MARGARITA: A Guatemalan Peace Corps Experience

Margaret DeMoss Casebolt

Some years after graduating from Washington State University in Pullman, the author made a decision to join the Peace Corps. In 1988 she was assigned to serve as a nutritionist in a health center in southeastern Guatemala. In her field of home economics and education, she started women's groups, taught public health in local schools, and worked at the health center with Guatemalan medical interns and with a nurse, especially weighing and measuring babies. Since her name could not be translated into Spanish, everyone called her Margarita. In her two years of living and working in the small, poverty-stricken village of Llano Grande, she felt totally accepted because of the wonderful people