Clinton Kellner Oral History Interview
Interviewer(s): Margaret Nott
Interviewee(s): Clinton Kellner

Margaret Nott: This is Mardi Nott, RPC of Benin from 1991 to 1994, interviewing Clinton Kellner, RPC of Guatemala, 2016 to 2018. So why did you join the Peace Corps?

Clinton Kellner: My wife and I served together. We'd always wanted to volunteer internationally and improve our Spanish and experience what it would be like to live in a different country. Not just tour there but live there.

Margaret Nott: So a couple of questions. You said you wanted to improve your Spanish. Were you fluent before you left?

Clinton Kellner: No, I wasn't fluent. We knew, we knew Spanish, but we didn't, we weren't fluent.

Margaret Nott: OK. And another question, if all you wanted to do was live in another country, why did you choose Peace Corps?

Clinton Kellner: Because it was, it was a volunteer experience. We wanted to volunteer. We wanted to see what it would be like to try to help people in another country, and Peace Corps paid expenses. So those were two things. They also had good medical care and the logistics were all worked out instead of trying to go through the process of figuring it all out yourself.

Margaret Nott: Yes. Um. OK. What was your life like before joining Peace Corps? Like your childhood, education, other experiences relevant to becoming a Peace Corps volunteer?

Clinton Kellner: I would say we came, I came from a working class neighborhood. My parents both had college educations, so that was a little different from the people that lived around us. They didn't make very much money, so I was used to frugalness and I maintained that frugal perspective throughout my life. I went ahead and got a bachelor's degree at UC Berkeley, a master's degree at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and a doctorate at UC Davis, all in ecology. So I was interested in the out-of-doors.

Margaret Nott: And what was, what form did your career take?

Clinton Kellner: I've worked as an environmental consultant all my life, basically for the same firm for 30 years.

Margaret Nott: OK.

Clinton Kellner: Reached a point in our career that we could leave our work and take off and go do something else. And so that's what we did. I did environmental impact analyses, endangered species surveys, vegetation analysis.

Margaret Nott: OK. Oh, interesting. So how did you hear about Peace Corps and what made you decide to apply?

Clinton Kellner: It was something that my wife really wanted to do, so she took the legwork on investigating different programs, and it seemed like Guatemala had the closest fit where we could both serve together at the same place in different programs. The programs weren't an ideal fit for either of us, but we made it work.

Margaret Nott: And what did your wife do as a Peace Corps volunteer?

Clinton Kellner: She worked in the Healthy Schools program. I worked in the Youth and Development Program. I was working with middle school youth, teaching them life skills, subjects like self-esteem, sexual education, leadership. She worked with teachers of elementary school students and teaching them healthy practices like washing hands, good nutrition.

Margaret Nott: And how? I'm not. I'm unclear here. So what were their perceptions of good nutrition before she got there and how did they change?

Clinton Kellner: She focused on school gardens because malnutrition was an endemic problem throughout Guatemala. Fifty percent of the children under five were malnourished. In the indigenous community where we were, it was more like 80% chronic malnutrition. Um, I don't know that we can answer that question. What were their perceptions of good nutrition? They probably knew eating chips was bad. I don't know that they knew that giving a baby a bottle with soda pop in it was bad, because that's what they might have seen their parents do. But their parents before that, there was no soda pop there. This was an indigenous community. There was hardly anything available 20 years ago or 30 years ago. There might not have been soda pop in these villages. So it's hard to, it's hard to change behavior like that.

Margaret Nott: Right, right.

Clinton Kellner: And so school gardens was how they approached.

Margaret Nott: Were your jobs requested by the community or by the larger government?

Clinton Kellner: The superintendent of instruction requested that the Peace Corps volunteers serve in the community, the superintendent of schools. So we worked through him. My wife worked with him more directly than I did. I checked in with him infrequently, and I worked with the principals of the two schools I was assigned.

Margaret Nott: OK. Uh, can you tell me about the challenges that you spoke of earlier in doing your job?

