Sonoma’s Peace Corps connection

The Peace Corps marks its 60-year anniversary this week and Taylor Rose Vick relishes the opportunity to tout its excellence.

“The Peace Corps changed my life so profoundly that I want people to know that it’s out there and that it’s a wonderful option,” she said. Vick was a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching high school English in Indonesia for two years, and then became an employee. She’s now enjoying a career as a placement supervisor at its headquarters in Washington D.C.

She was briefly back in the Sonoma Valley recently, visiting her parents, Vance and Kelly Rose, and celebrating her mom’s 60th birthday, as apparently 1961 was a year that teed up her bright future. She chatted in the garden about the public service agency founded by President John F. Kennedy through which 141,000 volunteers have served in 140 countries.

Vick graduated from Arizona State University in 2010 with a degree in journalism and worries that “print journalism is dying.” Having interned at the Sonoma Index-Tribune and Phoenix Home and Garden magazine and written for the Arizona Republic, she wasn’t convinced being a reporter was the road to follow.

“I didn’t really have a plan and my dad suggested I look into the Peace Corps. I applied right away.” She was thrilled when she was accepted and off to Southeast Asia. She had spent a summer in Europe and studied for a year in London, but this was to be a monumental journey. “It was really hard to leave because everything was so unknown, but my family was so supportive and the Peace Corps provides incredible training.”

She flew to Indonesia with a cohort of 30 volunteers and began three months of intense training in the native language and culture. Then each member of her group was off to their individual assignments. She settled in with her host family in Madura and began teaching 10th and 11th graders how to improve their English.

Her students had some English training, but her host family didn’t speak any English at all. “You have to learn if you want to eat or get somewhere, and especially in the beginning there’s a lot of miming,” she said. During her two years there she learned to speak Bahasa Indonesia fluently. “It has the same alphabet, which is very helpful,” she said.

“One of the highlights of my service was that the students were amazing. Kind, funny, helpful and so eager to learn,” she said.

Another joy attained through her service was friendship. She is still close with 20 members of her cohort group, and they will be getting together for a 10-year anniversary later this year. And Vick has returned to visit twice. “I will have a lifelong connection to my host family.”

Her parents visited her twice while she was away, and they traveled together to Vietnam and Thailand. Her mother also made an unplanned trip when Vick contracted Dengue fever and spent a few days in the hospital before making a complete recovery.

She took another opportunity to travel when her service was complete, eventually returning to Sonoma and pursuing a career with the Peace Corps. She started as an intern, which led her to a post as a senior placement specialist in California and eventually to her current supervisor role in D.C.

Before her move to the East Coast a mutual friend suggested she get together there with another Sonoman, Ben Vick, a young attorney doing post-graduate study at Georgetown University. The couple married in 2017.

Taylor attended Dunbar Elementary School, was in the first graduating class at Adele Middle School and was in the class of 2006 at Sonoma Valley High School. Ben attended St. Francis Solano and Justin Siena and graduated from Santa Clara University and Boston University law school.

The couple enjoys living and working in the nation’s capital. “We both love D.C. It’s a very young, friendly city.”

COVID has created an unusual time for the Peace Corps, as it has for almost every organization. All 6,000 current volunteers throughout the world were flown home from their assignments early last year and it is unknown when they will return or when new volunteers will be assigned.

Vick is nonetheless hopeful about the Peace Corps future and the opportunities it offers. “The way your family and your country does something is just one way. It is amazing to learn about different ways other people live. And to be taken in and treated like a family member by another family is really incredible.”