Alumni Profiles - Ecole Bilingue de Berkeley

ECOLE BILINGUE DE BERKELEY
ALUMNI PROFILE: PILAR
ABASCAL, CLASS OF 1996
As I was finishing up my senior year at
Stanford, I realized that although I had
always wanted to be a doctor, I wasn’t
quite ready to dive into the grueling years
of medical school and the career that
would follow. I wanted to do something
completely different and have a little adventure
before I started down that path.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted the adventure
to be, just that I wanted to be living
abroad and learning Spanish. Next thing
I knew I was packing my bags to go to
Peru as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
For the next two years I lived in a small,
Andean village working as a community
health volunteer. San Juan is a town of
about 1,000 people in a spectacularly
beautiful valley in the northern part of
Peru. Pretty much everyone in town had
their own little plots of land where they
grew potatoes and corn and alfalfa for
their guinea pigs, which are a favorite
food in the Andes. In town, you couldn’t
walk one block without running into a
cow, a couple of dogs, and a chicken or
two. Having lived my whole life in the
Bay Area, it took me a while to get used
to this lifestyle. Little old ladies sat on
the corners spinning yarn from the wool
they had sheared from their own sheep
and gossiping for hours. The town square
was always full of kids running around,
climbing over fences and generally distressing
the grandmothers, who looked
up from their knitting every now and
then to keep an eye on them.
Not everything was idyllic; most of
those same grandmothers were illiterate.
When they had been children, only the
boys were sent to school, if their families
could afford to send anyone at all.
Gender inequality is still a huge problem,
as is poverty. In San Juan 40% of young
children are chronically malnourished
because their mothers were never taught
proper nutrition or hygiene. Most of my
work involved teaching these mothers
economical ways to add protein, vegetables
and fruit to their traditional diet of
rice and potatoes, as well as instilling the
importance of boiling water and washing
hands. Trying to convince people to
change such fundamental things as what
they eat and how they prepare it is necessarily
a long and frustrating process.
But despite all the frustrations I encountered
in my work, the experience of living
in San Juan with a Peruvian family more
than made up for it. I learned invaluable
lessons about myself and about how
much we all have in common. Now, I’m
back in the Bay Area getting ready to
apply to medical school, and I know that
I will be a better doctor because of my experience
in Peru. I’m not sure what made
me brave enough to join the Peace Corps
and move to Peru, but I think that going
to EB and learning to think of myself as
part of a global community was definitely
part of it.
Pilar Abascal with her Peace Corps host family in Peru
WN21–5 MAR 2007
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