Where the Heart Is

by Lorraine Berry

In 1991 Gretchen "Gigi" Goodhart '85 had a great job working as a freelance production coordinator on TV commercials and music videos; she planned to use a stint in Africa with the Peace Corps as a springboard for moving into documentary film production. Instead, she discovered a whole new talent.

Goodhart was assigned by the Peace Corps to Cape Verde, a small group of islands off the west coast of Africa. Today the onetime communications management major lives and works in neighboring Guinea-Bissau with her husband, Raúl Monteiro Baptista de Pina, a native of Cape Verde, and their three-year old son, Alexandro. There she directs various community enterprise projects, living happily under African skies.

"I lived on the island of Fogo," she says. (The island itself is an active volcano that last erupted in 1995.) "I was a small-business development volunteer, and, as the only Peace Corps volunteer (PCV) with that type of job, I was fortunate enough to support PCVs [who had other duties] on other islands. Most of my work was in the field, executing extension-based activities. I helped groups of youths start chicken cooperatives, taught a community how to open a goat-cheese production business, worked with artisanal fishermen [who fish from small, homemade boats, using long lines], and taught semiliterate and illiterate women how to keep business records and simple accounting books, using mainly pictures and crosshatch counting methods. I went a little more 'corporate' when I designed a credit program to support agricultural development on two of the islands."

It's not uncommon for returned PCVs to feel overwhelmed upon their return to the States, and Goodhart (back right in photo) felt the experience intensely when she returned to her childhood home in Katonah, New York. "The bustle and pressure of life in the U.S.A. were a real shock," she says. "It is called 'reverse culture shock.' It seemed like there was so much made-up stress! What was the big deal? [Why] gripe because the train was late --- children were dying of the measles and diarrhea where I had just come from!" While Goodhart was happy to be near her family again, she wound up doing temporary work while she sorted out what she wanted to do next. She came to the inescapable conclusion that there was only one place for her to go: "back to Africa!"

Goodhart's return to that continent has been fraught with drama. In 1998 Guinea-Bissau was torn apart by civil war, and she and her husband holed up with his relatives in Cape Verde. But they lost virtually everything in the chaos, including Goodhart's IC diploma. [After learning this, the ICQ contacted the registrar, who issued a replacement.] She and her husband relocated to Boston, where they stayed three years. Goodhart worked as the regional administrator for the Boston Peace Corps office, while her husband was a quality control specialist at Ikon Office Solutions. Although they had ties to Boston --- their son Alexandro was born there --- it was clear that their hearts belonged to Africa.

In 2001, with things considerably more peaceful there, the family returned to Guinea-Bissau, where Goodhart is now working for Enterprise Works, an organization that supports the strengthening of the private sector in developing countries. She also directs a United States Agency for International Development private-enterprise development initiative focusing on cashew nut processing. "It is fantastic, albeit very challenging work," she says of both her jobs.

Goodhart says that she was always known as a thinker, and before she joined the Peace Corps a friend told her that Africa would be good for her because, she paraphrases, "I would have so much time on my hands that I would be able to philosophize endlessly." But that's not exactly how things transpired. "I was too busy actually living to analyze what life should be about," she smiles. "You can't beat that state of mind."