by Lorraine Berry

Speech pathology and audiology graduate Pamela Rodes '77 was working as a communications manager with a mutual fund firm --- a career she found not entirely satisfying. Then, she remembers, "My sister threw me a 40th birthday party. She made a video of my life. It included an essay I had written at 10 in which I had listed my life goals, [including one] to be in the Peace Corps. I thought, 'I've been seeing a career counselor for months, and yet at 10 I knew what I wanted to do.' "

So in 1996 Rodes found herself in the Peace Corps in Iasi, Romania, working as an NGO consultant, helping nonprofits with aspects of communications --- newsletters, grants, and the setup of an HIV/AIDS resource center.

Fluent in Romanian, she traveled in isolated areas. "A friend and I traveled to a region where it was as if we had stepped back a century in time," she says. "I approached three old men sitting on a bench and asked them where we might stay. 'You can stay with me,' one of them told us. We wound up at this leaning wooden house, welcomed by an old, toothless woman. After dinner the family entertained us all night with traditional dancing. I took photos. A year later I was traveling [near there] again and went to drop off the photos. The old woman came out, and as if I had been gone five minutes she said, 'So where have you been?' She then filled me in on everything that had happened that year.I had spent only one night with that family, and yet I was welcomed back as if I was returning home."