Alumni Update
Catherine Nourse (L) visits a Peace Corps volunteer in Guinea in 2005 as part of her job as associate director of public health for the Peace Corps.
Catherine Kling Nourse (BSFCS '91, Consumer Foods) was surprised—and a little frightened—as two women rapidly approached her at a Sierra Leone roadside stand, where she and a colleague had stopped to buy bananas. Having arrived in the West African country just days after peace had been declared, following an 11-year civil war, Nourse was working with Catholic Relief Services to establish health-education programs as the country began transitioning back to a stable government.
"First one woman started yelling," Nourse recalls. "Then another one started yelling too and together they ran toward me. When they reached me they were talking really fast and—my Krio isn't very good—I didn't know what was going on." But as they began to pull notebooks filled with laminated flipcharts out of their torn satchels, Nourse realized that she had trained these young women three years earlier as peer health educators. At that time, they were living with 60,000 fellow refugees in a camp in the Republic of Guinea. Now, they were healthy and returning to their homes, still carrying their notebooks and proud that they would soon be leaders in their villages and communities, explaining issues surrounding reproductive health and the prevention of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections
A Labor of Love
Nourse and two colleagues take a break outside the Catholic Relief Services field office in Kenema, Sierra Leone, in 2002.
Seated in Dawson Hall, Nourse recalls the Peace Corps ad she saw as a high schooler that started her on the path of international development. "It showed this guy standing in a flooded field casting a net. He looks back at the camera and says, 'It's the toughest job you'll ever love.'" Having spent much of the past 15 years in a series of international positions, including several with the Peace Corps, Nourse clearly shares the ad's sentiment.
Her adventures began when, soon after earning her undergraduate degree, she joined the Peace Corps. She spent two years as a volunteer in the Central African country of Cameroon, working as a health educator in the town of Kalaldi and providing outreach programs to communities up to 60 kilometers away.
During a recent conversation with her college sorority sisters, Nourse learned that her letters from Cameroon had turned her into a bit of a celebrity. "They remembered that I had written them about killing two snakes in my house," she says, laughing. "But the story grew into this whole drama where I slept with a machete under my pillow and had killed two highly poisonous snakes. I did have a machete, though I kept it by my door so I wouldn't forget it when it was time to farm. I would pitch in when I met with a women's group in the fields where they were farming. I'm not sure that the snakes were even poisonous!"
Although she laughs at many memories of her days in the Peace Corps, Nourse did have some serious experiences while in Cameroon, including the sparing of two young men who had broken into her house from being banished. "The village chief was afraid the Peace Corps would hear about the robbery and force me to leave the village; and the families of these young men depended on them for their labor." Ultimately, Nourse negotiated with the village elders and the chief to reduce the banishment to only six months, and she herself stayed put.
Helping "People Who Had Lost Everything"
Nourse meets with Bedouin women in Jericho, Palestine, in April 2009 as part of her work with Medical Aid for Palestinians.
After completing two years with the Peace Corps, Nourse returned to the United States, earned a master's degree in public health, and served as project director for an AmeriCorps program that provided health education to uninsured and underinsured individuals and families in Jefferson County, Ala., which includes Birmingham. When the program lost state funding, she landed a new job with the Crisis Corps (a short-term program for former Peace Corps members), working with the International Rescue Committee in the Republic of Guinea. Her assignment was to provide support to women who had been victims of violence, arrange for the reunification of families, provide health education, and train peer health educators (including the two who recognized her at the banana stand in Sierra Leone).
"I had never worked with people who had lost everything," she says. "I met people whose houses had been burned, their things taken, their spouses killed." During the nine months she was there, Nourse helped reunite 57 children with their families. "When a village was taken, the families would flee. If the parents of a 3-year-old child were killed, maybe another family would take the child in or spontaneously adopt him or her; maybe they would get the child to another village where there were aunts, uncles or other family members. Sometimes, children and their parents were simply separated as a result of the confusion associated with the attacks."
