No electricity. No running water. No cellphone service. When Friends Academy alum Trevor Dineen ’16 first arrived in a small African village as a member of the Peace Corps two years ago, he struggled to find comfort in a most unfamiliar territory. No, it wasn’t the lack of first-world amenities.
It was the unmistakable feeling of being an outsider.
Posted in Zambia, a landlocked country in South Central Africa, Trevor wasn’t just new to the Peace Corps, he was also a “trailblazer” — meaning no one from the Peace Corps had ever worked in this village of roughly 25 people before he and six colleagues began their two-year mission to assist with health, education, agriculture, and clean water projects.
Trevor anticipated not having electricity or running water, but the lack of cellphone coverage, he says, “was very confusing for me.” Throughout his first several days there, he walked around the village, phone in hand, searching for a signal that never connected.
“I would get laughed at by the villagers every day,” he says. “They told me I didn’t know how to live there. They thought I was crazy.
“Just being an outsider like that was one of the most uncomfortable scenarios I’ve ever found myself in,” he adds, “but it helped me learn one of the most important lessons. You have to be able to laugh at yourself for people to trust you.”
As a prelude to Peace Week, Trevor returned to Friends Academy to speak to Middle School students and host a Lunch & Learn session in Frost Hall with Upper School students and faculty. He focused on the theme of peace and shared how his lived experiences changed his understanding of what peace means.
“Peace sounds really gentle, but my time in Zambia taught me that it’s demanding,” he said. “It’s upfront, personal, and in your face. You have to live with this practice of peace every day and every moment. It’s not fluffy. It’s not looking through rose-colored glasses. It’s hard. It’s sort of everything you don't expect it to be.”
For Trevor, living with peace and creating peace meant slowing down, leaning into discomfort, and forming relationships by living with others rather than living amongst them. Beyond the humility of laughing at himself, he says, he found his place in the community by leaning into curiosity, empathy, and thoughtful choices — ingredients that led to deeper trust and people asking for his help when larger issues popped up.
Trevor was sought out when a neighbor’s water pump, the only one in the village, stopped working. He knew exactly what to do, especially since he’d found a cellphone connection a mile outside the village. He made the walk to what he called his “internet tree” and put in a call to a larger town for repair help.
Help would arrive the next day, he was told — a message that would be repeated multiple times until help arrived nearly two weeks later. In the meantime, Trevor pivoted and sourced water from another village that was out of the way but not impossible to reach.
“Patience is ingrained in the Zambian lifestyle. That was an adjustment I had to make,” Trevor says. “I had to rewire my brain. Maybe things are more rewarding when you have to wait for them.”
Another way he felt compelled to rewire his brain: “Doing less was harder than doing more,” he says. “I spent a lot of time not doing anything, to explain it through a Western lens, that I could put on my résumé. But I was doing the hard work to become a part of the community and be welcomed into it. A big part of my job was just simply existing and talking with my neighbors.”
Across Zambia, a nation of some 21 million people, people speak 72 different dialects. “I learned about one and a half,” says Trevor, who also learned that peace can be defined through actions in ways that words might not suffice.
“Peace in the Zambian context means greeting your neighbor three times a day,” he says. “Those three greetings make your world a lot smaller, a lot more purposeful, and that is something that has really stayed with me — how important it is to just greet people and acknowledge human existence.”
In Africa, Trevor lost connection with global affairs and fell into a rhythmic sun-up, sun-down way of life.
“I didn‘t have a radio because I didn‘t think to bring a radio,” he says, “and so all I knew was what I was talking about or doing at the moment. Every night, that usually just meant us all playing a soccer game. My life was my community.”
For Peace Week at Friends Academy, Trevor offered a query: What does peace look like in the way we treat people each day?
It was, and remains, a personal focal point now that he’s living in New York City, where he recently started a new job at an architecture firm and walks past thousands of people on the sidewalk each day with no one acknowledging each other’s existence in neighborly ways.
“It was a strange thing coming back and being reconnected to the whole world. Cars, advertisements, information — it was way overstimulating,” he says. “The Peace Corps prepares you to come home, and as they say, you don’t fully adjust back. You can’t unsee the things you saw. You can’t unlive the things that you lived. So I do my best to live slowly, to carry simplicity throughout my days, and to treat the world with patience and kindness the best that I can.”
Photography by Alvin Caal / Friends Academy