Linn-Benton Instructor Susan Peterson Shares Experience in Health, and time in Peace Corps.

    

 Susan Peterson works as an instructor at Linn-Benton Community College and as a Josephine County Public Health official in Southern Oregon. 

Peterson earned her bachelor's degree at Southern Oregon University and master’s in public health at Oregon State University. When Peterson left college she volunteered with the Peace Corps where she spent two years in Malawi, Southern Africa. 

She sat down to talk about her time working in Malawi, from living in a village where 30% of the population has HIV, teaching adult women to ride bikes, and being mugged trying to retrieve an American dairy luxury we all take for granted. 

Describe the job you do at LB.

    I teach PE 231- Lifetime Health and Fitness, and then I also teach Introduction to Public Health.

How did you get started at LBCC? 

When we moved back to this area in 2011, I wasn't ready to go back to work full-time, and so they had been hiring part-time faculty out at the Lebanon Center.  I don't live in Lebanon, but that's how I got started because I like being out there. It's a great center.  You have a computer lab, you have all this stuff there. So that's where I started. I moved to the Albany campus a few years ago.

What makes Lifetime Health and Fitness an important class? Why should students take this course? 

It's more about creating a pattern of healthy choices that you make from now through the rest of your life. And so part of my goal for the class is that if there's three to four take-home messages that students get that they can apply to their life to live a healthier life throughout their lifespan, then that's really successful for me. And so looking at healthy eating patterns, if they can adopt two to three healthy eating patterns, and maybe those things work for them and take them through the summer next year. And the same with exercise, just trying to add movement to their lives and figuring out ways to do that. Not everybody has to recreate their whole lifestyle. But just adding one or two things really makes a big difference overall. And over the last few years, I've tried to add more mental health and stress management to the class, because I think that's definitely missing from the traditional college experience at LB. There's not a lot of support for mental health programming and education. There is more now than there has been, but it's really important to keep that a component of lifetime health and fitness health.

What do you like most about working at LBCC

 The interaction with students. It was really hard teaching online those two years because I definitely prefer to be in the classroom and having that face-to-face interaction.

What other jobs outside of teaching do you do? 

I currently also work for Josephine County Public Health, and that's in Southern Oregon, so it's all virtual, but I'm an infection control consultation person with Covid outbreaks for Southern Oregon, and that's a wild job right now. It's a lot of phone calls and a lot of meetings. So I work with businesses doing infection control and a lot of education on what they do with their employees. So it's really a lot of phone calls and emails and letters.

How did you get involved with the Peace Corps? 

I went to the Peace Corps between undergrad and graduate school.  So when I graduated from Southern, I went to work at a ski area in Northern New Mexico. And after doing that for a few years, I decided I probably needed to do something else, even though that was amazing. And so then a group of my friends from school were applying. I thought, oh, I'll do that. And when I was at Southern, I worked with a lot of groups doing AIDS education, and it was related a lot to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And so I've done a lot of AIDS education there. And so when I applied to the Peace Corps, that was more my interest was to continue on with AIDS education. Since I didn't speak Spanish or French, then my options were English-speaking countries. So I was sent to Malawi, which is in Southern Africa.

Susan Peterson during her time with the Peace Corps.  Mchinji, Malawi,1995. 

When you first got there, what kind of things did you have to get adjusted to and what kind of things did you not expect that took you by surprise?

The food was probably initially the hardest to get used to in Malawi, they eat a very bland diet. And there were not a lot of choices in food. And so the food was hard at first, but then you kind of got used to it and just figured out other ways to make it a little bit more exciting, but it was harder than I thought to be away from the U.S. That was harder than I thought it would be. And I've done a lot of traveling before and I lived in other parts of the country, but I didn't realize how hard those cultural differences really meant. 

What Was your experience like?  

When I joined, it was definitely like that great things are going to happen. And one thing that we learned during training was that you spend a lot of time just visiting. Visiting and listening to people. So for the first maybe six months, that's really what it was. It was just socializing with different women's groups and different organizations. And so you kind of felt like I'm not really doing anything. But then eventually you realize, well, now I can speak this African language that I'm never going to use anywhere else. But you have these relationships with people that are really crucial and really important. So whether or not we prevented much of the spread of HIV, I don't really know. The community where I live was about 30% HIV positive. The community that I lived in was on the border between Malawi and Zambia, and there was a lot of truck driver traffic through there. And so there was a lot of prostitution. And so I spent a lot of time working with prostitutes and handing out condoms and talking about STDs and HIV. It was so prolific, but STDs were something that they could feel and they could see, so a lot of education really was around STDs and getting treatment. 

