A conversation with writer and everyday humanitarian Travis Hellstrom

Travis Hellstrom celebrating Mongolian Tsaagan Sar Holiday. 

  Travis Hellstrom’s first experience of really being of service came in elementary school with safety patrol. He was kind of a dorky kid, he says, but he loved it. Hellstrom, who was also a Boy Scout and an Eagle Scout growing up, joined the Peace Corps in 2008 and worked in Mongolia for three years. 

  During that time, he worked on a number of projects, including creating Peace Corps merit badges and falling in love with and marrying a local girl. Since, he’s written two books, “Unofficial Peace Corps Volunteer Handbook,” and “Enough: What I learned in the Peace Corps,” started a site called “Advance Humanity,” and he’s a Peace Corps Fellow at SIT Graduate Institute in Vermont.  

  Travis is studying B Corporations, or Benefit Corporations, which work to fill the space between non-profits and for-profits with the goals of creating financial stability and social change. 
  Travis and I Skyped last month and spoke about his writing, the role technology has played in changing the Peace Corps and the Peace Corps experience, and what those early days in safety patrol and the Boy Scouts meant to his time in Mongolia. 

  “I think my Eagle Scout project was the first time I ever saw how much the community gathers around you when you have a good idea and you’re obviously doing it for the community,” he told me.

  Those experiences taught him to listen, to work with others and that none of it was really about him. 

  Here’s our conversation, edited for length:

KH: It seems like, from everything that I’ve seen from your web site and your projects, your Peace Corps experience in Mongolia was kind of a spark for you for changing the direction of what you wanted to do in your life. How did that experience lead to where you are now?

TH: Peace Corps was something I had heard about for a long time and had always been inspired by it. It was a hard decision to choose between Peace Corps and medical school, but the thing that drove me toward medicine in the beginning was the desire to help other people, and Peace Corps obviously has the same mission. So it felt right, and I was really excited about it. I started writing a Peace Corps book before I even left for the Peace Corps. I just kept track of everything that I was going through, things that I wish people would have told me. I ended up being placed in a wonderful village in the east of Mongolia and I ended up staying a third year to be a Peace Corps volunteer leader... and from there I met other people who had a similar mission of wanting to help others and make the world a better place, make Mongolia a better place. In a lot of ways, I think Mongolia is a lot more progressive in terms of business and social change and how quickly they’re moving forward and trying to make the right decisions for everyone in the country ...Peace Corps was a spark that led me to so many wonderful people that still I’m in touch with and working with and inspired me to pursue benefit corporation work, helping non-profits, helping social businesses, social entrepreneurs. Its such an exciting time, especially with technology now, to be able to connect people, just like we’re connecting now. 

Photo by Travis Hellstrom

KH: It’s such a different world than when I was in the Peace Corps, 2000 to 2002. I can remember one of the volunteers who came in a later group than me, he was in country for maybe a month and he was blogging about his Peace Corps experience. They threw him out. They sent him home. They said, no, you can’t do that, it breaks all kinds of privacy issues. And now Peace Corps Guyana has a Facebook page and they’re constantly showing us everything everyone is doing. How do you think technology has changed the way that Peace Corps volunteers do their work, and even their experience of just being abroad?

TH: Before you can leave for Peace Corps, you can join future Peace Corps volunteers on Facebook and ask tons of questions. Before you even arrive in country, you can meet all your fellow volunteers you’re going to be serving with, start communicating with them, you can read books, you can talk to people online, you can read blogs. Everything’s changing so rapidly, I think for the better, because volunteers can be more prepared, they can be more excited, they can be more collaborative, not only in their country, but around the world. An exciting thing that I worked with with the National Peace Corps Association is called the Serving Volunteer Advisory Council. Usually, within a country there’s a volunteer advisory council... we tried to create a global one, and it’s currently working and it’s very exciting... We have a monthly meeting and ... usually there’s at least 14 time zones calling in at the same time. They’re talking about what are serving volunteers going through right now, how can we help them, how can volunteers help one another, how can the National Peace Corps Association help volunteers, and how can Peace Corps help volunteers? I think its a wonderful conversation. I’ve been so happy to be a part of it...

KH: Tell me a little bit about your book “Enough,” which talks about what you learned in the Peace Corps. 

