MANKATO — As she tells the story of her time in Nigeria 63 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer, it becomes apparent how that experience from 1963-65 has been a lifelong guide in Barb Maher’s life ever since.
In fact, it was while Maher, 85, was in Nigeria that she met her husband, Bill, and when she came back that she realized how wasteful we as Americans are. Eventually, she became Minnesota State University’s first environmental sciences graduate, a citizen volunteer for the community’s first garbage pickup and recycling efforts, and a strong advocate for mindful treatment of our world.
“I was the first one in my family that had gotten to go to college, so I really felt that I had gotten a special help from my family,” she said in the living room of her Mankato home. “And the whole attitude was, we are so wealthy here in the United States, we need a Peace Corps because we should be sharing the wealth. And I felt, ‘I’m one of those wealthy people.’”
She was raised Catholic in St. Paul, had gone to an all-girls high school the last two years and an all-women’s college. Although she felt lucky to be assigned to Nigeria, which two years earlier had gained its independence from Great Britain and the people spoke English, her new situation was quite different.
“They put me on an island in the Niger Delta, and I was the only white person living in the town,” she began. “I was the only female teaching in a male school, (with) no other women on the staff. …(A)ctually, people were very supportive of me.”
There was another Peace Corps volunteer with whom she could talk, and she became good friends with women teaching at a Catholic School. But there was another occurrence that was a bit more out of the ordinary.
“There were boats that came in there every once in a while, and when (passengers) came in they heard somehow that I was the only white woman living in town. I sometimes had people come knocking on my door and inviting me out to visit with them.”
She always felt safe, she said, and many of the men simply wanted to talk and show her pictures of their wives.
One of those men was Bill Maher, a Canadian surveyor on loan to Shell Oil, she said. He and a co-worker knocked on her door, looking for the white woman they had heard lived there. They invited her to dinner, then mostly walked out of her life as they continued creating maps for oil exploration in the newly opened country.
When he returned occasionally, they found they both had Catholic upbringings, their fathers were both working men, and their relationship grew. They were married by an Irish priest in town whom she had befriended; she left Nigeria and they began their lives together.
Her home is filled with items she bought when she left her African delta town on school breaks, and through travels the couple did together to such places as the Arctic. Through it all, she carried the memories of being treated well and feeling safe during her Peace Corps time.
That time also made her a staunch environmentalist.
“I sometimes was an embarrassment to my kids because any plastic fork or spoon that you’re given at a restaurant, it’s still usable. It comes home with me and has to be used for something else,” she said.
“Every extra bag has to be saved. Paper, newspapers, have to be used again for another case or recycled and given to somebody who doesn’t have one. I mean, that just became part of an ethic that I had.”
All from the time, more than 60 years ago, as a Peace Corps volunteer and the direction it led her.