Marian Berryhill '98 (Dominican Republic, 1998-2000)
Serving in the Peace Corps can certainly be life-changing, but few volunteers credit the agency with their very existence. Marian Berryhill does. "I'm a legacy," she says proudly, explaining that her parents served as volunteers in Afghanistan in the mid-1960s. "I owe my life to the Peace Corps because my parents met there."
In fact, of the 50-odd volunteers who traveled with Berryhill to the Dominican Republic, eight were second-generation volunteers. Berryhill is also a Hamilton legacy. Both her great-uncle Douglas Kuhn '44 and his son Eric Kuhn '74 are alumni.
Her decision to join the Peace Corps, then, didn't provoke the cocked eyebrows or anxious twitters it inspires in many parents. On the contrary, the Peace Corps was a frequent topic of conversation throughout her upbringing in Shrewsbury, VT. "The Peace Corps was very present in my childhood," Berryhill says. "I was raised to believe that joining would be a perfectly reasonable course of action after I graduated from college." Her younger brother Hunter (Vassar '01) was equally inclined toward voluntarism, joining AmeriCorps a few years later.
After graduation, Berryhill packed her bags, headed to Miami and hopped the short flight to the Dominican Republic. Because of its proximity to the United States, the country isn't as immune to the trappings of western society as farther-flung Peace Corps sites. In fact, many young Dominican men head to the U.S. to work, regularly sending money home to their families. One of Berryhill's fellow volunteers lived in a village completely devoid of 20- and 30-year-old men; they'd all left the island to find work in the United States.
Berryhill's home was the mountain town of Rancho Francisco, population 160, a remote settlement in which everyone was somehow related to everyone else. She was assigned as an agriculture volunteer, primarily in charge of pest management. "I had to come up with nontoxic, useable methods of farming and create organic fertilizers," she explains. "There's a heavy reliance on toxic pesticides there, with no safety precautions at all. I'd frequently rant and rave about the dangers of pesticides, saying things like 'Do not mix pesticides over your water supply' and 'Do not use empty pesticide containers as drinking containers.' But if the pesticide containers were the only lidded containers around, what else could the villagers do?"
So Berryhill threw herself into a secondary project: raising funds and mobilizing her community to build a permanent hurricane shelter. In 1998, the year she arrived, Hurricane George had decimated the island, killing hundreds of people and driving thousands, newly homeless, into the capital. Hurricanes are a frequent threat, but families in outlying hamlets like Rancho Francisco have few shelter options when one pummels them. Berryhill organized a workforce, and together they built a concrete shelter. "I was a foreman!" she laughs. "Before this project, there were no concrete buildings in town, only thatched huts. So when Hurricane George came, everyone had to flee to the next town on foot. Now there's a big cement-block shelter in town."
Since her return to the United States, Berryhill earned her doctorate in cognitive neuroscience from Dartmouth and now holds a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies visual perception. "I decided to go into research," she says, "to discover things that are unknown. I want to add to the body of knowledge of the world in a meaningful way."
And she continues to do what she can for the people of Rancho Francisco. She goes back every other year to visit. "There are people there who call me their daughter, sister, friend," she says. She has offered to foot the bill for any local students motivated to apply to college — so long as they do the legwork themselves: "My goal was always to teach them, 'You can be in charge of your own life, but you have to work for it.'"
