One day after a big rainfall I was walking down the dirt road in my village when my sandals both broke, one right after the other. I stood there looking at the dirty road in dismay, not wanting to walk through the mud and manure barefoot. A man across the street saw what happened and came over to me. He’d never met me before but he offered me the shoes off of his feet so that I could go back to my house and get a new pair while he waited by the side of the road barefoot. Things like that were a common occurrence in Niger — everyone was incredibly generous and friendly.

What is one of your least favorite Peace Corps memories?

It was late in at night and I was drinking tea with friends from my Peace Corps village. A small child approached, stumbling out of the darkness and collapsing at our feet. The boy had left his family to search for food and had not eaten in three days. All of the village women had put out their cooking fires, but I was known for eating packaged foods. That morning, a care package had come from my mother, full of nutritional bars. I grabbed a few, stuffing them into the hands of the child and praying that it was enough. However, I knew that it was not.

We have been stuffing food in the hands of Africans for decades with little improvement for those we are purportedly trying to help. To put a new spin on the classic fisherman adage, “Give a Nigerian woman a sack of American-grown corn, and she will eat for a day. Teach her how to grow nutritious food, and she will feed her entire community.

What do you miss about the Peace Corps?

My village in Niger was tiny, home to just 2,000 people. Geographically, it should have taken no more than ten minutes to cross it, and yet it always took forty. Every couple of feet, I would stop to speak with a neighbor or friend, asking about their health, family, and farm. I miss the people I met there, and the incredibly close relationships I formed in a short amount of time.