2025 Peace Corps Week: Jasmin Kiernan’s healthcare career started in 1975 as a Peace Corps volunteer in Southern Africa
Jasmin Sison Kiernan spent her time in Swaziland in the Lubombo District providing health screenings, oral exams, vaccines, and checking water sources for parasites.
Each day this week — 2025 Peace Corps Week, Feb. 24-28 — UH Hilo Stories is featuring a former or current Peace Corps volunteer with ties to Hawaiʻi Island. This story on Hawaiʻi Island healthcare administrator and Captain Cook resident Jasmin Sison Kiernan is written by UH Hilo political science major Makayla Carmer based on interviews conducted by Peace Corps chronicler Bill Sakovich.
By Makayla Cramer.
Jasmin Sison Kiernan was born in Balungao, Philippines, after her grandfather founded their village in an effort to find better farming land. Growing up for six years with a water pump and no electricity, moving to San Francisco was a massive shift in lifestyle; gone were the rivers and trees, and Kiernan was thrust into an urban lifestyle.
At 16, she made a vow to herself that she would one day visit Africa after reading the book Congo Kitabu by Jean-Pierre Hallet, which discusses their experiences in the Congo. With this vow and having a friend who had recently graduated from college and joined the Peace Corps and was writing “vivid and inspiring” letters to her, Kiernan knew her opportunity to do so was through volunteering in the Peace Corps.
The Kingdom of Swaziland
After completing her clinical science degree, Kiernan successfully received her Peace Corps volunteer assignment to the Kingdom of Swaziland, now renamed Eswatini. During her time serving there, Swaziland was the smallest country in Africa and was being ruled by the longest-reigning monarch, King Sobhuza.
Assigned to a small group of 14 volunteers, Kiernan arrived in Swaziland in November of 1975, where she had in-country training in the capital of Mbabane. During this time, she took SiSwati language classes and immersed herself in their culture, all while learning her new role as a school healthcare provider.
The family she stayed with accepted and integrated her into their lives, even making an outhouse specifically for her, as she had never seen anyone else use the newly built structure. Her sleeping arrangements were a hut with a platform she shared with two sisters.
Living with this family impacted her as she recounts how her “Swazi family asked me about my home and how many cattle we owned.” It was the moment that hit her how little outsiders knew about the United States and what it was like to live in an urban community despite being born in similar circumstances.
A particular experience that stands out to her is when a Swazi princess invited the director of Peace Corps Swaziland to visit a village that trained people in traditional medicine. There, Kiernan encountered diviner healers, or sangoma, who “danced to the rhythmic beating of the drums” and entered a trance-like state. She later learned that this allowed them to enter their spiritual world and interact with their ancestors. After they finished dancing, they went around Kiernan’s volunteer group. Previously, each member of her group was asked to hide an object from them; the sangoma told each of them what and where they hid their object.
The foundation of a healthcare career
Kiernan spent her time in Swaziland in the Lubombo District working with Isabel Dlamini, a Swazi nurse, and her partner Jim Bailey, who had all been trained on how to identify bilharzia through their microscopes. Their primary focus in this district was to “provide basic health screenings like vision and hearing, oral exam, vaccines, checking water sources and collecting urine and stool sample to check for bilharzia, a fluke parasite found primarily in the slow-moving waters in the Lowveld with three hosts: snail, cattle, human.”
Kiernan recalls sites that had no water sources or school feeding programs and the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness she felt while seeing all of these suffering children. Through their work, she and her team were able to pull data and point out the areas that needed water well for the communities.
After serving, Kiernan and her husband moved to Hawaiʻi in 2004 with West Hawaiʻi Community Health Center (now Hawaiʻi Island Community Health Center), which has now grown to five satellite clinics that provide medical, mental health, and dental services. Her department within the clinic goes out into the community to provide health screenings and health education by helping people get insurance and Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act.
Kiernan reflects on her time in the Peace Corps as an opportunity that prepared her “to meet the challenges of my new home of Hawaiʻi as it instilled in her a passion to serve.” She says the Peace Corps will always be a part of her, with experiences and memories that are ingrained in her today.
Story by Makayla Cramer, a political science major at UH Hilo.
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).