TH: After I wrote the “Unofficial Handbook,” I had a lot of family and friends who really wanted to learn more about what I’ve learned and what I’ve experienced, and that really isn’t the right book for that. “Unofficial Handbook” is really for Peace Corps Volunteers. For family and friends, I wanted to be able to share lessons I learned in a very easy way. Enough is built on a mini-chapter idea. A friend of mine, Brian Johnson, wrote a book called “Philosophers Notes” that I really love. It’s the kind of book that you can open at any point in the book and read a quick chapter. I built off of that model... I think it turned into almost 80 little stories or little lessons I wanted to be able to share that with my friends and family. It turns out that it’s also something that’s fun for people who might not ever do the Peace Corps, might have done something else, might just want to understand more how they can do humanitarian kind of work or volunteer work or just kind of get through every day life... I think a lot of PCVs I’ve talked to, especially returned Peace Corps Volunteers, have said, I’ve always wanted to write down what I experienced, to try and explain, very simply, all the things that happened to me. And it gets harder and harder over time. I feel lucky to have heard that advice as I was going through it. It took maybe 30 minutes every couple days and I just kept writing down things. 

KH: Can you talk a little about some low moments, some of the moments when you just wanted to go and get a cold beer or a hot coffee, watch a game, do something "American"? Do you remember any experiences like that, where just the very fact of being foreign in itself was very challenging?

TH: Absolutely. There’s a lot of them... There was one worst day of my Peace Corps experience and it was stomach-related. But the other one was my deputy director of my health department where I worked, we had a very bad annual review. I thought things were going great. She thought the opposite. It was a very difficult conversation. It was very saddening and made me question everything I’d done the whole past year. Again, I was very lucky. That night I spoke to a volunteer named Mary who was in the Philippines. She pretty much had the exact same experience the exact same week with her deputy director. It was crazy, and when we talked about it, she thought the conversation was going to be me helping her through the experience because she thought everything was perfect for me and everything was going great. That’s what she saw online, and I guess that’s part of what we do, we put up the nice stuff. But as we talked, as she heard about this horrible week I’d been having, she started saying that she had the same thing happen, and she helped me through my experience. As time went on, I learned a lot more about my co-workers, and it turned out that was her management style. It was a very Soviet management style. She had learned that if you kept berating everyone, telling them how bad they did, then they’ll do better. When I talked to one of my colleagues, she said, oh, it’s OK, she makes everyone cry every year. That’s what she does. It ended up being a wonderful way to understand what everyone else was going through and how to talk about leadership. Some of my colleagues that I worked with that year ended up becoming the new directors. There’s this very changing environment with younger people becoming leaders in organizations around the country, and there’s a big shift happening, too, in the ways people motivate each other and empower each other. Things are changing, but I was just a small piece in that and saw what people had been living with for years and years. 

KH: Your background in service work and in the Boy Scouts played a big role in your approach in Mongolia. How did that Boy Scout approach work there? Were people as receptive to it in Mongolia as they were in Florida and North Carolina? Or were they like, what are you doing and why are you so happy?

Hellstrom and his Peace Corps Mongolia group. Photo by Richard Sitler

TH: That’s a great question. One piece of advice that I followed that I think was the most helpful for me was spend your first year of Peace Corps not really trying to do anything. Just be with your community, just make friends, just listen. You have to listen because you can’t speak. I can understand Mongolian way better than I can speak it. That was extremely humbling. You just sit around all day long, you listen for 12 hours, and then you speak for 30 minutes maybe. That whole experience of doing that for a year makes you extremely reflective, very empathetic, very patient, and that’s the right place to come from later, when you start mentioning ideas. After listening for a really long time and understanding what people were saying they wanted and needed, I started asking the right questions and trying to figure out ways to make things happen ... In my case, and I think you can probably relate to this, in my case, I learned so much and changed so much personally and ended up falling in love. The person that I met had grown up in the community her whole life. That was a huge part of it, too. I wouldn’t say Peace Corps Volunteers have to do this, that would be kind of silly, but I think it’s special when you start seeing yourself as part of the community and you’re humbled by how small of a part you play, and how important it is for you to empower other people. That’s really the most important thing, and that’s hard. I know a lot of people want to come in and get something done and have some kind of recognition for the work they did. I understand that feeling, but I think you really have to let that go, and just be of service and try to be helpful...

  Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Travis if he’d be willing to share any stories with Hard Corps, or if he’d let me share any of his stories. I’d love to see what you come up with, he said, and then told me the story of falling for his wife. That’s coming next week, but let me just say, Travis was pretty clever while trying to get to know Tunga. I think those Boy Scout skills were well-used.

What happens when a Boy Scout joins the Peace Corps?

  Coming tomorrow, my conversation with author, social entrepreneur and all-around nice-guy Travis Hellstrom on how his time in Mongolia changed his life's direction, his books and how his early experiences with service prepared him for the Peace Corps.
  “I think my Eagle Scout project was the first time I ever saw how much the community gathers around you when you have a good idea and you’re obviously doing it for the community,” he told me.

  More tomorrow on Travis, safety patrol, how technology's changing the Peace Corps, and falling in love.

The story of how we met (and then, how we really met)

Guyana, 2000                   Photo by Kristen Hare

By Kristen Hare
Guyana, 2000-2002

  When it’s time to tell a story, my husband usually sets it up nicely with a few words in his singsong accent, leans back and opens his hands up to me in a silent “proceed.” 

  He can change my car’s oil, grill a beautiful piece of meat and make us new friends in ways I’ve never been able, but Jai leaves the stories to me.

  Usually.

  So one night nearly 10 years ago, when we’re sitting around with a group of friends in our tiny first apartment in St. Joseph, Mo., and someone says, “How did you two meet?” he looks to me, and I proceed.

  The very first time wasn’t actually meeting as much as passing. Jai sat on a bridge with a few friends one hot night in Guyana and I walked by. I’d had one of those horrible Peace Corps days, one where every flaw I had was called out. I was fat. My hair wasn’t pulled back nicely. My slip was showing. 

  So I took my fat, rag-a-muffin, slip-showing, poor little self down the main road in my village, Adventure, and bought a small tub of ice cream, a tin of Pringles and a glass bottle of Coke from a little rum shop, then stomped my way home.

  “Miss,” a voice reached out from the dark, calling me the respectful title all female teachers got in public. “You sharin’?”

  “NO.” I shouted back and kept on stomping.

  Jai was aware of me, the new white girl in his village who exercised up and down the main road every afternoon, headphones firmly over ears, but the second time I became aware of him was a few weeks later, in October of 2000. 

  Someone down the road in Adventure was hosting a Hindu thanksgiving celebration, which meant lotus leaves piled with seven vegetarian curries, loud music and lots of great people watching. It also meant I got to wear a sari every night, so I was in. 

  That night, I wore a bright green one, and by the time I saw Jai, I was a bit sick of male attention. This wasn’t because I was stunningly beautiful, but in Guyana, I was stunningly different. 

  Oh, and my mother was not present.

  So when a student pointed out that a man nearby was staring at me, I looked up and saw Jai.

 My manners were on empty.

  “What?” I pretty much shouted across the bottom house at him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “Just admiring.”

  I gave myself a few moments reproach for being a nasty American bitch, then went back to talking with my student. Woletta, or Wooly as everyone called her, sat with me that night and we chatted about the things a 22-year-old American can with a 12 or 13 year-old Guyanese girl. Namely, boys.

  “Miss,” she asked me. “How do you let a boy know when you like him?”

  “Hmmmm,” I tried to look thoughtful, but was really planning the quickest way out of this line of questioning. “Well, you can play the eye contact game.”

  Seemed safe enough. 

  “What’s that?”

  “You just look at a boy for a moment,” I told her, “then look away. Then look again a bit longer, then look away, and after a few times, he’ll probably come over and talk to you.”

  Her eyes opened a bit wider, absorbing what I’d said.

  “Show me,” she hit back.

  Gulp. Was not expecting that.

  “OK,” I said with dread. “Pick someone.”

  “Him,” she said without missing a beat, pointing to my earlier admirer.

  Great, I thought. Fine.

  So I looked, and looked away. Looked again, and Jai sat up a bit straighter, then looked away. By the third time, I could tell he wasn’t really listening to the person next to him, and I was feeling a bit amused myself.

  “That’s it,” I told Wooly. “Now we’ll see if it worked.”

  It did.

