While most students graduate and start their hunt for jobs Jesse Garcia, a Cal State Long Beach graduate student and teaching assistant, took a different route after college. He went to Africa.
In 1999, a few credits away from receiving a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and English literature from the University of San Francisco, Garcia found his interest piqued when he heard about the Peace Corps. A year later at just 25 years old, Garcia was on a plane to Zimbabwe.
“Going into it, I intended only to do the two years of the Peace Corps,” Garcia said. “I never expected it to balloon into 11 years of living in Africa.”
Garcia said he started his Peace Corps service by teaching English to high school students in a little village in the Mashonaland region of Zimbabwe.
“The very first day of teaching was intimidating because I was teaching kids who were almost my age at the time,” Garcia said. “There were some students who were 21 years old and [still] in high school because they got a late start.”
Eventually Garcia settled into his work, but just 10 months into his assignment, the Peace Corps evacuated Garcia and many others from Zimbabwe due to unrest.
While most of the evacuated volunteers made their way back home, Garcia said he decided to stay.
“I was so stubborn. I wanted to do the Peace Corps and do the complete two years, so they transferred me to Senegal to learn French,” Garcia said. “They then transferred me to Guinea to another teaching assignment, and that’s where I just sort of went with it.”
After completing his two years of teaching, Garcia began an internship with Population Services International, a global health organization. That was followed by another internship and eventual full-time position with the United Nations’ World Food Programme, which lasted six years.
“It was … lucky that I stayed so long because I really didn’t intend to,” Garcia said, “but things just fell into my lap, and I was just at the right place at the right time.”
Athena Pantazis, who was in the Peace Corps with Garcia in Guinea, said she believes his friendly personality and grasp of the local language, Pulaar, were some of the reasons why he was well-suited to stay in Guinea so long.
On one occasion while Garcia was visiting her village, Pantazis said she recalls being surprised by how outgoing he was.
“While in my village, he went out on his own while I was teaching one morning and made new friends with people I had never met, as well as visited with my good friend TaTa without me,” Pantazis said. “No one else who had come to visit had ever done that.”
Matthew Rusling also met Garcia as a volunteer in the Peace Corps but lost touch with him during the evacuation from Zimbabwe.
According to Rusling, Garcia’s curiosity of other cultures and languages was what set him apart from others.
“There is a tendency of a lot of NGOs and journalists to go overseas and just hang out with other expats the whole several years that they are there and have very little to do with the communities that they live in,” Rusling said. “[But Garcia] was not like that at all.”
Garcia returned home in 2010, and is now a teaching assistant in the Romance, German, & Russian languages and literatures department at CSULB. He is also pursuing a master’s degree in French and Francophone studies.
Now in his late 30s, Garcia is again just a few credits away from graduation, though this time he said he is thinking about Ph.D. programs instead of Africa.