Clinton Kellner: The challenge, I think the biggest challenge was the interest and poor behavior of the students I worked with. The students liked me. I would walk around the town and they would shout out, Clinton, photo! I had my camera with me all the time and they would tease me about taking pictures. At first, when the kids bothered me, I'd whip out my camera. They didn't want their pictures taken, and so then they would turn away.

Margaret Nott: Oh.

Clinton Kellner: And so that was a way for me to get them not to bother me. I'd pull out my camera. But it didn't take them long to tease me back by saying, Clinton, photo! And then I'd whip out my camera and I'd get great pictures of the backs of their heads as they turned away. So. So it was a back and forth like that. And there was, um, we liked each other, but they didn't really like to learn anything. And they didn't, this is in general and this is how I felt. Of course, there were lots of students that were learning and they wanted to progress ahead. And several wanted to be doctors. Others wanted to be architects, psychologists. They had their desires. A lot of the boys wanted to be football players, but they didn't, still didn't feel they needed to behave well in class. And the first year was especially difficult.

The second year I didn't teach unless there as a teacher in the class. These teachers had grown up there. They were from the community, so they knew what the behavior was like. It was probably generational. It was endemic to the, and it wasn't just my village either. It was other villages, well, I was in a town of 4,000 people. It was other communities had very poor behavior as well, spread throughout the central highlands, that is. I talked to some of the other volunteers in my program, Youth and Development.

Margaret Nott: But they didn't behave this way for the other teachers, just for Peace Corps volunteers?

Clinton Kellner: They behaved poorly for the teachers, not as poorly as they behaved for me. There were some teachers that could exert excellent discipline, same students. So they knew how to exert the discipline. I could never get there despite trying.

Margaret Nott: So can you give me an example of, um, a particular incident involving poor behavior?

Clinton Kellner: Well, let's say a student would get up and walk down the aisle and he'd get kicked in the butt as he did so. But then he'd grab a pencil and then maybe poke somebody with the pencil and then throw it across the room and then grab somebody's notebook and throw that and then go back and sit down.

Margaret Nott: OK.

Clinton Kellner: That was about the worst behavior that would happen. But you can imagine a classroom like that. And that was the worst. So most of the time the kids sat and they would, they would talk or pass notes.

Margaret Nott: Sounds like an American classroom to me.

Clinton Kellner: Yes.

Margaret Nott: So what ages were the kids and, um, can you give us an example of a particular lesson that was particularly memorable?

Clinton Kellner: They were 12 to 18, and I really didn't know their ages. Th, uh, my best student was a 13 year old young woman, and she graduated at 13. So she was definitely advanced. Her parents were proud of her. She had a younger sister. So the parents were practicing birth control. She was just a phenomenal student. And she was going on to a religious high school. The, I forgot your question.

Margaret Nott: Oh, a particularly memorable lesson.

Clinton Kellner: My, the lessons that I liked to do were showing them out of the box types of experiences, and gender was a good one. I would have a list of true false questions and they would mostly be, um, the students would mostly get every one wrong. They would, the questions would be like, men can do harder work than women. Women can raise children better than men. Those kinds of questions. And so I would tell them that, but there are women that work very hard, and tell them about the attorney general of Guatemala. Tell them that she really works long hours and is trying to better the condition for the people. I would tell them about my brother who cooks. His wife doesn't cook. And then I would tell them about the women in the market that are, whose husbands have run off, and how they are managing their households. Just to get them out of the mindset, that women are powerful. So that was one of my favorite lessons.

Margaret Nott: Do you feel like the kids were receptive to that idea or some of them were receptive to that idea eventually?

Clinton Kellner: I think some, I think some were receptive. I think some of them got it. And I was, that was a recurring theme in my presentations.

Margaret Nott: Hmm.

Clinton Kellner: So, yeah. I remember one woman was surprised that homosexuality was something that you, that was innate, something that you can't recondition somebody to not be homosexual.

Margaret Nott: Right.

Clinton Kellner: So she appreciated that. And conveying that type of information.

Margaret Nott: Right. You keep stating that you were working with an indigenous population. Can you tell me a little bit about the tribe or their customs?