The longest separation that Nourse helped end involved a child who was 3 when he was separated from his family and 12 when reunited with his older brother and grandmother, his only known family survivors. The success of this reunification and others was the direct result of a shared database (among Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia) Nourse created while working for the IRC.
Following her work in Guinea, Nourse returned to the United States for a time but soon accepted a position with Catholic Relief Services based in Senegal. It was here where she met and fell in love with her future husband, Tim Nourse, a fellow CRS staffer who had been temporarily reassigned there, following the Sept. 11 attacks, from his base in Jerusalem. A long-distance romance followed, with Tim in the Middle East and Catherine on the west side of Africa. The couple reconnected in 2002 in Sierra Leone and eventually moved to Guinea, where Catherine served as an associate Peace Corps director for the public health project from 2003 to 2005, focusing on the control of malaria, promotion of childhood immunizations, and reproductive health education.
After marrying in 2004, the Nourses made their way to Washington, D.C., in 2005, where Catherine accepted a position as a Peace Corps technical advisor for community health. She provided technical assistance to 19 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Although they were in their native land, the couple still had a peripatetic existence. For example, Catherine traveled internationally on a regular basis—including a trip to Central Asia when she was several months pregnant—and soon after the birth of their son, Noah, in 2007, Tim traveled to Afghanistan for a month as part of his work in post-conflict micro-enterprise development.
In November 2008, the Nourses left for Ramallah, Palestine, where Tim began his current assignment as project director of a financial services expansion project. Catherine spent 18 months as a program manager for the British nongovernmental organization Medical Aid for Palestinians. As part of her assignment, Nourse was involved in the development of a neonatal intensive care unit at Al Awda Hospital in the Gaza Strip. "I don't typically work on infrastructure projects, but to see all seven of those beds occupied…," Nourse says, her voice trailing off with emotion, knowing that without the incubators and trained staff any of those seven babies would likely have died.
Adventures at Home and Abroad
Nourse walks with children in Guinea in 2004 as part of an annual event to promote road safety throughout the country.
Like other FACS students, Catherine Nourse's week before Spring Break is filled with tests and projects; she returned to UGA this past January to take the required courses for a dietetics internship and, she hopes, to earn a Registered Dietitian certification within a couple of years. Unlike her classmates, however, Nourse arrives for her final class pulling two full-sized suitcases, one packed with her clothing and hard-to-find items for Tim and Noah, the other filled with books requested by a friend. After class, she'll take the nearby shuttle to the Atlanta airport and an overnight flight to Tel Aviv, where she'll be met by Tim and Noah for the final leg of her trip home to Ramallah. The following Sunday, she'll repeat the process back to Athens.
"When I talk to Noah via Skype, he'll say, 'Right now, I'm having an adventure with Baba [the Arabic word for daddy]; but this fall I'll have an adventure with you,'" Nourse says, explaining that Noah will join her in Athens for the fall semester. By January, Tim will also move back to the States and the family plans to settle … somewhere! "We're not completely sure where we'll be," Catherine says, laughing at what appears to be a continuing nomadic existence. "We might be back in D.C., but we also have some leads on jobs in the Boston area, near where Tim's family has a berry farm."
Looking back, Nourse describes her decision to apply for the Peace Corps as a deeply influential turning point in her life. "Not a lot of people are convinced you can do it, not even you yourself," she says, "But you can do it, and I did do it. And being able to live, learn, and experience something completely different has truly been a gift that has served me again and again—service to others is service to yourself and your community—wherever that may be."
(Update: The Nourses' current plans are to return to Washington, D.C., in the fall, where they own a home. Tim has accepted a position as executive director with Making Cents International and Catherine plans to continue taking courses and preparing to become a Registered Dietitian. The couple will also continue working with the Olde Nourse Farm Gourmet business in their spare time.)
