My family is from the Philippines. I was born in the Philippines, and I grew up in Southern California: Long Beach and then Riverside. I went to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon. I did a graduate degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins, and then I worked for Catholic Relief Services overseas in Cameroon, Morocco, Mali, and Burkina Faso. And then we came back to the States, and I worked for a couple of other NGOs and a consulting firm before joining the US Agency for International Development. My official title is Technical Advisor for Gender Integration for Agriculture and Food Security, specifically the presidential initiative called Feed the Future. What I tell people is that I help farmers and their husbands. So, I make sure that all of our activities enable women to participate in and benefit from our work. Because women do most of the agricultural labor, but they hold very few of the assets or resources.
The most interesting exercise I had recently was going to Burkina Faso and seeing what communities do in times of stress, like droughts or political unrest.
We found that the rates of child marriage go up, and this is probably true in southern Africa as well, because with child marriage you get rid of one member of the household whom you would have to feed. And you get an infusion of cash or an asset like a couple of head of cattle. How do I enable communities to not resort to that? So, it was a very interesting experience. It’s an awesome job.
That’s a difficult question because growing up in California I always knew about the church and I have a good friend (we’ve been friends since we were twelve) who is LDS, so it was through her that I was introduced to the church. I would go with her to services, and we kept in touch during college. When I was in the Peace Corps she was on her mission. So, I’ve always had a lot of Mormon friends in my life. The turning point was when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon. At the time, Cameroon was the Regional Training Center for other countries in that area. The summer between the two years I was teaching English, I was helping out with the training of the next set of volunteers. All the trainers live together. At the same time the Cameroon group was there, there was a group going to the Congo. So, I got to know the Congolese trainers. And one of them was LDS.