We Would Cry Three Times: Retirement...As An Adventure

By Peg McIntosh

Bob Evans and Peg McIntosh belong to that group of dreamers inspired by Bobby Kennedy’s words, “Some men see things as they are and ask why? I dream of things that never were and ask why not?”

Following an early retirement in 1992 they took a step back and asked the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kingman Technology Group LLC
• Release date: Aug 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732668614

Book preview

Chapter 1

Retirement, As An Adventure

As we grow older, some of us look back on our lives with nostalgia and dream of fulfilling ambitions that we either sidestepped in our youth or were never given the opportunity to pursue. I guess both my husband and I belong in that group of dreamers of what might have been. We were watching TV one night when a public announcement flashed on the screen calling for Peace Corps volunteers interested in assisting the Russian people in establishing small businesses. This was right after the fall of the Berlin wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. The announcement specifically encouraged seniors with business experience to apply.

My husband Bob sat upright in his chair. You know, this is pretty wild. Here we have just been talking about what we want to do when we grow up. He laughed, I mean something exciting that we could do in our retirement. We had both retired the previous year without a definitive plan for our future.

I replied, Yes, I always wished I’d done the Peace Corps thing.

Still smiling he said, Is this a crazy idea? Or, could this be a chance to see the world and at the same time do something of value with our lives? I mean other than playing golf or babysitting the grandchildren.

I thought for at least two seconds, and said, Well, let’s at least look into it. See if they’d even want us!!

My husband had an MBA and had been involved in many phases of running a larger business, and I had run a small consulting business of my own for several years. After a bit more discussion, my husband called the Peace Corps and asked their representative a number of questions, mostly about our suitability for these openings in Russia mentioned in their ad. The woman on the phone asked about our health, and our answers seemed to more than satisfy her. But, against better judgment, I motioned to my husband and asked to take the phone. I introduced myself and said, I did suffer from menopausal depression ten years ago. Could that be a problem? I was on medication for a year or so, but then put on estrogen, which seemed to solve the problem.

The woman replied, I hesitate to say this, and please don’t quote me, but my advice would be to forget to mention this. It was some time ago, and you say there were no recurrences? It seems to me most likely a symptom of menopause, but it could unnecessarily raise some red flags in processing your application.

And so we went ahead and applied to the Peace Corps, and a month later we were called to interview in Boston. I thought our interview went quite well. They asked generally about our health records and seemed satisfied. But throughout the discussion, I was feeling some guilt about not disclosing my bout with depression. When filling out the forms where you swear to tell the truth on pain of prosecution for perjury, I had followed the initial advice given and did not mention it.

I knew my husband would not agree with me, but facing the interviewer I decided it best to be totally transparent. I didn’t want this to come back to haunt us. This disclosure, as predicted, caused several holdups on my application, and finally caused us to miss out going with the group to Russia.

Fortunately, at the same time that we applied to the Peace Corps, we also sent in an application to the VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program, the domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps. We were called by VISTA to serve in Elgin, Texas with Advocacy Outreach, a local non-profit serving the poor and disenfranchised of Bastrop County. Their only issue was that as Roman Catholics, would we be willing to hand out contraceptives? The answer was Certainly. We completed a very satisfying year helping this start up to obtain funding and leaving them a blueprint to follow when applying for funds and documenting their services in the future.

What Do We Do Next?

Our return to Connecticut in the fall of 1994 was a period of transition. Upon arriving home, we visited family and friends, became acquainted with one new grandchild and reapplied to the Peace Corps for a new assignment, since the previous possibility in Russia had been filled and was no longer available. Again we went through the interview, medical clearance process and were tentatively approved for a two-year assignment in Suriname, a small country on the northern edge of South America, formerly called Dutch New Guinea.

During this time, we had placed our home on the market and had found a buyer. We had been given our tentative departure date several months in the future, and the sale of our home was consistent with two-months of travel before we were to start our assignment in Suriname. Following the closing on the house, we left Connecticut once again to drive cross country, visiting our children in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin and California. The trip was another opportunity to see areas that we had missed during our first cross-country trip and to spend some time with our children and grandchildren whom we hadn’t visited while in Texas.

After crossing through the northern United States and visiting my son Ray in Monterey, California, we proceeded on to Palo Alto, California to visit my son Jim’s family and drop off our dog, Cassidy. They had agreed to look after our very special cocker spaniel while we were away in South America. It was during this time in Palo Alto that we finally had further communication with the Peace Corps. It seems that before final sign-off for medical clearance, some bureaucrat decided he wanted some 10-year old medical records. They explained that my final approval had been stopped because I had once been treated for depression. All my records for that period had to be sent for and reviewed. However, there were more questions that final month from the Peace Corps.

Would I be willing to meet with a psychiatrist there on the West Coast, who could give me a clean bill of mental health? Of course I complied, and that doctor, based on the timing of my use of an anti-depressant, said I probably could have been much better served by taking hormones following my hysterectomy at age 36, just before the onset of my depression. She 100% OK’d my fitness for the job.

