After living in Afghanistan for nine months, where he learned the art of avoiding land mines and confrontations with authorities, Steven Boyack is back in the relative safety of Chicago. He isn’t sure, though, how long he will stay home.
According to Boyack, once the bug of world service and international travel bites, it inflicts a lifelong yearning.
“This type of work is an addiction,” says the 28-year-old Boyack, who was in Afghanistan volunteering with Doctors Without Borders, an emergency medical relief agency with U.S. headquarters in New York that has 2,000 workers in 80 countries. “Very few people can walk away from it forever.”
Boyack, who grew up in Arlington Heights, came home in May and was supposed to be here a month before returning to Afghanistan. Instead, he decided to take a break from the intensity of living in the war-torn country and wants to rejoin Doctors Without Borders in a year or so, in whatever place they choose to send him.
“I’ve seen some wonderful things, but I’ve also seen some horrible things,” including the many Afghanis who have lost limbs to land mines, Boyack says. “I think you have to get over some of that stuff before you go back.” For now, he has settled into an apartment in Chicago and has a job with a real estate management company.
Boyack went to Herat, Afghanistan, in August 1997 and worked as a logistician. That’s basically the person who sets up the infrastructure that allows the medical people to do their work. It includes such things as making sure equipment arrives on time, building water or sanitation systems, seeing that offices and medical clinics get set up, and working with local authorities.
His team included a doctor, an administrator and a project coordinator; two team members were Dutch and one was Australian. They worked in a refugee camp with 18,000 people, implementing water and sanitation systems and providing medical care and health education programs. Their focus was women and children.
Since 1996, when the ruling Taliban party took over much of the country, restrictions on women have become so severe — they can’t go outside unless accompanied by a male, for example — that many of the educated women in the medical professions have left the country. Male doctors would be executed if they treated a female patient.
So Boyack’s team and its female doctor trained Afghani women as midwives and health-care providers.
“Women’s access to health care is almost nil,” says Boyack, a 1988 graduate of Buffalo Grove High School. “We trained health workers to go around and provide the most basic information, like (the importance of) hand washing. We did an extensive immunization program. We went to the elders and had them suggest people we could train as midwives.”
The contact with these women, though, was done by other women, not Boyack, in adherence with Taliban law. Being denied contact with half of the population was the most difficult part of being in Afghanistan, he says.
“My greatest pleasure in working in different countries is to step inside another culture and learn about it,” he says. “And in my opinion, the females embody the culture. To not have access to that was really difficult. You’re working for these people to make their lives better, and you never get to see who you are working for.”
In contrast, Boyack became very close to the people he worked with as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana for three years. After he graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in economics in 1993, he joined the Peace Corps and was trained as a health education and water and sanitation specialist.
Unlike Afghanistan, where he worked with a team, in Ghana he was on his own, living in the village chief’s palace, a 40-room building with peacocks strutting on the front lawn and electricity that worked most of the time.
For most of the population, there were no latrines or sanitation system. By the time Boyack left, latrines (a self-contained system that wouldn’t contaminate the ground water) had been built in about 400 homes, and these homes each had 30 to 40 people living in them.
Boyack didn’t do the work so much as train others to do things like write proposals for funding and teach people to build the systems.
“This program showed them they have the ability to get what they need,” says Boyack, who was an administrator for the Peace Corps for his last year and a half in Ghana.
Boyack would like to return to Africa someday, in part because of his fondness for the people. “The people are amazing,” he says. “To walk down the street and just wave to someone as you go by is an insult. You’d better stop and talk. They want to know how you are and how your family is doing. If you ask for directions, they don’t point, they grab your hand and take you where you need to go.”
Craig Hubbard, another Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana who now is living in San Francisco, recalls Boyack as being successful in his Peace Corps work “because he has a really good sense of humor and he was able to take things not so seriously. Whereas others might get frustrated, he was tenacious enough and self-motivated enough to keep trying for something, without letting it drag him down.”
Boyack’s mother, Carol Jackson, says she is thrilled that her son will be home for a while and out of harm’s way. She adds, though, it wasn’t out of character for him to sign up for either of his missions.
“He is a real compassionate and caring person. He has always been that way,” says Jackson, who was divorced when Boyack was 8 years old and raised three children on her own.
It wasn’t always easy making ends meet, and Boyack believes those childhood experiences might have shaped his desire to do volunteer work.
“I started working when I was 13, and I know what it’s like to suffer a little bit,” says Boyack, who put himself through college by starting his own construction company. “So now I have the ability and talents to help others, and I want to do that.”
Doctors Without Borders was founded in 1971 by a small group of French doctors who wanted to respond to public health emergencies around the world. That could include populations threatened by war, epidemics or natural disasters. Since it was established in the U.S. in 1990, 12 volunteers from Illinois have served in its programs.
Joelle Tanguy, executive director for Doctors Without Borders in the U.S., says about half of the volunteers go back for a second mission. “They first think of themselves as doing it once,” she says, “but then they get very interested and fascinated by it, and quite a few go back.”
Boyack plans to be one of those.
“I know this work is where my heart is,” he says.
