special issue: inauguration 2009 - National Peace Corps Association

Letter from Cape Verde
REWIRING PEDRO BADEJO
A Peace Corps beneficiary returns the favor
by Alex Alper
It’s Saturday and there are no
students in the courtyard of
Pedro Badejo’s Vocational
Education School. The sun is shining
on a series of Greek arches—the final
exams of the school’s stone masonry
students—giving the school courtyard
the odd feel of an ancient mosque.
Andrew Vernaza is standing beside a
table saw talking to the wood shop
professor.
The wood shop teacher flips the
switch and the two excitedly watch
as the saw begins to spin. Pedro
Badejo’s technical school hasn’t had
electricity in about a month, which
hasn’t exactly made it easy for Andrew
to begin teaching electrical wiring to
his students. A strong
wind blows through the
courtyard and the saw
slows, stops, and begins
turning in the opposite
direction. The two
chuckle. No more power.
Andrew is a first year
Peace Corps Volunteer,
a recent electrical
engineering graduate of
Drexel University, and
the son of Columbian
immigrants, who
wouldn’t have made it
to the United States if
it hadn’t been for the
Peace Corps. “Like
all other volunteers, I
guess, [I joined because]
I wanted to help out,”
says Andrew. “I really
saw the impact first hand
of another generation of
Peace Corps volunteers.”
His parents
immigrated to the
United States in 1976,
eventually settling in Mount Laurel,
New Jersey to raise their two sons.
His father learned English from an
ESL volunteer at the Universidad de
Valle in Bogotá, where he studied
engineering. His excellent English skills
aided him in his embassy interview and
subsequent transition to America. His
mother, from the rural suburb of Tenza,
watched as an irrigation volunteer
helped her family greatly improve their
farm’s efficiency. “We still go back there
for vacation and eat the tomatoes,” says
Andrew. “The reason the farm is still in
my family is probably because of that
Peace Corps Volunteer… My family
really understands the impact Peace
Corps has had on their lives.”
Cape Verde Volunteer Andrew Vernaza works with one of his students.
Andrew joined the Peace Corps
to give back, a decision he is still
committed to, though his job isn’t
always easy. “I’m not a teacher, I
engineer things,” he says. As he
glowingly describes “cool circuits” like
burglar alarms, it’s easy to imagine he
is happiest when working on his own
experiments.
Teaching, he explains, “is so
frustrating sometimes. Once we were
doing this problem with the equation
V=IR. It’s like the most important
equation of electricity.” He writes it,
voltage equals resistance times current.
“I gave the students simple numbers for
resistance and voltage, but they couldn’t
come up with the current. They hadn’t
Alex Alper
36 Spring 2009