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AI: Well, so this was in the early '90s, and during this time, you were doing some site visiting. You were actually, as you were mentioning, traveling through these countries and visiting the sites where some of these products were being used, where the projects were underway, and where you had funded some programs. But this was also a time of a lot of conflict in, in most of these areas, and I'm wondering, did any of the political conflicts or the violence actually, and wars affect you in any way while you were traveling?

PJ: Well, yeah, I mean, in, in kind of just in terms of the deals that we were doing, we had, I mean, we would have coups breaking out in countries. I mean, we funded this project in Sierra Leone, which never got off the ground because there was a coup. And luckily, we hadn't transferred the money -- [laughs] -- but, you know, that was a constant sort of -- just from a practical standpoint. But I think, just in terms of my overall perception of the world, it was this whole new thing because now I was running this project, and it was integrally tied to politics, and it was so exciting to me that I was finally doing something that wasn't separated from my desire to be kind of involved in the world. And it was really the first time that I got to do that. The world economy, or the world political situation or whatever, was not tangential, but it was central. So I think that's how I remember it the most. In terms of my safety, there were always those kinds of issues, where you didn't know. Could you, could you go to Sierra Leone? Was it safe? Should you not go, you know, to wherever? Brazil, was it safe to go travel -- and, you know, as a woman, young, pretty young woman, to go traveling around on your own in countries that you don't know, I guess some people would think of that as scary. But I wrote an essay called, in a collection called, "A Woman Alone," that was about women doing solo travel. And the editor had called me to ask if I would write a piece, and I said, "Yes," and I fully thought -- and she fully thought -- that I would write about some of these experiences. You know, kind of going to some country and traveling on my own. And actually, what I ended up writing about was, after I ended up getting divorced, a trip that I made to the Wallawas, to Eastern Oregon, and how much I hate to drive in the snow, and this long trip, and kind of the emotional journey of what you go through in a situation like that. Because, in some ways, that felt more foreign to me than the physical journey of going to a new country. I was raised with that sense of adventure and that sense of, kind of exploration as being a part of it. And so the job felt perfect in that way.

AI: Well, it sounds like it was an exciting time, and a lot of exciting places, and to be able to introduce things that you could see were making a tangible difference.

PJ: Yeah, that was really wonderful. I think the thing that was hard about it was that the development world has just as much classism, racism, bureaucracy as the... maybe not as much, but you have different expectations, and so it feels like as much as a for-profit world. And I think that's eventually what had me leave; I stayed there until 1995 and then I really felt like I wanted to go. There were just too many people that were involved in that world who were making policies and programs for people living in villages, and they never had visited those villages, or had any idea of the culture or what the situation was. It just felt so hypocritical to me that I was becoming a part of that, part of that system. And the higher I moved, I was also one of the only women of color, I was one of the few international people in senior management, everybody else was white, which felt very -- so I went through a big struggle within the organization around diversity and expanding diversity within the organization, and it just felt like it was time for me to move on.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.