Susanna Ok '02

Finding the Unmarked Chicken

After graduating from Kenyon in 2002, Susanna Ok came close to traveling around the world for a year studying the role of wine in different cultures.

Instead, she taught vegetable pickling and the art of vaccinating chickens to rural Nicaraguans.

The contrast may seem startling, but Ok, who double-majored in psychology and Spanish, is a young woman of wide-ranging interests.

As a senior, Ok was a finalist for a Watson Fellowship, which would have supported a research project on how a number of countries incorporate wine into their rituals and ceremonies. But when she didn't make the final cut, she had no problem joining the Peace Corps in Nicaragua.

"With the Peace Corps, I got to travel, meet new people, try new foods, and help others. It really wasn't a hard choice to make," Ok says.

Ok was placed in the sustainable food security project, through which she helped rural residents learn to grow and prepare foods in ways that both protected the environment and improved their nutrition.

"We're the 'brochure volunteers,'" she says, referring to the agency's projects in agriculture. "We're the ones you see pictured working in the dusty fields, next to the stone homes and babbling brooks."

After a three-month training period, Ok was assigned to San Diego, a small town in the northwestern part of the country, where she lived in a simple concrete block house with a tin roof. She was a source of curiosity for her neighbors because, as a native of Hawaii of Asian descent, she didn't fit the stereotype of the white-skinned American. Local residents were doubly surprised that she spoke Spanish, and not Chinese. But the people were friendly and warmed up to her quickly, she says.

Ok adds that her understanding of Nicaraguans benefited immensely from Kenyon classes on Latin-American literature and popular culture that she had taken with Clara Román-Odio, associate professor of Spanish. Román-Odio also wrote to her while she was in Nicaragua, offering encouragement.

Many of the skills that she used every day, however, were not exactly part of the Kenyon curriculum. For example, she helped teach people how to make soaps and cough syrups out of medicinal plants, as well as how to prepare nutritious foods that won't spoil quickly, such as jams, pickled vegetables, and peanut butter. She also learned, and later taught residents, how to vaccinate chickens with a syringe.

"Every chicken needs to be individually picked up, vaccinated, and marked to show that it's received its vaccination," she wrote in her journal, "all of which can be a little tricky after about chicken number twenty-two, when they all begin to look the same and you can't find the unmarked chicken."

With her new-found knowledge, Ok wrote a bilingual (English and Spanish) manual on sustainable food security that has been published by the Peace Corps. "The whole manual is based on experience, things that have actually been tested and work in the real world," she says.

Ok, who returned to the United States in January, is living again in Hawaii, establishing a career in the culinary arts by working at a restaurant in Honolulu.

She says she is glad for her time in the Peace Corps. But there are some things she will not miss-like dengue fever, which she suffered through twice in Nicaragua. Most of all, she won't miss washing her clothes by hand on a rock.

"I didn't have a fridge or an oven and I got along fine. But a washing machine-oh, I love a washing machine!"

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