August 22, 2026
In just a few days, I will leave the United States and begin 27 months of Peace Corps service in Madagascar.
Even writing that sentence still feels a little surreal.
For the next two years, I will be serving as a Food Security Promoter, living in a community somewhere in Madagascar and working alongside local farmers and community members. Before I leave, I wanted to answer some of the questions I have been asked most often—and some that I have been asking myself.
Why Peace Corps? Why agriculture? Why Madagascar? And what exactly am I hoping will come from the next 27 months?
Why Peace Corps?
In some ways, the desire to serve others has been part of my life for a long time.
I grew up in Scouting, where service is woven into almost everything we do. The Scout Law asks Scouts to be helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, and loyal, among other things. Those words can easily become something you recite at the beginning of a meeting, but over time I came to understand them more as expectations for how you should interact with the people and communities around you.
Scouting taught me that service does not always have to be dramatic. Sometimes it means leading. Sometimes it means teaching. Sometimes it means doing the job nobody else wants to do. And very often, it simply means showing up consistently and being willing to help.
That idea followed me into my studies in international development.
During graduate school, I spent a great deal of time reading about community-led development, locally led development, participatory approaches, and the importance of designing programs around the priorities and knowledge of the people who actually live in the communities where development work takes place.
Those ideas make sense on paper.
But I wanted the opportunity to see what they mean in practice.
Peace Corps offered me the chance to move beyond studying bottom-up development and spend two years trying to practice it—to live in a community, listen before acting, build relationships, and learn what development looks like from the ground level.
Just as importantly, I wanted the opportunity to learn from people who work in agriculture every day.
I have studied food security and agricultural development academically. Now I want to learn from farmers.
And, quite literally, I want to learn how to farm.
Why Agriculture and Food Security?
My interest in agriculture began somewhat accidentally.
Throughout middle and high school, I participated in the Pennsylvania Envirothon, an environmental education competition covering subjects such as forestry, wildlife, aquatics, soils and land use, and environmental issues.
At first, forestry seemed like the obvious subject for me. Through Scouting, I could already identify quite a few trees and was comfortable spending time in the woods.
But our team needed someone to cover soils and land use.
It was not exactly the most sought-after position.
So I volunteered.
Because there was relatively little support available for the subject, I had to seek out people who knew more than I did. I eventually connected with a former principal and educator who had studied soils at university and was willing to help me learn.
What started as filling an empty position on an Envirothon team became something I took very seriously. I studied soil horizons, erosion, drainage, land capability, soil texture, conservation practices, and the ways that human decisions affect the land beneath us.
Eventually, I competed in two statewide Envirothon competitions and, at one point, ranked 17th in Pennsylvania in the soils and land-use portion of the competition.
More important than the ranking, though, was what happened as I kept reading.
I began learning about the degradation of soils around the world and the consequences that degradation can have for food production.
Healthy soil sits underneath nearly everything else in agriculture. If soils lose nutrients, erode, compact, or become less productive, that eventually affects the crops farmers can grow, the food available to households, and the resilience of entire food systems.
From soils, my interests expanded outward.
I became interested in agriculture, then in food systems, and eventually in food security: who has access to sufficient, nutritious food, who does not, and why.
That led me toward smallholder agriculture and the millions of farmers around the world whose livelihoods and food security are closely tied to what they can produce from relatively small plots of land.
It is one thing to study those systems from a classroom.
I am excited—and humbled—to have the chance to learn about them directly from people who live and work within them every day.
Why Madagascar?
My path to Madagascar was less romantic than people sometimes expect.
When I applied to Peace Corps, there were two agriculture-sector positions available that interested me: one in Jamaica and one in Madagascar.
The Madagascar position was specifically described as a Food Security Promoter. The Jamaica position, by comparison, had a stronger business and entrepreneurship component.
Because my academic background is much more closely connected to food security, agriculture, and development than to business, Madagascar seemed like the position where my existing experience would be most useful.
So I applied.
At that point, I certainly did not know Madagascar as well as I do now.
Since being accepted, however, I have spent months reading about the country—its history, ecosystems, agriculture, languages, food, biodiversity, and culture.
And somewhere along the way, Madagascar stopped simply being the country where my Peace Corps position happened to be located.
It became somewhere I was genuinely excited to call home.
