Higher Education and Global Poverty: University Partnerships and ...

Chapter 1

Introduction

—Lila Watson, Aboriginal activist

The preceding quote was written on a whiteboard in a Los Angeles hotel during the staging period for my service in the Peace Corps. Our group was about to depart for the island country of Vanuatu, where we would serve primarily in a human resource capacity as volunteer educators across the country. Training continued once we had arrived on the South Pacific island nation, and for one week during this time, we left our training village to visit the locations to which we would be assigned for the remainder of our service. I left the island where my host family lived and traveled to a location more remote than anywhere I had ever been. From my starting point on an island nation in the middle of the South Pacific, I took a ninety-minute flight on a fifteen-passenger plane that held pigs and chickens as cargo and that landed on a strip of crushed black volcanic rock; I took a two-hour boat ride around this new island because there was no road from the airstrip to the village; and then I hiked for two