrepit old shack of plywood and cardboard which almost burned down. When my elusive heart throb finally led me to her room one night, I barely avoided coming under the knife. I could never have imagined I would find myself stranded one stormy night on a reef infested with sea snakes; or find myself positioned in the middle of a riot between locals and the US Coast Guard. But whether diving with Life Magazine‘s Stan Wayman, fending off sharks for underwater photographer Doug Faulkner, fishing with Lee Marvin, or searching for starfish, it was mostly all good.
In relaying his story to Hilo-based Peace Corps chronicler Bill Sakovich, Bryan says he hadn’t planned on beginning his service journey in the Peace Corps fresh out of Humboldt State College in California (now Humboldt State University); he initially wanted to fly jets for the Air Force or Navy but was rejected due to an ulcer. So he jumped on the opportunity to participate in the fisheries project. He was assigned to Micronesia with a group of Peace Corps volunteers responsible for teaching English as a second language, health care, and community development.
While training with the Peace Corps before embarking on his assignment, Bryan and his group of volunteers studied the Palauan language, which he struggled with for the majority of his training, but during the last two weeks, it all came together, and he passed his language exam with ease. He was assigned to manage the Palau Fisherman’s Co-op for six months despite not having any experience in managing money and having never balanced a checkbook. Despite these challenges, he describes the experience as doing the right thing.
In Micronesia, Bryan met Peter Wilson, his boss at TT Marine Resources, who saw many instances in which Bryan had made significant changes to the Palauan community. Bryan later went on to work with Stan Wayman as a support diver, focusing on the reef life around Palau; a story was written in Life Magazine about this reef work of monitoring and killing an overpopulated starfish species that was causing havoc to the reefs of Palau. Bryan was then sent to Kapingamarangi and Nukuoro in Ponape to study and monitor those the coral reefs. While at Helen Reef, he was struck with a biological atrocity, which he recounts in a memo to Wilson titled, “The Rape of Helen Reef.” Wilson then helped pass this information on to the district administrator.
According to the bio in his 2011 book, after the Peace Corps, Bryan earned a master’s degree in marine biology from the University of Guam Marine Laboratory and returned to Palau to work on culturing fish at the Micronesian Mariculture Demonstration Center. The team was the first in the world to successfully spawn two specific species from hatchling.
Bryan continued his career, becoming the first fisheries specialist for the Marshall Islands. In Samoa he ran a successful mariculture project propagating bait fish for pole tuna fishing. He also helped establish fish aggregating device systems in Samoa. Later, Bryan worked on marine projects for the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
In 1990, Bryan moved to Hawaiʻi and purchased a fishing vessel that bankrupted him. He returned to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands under government contract, becoming a private environmental consultant before returning to Hawaiʻi in 2000. He currently resides on Hawaiʻi Island.
Story by Makayla Cramer, a political science major at UH Hilo. Susan Enright, editor of UH Hilo Stories, contributed.
Peace Corps Volunteers Project
This week’s stories on former Peace Corps volunteers is part of a larger project headed by Su-Mi Lee, a professor of political science, 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. Learn more about Lee’s Return Peace Corps Volunteer Project (2023), and Return Peace Corps Volunteers video interview project (2024).
