Christen O’Brien

Issue: Summer 2004

Editor’s Note

WHEN CHRISTEN O’BRIEN ’01 first approached us about writing a feature article on Trojans in the Peace Corps (page 42), it seemed like a stretch. Never mind the time constraints on someone holding down a full-time job as an English teacher in Bulgaria while starting up a leadership camp for local kids and a book-donation program through the Girl Scouts of America. How could she hope to interview sources on five continents, collect their photos, and write and file her story from a place where telephone lines are iffy and even writing paper is scarce?

The answers to these questions demonstrate a major change in the Peace Corps experience. Thanks to the Internet, volunteers today can live in the remotest corner of the globe yet stay intimately in touch with the world they left behind. “It’s a very different experience,” says USC vice provost for international affairs Richard Drobnick PhD ’79, whose own Peace Corps stint in Malaysia back in the 1960s involved near hermit-like seclusion from Western influences.

Christen conducted all her interviews via e-mail and collected her photos digitally. Over several months she wrote and re-wrote drafts of her story on a laptop computer, responding to queries and directions via e-mail. Fascinated, we asked her how she managed this from Pernik, a city of 90,000 in one of the poorest countries of the former Soviet bloc:

“There are a few Internet cafes in my town,” she wrote. “There’s one I frequent in a bank: it has five computers set up in a corner. It takes about 15 to 20 seconds to upload a page (that’s fast for here). The computers are small and old. It costs about one lev [Bulgarian currency] an hour for Internet usage here, which is somewhere around 55 cents – very cheap. But since I am living on a Bulgarian salary, it adds up. I don’t have to travel far for the Internet: I walk about 10 minutes. However, some of the volunteers I interviewed, like Matthew Romsa, only get e-mail access once every few months. He has to travel hours to get to a computer.”

We hope you’ll find Christen’s account of life in the Peace Corps as inspiring as we did.