Robert Onstine
RPCV Morocco 2000–02
Near the end of his first year of teaching in a public school, way up in Northern California, Robert received an invitation from the Peace Corps asking him to serve for two years in Colombia. He accepted it with an overwhelming sense of joy and excitement in his heart. Those two years turned out to be some of the most rewarding and beneficial of his life because living and working with Colombians, he acquired a level of language competency far beyond anything that can be achieved in a university classroom. In Colombia, he became fascinated with contemporary Latin American literature, and Hispanic linguistics. At the end of his PCV service, even though he had barely an academic minor in Spanish, he was accepted into the masters program at Middlebury College, Madrid, Spain and then went on to earn a PhD. in Hispanic language and linguistics. Robert also served in Morocco from 2000-2002 and Ecuador from 2017-2019.