Graphic by Emma Skeels/Old Gold & Black
Ever since he visited Rwanda in the seventh grade with his parents, senior Ty Kraniak has had a passion for traveling and for global health issues.
While in Rwanda, Kraniak met former Peace Corps volunteers who had stayed in the country to continue working. Over the years, he traveled to other countries in Africa and in Latin America, where he met more current and former Peace Corps volunteers who inspired him to apply.
“I was really impressed with them,” Kraniak said. “I thought it was really cool what they were doing — making lasting changes to their communities, because they are there for two and a half years.”
Now, nine years later, he prepares to go back to Rwanda, this time as a Peace Corps community health volunteer.
The Peace Corps is a service organization that sends volunteers to various countries worldwide to effect sustainable changes in their communities. There are currently over 6,000 volunteers working in 64 different countries.
The Peace Corps recently announced its 2015 rankings of the top volunteer-producing colleges and universities across the country.
This year, Wake Forest ranks No. 20 among small schools, classified as less than 5,000 undergraduates. The last time the university ranked in the top 20 was in 2012.
Furthermore, Wake Forest is the sixth highest producer of Peace Corps volunteers in North Carolina this year and ranks fifth on the all-time list of top volunteer-producing institutions in the state.
Since 1961, 218 Wake Forest alumni have served in the Peace Corps after graduation, and there are currently nine alumni volunteering worldwide.
“I think that our motto speaks for itself to some extent,” said Penny Rue, vice president of student life. “I think we do a nice job of helping people understand their obligation to give back in whatever form it takes. I do think our emphasis on global travel probably does influence our participation in the Peace Corps.”
This focus on a global education certainly influenced alumna Elizabeth Haight, who graduated from Wake Forest in 2010 with a degree in political science and Spanish. She then went on to serve in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic, training health promoters and youth groups on sexual and reproductive health and HIV prevention.
“My coursework and extracurricular activities helped me hone my interest in pro humanitate endeavors, but it was a Wake Forest summer service-learning course in Nicaragua that clinched it for me,” said Haight. “After that I was determined to work in community development.”
Similarly, Kraniak spent a semester studying abroad through the Wake Forest program in Salamanca, Spain before applying to the Peace Corps.
Kraniak will leave for Rwanda just two weeks after he graduates from Wake Forest in May.
He will live and work there for two years and three months, with only two vacation days per month.
As a community health volunteer, Kraniak will be assigned to a hospital where he will try to find ways to make operations in the hospital more efficient. He will also be tasked with jobs such as finding ways to prevent malaria outbreaks, perhaps by partnering with American businesses to bring malaria nets to the villages, and trying to increase awareness and prevention of HIV/AIDS in the community.
Photo courtesy of Daniel Kim-Shapiro
Another aspect of his work there will be educating people about nutrition — for example, working with local farmers to grow more nutritious crops, such as sweet potatoes, instead of less-healthy crops, like potatoes.
“I really hope that I can make some lasting change and help some people there. That’s the main reason why I’m doing it,” Kraniak said. “I also really love adventure, and I really love doing things that are different. I find it fun and interesting to be in an environment where I’m kind of an outsider. You never know what you’re going to find; you never know what’s going to happen in a day. I kind of like that edge to life.”
Daniel Kim-Shapiro, professor of physics, found that his experience serving in the Peace Corps in Zaire — now the Democratic Republic of the Congo — truly expanded his worldview.
“I walked away with an appreciation of the way other people are in the world, how we’re all sort of the same but just with different cultures, and how privileged really all Americans are compared to people living in Zaire or other places,” Kim-Shapiro said.
As a double major in anthropology and Spanish, Kraniak aims to go into global health after his time in Rwanda. He has already been accepted into graduate global health programs at University of Pennsylvania and Emory University. From there, he hopes to go into a governmental job where he can work on global health.
“What happens in the world with health affects Americans, as we can see by the Ebola outbreak,” Kraniak said. “I think our government’s realizing that, and there are a lot of global health positions that are really important for the health of the American people.”