  Jai sat down near by on a wooden bench, and he didn’t propose marriage or tell me I was a sweet gal or say any of the terrible and disgusting things some Guyanese men feel the need to say to women. Instead, we talked about school. I learned he was pretty smart. He read several newspapers every morning and knew more about the world than I did. The reporter in me was impressed. He was back after two years of school in the capitol to run the gas station down the street. His mom had been ill and he wanted to be closer to help his family.

  I’m not sure how long we talked, but it was the first time I’d had a real conversation with a Guyanese man, and as someone who always had close guy friends, it was nice.

  Somehow I mentioned what I really missed was cereal, and he told me they’d have it soon at the gas station. He repeated this every single day as I passed by on my afternoon walks, where he’d stop me to talk more, and every single day I went back, until at some point I wasn’t asking about the cereal that they’d never have.

  That night in St. Joe, I retold the story of how we met, and Jai looks up and says, “That’s not how it happened.”

  “Of course it was,” I say.

  “No,” he says, and I’m sure he was shaking his head and smiling big. “After you played your game, Wooly came over to me.”

  “What?”

  “She said, Miss Kristeen wants to talk to you.”

  “What?!”

  “And so I got up and came over to see what you wanted.”

St. Louis, 2003

  "What!!!"
When Jai first corrected the history I’d already cemented in my head, I was a little upset with Wooly. Why had she done that? Was she trying to get us to talk the whole time? What a conniving girl. Next, I felt embarrassed and a little silly for thinking my game worked. And finally, I admitted it was all kind of funny.

  Now, after 10 years of marriage, two awesome kids, and more adventures than I thought I’d get post-Peace Corps with someone who makes me feel stunningly beautiful every day, I’d like to find her and say thanks.

  Because of that wily Guyanese girl, the story of how we met turned out way better than any I could have told on my own.

Coming tomorrow, a love story, Peace Corps style

Guyana, 2012                    photo by Kristen Hare

  

  

     

  One of the things I least expected from the Peace Corps was to fall in love. And after I did, I certainly didn't imagine how that relationship would extend my two years in Guyana into a lifetime. And yet, this summer, my Guyanese husband and I are celebrating our 10th anniversary, we return to Guyana every other year with our two children, and just yesterday, my 5-year-old told me he was, in fact, a Guyanese. 

  Coming tomorrow, the story of how my husband and I met, and then, the story of how we really met. It starts like this...

  The very first time wasn’t actually meeting as much as passing. Jai sat on a bridge with a few friends one hot night in Guyana and I walked by. I’d had one of those horrible Peace Corps days, one where every flaw I had was called out. I was fat. My hair wasn’t pulled back nicely. My slip was showing. 

  So I took my fat, rag-a-muffin, slip-showing, poor little self down the main road in my village, Adventure, and bought a small tub of ice cream, a tin of Pringles and a glass bottle of Coke from a little rum shop, then stomped my way home.

  “Miss,” a voice reached out from the dark, calling me the respectful title all female teachers got in public. “You sharin’?”  

  “NO.” I shouted back and kept on stomping.

Great expectations

Armenia, photo by Tanya Andren

Aria Kinch, Armenia, 2001-2003

By Kristen Hare

  She knew, before she left Michigan, what the Peace Corps was, and what the Peace Corps wasn’t. At least a little.

  Aria Kinch agreed when the recruiter told her that she’d get way more out of these two years than she’d ever give. She understood that life in Armenia would be hard in a million ways life had never been hard before. And she got that the Peace Corps’ logo, “The toughest job you’ll ever love,” wasn’t false advertising.

  Still, with each conversation she had before leaving home, each goodbye, her excitement and her expectations grew.

  “Go out and change the world,” her friends, family and colleagues told her again and again.

  On the plane ride from Washington D.C. into Zvartnots International Airport, Aria carried that with her. 
  Go out. 
  Change the world. 
  The sense of possibility buzzed around inside her.

  Off the plane, the Peace Corps staff took Aria’s group to Zvartnots Cathedral, an Armenian heritage site, for a welcome ceremony.

  The full moon hung heavy to one side of a snow crowned mountain that June morning. At the old temple ruins, first built in the 7th century, she was surrounded by arching pillars and red poppies.

  As the sun rose, local musicians played the duduk, a wind instrument made from the wood of the apricot tree. Other than their song, the place was silent.

  Her own excitement quieted.

