Brian Connors, a Duxbury native, works for the Peace Corps in Malawi helping local farmers and businesses. Despite the fact that Connors described his job as “one step away from the villages,” he often ventures out to check up on projects and visit with local villagers.
There’s a saying that if you give a man a fish, he eats for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime.
Brian Connors is teaching men to fish.
Connors, a Duxbury High School graduate, works for the Peace Corps, a government agency dedicated to promoting world peace and friendship, according to their Web site. He is stationed in Malawi, an African nation wrapped around the 10th largest lake in the world (Lake Nyasa) and surrounded by Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique.
His job as Assistant Director of Environmental Program has him overseeing 40 Peace Corps volunteers.
His job involves small enterprise development, agriculture and water projects. Most important, he and his staff are trying to encourage local farmers to rotate other crops into the Malawi staple, maize, to improve nutrition and to keep fields from going fallow.
“The forest in Malawi has the fastest rate of deforestation in Southern Africa,” Connors said. “Everyone grows maize. What are you planting with that that’s complementary?”
Connors described his job as being “one step away from the villages.” Rather than working with the local people directly, Connors supervises his volunteers and coordinates projects from Malawi’s capital and major commercial center of Lilongwe. He calls his role that of “community educator.”
“My job is finding local people who are interested in improving conditions in their life,” he said.
One of the ironies of a vast undeveloped land like Malawi is that although the land abounds with natural splendor, due to the immense poverty conservation is the last thing on people’s minds. "People won't connserve if they’re not healthy, if they’re not educated and if they can’t feed themselves,” Connors said. “We’re trying to help them be more self-sufficient.”
He said that in many ways, environmentalism is a first world luxury.
“We see the impact of poverty on the environment. It’s such a strong impact, it’s so intense,” he said.
Connors has worked in Malawi with the Peace Corps for 2 1/2 years.
“I always had the idea of going to Africa,” he said. In college, he minored in Afro-American studies and learned Swahili.
It isn’t his first stint with the organization, however.
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After college, Connors moved to rural Alaska and worked odd jobs for seven years.
“If you move to a small island in Alaska you do anything you can to survive.”
His parents, Don and Peggy Connors of Duxbury, had friends in the Peace Corps while he was growing up, and he latched on to the idea.
“Community service has always been in my blood,” he said.
Connor’s first experience with volunteerism occurred in Duxbury. While in high school he went with a group, which he describes as a precursor Habitat for Humanity, to West Virginia to build houses and repair windows.
“Joining the Peace Corps was a natural extension of that,” he said. “I just never lost it. I’ve always had that direction in mind.”
In 1990, Connors volunteered for the Peace Corps in Kenya. Not only did he find his future career, he also met his wife, Ann.
Together they moved to neighboring Tanzania and ran a wildlife conservation area for several years before moving back to Alaska, where Connors worked for a non-profit and the couple started a family. Maria is now 10, Nicholas, 6, and Caroline 3.
But after several years, the call of Africa, and the Peace Corps, beckoned.
When Connors’ third child Caroline was born in 2005, he started looking into the Peace Corps jobs.
“Sixth months later, we were headed to Malawi,” he said. “We knew when we left Africa in 1996 that we wanted to go back.”
He and his wife are glad for the opportunity to give their children a view of the world many Americans don’t get to see.
“Our children are growing up with an appreciation of a world, rather than just a place,” he said. “They get to see village life. It’s real to them.”
The family recently came to the United States for the first time in 2 1/2 years, and Connors admitted there has been some “culture shock.”
“That’s a long time. It’s been good to come to Duxbury and touch base.”
Working in the Peace Corps has been a rewarding experience for Connors, although he said people who work in jobs like his don’t always see a direct result for their work.
“You often don’t know you’re successful until years later,” he said.
Mostly, Connors sees the result of his team’s work in the faces of the volunteers. People will come to him, excited after a village elder or other local figure comes to an understanding about a particular agricultural program.
“Then they’re excited. There’s a sense of accomplishment,” he said.
As an example, Connors told the story of two Peace Corps volunteers picked up by a local man who, when he saw where his two passengers were from, loudly exclaimed that the Peace Corps had “saved his life.”
It turned out the man has contracted tuberculosis, and a Peace Corps worker known as “The Pope” worked with the man’s father to get him treatment at a clinic. Connors knew “The Pope” from his work in the country, and eventually relayed the story.
“He found out 40 years later that the work he did had an impact,” Connors said. “If you’re working with people, your results may not be known in your lifetime.”
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