Cadillac, K-College grad joins the Peace Corps

Photo courtesy of Mollie McCurdy While studying in Spain, Mollie McCurdy took a break to go backpacking in Morocco. Here she is on a camel ride in the Sahara Desert.

CADILLAC — After attending her brother’s wedding in Connecticut, where she will walk down the aisle in a strapless pink bridesmaid’s dress, Mollie McCurdy will hug her family goodbye and leave for the island of St. Lucia, where she will train for a 27-month Peace Corps assignment.

After her training she will live in poverty with a local population somewhere on an eastern Caribbean island. For two years she will work in community development with an emphasis on HIV/Aids education. The Caribbean, she said, is second only to “sub-Saharan Africa in the prevalence of Aids.”

She has been told to pack a short wave, battery-operated radio and duct tape. She should also take hiking boots and children’s books and crayons.

Mollie, a 2003 graduate of Cadillac High School, said that after spending her junior year in Brazil, she knew she wanted to work in the Peace Corps.

That was the year she learned to rely on herself. She became fluent in Portuguese, made international friends through the Rotary, and became an avid world traveler. And although her host family was middle class, living in Brazil was her first exposure to “real” poverty, exposure that inspired her to pursue a degree that would enable her to work with impoverished populations.

She chose Kalamazoo College so she could do two study-abroad programs, one in Mexico and one in Spain.

“My anthropology class traveled to little villages on the outskirts of a city in Mexico,” Mollie recalled. “I taught the children English and played games with them. I really liked that.”

After Mexico, Mollie spent six months studying in Spain.

With her degree in Human Development and Social Relations almost complete, she started interviewing with the Peace Corps last year to accept an assignment to live in poverty and “give people tools to help themselves.”

She said from her experience, living in those circumstances brings joy.

“I think I’m happier in those places,” she confessed. “It’s just a different value system than America. They value personal relationships and family and they can’t value material things as much as we can so small things matter more.”

“I just knew I wanted to do this,” she said of joining the Peace Corps after her June college graduation. “This was my plan in high school. Brazil was the biggest challenge of my life. Anything less than a year is a piece of cake so this two-year commitment is my next big challenge.”

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