After being delayed for almost three years due to COVID, Molly Maier ’21 has begun her two years of service with the Peace Corps in Guatemala.
Maier specifically applied to the Maternal and Child Health Promoter Peace Corps Program in Guatemala because it combines her interest in the Spanish language with her passion for maternal and child health.
“Colorado has a large Spanish-speaking population, so I wanted to take the unparalleled opportunity of two years of language immersion to develop functional fluency in a language I know I will use to serve my community when I return to the United States,” says Maier, a molecular biology major and global health minor. “I also knew I wanted to specifically work in maternal and child health. I’m a birth doula, I’ve worked in social assistance programs with pregnant and parenting women, and eventually I’d like to be a midwife working with out-of-hospital births.”
Maier arrived in Guatemala in March and spent 10 weeks living with a host family and participating in pre-service training. She was officially sworn-in as a Peace Corps Volunteer on May 16 and moved to Momostenango, where she will complete two years of service.
In Guatemala, health volunteers are assigned a socio, or a specific work counterpart, within either the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance or within a health-focused non-governmental organization. Two months into her service, Maier is no longer working with just her assigned socio, but with a network of social workers, educators, and reproductive health nurses within the Ministry of Health, as well as with other Guatemalan governmental agencies such as the Secretary of Food and Nutrition Security and the Ministry of Education, and various non-governmental organizations like World Vision and Health Poverty Action.
The Maternal and Child Health Program is focused on building capacity on three levels: increasing the capacity of health service providers to support mothers in adopting key maternal and child health behaviors; increasing the capacity of women to adopt maternal and child health behaviors; and increasing the capacity of key actors and organizations to strengthen community systems that allow the adoption of maternal and child health behaviors.
“In terms of what that actually looks like in action, each day is different,” says Maier. One day she might co-lead a group education session for pregnant women, and the next day she could co-train nurses on an experiential learning cycle model.
Maier knew of the Peace Corps since elementary school, and once she decided she wanted to apply, she reached out to the Career Center, who put her in touch with Gretchen Wardell, student success specialist.
“Not only did Gretchen help me tweak my resume and check off the steps to earn a Peace Corps Prep Program Certification, but she also helped me consider how Peace Corps could fit into an overall career trajectory, even through the messiness and unpredictability of the pandemic,” says Maier.
Maier says her Global Inequality class with Eric Popkin, associate professor and associate chair of the Sociology Department, and her anthropology classes abroad with Dionisios Kavadias, broadened her perspective and helped to prepare her for her work with the Peace Corps.
“In those classes, I was pushed to question the historical roots of international aid and all of the ideological and power dynamics that underlay an often glossy and appealing image,” says Maier. “It was uncomfortable, and it needed to be. In those spaces of deep critique, I found myself feeling almost crippled by all the wrongs that have been and are being done by people with my privilege, and asking how one goes on to do anything. Although neither gave me an easy, polished solution, they both pointed me towards listening more than speaking, towards elevating and privileging local knowledge, towards looking for better questions instead of answers. I’m more engaged and present with the complexity of my role as a Peace Corps volunteer because of the lenses they gave me.”
After spending a summer of service with AmeriCorps and participating in an anthropologically-based study abroad program during college, Maier says she learned the importance of intentionality when visiting other countries and cultures.
“My decision to apply for Peace Corps came less from a place of believing I would ‘help’ the community I was placed in and more from the desire to be molded by living daily in another culture, and hoping to build a somewhat reciprocal exchange of experiences,” says Maier.
“My Peace Corps experience also doesn’t end when I leave the health center for the day,” says Maier. “I teach ballet classes for the cultural center once a week, a structured activity that fits within the goal of intercultural exchange, but I also have so many ordinary, daily moments of challenge and learning and exchange: bargaining for my produce in the market, practicing making tortillas by hand with a friend’s mom, and talking at the dinner table about my American experience with as much nuance and complexity as my Spanish vocabulary allows me.”
