SoN alum Erinn Foster shares her Peace Corps experiences

“Life is calling. How far will you go?” is the resonating mantra of today's Peace Corps. Not so long ago, Erinn Foster, '01, heard a similar corps message—“The toughest job you'll ever love”—and the words stuck.

As Foster watched the television commercial of Peace Corps volunteers pumping well water, planting trees, building buildings and playing with children, she was captivated by its images. She was six or seven at the time.

“I really had no idea of what it all meant, but I remembered it,” she says.

She carried that imagery with her through adolescence and into young adulthood. In the fall of 1997, she came to college at the UW-Madison—a campus that, arguably, is the number one contributor of volunteers to the Peace Corps.

In the fall of 1999, Foster was accepted in the baccalaureate nursing program at the UW-Madison School of Nursing (SoN)—in retrospect, an unsurprising choice of majors considering Foster's penchant for helping people improve their lives. It was then that those Peace Corps images from her childhood began to take shape and direction.

“I saw [Peace Corps] signs posted around campus and had friends with similar hopes of joining up after graduation, and the next thing you know, I was filling out the application,” notes Foster.

In her senior year of nursing, she was finishing up classes and clinical courses, while simultaneously buying clothes and supplies for two years in Togo—a small country in sub-Saharan West Africa. If everything went according to schedule, she would be on a plane to this country of gently rolling savannahs, hills, lagoons and marshes in September of 2001.

But things never went as planned. September 11, 2001, rocked the nation with tragedy and Foster's plans to leave the country were derailed for a month. But on October 18 th , she boarded the plane for Togo, and so began her journey with this international service corps: 170,000-members strong and serving 137 countries throughout the world.

Her total time commitment spent in Togo—an area slightly smaller than West Virginia— was two years and three months. Her first three months were spent entirely in training—technical, cross-cultural and language. Once completed, Foster was shipped to her post in Tovegan, a small village of about 3,000, located in the southern region of Togo.

Foster found that her major challenges consisted of life's daily events. The physical conditions didn't take as much getting used to as the cultural and language obstacles.

“I think I was used to heat, lack of running water—or any water, for that matter—no electricity and different food by the end of my first six months. It took longer to adjust to the cultural barriers and the language difficulties—Not seeing anyone who speaks English for weeks at a time can begin to wear on you,” she says.

Getting people to trust her was another issue for Foster. “Most people thought I had come with money to dole out and didn't really want anything to do with me once they found out otherwise,” says Foster.

Eventually, she found people who trusted and really wanted to work with her. From that point on, she says, “my stay over there changed from just work to my life. I loved it.”

What Foster found most rewarding about her service was working with the Togolese women. She did a lot of nutritional counseling for pregnant and new mothers. Because the fertility rate in this country is estimated at 4.79 children per woman, the need for educating mothers to improve the life and health care of their children is vital.

When making a home visit to a sick villager, Foster met the most unforgettable aspect of the trip—a little girl named Adiza (see photo).

Adiza was close to death from malnutrition when I met her,” says Foster, “and I visited with her once a week to teach her mother how to make soy milk.”  

Foster had first visited the farm of Adiza's parents under a friend's misconception that Foster could help the girl's father find extra funding to give his farm a little jump start.

“When his wife [Mary] met me and realized that I was with the Peace Corps and worked at the health clinic in my village, she brought me to see Adiza, “ says Foster.

Foster introduced Mary to soy milk to help Adiza gain weight. As the little girl started gaining in pounds, Mary became Foster's biggest supporter, introducing other mothers to Foster and “bridging cultural gaps,” says Foster.

When she last saw Adiza, Foster notes, the little girl was “running around and starting to talk—a milestone that I didn't think she'd ever reach when we were first introduced.”

Adiza's malnutrition was not unique to the village; Foster focused a lot of her volunteer work on helping mothers with nutritional regimens. One way of improving nutrition for mother and child, while building community among the villagers, was called “baby weighing day.” Mothers would bring their babies to a specific tree in the village where the baby would be placed in plastic shorts hanging from the end of a balance scale suspended from a tree (see photo). This was the only good way, Foster reports, to track growth rates of babies and to catch underweight and malnourished children before it was too late.

Other projects in Foster's repertoire of responsibilities included HIV/AIDS education, condom distribution, basic sanitation and health classes, Guinea worm eradication, and Red Cross first-aid training. Although the country's population is estimated at 5.5 million, AIDS causes so much mortality that it is hard to know how large the population actually is. The Guinea worm disease, is a parasitic worm infection that results from drinking contaminated water from ponds or wells, is endemic to Africa and common to poor rural villages found throughout Togo.

Shortly after returning to the United States in spring of 2004, Foster took time to reflect on her life-altering experience in Togo and how it changed her ideas about nursing and her future in health care:

“I feel like I'm more prepared to problem solve and work with what I've got”, she notes. “I've seen how other aspects of a person's life can greatly affect their health and want to be more involved with improving all parts of a patient's life in the hopes of improving their total quality of life. Patient education has taken on a whole new meaning for me and I hope to incorporate what I've learned in Africa in my every day practice.”

Foster will be returning to school at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., to get a master's in both public health and nursing. A part of her, she says, will stay in Togo.

“Readjusting to life here is certainly a lot harder and takes considerably more time than adjusting to life in Africa,” she says. “I miss my friends there; I miss my life. It is an experience I will never forget. My continual tears when thinking back to the end of my time there can attest to that.”