  Zvartnots was an ancient place of worship, but there was little left now. Just crumbling stones the shape of what once was and a group of eager Americans ready to go out and be helpful.

  Aria and her group boarded a bus bound for a town two hours from the capitol. Through the mountains, across the Armenian roads, they saw no one. They arrived in Gymri late that morning and found a town devastated by blow after blow after blow.

  Gymri was at the epicenter of an earthquake in 1988. Many buildings never rose again. Pictures of the dead decorated the headstones in the vast graveyard. There’d been the recent land war with Azerbaijan, cutting off the town’s supply of natural gas. And the town had lost power for two and a half years after the Soviet Union fell. Many places never got it back.

  This was a staggering place, but still, she found quickly, it was a place that remembered what it had once been. The literacy rate in Armenia was 96 percent when Aria was there. People were well-educated. They knew of the world. But there was little power. No jobs. Most of the men left to find work elsewhere. 

  It felt like a place in permanent mourning.

  From the beginning, Aria struggled with the language, more than most, she thought. She cried a lot in frustration. And sometimes, she laughed.

  The word for toilet was similar to the word for watermelon. She often requested the wrong one.

  She couldn’t talk as she had back home. Seeing the sadness and struggling to find words, her excitement withered. 

  But in its place, something new developed.

  People saw her, a young American with wild blond hair and a quick smile, and they wanted to talk. They told her about the people they’d lost, the good jobs they’d once had, what life was like before.   

Aria Kinch, right, and a friend in Armenia. Photo by Tanya Andren

  She listened, often seated in the homes of the old women in her town, sipping strong coffee and accepting a gregarious hospitality from people who had little to give.

  For two years, Aria worked as an English teacher in Nor Hajen.

  But she thinks now, 10 years later, that wasn’t her real work.

  In Armenia, Aria learned that change comes very slow in a place that has existed for very long. Traditions matter, sometimes greatly when they're all that's left. She learned to stop. To listen. To witness. 
  Now, when people ask her what she did in the Peace Corps, she tells them, quite sincerely, and quite proudly -- I drank coffee with old ladies.

Coming tomorrow...

  When I spoke with Aria Kinch about her time in Armenia, a few stories stood out -- like the time a few volunteers, in another town to hold a training, left some cheese at a nearby home that had power. When one of the volunteers went to the wrong home and asked for the cheese, the Armenian woman shrugged gave him her own. And early on in Aria's training, she and her fellow volunteers realized that there was something odd about the hotel where they were all staying. Why did men keep showing up trying to get in late at night? Oh, yeah, it was a brothel.
  But what stuck with me after Aria and I spoke was something much quieter, a sense that came over her during her two years in a country that had been down on its luck for quite a while.
  More tomorrow.

Awesome Opossum

We’ve read, already, of the critter encounters Sarah Ambriz had one night in the jungles of Guyana. In addition to the snakes, spiders, bats and roaches Sarah shared her home with, she had other squatters, too. Frequently, mouse opossums (real thing, I googled it,) liked to sneak in and steal her fruit, dragging it all about her house. Once, she says, she found a few of the babies inside her narrow-mouthed Nalgene bottle. Eek.

The following happened one night in 2009. Her captions show the value of a great sense of humor, I think. But I do wonder what she did with that baby-filled Nalgene bottle... 

And so begins the story of Encounters of the Possum Kind, as told photographically.

Possum: What? What? So I wanted some mango! Big deal! Let me go!

Captors: You're trapped! Come out with your tail coiled!

Possum: You bastards think you can capture me? HA! Watch my mad jumping skills!

Captors: You're free, but you can't escape the mesmerizing power of our flashlight. We will hold you hostage, no matter how much you jump at us.

Possum: Ok, the jumping thing was a failure. Let me try to entrance you with my hissing and forearm waving.

Captors: Hissing won't work either.

Possum: Wow, tough crowd. 

Captors: We are not impressed.

Possum: Fine, I must resort to insults - I fart in your general direction.

Captors: Fine, show your behind, you're still stuck on the broomstick, which we will now use to deport you from this area.

Possum: Ok, let's call it a truce? No, please! Don't carry me to the vickrage! It's so big and empty there! I can change! Noooooo!

Captors: You might as well be mature about it; YOU'RE GOING.

Possum: Fine. Same time, same place, next week?
Captors: Sounds good.

                                                           ~Fin.