Meeting Mark

After finishing school in Iowa, one of my best friends invited me to come stay with her in New Orleans for a couple of months. When I left Iowa, there were 8 inches of snow on the ground, and when I arrived in New Orleans in time for St. Patrick's Day, it was 85 degrees and sunny!

To practice teaching and sustain myself financially during my stay in New Orleans, I put the word out offering my services as a language instructor, and soon I had a few ESL clients, and a Portuguese student with a very interesting history (seriously, click on his name and learn more about him!) named Lionel Lombard. At our pre-instruction interview, Lionel mentioned that he had a friend who just joined Peace Corps and was going to Namibia in July to work in education. This was an amazing thing to hear, because there are something like seventy (my estimate) people going to Namibia with Peace Corps this year. Those seventy people will be divided into PC's different projects in Namibia: education, community health and HIV/AIDS, and small business development. So that means Lionel introduced me to one of the fifty-or-less people in the United States of America with whom I will be training in Windhoek for three months before each of us departs to his/her assignment!

Mark at Lake Titicaca, June 2011

My new friend's name is Mark Burgunder. Meeting Mark makes me enthusiastic about what I will potentially have in common with my fellow volunteers. He comes across as quietly energetic and enthusiastic about sharing his life lessons and talents with other people. We found out we are both keen to use art and music as a way to allow students greater insight into themselves. He is a native of San Diego, California, and graduated with a B.A. in English Writing and Literature from Loyola University New Orleans in 2010. Then he went to Cusco, Peru, earned his TESOL certification, and taught English for a year.  After that, he traveled to other countries in Latin America and worked as a ranch hand in Glennville, CA. He moved back to New Orleans near the end of 2012.

Mark tells me that he found out that Peace Corps alternates between sending volunteers to the North and South of Namibia and that we will most likely be sent to the South, which is exciting! He also has a plethora of books and media he has found on Namibia that we will be exchanging before we leave. We only met up a couple of times over the course of the two months I was in New Orleans, but it's such a relief to know at least one person who will be in the same country as I for the next two years!