Carole's Page

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Windham Hero

Windham Independent {Maine}, Wednesday April 7, 2004
By Anna Fiorentino

“I like it when people get their prejudices shaken up”

            Carole Kimball, 51, of Whites Bridge Road works for DownEast Energy and jokes that she lives “in sin” with her boyfriend, Bob.  But her life hasn’t always been so mellow.  She once bumped around from country to country as a member of the Peace Corps.  Over her 11 years of working and volunteering for the Peace Corps she said she saw the world through the eyes of a minority---something most Caucasians never experience.

            Kimball witnessed rebel attacks, abject poverty and prisoners on the loose in places like the Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal, Lesotho, Kiribati, Romania, Poland and Kazakhstan.

            Kimball brings her colorful and at times dangerous experiences home to a diversity workshop at the Manchester School.  She was just one of six people who showed.

Windham Independent:  Why did you become interested in Peace Corps?

Carole Kimball:   Growing up in Saco, it just happened that there was a big Greek community there and a lot of Franco-Americans.  My background---it’s English Irish---always felt very waspy.  I was always intrigued by different languages and different cultures and different ways of looking at things.  Being in another culture, it felt like the volume got turned up and the colors got more vivid because you’re struggling so hard to understand what you’re seeing.

WI:  Where did you go?

CK:  to a little country called Lesotho, it’s surrounded by south Africa in a town called Mafeteng.  The elevation there was just about the same as Mount Washington, and the country just went up from there.  We had snowfall in July and August.

WI:  How long did it take you to adjust?

CK:  Right up to the end I was still feeling like, “Oh my gosh, I never would have expected this.”  I remember watching the Peace Corps van drive away and I started to cry.  Then I looked around and I thought, “Wait a second, this is exactly what I thought I was getting myself into.”  I lived in this really pretty terrible mud hut made out of stones and cow dung.  It was in real bad shape.  It leaked.  I thought “What are these little lobsters on the floor?”  They were scorpions.

WI:  What was your job?

CK:  My job was to work with foreigners to try to get more green leafy vegetables cultivated and to grow sunflowers as a cash crop.

WI:  How did you get from place to place?

CK:  They had vans and it would be kind of like a clown-care thing, where it would open and literally 23 people would get out all wrapped in blankets because it was cold in the winter.  Sometimes you’d be going up the mountains on these twisty roads that just drop off on the side, and you’d look down and see wrecked vehicles down at the bottom.

WI:  Were you ever scared for your life?

CK:  In the Philippines, there’d been a civil was going on there for 30 years.  Not the Islamic fundamentalists that you see now that are creating a lot of tension in the south, but there’s always been this rebel movement of communists.  There’s always been clashes between them and the Philippine army and they were always trying to do something to heighten their profile so they decided to start taking people hostage.  They assassinated about eight different Americans, mostly people associated with the military bases.  This one man in the Peace Corps was in a really remote site and his wife called the office and I happened to answer the phone.  She said he’d been taken hostage like 10 days before and she was afraid to tell anybody.  It was about 50 days that they had him. At one point they told us that he was dead. 

“My job was to work with foreigners to. . . get more green Leafy vegetables cultivated and to grow sunflowers as a cash crop.”

WI:  What did the rebels say to you after the man was returned?

CK:  The men kind of hung back and I was the one who shook hands with the rebels and said thank you for keeping your word.  There were four or five men and they were covered in guns and bullets and grenades. 

WI:  You were brave.

CK:  I was confident that they’d say, “We’d take her but she’s to big; we won’t be able to feed her.”

WI:  Have you thought about writing a book about your experiences?

CK:  Yes.  In Kiribati, those were really small islands, smaller than Raymond neck.

WI:  What is it like living in such a self-contained place?

CK:  You’re always in a fishbowl when you’re in the Peace Corps, but in some of those places everybody knows everyone’s business.  In the Solomon Islands, the national prison was not to far from the house I lived in and the inmates overpowered the guards that were there and broke out.  So you have 144 prisoners running through the town. 

WI:  What was it like being in such poverty-stricken places?

CK:  It’s funny, like in Lesotho, people had so little and there was a lot of government turmoil-assassinations, political fighting at times of elections, there was a drought, a sickness, not much food.  Still, those farmers get up in the morning and say, “We’ll try.”

WI:  What else happened to you?

CK:  I got mugged a couple times.  The first time I was walking at night and I was wearing blue jeans and at that place in Lesotho, only prostitutes wore blue jeans.  Another time I was in the market and two teenage boys said, ‘Oh my God, look at her.  It’s another one of those American hookers”  I turned around and said “Hbanehg u mbitsa lehooa?”  which translates to, “Why are you calling me such an awful name?”  The said, “How do you know our language?”  And we ended up having a good conversation. 

WI:  You were a minority over there.  How did you make yourself feel comfortable?

CK:  I always found that I had a lot more common ground with people that I thought.  Someone told me once the trappings---your culture, your language, your clothing, all those things--- can be different.  But if you can relate on a feeling level---like, that made me scared or that made me laugh until my tears rand down my face--- that’s where you’re going to find common ground.

WI:  Why did you attend the diversity workshop in Windham?

CK:  I guess having been a stranger in a place my heart goes out to people who are in a situation that they feel different.  And I just really enjoy the process of people relaxing and saying, “Oh wait a minute. I can fit in here.”  I like it when people get their prejudices shaken up.