I really think the biggest impact we had was that in Malawi, it had been run by a dictatorship until, like 1994. Under that regime, one of the things that happened was that women couldn't be seen by male health care providers for things like labor and delivery or any kind of female issues that had to be female nurses or medical assistants. There weren't really any female doctors. Well, there was none where I was. We realized that these women weren't coming in for a lot of treatment and different things because the only person on call was a male healthcare provider. We had health assistants that would ride their bikes up to the villages, but none of the nurses or health assistants in my village could ride bikes. So if a  woman wanted healthcare, they were walking like 10 miles, 20 miles, 30 miles into the village to get healthcare or into the little community area. 

So we taught them how to ride bikes, and that was hilarious because these are adult women who have never been on bicycles. Men ride bikes all over the place, but women didn't really at that time as much. And so that was probably the biggest impact that my roommate and I had was teaching these nurses and health assistants to ride bikes, because then they could ride out the 10 miles, 15 miles, 20 miles out to these really rural villages. It was the first time some of these villages had immunizations or well-child checks for their kids because now these nurses and health systems were riding their bikes out there.

Could you walk me through what a normal day would have looked like for you?

So the sun rises around 6 a.m. and sets around 6 p.m. All year long. And so the chickens and the rooster start waking up in the area, like between four and six. Then my house was near a mosque. So if you haven't been to another country where there's mosques, there's calls to prayer so many times throughout the day. The first call to prayer, I think, was about 4 a.m.. So that's kind of your wake-up call is that early morning call to prayer or the chicken. Then you're just kind of up, probably about half the time I spent at the hospital, just like having meetings because we each had a Malawian counterpart who we were supposed to be working on projects with. 

Then the other half the time was going to school or community groups or just going and visiting with different organizations. So you pretty much touched base in the morning in the hospital, and then kind of went over what you were going to be doing. And then my American roommate, and I would pretty much just leave after that, like by about 9 and either ride our bikes or take a bus out to whatever little community group we were going to for schools. So then there's lunch if you're in the hospital, lunch is at noon. It goes until about 2, and sometimes people come back in the afternoon, but sometimes people don't. If it's really hot during the hot season, they don't often go back in the afternoon. 

Did you ever had any scary experiences in Malawi? 

Yeah, and most of Malawi isn't like that now. It wasn't like that then, but just this area where I was because of that traffic between the two countries, that trade that went on, there was a lot of smuggling going on; smuggling of goods, products, people, all of it. And so we had a lot of people walking by our house. So we did have a lot of those issues. And then one time  my roommate and I were going to Zambia so that we could get ice cream  because this one store sold it. We could go between the two countries without having to use our passport because of where we lived. And so we're like, well, we'll just walk there and get it. We picked the shortcut, and anyway, we got mugged and because we were going to Zambia, we had dollars. And so they took all of our U.S. dollars. 

The other part of that is that there is a mob ruling. So the hardest part of that, we were really freaked out when we got mugged for many reasons. One, we weren't really supposed to be where we were. And so then we had to answer to the industry about why we were in this location. And how lame is it to say, well, because they had ice cream and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Why not? Why wouldn't we be there? But anyway, when we've gotten mugged, we were close to a village, and so you're supposed to shout, like, thief, then everybody runs after this person, so  then there's like 20 people, and then there's like 100 people going after this person. 

By the time we got back to our little village town center, they had this person there that had mugged us. And people were like, beating up this person, and then they turned to us and they said, well, do you want this person to die? We can kill this person for you. And we're going no, but then they ask are you sure? I said, yeah, I'm sure. That was just really overwhelming. And we didn't really know what to do with that.

What kind of advice would you give someone who wants to get involved with the Peace Corps? 

 Don't have a lot of expectations and just be really willing to just learn the culture and get to know the people, because that's the best part of it, is the cultural exchange.

Can you tell me a little bit about where and how you grew up? 

I grew up in Lake County, which is on the California-Nevada border. So it's really in the middle of nowhere. I first started out in a town called Paisley, which has like 200 people, and then went to high school and stuff in Lakeview, which has about 2000 people, maybe 1800 people.

What are you passionate about outside of work? 

That's a really hard question. Well, I feel like for the last 18 years it's been just being a mom and everything around my kids because I'm not a huge sports person. So I've done all these sports things that I never, ever would have thought that I’d participate in. And so really, it's just that kind of stuff. But the things I'm most passionate about are anything outside, whether it's gardening or skiing or cycling, hiking. That's kind of where I'm in my happy place. I started taking my children skiing at a year and a half old and they both don't like it and I don't know what's wrong with it.

At A Glance

What: Q&A interview 

Who: Susan Peterson 

Born: Southern Oregon

Job: Lifetime Health and Fitness instructor 

Experience: Peace Corps.