Interview with Shannon Brooks, January 1, 1970

Interview Summary

Peace Corps appealed to Brooks because she comes from service-oriented families. As an “Army brat,” she’d visited Panama before arriving in Cabuya Arriba, her remote mountain village. Her first order of business was to build herself a house. The villagers helped Brooks build her house; in turn, she worked alongside them in their fields. A new concept for villagers was to grow crops well and continuously on one piece of land. Brooks introduced a few techniques, such as contouring and minimum tillage of the soil for erosion control and as a labor saving techniques and using legumes as green manures. In retrospect, Brooks thinks that she was an “anomaly” to village women: a single woman living alone in a foreign land doing “men’s work.” She hopes that she provided the women a different way of thinking about their lives. In the process, she learned that the lack of expertise doesn’t mean you can’t contribute to the work; she learned that she was “bull-headedly” independent; she learned that joining the PC was “not a mainstream choice;” she hopes that she made a difference in at least one person’s life.

Interview Keyword

Panama "Army brat" Cabuya Arriba Mountain village House Contouring Minimum tillage Soil erosion Legumes Green manure Lack of experience Independent Differencde

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