But the saga with the Peace Corps continued. Just before our final signoff and our flight tickets were to be issued, they requested transcripts of any psychiatric counseling that I had 10 years before in Connecticut. How would that even be possible at this late date? Based on the fact that he hadn’t met with me for ten years, and that I was presently in California, my Connecticut counselor refused, stating the request was ridiculous. And so things stalled once again, and we began to suspect it was because of our age (approaching our 60’s) that the Peace Corps were holding us back.

Since we were in Palo Alto, California, home of Stanford University, and my son’s alma mater, we visited their library on campus. We were fortunate to find a book entitled Alternatives to the Peace Corps, which felt like divine intervention to us at the time. We read and reviewed the possibilities carefully and found one organization that interested us; it was the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). We were later reminded that one of my sister’s friends, Jane, had taken an assignment with MCC following her Peace Corps assignment in Africa, and we knew she was a Roman Catholic, not a Mennonite.

MCC is headquartered in Akron, Pennsylvania, and they have a unique peace and justice orientation, with no missionary or religious work required of its volunteers. Its model is quite close to that of the Peace Corps, but its volunteers have more latitude in their choice of an assignment based on their professional background. MCC works in 52 countries throughout the world (mostly third-world countries) teaching and working with universities and nationally run non-government organizations (NGO’s). They advise in marketing, fund raising, engineering, education, small business, and also provide grants to small businesses, schools and orphanages, regardless of their religious orientation.

Since we were now on hold in California with the Peace Corps, we rented an apartment on a month-by-month basis, and decided to seek an interview with MCC at their Reedley, California office. My husband volunteered to call them, told them about our Peace Corps dilemma, and asked about their peace and justice work—if they accepted candidates who were Episcopalian, not Mennonites, and whether it included any evangelical work. Yes, they did accept other Christians, based on their qualifications and, no, MCC was not engaged in missionary work, only peace and justice. They seemed interested in our qualifications, and so we made an application.

Two weeks later we were called for an interview in Reedley, California. We met our interviewer, Stephen Penner, a very gentle man, probably in his late 40’s, who had served a number of years overseas with his young family, but now was in charge of interviewing and screening candidates for overseas service. In other words he would be judging our motives and our suitability to serve in the conditions with which he was very familiar.

Some of his questions were a repetition of those mentioned in the write-ups for service. Soon after we sat down, Stephen began, Have you ever served in a third world country? Or in an area of sustained poverty? Without hesitation, my husband explained, No, but we traveled quite a bit ... throughout Europe and some in Mexico…We also spent a year with VISTA in one of the poorest towns in Texas, volunteering for a social services agency serving African Americans, Mexican Americans, and poor whites.

Stephen nodded and asked, Were you ever bothered by being restricted to some different or strange foods, eating habits, or strange smells?

I jumped in at that point, Oh no, we don’t mind strange foods. In fact we make a point of always trying things when visiting foreign countries, like haggis or Guinness or kidney pie. And we both love Mexican food.

Stephen chuckled when I added, But I must admit I don’t relish being asked to sample foods chewed and predigested by tribesmen, something I’d seen on South American tribal travel films. Stephen continued, What about strange smells? I relied, What? Strange smells? I raised a large family, raised some livestock along the way, I think I experienced some pretty exotic smells in my time.

The interview was both intense and informative and lasted most of the day. We stopped briefly for lunch at a small cafe across the street. Following our lunch, the questions became even more challenging, testing our problem solving under pressure: How would we handle conflict situations in the field? And basically, what did we expect our role to be in the field working with nationals?

For example, Stephen asked, "What if you were working in a small village in Africa, with a number of nationals on a project, and a dispute started between two of the workers. Would you allow them to work it out themselves or would you get involved?

Bob answered, I think I would attempt to let them work it out themselves for a while… You can’t be expected to immediately understand another’s conflict, especially in another culture. But if it became more heated I would approach them and ask it I could be of help. After a brief pause Bob added, I think I would see my role as a peacemaker, not as a boss. I would try to be a friend, sympathetic rather than judgmental. However if there was an issue of safety, I would get help from others in settling a dispute.

The weightiest question our interviewer asked, Could the world have avoided the war with Hitler any other way than going to war?

Bob, being a historian, answered, Possibly, if we had gotten involved much earlier, soon after the First World War, when people needed help and were starving and vulnerable. Perhaps, if we had been supportive, the Germans wouldn’t have been vulnerable to Hitler’s message and the promise of a favorable economy.

Overall, the interview gave us a fairly realistic glimpse into MCC’s supportive, rather than domineering approach to working abroad in another culture and to their non-violent emphasis on peacemaking and conflict.

