Megan Patton '84
You Dig Deep
Meg Patton is the daughter of Kevin O'Donnell '47, who brought wife and children along for the adventure when he traveled to South Korea with the Peace Corps in the 1960s.
Megan Patton '84 was one of those eight children who had packed up their crayons and stuffed animals and, with childish wonder, headed off to Korea with their mom and dad. "We learned at a very early age that the world was our oyster," recalls Patton, now a sales director with Mary Kay Cosmetics in Ohio. That attitude gave Patton, a religion major at Kenyon with a special interest in Buddhism, the confidence to join the Peace Corps herself. After graduation, she moved to Nepal.
Her experience was very different from her father's. As country director, O'Donnell had lived in a manner consistent with his administrative peers in the Korean government. He and his family had a nice house in Seoul, complete with a staff. The house was always full of visitors-Peace Corps colleagues as well as officials from both the American and Korean governments. Patton, on the other hand, was a volunteer teacher in a remote village, Bhojpur, in the mountains of eastern Nepal.
A twelve-hour walk from the nearest road, Bhojpur was actually larger than most villages, as it was a regional center. But creature comforts were few. Patton lived on the second floor of a handmade brick house, over a store that sold mainly cigarettes and tea. There was no electricity or indoor plumbing. For two years, she bathed in a stream, fully clothed out of respect for Nepalese modesty. The sari that she wore doubled as a washcloth.
Conditions in Patton's school were better than most-she had chalk and a blackboard, and the roughly thirty children had paper notebooks. The toughest part was living up to the expectations of her local teaching colleagues. Although she was much younger than most of them, they looked to her for new methods and approaches. "There were times when I thought, 'What am I doing here,'" recalls Patton. Her father had warned her about those moments.
"My dad told me a couple of days before I left that I would get there and things would be exciting, and then [at a certain point] I would hit rock bottom and want to come home. 'If you persevere, it will pass,"' he added. It did, and Patton ended up staying a third year, in Kathmandu, to write teacher-training manuals.
"You dig deep and find out what you're made of," says Patton. The experience of such utter self-reliance gave her a lifelong confidence in her ability to thrive anywhere and do anything. "I don't see life as being filled with obstacles," she notes.
Neither does her dad. After leaving the Peace Corps, O'Donnell spent another eighteen years back in the steel industry, retiring in 1990 as chief executive officer of SIFCO Industries. Dozens of community nonprofits have benefited from his commitment to public service. At eighty, he remains active on numerous corporate boards and
foreign-affairs associations. But the Peace Corps holds a special
place in his heart.
"I'm still in love with that outfit," he says.
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