Clinton Kellner: These were K'iche' [also called Quiche] people. K'iche' is the largest indigenous group in Guatemala. About 45% of the people in Guatemala are members of one indigenous group or another. There are 22 Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. Some are on the verge of of being lost. There are three other languages in Guatemala, along with including Spanish, along with the indigenous, four other languages from Guatemala. The people we were with were pretty reserved. They had experienced a 20, 30 year civil war sometime in the sixties that began and the peace accords were signed in the 1990s. That doesn't mean that aggressive activities were ended. There's a woman from New York, Sisters of Charity. She was very involved in indigenous rights, empowering women. And she got into digging up graves to find out what happened to massacre victims. And she was murdered in 19-, she was murdered in 2001 in Guatemala City. So, um.

So that has an effect on the population. They are, they keep to themselves. They're not really questioning or curious people, those that were questioning or curious were knocked off, killed. In our particular community, I don't think there was much, uh, much effect of that war. But other communities, there were, and they were very proud people. The women wore their indigenous clothes. The young, the young women in the classrooms, about half of them wore indigenous clothes. They all had indigenous clothes. And they're beautiful. My students were beautiful, beautiful kids, men and women. And when they graduated, they graduated in their indigenous clothing.

Margaret Nott: Beautiful. So I assume, possibly correctly, that you taught in Spanish?

Clinton Kellner: Yes.

Margaret Nott: Did you learn any of the indigenous language?

Clinton Kellner: Yes, yes. Our unfortunately, our language teacher died of cancer shortly after we started taking classes. He was in his seventies. It was, it was a tragedy. He was well liked in the community. Our situation was that it was, we were doing complicated stuff in our teaching and trying to learn and always trying to play catch up. And we had a difficult time. So we didn't fit in a replacement teacher for this man. I would be tested when I was on the bus or walking around town. They would say, what's my name, in K'iche' and fortunately I knew what they were asking and I could respond in K'iche'.

Margaret Nott: Yeah. So your language teacher. Was your language teacher Guatemalan or was your language teacher associated with Peace Corps or both?

Clinton Kellner: We had some language instruction before we were sent to our communities in K'iche', and that was one of the language instructors and her sister. So she brought her sister in for this special K'iche' language lesson. And then when we went to our community, then we were able to find a language instructor in K'iche'. And unfortunately he passed away. He lived right there in the community. A very nice tradition in our community was when somebody passed away, you showed up at their house and gave your condolences. So a number of the teachers and I went to the house and gave our condolences there or just showed up. And, uh, the, uh, the principal of the school gave his condolences. The man was his K'iche' teacher. He was a K'iche' teacher of all of the teachers in the community.

Margaret Nott: So when you arrived. What did your training look like? Some Peace Corps volunteers have been trained entirely in the United States. Some are trained in country. Some are trained in homestays. Can you tell me a little bit about your training and what that looked like?

Clinton Kellner: We had kind of. We met in Houston. We had one day of training there in the afternoon. And then the next morning we went to Guatemala and we began our training the next day, after getting, settling in, settled into the hotel. And the training consisted of, it was in two parts. One was language and cultural three days a week, and the other was a training on how to do development work. So just general training. What it's like to be Guatemalan, how Guatemalans are very social people and Americans are very individualistic on opposite ends of the spectrum, what that means. So that's the kind of general training we got.

After a few days in the hotel, we went to host families and lived with them to get into integrated, to learn about the cultures and customs of Guatemala. I went to one host family and my wife went to another host family in a city half an hour, an hour away by bus from where we were. And we would meet in the Guatemalan Peace Corps office 2 to 3 days a week. And we would get there on, we were shown how to take the bus and we would get there on the bus.

Margaret Nott: OK. So the primary way you got around was by bus.

Clinton Kellner: Bus. We weren't allowed to ride motorcycles. That would get us a free trip out of the country. And if we drove a vehicle in Guatemala, we would be exported as well. So it was by bus or private transport. The Peace Corps situation in Guatemala was such that there needed to be a lot of security requirements and bus. So bus travel to the Peace Corps office or to, um, to Guatemala City was prohibited on the public bus because there was extortion and bus drivers would get killed. So we were. So Peace Corps instituted a shuttle and we rode the shuttle.