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SALAYSAYAN – Peace Corps Philippines Staff Roster-September 1988          

“Carole Kimball, who was born in Maine and studied social work at the University of Maine, is no newcomer to Peace Corps although she only recently joined the Philippines staff.  She started as an agriculture extension volunteer in Lesotho in 1980 and assisted in training programs there before entering the Peace Corps Fellows Program in Washington, D.C. in 1983.  She went on to be an APCD in the Solomon Islands and Kiribati, a project director in the Marshall Islands, and a training technical coordinator here before assuming her new studies.  She fells she has a lot to learn about Region 1 and the Philippines, but is eager to get down to business because “I’ve been around Peace Corps long enough to know of the good that comes from it, and the achievements PCV’s make.”

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Peace Corps Traveler: 11 years of Service
by Michele Valway Journal Tribune, Friday August 9, 1991

When an entrepreneurial Lesotho woman asked for Carole Kimball’s help writing a sign to sell cabbage seedlings, the Saco {Maine} native volunteering in the poor South African Country graciously accepted the task. 
As the illiterate woman spoke, Kimball struggled to understand the Sesotho language that is marked with alliteration.  And with a sense of accomplishment, the Peace Corps volunteer completed the sign.
Posted on a fence at the woman’s straw-roofed house, the sign advertised: “I will leave this place for 5-cents”
         Kimball, who has a contagious laugh, enjoys reminiscing about her 2-year Peace Corps enlistment that turned into an 11year stint. {Remember this is 1991} In June she returned to her sister’s family in East Waterboro, after serving in Lesotho, the Solomon Island, Marshall Island, the Philippines, Poland and Romania.
         “I just ended up falling in love with the craziness of it all, and I stayed,” she said.
         Crazy isn’t an unfamiliar word.  Her late mother, Ethelyn Kimball, tried to talk her out of joining the organization in 1980, nine years after her Thornton Academy graduation.  Kimball at the time was working for St. Louis Child Care Service, if Biddeford, after studying social work at the University of Portland-Gorham (now University of Southern Maine).
           “Before I settled down, I decided to do this crazy thing…. I liked that job – but I don’t know, I guess I was curious,” she recalled.  “My mother would say “I know you want to see new places and learn an exotic language, but couldn’t you do that in Boston?’  And she meant it.”
         Lesotho, which is slightly larger than the state of Maryland and has a population of 1.7 million, Kimball trained villagers to grow drought-resistant crops.  The country she described as “a mountainous desert” where cows are used as currency, and round homes are made using cow dung and stones for walls and straw as roofs. 
         It’s a country where chiefs own land, and where people, despite rampant malnutrition, are not too anxious to improve the plot out of fear the chief will award the improved soil to his family.
         Despite her social work background, Kimball initially volunteered to work in agriculture because she grew up in a family that always had gardens.  Her uncle, she said, sold produce.
         The day she arrived in the village of Mafeteng, seven years into a 10-tyear drought, it was raining.  The people named her “Born In the Rain”.
         There were other struggles in other countries, too, besides planting crops that wouldn’t grow in starved soil.

Romania
         In Romania, she struggled with how President Nicolae Ceausescu, who was overthrown and executed in December 1989, could have been so cruel to require women under 45 to have five children.
         For four months, Kimball trained volunteers in language, cultural and technical skills in six orphanages, where some are set up like hospitals for children dying of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
         “It’s a big system without a lot of money right now” she said of the orphanages she left in June.
         She was disheartened to see the hundreds of children, most of whom will grow up in the orphanages.
         “You have infants placed in cribs, having never been cuddled, having never been bounced on a lap, having never looked into a loving eye,” she recalled.
         She was concerned that there were approximately 35 children to every one woman, and the children will have developmental delays.
         “I wonder what’s going to happen when they all grow up.”
         While the Romanian government is encouraging Romanian families to adopt, Kimball said out-of-the country adoptions have been temporarily suspended because of what was a growing black market for infants.
         Another four-month stint, this time in Poland in 1990, caused her to reflect even more on how government effects people.
         Kimball trained volunteers while the country struggled with electing a president, keeping a prime minister and adopting a constitution.  Her observations in Poland made her wonder what the United States must have been like two centuries ago when it formed a democracy and elected a president.

Philippines
         Before that, she escaped assassination in the Philippines.
         Last summer, communist guerillas accused the Peace Corps of spying for the U.S. government and held a Wyoming volunteer captive for six weeks.  Kimball helped work for his release, and waited in a jungle until nighttime the day his kidnap ended.
         “It was probably one of the bizarre parts of my whole experience,” she said, adding she might write and try to publish her account.
         After 2 ½ years in the Philippines, Kimball and all volunteers had to abandon the country after being placed on the guerillas’ list of assassinations.
         At 38, Kimball is by no means settling down.  She is staying with her sister and brother-in-law, Laurie and Bruce Stacpole.  She is enjoying her time playing aunt to the Stackpoles’ children, ages 6, 10 and 17.  And she is contemplating her next career move.
         “I have a chance to go to Czechoslovakia,” she said, raising an eyebrow and reveling a mischievous smile, “but I’ve been looking forward to settling in the U.S.”         
         She wants to complete her bachelor’s degree and earn a master’s degree studying “cultural diversities.”  She said she could work with businesses, institutions or organizations to help people of different cultures understand each other and work together.
         Still, it’s hard to pin her down.
         “My Philippines contract was going to be my absolute last,” she said, again smiling. “I’m too indecisive to be absolute about anything.”