English Lit Degree Pays Off

Vickery Prongay '89

by Lorraine Berry

When you're a liberal arts major, you get used to the question, "So what are you going to do with that degree?" Vickery Prongay '89 discovered the answer when her degree provided her with valuable tools in Tormelin, Guinea. "I was an English lit major," she explains. "The best thing I learned was that understanding the context in which a work was written --- the politics of the time, the social mores, the ways in which people spent their time, etcetera --- enabled a far deeper appreciation of the book than if it were to be read in isolation. That principle of striving to know all that surrounds a central idea or event has been critical to my international work and especially to my work in Peace Corps."

Prongay was a community development health worker. "The primary things I did week to week were to help improve the functioning of the village health center, arrange midwife trainings in villages around my region, and coordinate conferences for girls in the region.

"Unofficially," she continues, "my job was to entertain my neighbor kids. I did everything from teaching them how to read all the big maps I kept on my wall to how to blow on a blade of grass and achieve something akin to a bird call."

In looking back on what she accomplished during her term as a Peace Corps volunteer, Prongay struggles to quantify things that perhaps are uncountable, something that seems to be a problem for many of the Peace Corps volunteers in talking about their experiences. "Every quarter while I was there, I wrote up a report on the work I'd done, and most of the time found it difficult to quantify," says Prongay. "I've no doubt that kids in Tormelin are still doing the blade of grass bird call I taught them, for example, but whether or not the midwife trainings I arranged made a statistically significant difference in the infant mortality rates and improved overall maternal health, I've no idea."

Prongay's international work has continued since her return from the Peace Corps. She was offered her first job before she left Africa, and after a brief vacation trip to France, she returned as Africa director for Earth Day 2000. In 2001 she was made assistant director of international programs for Earth Day Network, which enabled Prongay to travel in Latin America and Asia.

This past year has seen some major changes in Prongay's life. As she explains, "I've just finished my master's in public administration and international development at the University of Washington and am continuing with contract work I began for my thesis. My husband, Kevin McCall, and I recently moved to a beautiful spot in the foothills of the Cascades where deer sneak up and nibble the tops off my roses at night."

And their daughter, Naya Rielle, was born July 26. It is nice to imagine that in a few years there will be a small child in Washington and a child in Guinea, both calling birds with their blades of grass, both having been taught by an Ithaca College English lit major.