Last year at this time, Anna Nuñez was spending her gap year exploring Ecuador and spending quality time with her host family watching movies. While she’s exchanged the slow pace of Ecuadorian life for dorm-style living in Wheaton, Nuñez hasn’t forgotten her experience abroad, which shaped her desire to study medical anthropology.
“I thought being in Ecuador would give me a lot of vision for my future, and it actually taught me really well how to live in my present,” she said.
Although she knew she wanted to take a gap year after high school, Ecuador wasn’t her only option. She floated around the idea of doing the World Race, a gap year mission trip run by a non-profit called Adventures in Missions, but settled on going to Ecuador after making a connection with Kids Around the World, a different non-profit that partnered with her local church in San Diego, Calif.
Nuñez said she learned that there’s no replacement for genuine relationships in ministry and came to rely greatly on the knowledge of locals, like her host family, who moved to the community in the early 2000s as missionaries.
“They’ve lived there for 20 years — they are the experts,” she said.
The practice of treating locals as the experts and understanding differences is integral to the discipline of anthropology. It’s no surprise that when Nuñez arrived at Wheaton College, she was immediately drawn to the anthropology and sociology department. She started researching more about the discipline, and realized that much of her work in Ecuador was a “trial by fire” version of the subject, and she wanted to learn more about it.
Over spring break, Nuñez plans to return to the same community in Ecuador. This time, she’ll bring a renewed interest in maternal health and access to healthcare after taking a medical anthropology class at Wheaton.
Nuñez’s discovery of her desired area of study while abroad parallels that of Christine Jeske, associate professor of anthropology, who taught Nũnez in that medical anthropology class. Jeske, too, did not have any academic experience with anthropology when she decided to pursue it as a career.
Jeske also felt drawn to Latin America in her young adult years when she met a couple living in Nicaragua who worked with an organization that dealt with different aspects of poverty there.
Local relationships, as Nuñez also found, taught Jeske the most. Before she entered the anthropology classroom as a master’s student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she was a student of her newfound friends. She said she found meaning in the laughs she shared with an elderly friend, and in the crocheting business she helped kickstart with the other women in the village.
“I remember reading the Old Testament, and noticing how often it talks about the foreigner, the elderly and the widow, and that’s who we were, hanging out with together,” she said.
After her time in Nicaragua with her husband, Jeske returned to the United States and decided to pursue an MBA in economic development from Eastern University, which she finished in 2004. She later completed her master’s degree and a PhD, both in cultural anthropology, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It was within these disciplines that she learned the skills and understanding to start addressing poverty in Nicaragua, but also in China and South Africa, where she later lived.
“I think the combination of being in Nicaragua, and then China, and then South Africa — three different continents, languages, cultural backgrounds, histories — all of that gave me a really heightened awareness of how culture matters,” she said.
After traveling and living in each of these countries, Jeske was intrigued by the ways in which people thrived, even while living in poverty. She wondered, especially in South Africa, how unemployment related to people’s vision of “the good life.” The unemployment rate there is 33% overall, and about 61% among youth ages 15-24, according to a South African government statistics agency.
Through a culmination of answers to this question she wrote her first ethnography, “The Laziness Myth,” about South African cultural attitudes toward work. She said the diversity of answers she found to her initial question were the result of a search to ask God to reveal areas of her own blindness.
“I think being in intercultural situations has the capacity to open our eyes,” Jeske said.
But she felt her eyes were opened again when she made a return visit to Nicaragua this past summer, the place that started it all. Looking at how things had changed, she believes she saw God working in the people’s lives, even though Nicaragua is still considered the second-poorest country in the western hemisphere.
“There’s stuff that’s gotten harder, but there’s also really neat answers to prayer,” said Jeske. “It’s not like poverty has gone away by any means, but people still live their lives.”
Jeske said that going into Nicaragua for the first time, she wishes she would have known how to better view locals with agency. That’s what she would tell her younger self, if she had the chance.
“Trust people to be the experts of their own lives,” she said. “Learn how to be a recipient as well as a giver, especially when it’s an intercultural relationship.”
More than practical knowledge, Jeske learned about faith and what that faith looks like in practice, which, like Nuñez experienced, often comes from the people she came to love while abroad.
“Know that we see God through the imago Dei, of people made in his image, ” said Jeske. “Often there’s more to be learned about God through the stories of people that surprise us.”
