About Us
Read below for biographies of some of our tutors!
Kristen Seery
Wellington resident Kristen Seery graduated from Suncoast Community High School in 2000, where she earned an International Baccalaureate diploma. At the beginning of the summer of 2000, Kristen left Florida for Colorado Springs, Colorado, where she began basic training at the United States Air Force Academy. The Air Force Academy has a heavy math and science core curriculum, which she balanced by majoring in Humanities and minoring in Philosophy. In 2004, Kristen graduated and returned to Florida.
In January of 2006, Kristen joined the Peace Corps and left for Zambia, a remote country in southern Africa. Kristen lived in a small village and became conversant in Bemba, the local language. She taught preventive health care to Zambian villagers. Kristen also taught HIV/AIDS prevention to high school students in her village. Two years later Kristen returned to the United States.
Since her return in December of 2008, Kristen has been tutoring students of all ages in a variety of subjects. Kristen is passionate about learning, serving, and meaningful interaction.
About Kristen’s Peace Corps Experience
The First Three Months
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The above pictures are of the beginnings of my experience in Peace Corps, Zambia. I boarded a plane in January of 2006 with about 30 other volunteers. After a very long flight we touched down once in West Africa to refuel before continuing on to South Africa. Here we spent the night in a fabulous hotel with great food – a huge contrast with what was to come as we moved in with third world Zambian families for our two month homestay!
As you scroll through the photos, you’ll see pictures of the beautiful, lush landscape in Eastern Province, Zmbia. We arrived in Zambia during the rainy season. Daily there were torrential, Florida-like downpours that often quickly cleared to leave a cloudless sky. The rain meant that the grass was a vivid shade of green. The open expanse of blue sky and the orange clay Earth painted a picture of color unlike any I’d seen before, even in my four years on the gorgeous campus of the Air Force Academy.
You’ll also see many pictures of me and my friends. We spent the first two months living relatively near each other, in Kitwe. We met daily for language lessons and to learn our roles as Peace Corps volunteers. The friends that I made in Peace Corps continue to be the best friends I have. There is something about the intensity of the Peace Corps experience that allows volunteers to bond with each other much more quickly than people might otherwise connect at home in America. As a foreigner in a foreign land one finds that the differences between Americans become irrelevant in comparison to the differences between oneself and everything else-the place, the people, the culture.
There are pictures of my first home in Zambia and the surrounding landscape. My village was as far north in Zambia as it was possible to go. My village was the most remote of all villages. Peace Corps thought I was pretty tough because of my Air Force Academy background, and so they placed me in the toughest of all possible places. I was so far north that I could – and did – walk across the border to neighboring Tanzania for the huge open air market that ocassionally came to town. You’ll see pictures of my toilet, as well – a literal hole in the ground.
My Family – Harvesting Groundnuts
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I came to a point more than a year into my service when things just weren’t going well. I’d insisted that Peace Corps transfer me from my original village in the above pictures to another village. We had learned the basics of the Bemba language in training for two months, and my first village was Mambwe speaking, so I couldn’t communicate at all. I tried to get tutors to help me learn, and I used what few resources were available to help with Mambwe, but it was too much. I needed to be in a less remote location in a village that spoke the language I’d learned.
So I moved to Misengo, a village just on the outskirts of Kasama. I was much closer to town – about 60 kilometers – and to the provincial Peace Corps house where other volunteers and resources were available. Life was much better here, but still something was missing. I was finding myself very homesick. Night-time was the worst. I dreaded the long evenings watching the sun fade and reading, alone, by candlelight in my hut. So I made a deal with myself. I’d approach my neighbors – the people in the above photos- and ask them if I could eat dinner with them every night. Looking back I still can’t quite believe I had the nerve to do that. But I did, in my broken Bemba, invite myself into their family, and it was the best decision I made in Peace Corps.
From then on my evenings were spent sitting around in the darkness of the Zambian evening with Bana Victor, Bashi Vivtor, and their four boys. We ate nshima and played UNO by candlelight. They helped me learn Bemba and as I did, answered my questions about Zambian culture and village going-ons.
The above are pictures of my family harvesting groundnuts, which are basically peanuts, and a staple of the Zambian diet. (They became a big staple of my diet, too, resulting in weight gain while in Africa, believe it or not!) Zambian families are sustenence farmers and basically grow what they eat, selling any surplus they may have at the small market in town. Only two of the four boys are in the pictures above. Nkole is the baby. Before leaving Zambia I saw Nkole come very close to dying of malaria. By the time mom brought him to the clinic his eyes were no longer focusing and he was practically unconscious. Thankfully, he lived.