Margaret Nott: Hmm.

Clinton Kellner: So we'd have to make the shuttle reservations two days in advance, which took, so it was difficult because we had to plan two days in advance. And if we didn't have that and there wasn't, somebody didn't plan to have a shuttle reserved and there was no shuttle schedule, then we had to stay put until we could travel.

Margaret Nott: So you didn't have a bicycle or anything of the sort?

Clinton Kellner: Peace volunteers had bicycles and that was an approved method of travel. And horseback was also another approved method of travel.

Margaret Nott: Oh, wonderful.

Clinton Kellner: But we didn't, we didn't use those.

Margaret Nott: Yeah. So did Peace Corps volunteers have their own horses or did they? Was it just an approved method of travel?

Clinton Kellner: None while we were there. I knew of none that had horses, but it was an approved method of travel.

Margaret Nott: OK.

Clinton Kellner: I don't know that they used that method of travel.

Margaret Nott: Right. Right.

Clinton Kellner: We rode in the backs of pickups and, um, on one route that was particularly bumpy I refused to do that again. My old bones are just, just can't take it.

Margaret Nott: Yeah. Let's see. What did you do during your vacation time? Did you travel neat places?

Clinton Kellner: We traveled around Guatemala. We felt we should stay in Guatemala. And so we traveled around to different areas in Guatemala. Of the volunteers there, we were one of those that traveled the most within the country. We saw Livingston and the Garifuna, Garifuna people in the Caribbean coast, and we had some nice interactions with them. We traveled up to the quetzals, the Biotopo de Quetzal, just south of Coban and saw lots of quetzals. And our children came out at that time and traveled with us. We traveled through a very dry area of Guatemala. And I want to go back and stop there and see the plants and animals that live there.

We traveled to the Cuchumatanes mountains and the highest mountain in Central America that was not a volcano. So we climbed up to that one to see what the plants and animals were like. We were hoping to see vistas, but every summit of the volcanoes that we climbed, it was foggy by the time we got up there. And so. We climbed Pacaya. That was a very quick climb. Volcan Pacaya, an active volcano. You saw rocks being ejected from the summit as we were walking nearby. That was kind of interesting, and we had good views from Pacaya.

Margaret Nott: OK. Cool. Overall, how do you feel like you achieved the three goals of Peace Corps?

Clinton Kellner: In my classes and when we would talk to people, we would tell them about America. And so goal, uh, goal two we did while we were in country. Goal three. Now that we've returned, we're giving presentations to Rotary. We've given about seven presentations, my wife and I have. And I'm concerned about the situation in Guatemala. And I want to figure out how to inform the American people about the situation there, why Guatemalans are coming here, why other Central Americans are coming here. I don't understand why they don't know that the conditions in those countries are so terrible, that that is the reason that they're coming here. And our government is being counterproductive to that effort as well. So I want to figure out how to convey that in a form that can be heard. And while I was in country, I was doing the job that I was assigned and that the Guatemalans had requested. So I was helping out in that way.

Margaret Nott: Hmm. Have you maintained contact with people in Guatemala at all?

Clinton Kellner: Yes, I've made contact with, maintained contact with several of the students through Facebook or Messenger and through the, uh, some of the teachers and principals that. One of the teachers emails me in a semi-regular fashion. He says, hello, Clint. I hope things are fine there. Things are fine here. So there's, and then I write two paragraphs back about what's happening here. A very sad thing that happened. He informed me that there was some people had been killed in our community, the neighboring, because of a land dispute with the neighboring community. And that was very, very disturbing to me. And I immediately sent out messages to. A relative of my host family was also killed, was one of those killed. So I sent out messages to those that I had contact with and asking and hoping that everybody was OK so.

The Guatemalan students are very appreciative of our work, and they'll express that in very elegant language. It's a very different training they've had than we train our students up here. They're, the eloquence that they can express their appreciation for my work as, um, it's heartfelt. It's just makes me feel good. And so I've gotten some several gifts from them. So that's a different, um, different approach to life that they have and the parents as well. So they were appreciative of just us being there, validating them as people. And because they're just these indigenous community in a small town in the middle of nowhere, kind of. So they appreciated our thinking of them, our being there.

