DRAPER — Katie Lee gained a love for the Peace Corps while studying international issues and history at the University of Utah, where she was a 2008 graduate. She graduated from Juan Diego Catholic High School in 2004, where she learned social justice and a love for volunteering. "Through personal relationships and school experiences, I knew the Peace Corps was something I always wanted to do," said Lee. Lee joined the Peace Corps in 2009 and volunteered for 27 months. A Peace Corps volunteer assignment is for two years with three months of training. She was assigned to a community health position in Peru, and returned last October. Lee was born in Limerick, Ireland, and moved to England with her family when she was 6. The family moved to Atlanta, Ga., when she was 9, and then to Utah when she was 13. "We arrived in very good timing, just as the Skaggs Catholic Center opened in 1999 and I became a student at Saint John the Baptist Middle School," Lee said. Life in the Peace Corps was much different for Lee than in Utah. She lived in Peru in an impoverished village of about 100 people in the Andes Mountains about 18 hours outside of Lima. "I worked doing health promotion projects for people in the village," Lee said. "Among my projects was one in which I worked with about 30 mothers with children under 5 years old. We covered nutrition, prevention of parasitic infections and also the implementation of an improved cooking stove with a grant I received through funding from Utah through the Saint John the Baptist Social Justice fund as well as funding from a national Rotary Club." The mothers Lee worked with had severe upper respiratory infections because they cooked over open-fire stone stoves in the ground and inhaled the smoke, Lee said. The mothers often carry their children on their backs while they cooked and they also inhaled the smoke, Lee said. "Within that project, if the women attended the arranged meetings to learn about other important health practices, they could receive a stove," Lee said. "In the meetings, I taught them water purification techniques, nutrition, general hygiene and how to grow a communal garden for their own consumption." Lee said the participants paid for the construction of the stove and the grant paid for all the materials and the building of the stoves. "The Peace Corps wants the people to be participants and not just recipients of the stoves," Lee said. "We wanted them to earn it and learn from the experience." The Peace Corps has three goals. "The first being technical development from a project," Lee said. "The goal is familiar understanding and intercultural exchange in a sustainable way such as the improved stoves. The second goal is to promote the understanding of Americans to people of other countries. And the third goal is to promote the understanding of people of other countries we serve to Americans." Day-to-day life in the Peace Corps brought a myriad of cross-cultural experiences, especially in a tiny village such as the one in which Lee lived. "The hardest thing wasn’t going to the bathroom in the middle of a field under a tarp," Lee said. "It was that I had come to know and love these people. But if it got too hard, I knew I could leave. As a volunteer I had a sense of responsibility for the people to stay with them. "This experience has changed what I want to do in life," Lee said. "I was interested in refugee health, but now I would like to study nursing and specifically maternal and child health."
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