We returned to our apartment in Carmel and waited to hear their decision. A letter came within a month or so and, in all their wisdom, they accepted us and offered us a choice of different positions in three different countries: Cambodia, Haiti, or Bangladesh. Our interest in the particular jobs compared with our qualifications and interests were our main focus. Therefore, we chose MCC’s Job Creation Program for Women, based in Dhaka, Bangladesh and operating in remote villages. Our initial training would begin a few months later in Akron, PA and would last two full weeks.

The job write-ups, accompanying our acceptance letter, explained that the Job Creation program in Bangladesh works with disadvantaged women (divorced, widowed, or single) in this third-world Muslim country where women are regarded the property of their husbands, and single women are marginalized in many ways, particularly in supporting themselves and their children.

The MCC program provides single women job training, social skills in banking, language, writing and business. For example, these women make paper and create handicrafts, often based on their culture, that are sold in fair-trade stores in the United States, Canada, England, Japan, Germany and Australia. The women are very proud of their Bengali culture and their designs, and the idea of exercising their skills is very appealing to them. The MCC Job Creation Papermaking program needed volunteers who can contribute skills in marketing, design, engineering, writing, and teaching.

The location of the project wasn’t the reason for our choice. We felt that Bob’s experience in finances and organization, and mine in art and marketing would be the most useful to that particular program and would also match our own interests. Still in California, we had to weigh this with the remaining possibility of hearing from the Peace Corps.

That same month we received an emergency call from my sister Mary. My father, back in Massachusetts, had been diagnosed with leukemia. Without hesitation, our decision was made, and we packed up and headed back home to the East coast. Since some critical decisions had to be made within days regarding further treatment for my father, I flew home, and Bob drove in 5-long days, accompanied by our dog Cassidy, all the way back to Massachusetts.

Once we were back in Massachusetts, we stayed at my father’s house on Plum Island. The family had concluded that we were the only members available to care for my father and to get him to radiation treatments and visits with his oncologist. At that point, because we still didn’t have a decision from the Peace Corps, we decided to put that application on hold; but we would still go ahead with the final MCC interview in Akron, PA for the position in the Job Creation Program in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

After two months of chemo and radiation and enjoying my cooking, my father was responding and feeling much stronger, so we took him on a vacation trip to Florida to stay a month in his trailer and to enjoy playing golf with his friends. He also realized it was time to sell his trailer, which was now on its last legs. We also took him on a trip down to Key West to visit with some of his dearest friends. But, in the meantime, we put signs up around the trailer park and finally sold the trailer, after a comedy of errors and misunderstandings, to a travelling circus group of small people (at one time commonly referred to as midgets). All I know is that when we drove out of the trailer park that last morning, we felt like we had done a good job of saving my father and our family from some very real problems that had to be faced down the road.

Several months after we got back to Massachusetts, my father was examined and found to be in remission, which seemed almost like a miracle when we looked back on our arrival to do hospice for my father eight months before. And, so we accepted our appointment to serve in Bangladesh, beginning in March 1996. At the end of February, we travelled to Akron, Pennsylvania in a rented car to begin two weeks of orientation prior to starting our travel to a country we knew so little about, but which we would learn a great deal about in the next two years.

What adventures would lie ahead of us on this journey?

Chapter 2

Get Ready, Get Set...

Finally we arrived for training in Akron Pennsylvania. First, we checked in at the MCC Office, located where we’d be staying during training, and then we unpacked and rested. At that point, we were ready to begin two weeks of training for our upcoming volunteer assignment in Bangladesh. It was pretty exciting just thinking about what training would be like. Would classes include studying the culture of Bangladesh? Probably not because we were the only ones in training headed to Bangladesh, or were we?

That first morning and all the rest of the mornings we reported to the cafeteria for breakfast. It was a typical cafeteria, where you choose what you want of what was offered on that particular day. But that first day we were scanning the others seated around the tables, wondering if any one of them would be serving with us. We had no way of knowing.

However, it was not long before we met several people who had served once or twice overseas, and a couple of them in Bangladesh. They seemed fairly interested in talking and sharing some of their experiences, but at the same time, they were a bit formal, telling us nothing very specific. They asked us similar questions, and that surprised me. What they clearly wanted to know was more about us, and to somehow connect with us for some time in the future. I got the feeling that Bangladeshi alumni continue to stay in touch and share their experiences.

Two of the first volunteer veterans we met were Jim and Tom. Both were working for MCC Akron in responsible positions: Jim in the Ten Thousand Villages Outlet, and Tom in MCC Administration. Each had served two terms in Bangladesh: Jim in the creative marketing area, and Tom served as the Job Creation Administrator, the job my husband would have. They were the first to invite us to dinner; Tom asked if we had ever had Bangladeshi cooking. We told them that on our first day, Richard, Director of the MCC Tea Room, served us Bangladeshi food for lunch, and we enjoyed it. Tom smiled and said, I think you’ll enjoy some of our home cooked Bangladeshi food even more. Of course, we were more than happy to accept that challenge.

During one of our sessions with the training staff, I was told that Jim was a talented artist, so I knew that it would be an adventure for me just to see his