IN-PERSON & ZOOM MEETING : Heart of Texas Peace Corps & Nicaragua
Chris will give us an overview of the Heart of Texas Peace Corps, and then talk to us about his expereinces and projects in Nicaragua.
Peace Corps globally brings educated college graduates to developing countries all around the world and works in a wide variety of areas that are negotiated between Peace Corps and the host country to decide in what areas they will work. In Nicaragua there were 4 types of volunteers: English teachers, Environment, Small Business, and Health and in the past there had also been Agriculture volunteers. The 3 main goals of the health sector were 1)Reducing teenage pregnancy 2)Reducing the spread of HIV and STIs 3)Improving infant and maternal health. The Peace Corps experience will vary wildly from country to country, sector to sector, location to location, and the type of projects and community members you work with. There are goals to work towards but still a lot of area for personal preference and seeking out projects as makes sense to you in your community. The length of service is normally 27 months overall for 3 months of training and two years of service.
About Chris Shepperd
My full name is Christopher Shepperd and I am born and raised in Austin, Texas. I did not travel far for college and went to school to get my bachelor's degree right here in Austin at The University of Texas to study Sociology. I greatly appreciated that area of study and helped change the way I think and approach problems, but you study a lot of problems in society, and when finishing up school I wanted to find a way to try and tackle those problems and that has contributed to my career path since then. Around the same time I was also thinking of a change since of location since I had lived in the same place my whole life so far and had caught a bit of a travel bug. That led me to a bigger change than I expected and joined the Peace Corps when I finished school and spent the next few years teaching community health education in Nicaragua. Unintentionally that had also gotten me interested in mental health and after Peace Corps I found a job in Hawaii working at a Wilderness Therapy residential mental health program for young adults. A few years later it was time to come back home and returning to Austin I found a job working with neurodiverse young adults teaching life skills. Rounding out for the next change I am about to start a Master's program in Social Work back at UT in a couple weeks.