Jan Guifarro '73
Simple as Jumping Jacks
The tumult of the times had a lot to do with Jan Guifarro's decision to join the Peace Corps as her graduation approached in 1973. "The Vietnam War was going on," she says. "People were looking at alternative ways of living, and there was a lot of political activity on campus. So when the recruiter came to campus, I submitted my application."
Guifarro had little experience traveling outside the United States, but Kenyon had instilled a certain self-assurance. "In classes, you're expected and encouraged to speak, not just to sit there and be lectured at," she notes. "It gives you the confidence to say, I can do something, learn something, and hopefully help a little bit."
Guifarro was assigned to Honduras, a poverty-stricken nation ruled at the time by a military dictatorship, and lived in Tegucigalpa, the capital. There, she worked with the Honduran ministry of education, training teachers to integrate dance into the curriculum as a way of introducing physical activity to young girls, for whom exercise was deemed socially unacceptable.
Supplies were scarce, so she tapped the resources she had brought with her: a cassette player, some classical music tapes, and the knowledge of dance she had gleaned from childhood classes as well as at Kenyon. In the courtyards of the elementary schools, she would lead students and show teachers basic exercises, stretches, and dance movements. One aim was to show that dance and fitness could be as simple, and as much fun, as doing jumping jacks to music from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. She left the teachers with lesson plans, and many of them went on to organize student dance recitals with the students, she said.
"The independence and freedom I had at Kenyon allowed me to be able to go into a very unstructured situation and develop a plan and implement it," says Guifarro, who also worked with the Ministry of Culture, helping to teach classes at the nascent Ballet Tegucigalpa. The school later evolved into the country's national ballet company.
"In both instances, the most rewarding thing was bringing something new to the children," she says. "Life for many of them was very hard, and this was a way that they could have fun and express themselves. You really need nothing for dance other than some music, and your body and spirit. It was wonderful to see the children come out of their shells and dance."
Guifarro shared an apartment overlooking Tegucigalpa with another American woman. They lacked conveniences like hot water, a washing machine, and television, but the poverty around them put things into perspective. Many Hondurans lived in shantytowns without water or electricity, facing the challenge of survival one day at a time. "That a world filled with the resources we have does not simply feed everyone was shocking," Guifarro says.
The experience of dictatorship was also sobering. Guifarro couldn't help but compare Honduras, where the government controlled the media and where gun-toting soldiers patrolled the streets, quick to quash any disturbance, with the United States, where protesters railed against public officials and government policies. "It makes you think, well, maybe our democracy isn't all that bad, and maybe what makes us wonderful is that we're allowed to disagree and protest," she says.
After Guifarro's two-year assignment, she stayed on to train new Peace Corps volunteers. Later, in Chicago, she worked with Cuban refugees to help them develop job skills. Currently, she lives in Rye Brook, New York, and works as director of global consumer affairs for Colgate-Palmolive, heading a department that fields inquiries and conducts consumer surveys.
But she also sits on the board of directors of the Peace Corps Volunteer Association, a group of returned volunteers. And the agency has forever shaped her outlook on life. "After the Peace Corps," she says, "you never look at things in quite the same way-our way of life, other ways of life. The experience makes you a much more tolerant person. You want to understand different cultures and build bridges."
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