Margaret Nott: Um, can you tell me a little bit about the unexpected weather that you experienced or anything about the climate that you experienced? You told me a story about your son bringing hot water bottles.

Clinton Kellner: Um. So we were told to pack for hot weather or cold weather, but only two suitcases or a certain size. So we couldn't bring trunks of materials with us. And so I packed for 7,000 feet and we were living in a place that was 10,000. It's cold in Guatemala. It's really cold at 10,000 feet, especially in December and January. My feet didn't warm up at night in the, uh, in the bed. And so my son brought hot water bottles in March, and that was kind of after the time we needed them. But we used them the following year and we used them in June when the cold rains came. We had a, it was an unusually wet season that year, the first year, 2017. And it was cold, lots of rains.

The public school would cancel school because of the cold rains. And the principal said to me that some students have to walk 45 minutes to school. And they wouldn't have raincoats, they wouldn't have plastic slickers to put over them. They would just come in their light jackets if they had them or long-sleeved shirts. I don't understand how they could come to school. And the young women in sandals and skirts, and the teachers wouldn't have rain jackets either. They some of them might have umbrellas. It was something I didn't understand. But it must not, they must have thought that it was not cool to have an umbrella or a rain jacket. And so I would come in my rain jackets and still be cool. Wouldn't be warm.

In the non, in the summertime and in the wintertime, you could have a warm day now and then, where you could walk around town without having a jacket on. But most of the time I had a jacket on. And in the wintertime it was two jackets and boots in the house typing on my computer. We did have Internet most of the time. It would go out every once in a while. We had electricity and we had water. It was really hard washing dishes at night, in the dark, with cold water, in December. You're cold all the time and you go out to wash the dishes in the cold water. I put on my headlamp and did it that way.

Margaret Nott: Yeah. So was your water inside the home or just on the exterior?

Clinton Kellner: It was on the exterior, an exterior sink situation. The pila in Guatemala is an institution and it consists of two basins and three wash boards beside the basins. And that's where clothes and dishes are washed, is in the pila. We, because we felt the pila would wear out our clothes, we used the laundry facility in the town of Quetzaltenango about an hour away. So we would go take the bus to Quetzaltenango and have our laundry done by noon, and then take the Peace Corps shuttle back to our site, and the shuttle would continue its route.

Margaret Nott: So was your laundry facility um?

Clinton Kellner: It was a laundromat. We would pay people to do our laundry.

Margaret Nott: OK, that's what I was going after.

Clinton Kellner: And they would do the laundry and fold it up very nicely.

Margaret Nott: Did you have any issues in your village with theft? Such as did Peace Corps volunteers hire guards, get dogs, or hire maids?

Clinton Kellner: I don't know of any Peace Corps volunteers doing that, so it wasn't really done. There were no private guards in our village that I knew of. In the cities, you would see people with these handheld shotguns guarding stores. But none of that in our village of 4,000. We lived in a compound where you had to enter the compound through a gate. And so if people did that, then you would know that they were there. And it was difficult to enter the gate before a metal door was installed. So it took them forever and a day, the metal worker, to install the door after they were asked to do so by our host family and paid for it.

So. So there would have been theft, yes. But no, there wasn't. A few people knew where we lived. Many of the tuk tuk drivers, the kind of motorcycle taxi type of motorized rickshaw type of thing, knew where we were. But amazingly, many people didn't know where we were. We were then. I'm a tall, tall man, 6'5", with a gray beard. I stood out like a sore thumb. And it's amazing that many didn't know we were here in the town.

Margaret Nott: So you lived in a compound with an actual host family. You weren't isolated?

Clinton Kellner: Yes. Because of the security situation in Guatemala, we were required to live with the host family. That gave us status in the community. When my wife and I first got there, we walked around the perimeter of the community. People would ask us, who, what you're doing? They'd ask us in a very gentle fashion. We would tell them, and then we would tell them that we lived with Domingo and Paola. They knew Paola. Everything was okay when we got that, when we said that.

