Features
Iraq to Nicaragua: Combat vet Richard Hackett’s quest “to be a larger help”
September 23rd, 2009
By Rick DelVecchio
Legions of teens and young adults go abroad on short mission trips, hoping to make a difference in the lives of those in need. Fewer immerse themselves in the host country long enough to learn just how complicated making a difference can be. It takes training, not to mention inner strength, to perform in the face of what might seem to be overwhelming odds that one person can change things.
Richard Hackett is one young adult who is taking the longer, harder, way. A nursing student at the University of San Francisco, Hackett is considered by his professors to be a prime example of a young adult in formation for service in sustainable development modeled on Catholic social teaching. He is part of a USF pre-professional program that has just that aim in mind for a number of top students.
Hackett recently returned from an 11-week immersion service learning tour in Nicaragua. He worked at a public hospital and sent insightful blog posts that repaid his professors’ faith that he could move forward toward a service career. They noted that not only could he do a tough job but that he could do it while seeing deeply into power and justice in the host culture.
Hackett, 27, has a familiarity with power that most people his age lack. He served two tours in a combat platoon in Iraq, driving a Humvee in Baghdad at the war’s height. He saw enough misery on and off the battlefield to give him a strong idea of what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
He was afraid at times, outraged at others. He acted in the moment whether he felt ready to or not. When a soldier riding behind him in his Humvee was badly wounded by a roadside bomb, he applied first aid, assured the injured man that everything would be OK and drove to the hospital as fast as he could.
“I don’t know what the guy’s impression of me was,” Hackett, who lives in Emeryville, told Catholic San Francisco. “But inside I just felt complete panic. ‘This guy can bleed to death right in front of me, I don’t know how to stop it.’ I was just progressing through a few basic steps I was taught, and that’s about it. It gave me the feeling that there’s so much more I could learn in situations like that, I could be a larger help. It's something that stuck with me from that day forward.
Hackett put all his Iraq experiences and feelings together and decided he wanted to become a nurse, working in emergency medicine or public health.
Hackett finished his second tour, for which he had volunteered so married soldiers would not have to go back. He came to the Bay Area to enter nursing school at USF. He sought a degree but also wanted to continue his education in the real world. He got his chance when a USF committee looked at his record, and especially his writing, and unanimously picked him to go to Nicaragua to live with a family in Masaya and work at the local hospital.
The 82nd Airborne vet worked in all the departments at Hospital Dr. Humberto Alvarado and earned the respect of the staff, who had not had another visitor from the north stay that long.
Hackett had seen what civilians deal with in war and how they suffer because basic resources, like sanitation, are not in place. One of his most vivid memories from Iraq, other than the bomb blast, is of children in shorts walking barefoot through open sewage. The hospital was familiar: people streamed in and resources were so meager that the saying was that the staff worked con clavos – with nails.
“Once I arrived in Nicaragua, especially in the rural areas, it was definitely reminiscent,” Hackett said. “Children with no option but to live out on the street. Mothers with small children begging for food to eat. Even with the opportunity I had working in the hospital, even though the people have access to health care, they don’t always have the medicine needed to treat conditions. You have people suffering from conditions that here in the United States might be easily managed but down there, without the economic resources, it just becomes a severe problem. It seems unjust in so many ways.”
Hearts and minds
In its second year, the Global Service-Learning program, known as Sarlo Scholars, is a project of USF’s Office of Service Learning and Community Action in partnership with the Foundation for Sustainable Development. Students live with host families in Nicaragua or Uganda. Before and after they travel, they are in the classroom learning history, politics and basic development economics.
“We think it’s connected to the university’s mission and the Catholic mission, educating hearts and minds to change the world,” said Professor Julie Reed, the director of the office. “I believe strongly that they have to get involved in the work – they have to understand the complexities and messiness of social justice work.”
The idea is that students who complete the program would be able to work for a humanitarian or social policy organization and immediately be effective even though there would be minimal on-the-job training. “We don’t want to run the risk of giving them an experience of cultural tourism, a drive-by of the poor people,” Reed said. “We want those real social justice lessons to be learned by sustained involvement.”
The program’s benefactor, venture capitalist and philanthropist George Sarlo, also is inspired by that idea. He, his sister and his mother were the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust when the Nazis invaded Hungary. Two Catholic men helped them escape.
Sarlo is interested in whether the compassion that saved his life is innate to some people or whether it must be taught. His support for the service learning program is one of his many efforts to try to answer the question.
“We decided to try this method, to see what, if any, impact this will have on their life later on – on their studies and choice of profession,” he said. “We don’t know if we can find concrete proof but we’re hoping it will become evident after a few years.”
Hackett, who grew up in Chino and dropped out of high school, was a USF committee’s first choice for this year’s program. The committee took a chance in sending a military vet to Nicaragua, a country still suffering from the aftermath of civil war. “We had plenty of reason not to send someone with military experience there,” Reed said. “But his experiences so clearly reflected that he understood those power dynamics, understood social justice issues, had a hunger to learn more.”
Building relationships
Hackett immediately found his Iraq experience relevant. Perhaps what impressed him most about his time in both countries was the disparity. Resources, whether material goods like medical equipment or moral ones like freedom and justice, were unevenly distributed. What’s more, he saw that disparity was profound. He tried not be surprised or judgmental.
On his blog, Hackett reflected on an illiterate, pregnant preteen girl he had seen at the hospital. “It is perfectly possible that in the community she comes from, literacy may not be a necessary tool of daily life,” he wrote, “and I am sure that there are necessary skills in her community that I do not possess.”
Hackett learned that many people in Nicaragua do not have access to education. Those who do may not have time to take away from work. He met a woman who works 12-hour days, six days a week, as a housekeeper to earn $80 a month, which averages out to a quarter an hour. He learned that middle-class people are not exempt from economic hardship. He found that “what upsets people most” is that the majority of Nicaraguans endure these burdens while tax-funded, politically appointed elected officials receive far higher wages, paid in U.S. dollars
But Hackett also found that economic hardship teaches a lot of people to be more resilient and resourceful in ways that would be less common in the United States. “And having less economic capital makes many of the people more appreciative of things that are more substantial and important, such as family relationships,” he said.
The former soldier also looked into the impact of war on Nicaraguans, as part what he called the “continuing history lesson” that began with his enlistment in 2002 to fight in Iraq because he felt the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein. He toured a fortress on a hill over Masaya, called Forteleza de Coyotepe – Coyote Hill. There, the dictator Anatasio Somazo Debayle had imprisoned dissidents. Some of the cells let in no light. A guide told Hackett that the dead were likely disposed of below and there is no way to know how many people disappeared. Hackett noted in his blog that in 1979, the last phase of the Somoza family dictatorship, the government used the hill to shell rebel strongholds in neighborhoods below.
That was not so long ago, as Hackett discovered. The head of household in his host family was a woman with strong views about war. The resulting conversations were an education in themselves.
The woman’s family lost relatives in the fighting, Hackett said. “It was hard for her to talk about,” Hackett recalled. “I was kind of edgy for awhile. I remember one time we were sitting on the patio and it was a time when a lot of fireworks were going off. I was nervous. She said, ‘Oh yeah, it gets me the same.’ She told me there was a war here, too.
“The most important moments there were the times we spent on the patio and just kind of conversed,” Hackett said. “Week after week, you build up a relationship.”
From September 25, 2009 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
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