Madagascar is extraordinarily diverse. Over the next two years, I hope to experience at least some of that diversity firsthand—from the vanilla-growing regions of the northeast to the dramatically drier landscapes and spiny forests of the south.
But more than seeing Madagascar, I want to understand the small part of it that will eventually become my community.
What Do I Hope to Learn?
The short answer is: as much as I possibly can.
I want to learn Malagasy.
I want to understand local traditions, histories, and ways of thinking.
I want to learn how people farm in my community: what they plant, when they plant it, how they understand their soils, how they respond to drought or heavy rains, how families divide agricultural work, and what knowledge has been passed from one generation to another.
I want to learn to farm alongside them rather than simply talk about agriculture.
I want to understand how local markets function, where food travels after harvest, what challenges farmers identify for themselves, and what food security actually looks like at the household and community level.
I also hope to travel when circumstances allow and learn about parts of Madagascar very different from wherever I am ultimately placed.
But one of the most important things I hope to learn is something harder to put into a checklist:
how to listen well.
I am arriving with degrees, research experience, and some international field experience.
None of those things make me an expert on the community where I will live.
The people who live there are the experts on that.
My job first is to learn.
What Do I Hope to Contribute?
This is probably the question I am least able to answer right now.
And I think that is appropriate.
I have some experiences that may eventually be useful. My studies have focused on food security and agricultural development, and previous fieldwork in places such as Malawi and Zimbabwe has given me some exposure to agricultural development challenges in southern Africa.
But Madagascar will be different.
My future community will have its own priorities, strengths, problems, institutions, and knowledge.
It would be strange for me to decide from thousands of miles away what I am going to contribute before I have even met the people I will be working with.
For now, I know I can contribute my time and my labor.
I can show up.
I can listen.
I can work alongside people.
I can share knowledge when it is useful and ask questions when I do not know something.
Over time, I hope that my community and I will identify ways in which my background can complement the knowledge and skills that already exist there.
What those opportunities will look like, I genuinely do not know yet.
That uncertainty is part of the point.
What Am I Nervous About?
Language.
Definitely language.
Before beginning service at my permanent site, I will spend roughly ten weeks in pre-service training studying Malagasy, technical skills, culture, and the practical realities of living in Madagascar.
Then I will move into a community where people may also speak a regional dialect or variety of Malagasy.
I know that language will determine how well I can integrate into my community.
Without it, it will be difficult to understand what people care about, build close relationships, participate fully in daily life, or understand where I might actually be useful.
That makes the language-learning process exciting.
It also makes it intimidating.
Ten weeks is not a very long time.
I expect there will be plenty of embarrassing mistakes, confused conversations, and moments when I desperately wish I could express something that my vocabulary simply does not allow me to say yet.
But I also know that every conversation will make the next one a little easier.
My goal is not simply to pass a language test.
I want eventually to reach the point where Malagasy becomes part of my everyday life—where I can joke with people, ask meaningful questions, understand stories, participate in meetings, and have conversations that go beyond the basic necessities of daily living.
That will take much longer than ten weeks.
And that is okay.
What Would Make These 27 Months Worthwhile?
Before leaving, it is tempting to make a list of things I want to accomplish.
Learn Malagasy.
Complete a project.
Start another project.
Travel to certain places.
Reach particular professional milestones.
But I suspect Peace Corps service may resist being measured that neatly.
Projects take time.
Trust takes time.
Learning a language takes time.
Understanding another community takes a very long time.
So perhaps the better measure of success is whether, by the end of these 27 months, the place where I am assigned feels less like “my Peace Corps site” and more like a community of people I genuinely know and care about.
I hope I can speak Malagasy well enough to participate meaningfully in community life.
I hope I can understand considerably more about farming and food security than I do today.
I hope that people in my community see me not simply as an American volunteer who spent two years there, but as someone who showed up, listened, worked, learned, and tried to be useful.
And yes, I hope that during that time I can help support one or two meaningful projects that the community itself wants and can continue after I leave.
But if I finish these 27 months having built real relationships, learned from the people around me, contributed something useful, and become a better listener and development practitioner, I think that will be a service well spent.
Right now, though, all of that is still ahead of me.
My bags are almost packed.
My Malagasy vocabulary is still extremely small.
And somewhere in Madagascar is a community I have not met yet that will soon become home.
I have a lot to learn, and I cannot wait to begin.
This is the first in a series of dispatches documenting my 27 months of Peace Corps service in Madagascar.
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