Voices

Cultivating Empathy in University-Peace Corps Partnerships

The challenge is how to create pathways for students to develop empathy both in and out of the classroom.
 

Within minutes of arriving in Sokone, Senegal, I saw Brennan walking down the dusty and bustling main street to greet me. It had been more than two years since I last saw him on campus, before he left for Peace Corps. We actually met five years earlier when Brennan enrolled in my first-year seminar on global poverty. Now he was nearing the end of his master’s degree program as a Peace Corps Master’s International (PCMI) student in mechanical engineering at Michigan Technological University. Michigan Tech and more than 90 other universities in the nation offer master’s international programs in which students earn a master’s degree that integrates Peace Corps service into the program.

Brennan politely grabbed my suitcase, caked in a layer of red Sahelian soils, and led me to a nearby home, where relatives of his host family live. We waited out the heat of the day there before Brennan and the 7-year-old son of his host parents brought around a donkey cart that I would ride 7 kilometers back to the small, rural town where he lives. Beside me on the cart were three boys and a bag of ice that would provide refreshment after sundown during this month of Ramadan.

Brennan had already spent more than a year and a half living at his Peace Corps site and working as a Peace Corps agroforestry volunteer when I arrived. He had five months left in his Peace Corps service. As the donkey cart rattled down the broken pavement

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