We were assigned a host family. The host family was vetted through the Peace Corps. They were instructed on how to interact with us. And they were given some instruction on how to cook food for us, although we cooked our own food just because of either convenience and it was a way for my wife to de-stress. She liked cooking for us, so we cooked for ourselves. But everything was, we weren't just dropped off someplace and or told to catch this bus to this town and find a place to live. Everything was worked out and we were taken there with all of our materials on a Peace Corps shuttle, along with other volunteers. We got off at our stop and then the shuttle continued, taking people to another, to their place to live.

Margaret Nott: OK. So you were the only Peace Corps volunteers in your village.

Clinton Kellner: There was another Peace Corps volunteer there as well. I replaced a Peace Corps volunteer in the Youth and Development program. My wife, Madeline, started up the Healthy Schools program in the village. There was a maternal and child health volunteer already there. And she had followed another maternal and child health volunteer. So she was of great help to us. She was a young woman of, uh, Mexican American woman. And we got along well and we socialized some. And she was able to orient us to the community and to Quetzaltenango where we got our laundry done. She showed us where to get our laundry done. There was a Walmart there, so she showed us the Walmart, where to find stuff in Walmart.

Margaret Nott: Yeah. So, um. Huh. So do you have any stories of your experience that really stick out in your mind that you would like to tell?

Clinton Kellner: Um. I was included in the activities of the school. They really wanted me to go to these activities. They wanted the pictures that I had taken. So I gave the pictures to the two principals of the schools. It was a little difficult when the schools would have activities on the same day. Which school do I go with? That didn't happen too often, but it happened a little bit. One of the things that I. There are two things that stand out. One was I was a padrino for one of the graduations. That means I was kind of an authority. So I was up there with the graduates and with the two other padrinos. One was the school director and the other was a teacher. And we handed out the gifts for the graduating seniors at the middle school. The gifts were a cup that we had bought for them and the diploma. And so we handed those out. So that was, that was fun. And then we got our picture taken with the parents and the graduating student. And so that was, that was an honor.

Margaret Nott: Yeah.

Clinton Kellner: The other activity was we were invited to one of the quinceañeras of one of the students. She was a graduating student as well. And we were the, she told me that other teachers had been invited, but I was the only one that showed up. So it was an honor and we were there to see the quinceañera. It's not like the Mexican or Cuban quinceañeras where the young lady gets all dressed up and her friends are all dressed up. They're dressed nicely, but they don't have a lot of money to get all dressed up. It wasn't a super expensive, ritzy affair. It was a nice, simple affair where people got up and said very nice things about her.

Margaret Nott: Yeah.

Clinton Kellner: And she came by on our graduation, uh, right before we were ready to leave. And I gave her. She had given me a USB and I put the pictures of her on the USB and then she gave us a huipil. Huipil is the Guatemalan blouse. And so that was a very special gift, is to receive that huipil. My wife had collected lots and lots of huipils. She was known among the Guatemalan volunteers as someone who had taken a love of the huipils. And so she knew quite a bit about them and where they were from. And some of that rubbed off on me, but it was hard to keep track of all. Some of the designs were very similar, but from quite different villages or areas. So we hope to give an exhibit of our huipils in our local museum in Novato, California.

Margaret Nott: Oh, beautiful.

Clinton Kellner: We just haven't gotten the time to do that.

Margaret Nott: Hmm. Can you think of something you would like to mention? Anything else you want to add to this interview? I don't.

Clinton Kellner: Well, it is, um. You know, when you travel, you know, people are people and Guatemalans are people. And they are respectful and they are just lovely people. And you want to, you want to help them as much as you can. And it is. It is, uh. So that's what I'm going to try to do to the best of my abilities. And I wish more people knew that, that everybody has the same feelings. Not if, you know, if they're from the United States or Guatemala or Africa or Asia. They, they're all helpful and more or less the same.

Margaret Nott: Yeah. Hmm. OK.

Clinton Kellner: Thank you.

Margaret Nott: Yep.