Water. The very substance Americans take most for granted is the one thing new Peace Corps volunteers obsess most about when arriving in their host countries. Drinking, cooking, and bathing suddenly take work, as water must first be obtained — often no small feat — and then purified in a multistep process of boiling and filtering. It's a stark and immediate reminder that life in the developing world is fundamentally different from life at home. For Stephen O'Dowd, water held even greater significance.
Throughout the course of several months, he and a fellow volunteer in Tetouan, Morocco, taught an autistic boy how to pour himself a glass of water when he felt thirsty. Teaching someone else to master what, for most of us, is such a mundane task served as a touchstone event not only for the boy, who could finally identify and fulfill one of his most basic human needs, but for O'Dowd as well. In fact, in the roughly two and a half decades since he returned from Morocco, this experience continues to resonate with him as the most significant moment in his three-year service.
O'Dowd has spent his career with the U.S. State Department, largely in the hotbed of the Middle East. In one challenging post after another, he has learned the value of appreciating small victories. This perspective, he reflects, traces directly back to his days in Tetouan and that seminal glass of water. "In terms of how I approach challenges," he said, "this experience helped me focus on the incremental improvements that help people get through difficult times."
Raised 10 miles from Clinton in Waterville, N.Y., O'Dowd was the middle of five children. His parents worked hard to foster curiosity in their children though they themselves never attended college. "There's always been a heavy altruistic streak in my family as well," he says. In January of his junior year he traveled abroad for the first time, spending a month in Paris, an experience that fueled his desire to live abroad. Two weeks after graduation, he boarded a plane, Morocco-bound.
After a frustrating first year as a high school teacher in the phosphate mining city of Khouribga, O'Dowd initiated a job and site change. "My original Peace Corps experience wasn't what I expected," he said. "I was living in a city, and the English teaching program was very large, I thought there were other things I could be doing." He and a colleague identified a need for a special education program in Tetouan an old picturesque Moorish city 200 miles north of his original post. The Peace Corps brass approved the switch and he was off.
Over the next two years he worked with children with a wide range of disabilities, including Down syndrome, cerebral palsy and autism. Home was a section of a dilapidated historic house. A shower was down the block and around the corner.
Upon returning stateside, O'Dowd parlayed his Arabic language and cross-cultural training into a job as an intelligence officer with the State Department. From there he moved into posts as a Foreign Service officer in Jordan, Oman, Tunisia and Syria. He now serves as deputy economic section chief for the US Consulate in Jerusalem where he deals exclusively with Palestinian issues. The job's challenges he said can tend to wear you down. "So I learn to focus on the small things that change for the better, and I take my solace in that."
O'Dowd's daughter Caitlin recently joined the Class of 2011, and he couldn't be prouder. "My experience at Hamilton challenged me," he said. "It opened my eyes to other worlds."
