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.