Ira Frydman started out with a lot of advantages in life, even beyond just being born in the United States.
His father is a podiatrist. He had attended two private elementary schools — Hillel Academy and the Milwaukee Jewish Day School — and summer camps through the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center. His family lived in Mequon during his teen years, and he graduated from Homestead High School there.
Yet Frydman for a while lived in a place where he learned that “I could go two days without eating or drinking water” and “I could take a 12-hour bus ride while standing up [in the bus] through non-paved roads at about a mile an hour.”
Above all, he acquired “a general understanding of what life is really like for the majority of the world” — and it doesn’t resemble life in Mequon.
Frydman learned all this as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Caribbean country of Haiti, where he worked from August 2002 to this past February.
He also apparently learned something of what it is like to be a refugee. He had to leave Haiti quickly (and before his official term was due to end in December) when rebels from the Dominican Republic invaded the region in which he worked. Eventually, these rebels overthrew the government and forced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide also to flee the country.
Frydman had to leave behind almost all his personal belongings and almost all his photographs and other memorabilia of his life and work there.
In an interview at The Chronicle office, Frydman said that Haiti is “among the hardest Peace Corps assignments.” It is “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere,” its population is afflicted with AIDS, it has little infrastructure such as roads (which, he said, accounted for his days without food and drinking water).
Aristide’s government apparently had little interest in working to improve things, Frydman said, and “I have no idea if there will be changes” with the new government there. (Frydman added that Haiti has no Jewish community.)
Giving back
All this means there is “a huge drop-out rate” of Peace Corps volunteers in Haiti. “But those who stay love it,” including Frydman himself.
“You take a part of Haiti with you when you leave,” he said. “It has become a lot of what I think about [my life].”
Frydman majored in environmental science at the University of Kansas, building on an interest in the outdoors that he said he acquired at least in part from his experiences at the JCC camps.
He also spent his junior year abroad in Israel at the Arava Institute of Environmental Studies, working in a kibbutz near Eilat. This program wasn’t just about the environment, he said; it also was a peace-building program that involved Palestinian Arabs working with Israelis on environmental issues.
That “was where I solidified what I wanted to do; I knew I wanted to do environmental work,” Frydman said.
After graduation in 2001, he did some work for the Sierra Club, but then decided to join the Peace Corps. “I was given a lot while growing up,” Frydman said. “I wanted to continue learning while giving back and using my environmental background to help development, help people.”
He went to Haiti as an environmental educator, working to start projects like tree nurseries — deforestation is one of Haiti’s biggest problems, he said — and cooperative farms. He also did some AIDS education.
His stay was short, and some of his interactions with the people were frustrating — at one point children were stealing from him. Nevertheless, “I believe I did some kind of good,” he said. “I was showing that Americans have compassion” and “I learned more from them than they learned from me…. I was really sad that I had to leave.”
Frydman said he is now seeking to go to graduate school to study international development of agriculture. Then he would like to return to Haiti to “continue working to develop the country.”
He is also trying to raise money and send clothing to Haiti.
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