In 1962, the inaugural year of the Colby January plan, senior sociology major Marjeanne Jeanie Banks Vacco '62 landed an internship with Maine's Department of Human Services. She took to the work naturally and soon was seeking out challenges in the field: training workers for the first-ever Headstart program in Boston and working with families in the then new but already troubled Columbia Point housing project. Cutting edge sort of stuff, Vacco said recently.

She now can look back on a career that has included college-level teaching, establishing and teaching in a human services master's degree program at Springfield College, earning her doctorate from Walden University in 1991 and ongoing work with troubled families referred to her by the New Hampshire court system. Vacco also has been a guest lecturer at colleges in Finland, Sweden and Mexico. Earlier this year, the China, Maine, native broadened her sociological experience when she made her first trip to Asia as a Fulbright Fellow teaching at Al-Farabi Kazak State National University in Almaty, Kazakhstan. I'd never had an experience in Central Asia or in that part of the world, she said. And a large part of my life has been looking for new and different challenges.

And a challenge it was. Vacco, who does not speak Russian or Kazak, taught through an interpreter. A few of her students spoke some English but most were reticent to engage in class discussions, at least at first. Vacco was the first American most of the students had ever met. Their perception of America, for students and many faculty, was from bad media coverage and bad TV, she said. When I first got there one of the things they wanted to talk about was why we have such horrible violence in our schools. How can kids go to school with guns?

While Vacco tried to dispel the notion that all American schools are war zones and all Americans have five cars and live in mansions, she found some of her American assumptions didn't apply to Kazakhstan. Teaching a course called Social Defense of Population, she found that Kazaks had very different ideas about who is vulnerable in their society. Ambulances, for example, are unlikely to respond to a report that someone has fallen or is ill because of advanced age. On the other hand, families are expected to care for their own elderly, with the primary responsibility for aging parents taken on by the youngest son.

The concept of reporting suspected child abuse or neglect to authorities was foreign, and corporal punishment of children was accepted. Some assumptions crossed cultures, however, she said: The people love their children.

Last spring Vacco returned to her Londonderry, N.H., home, where she lives with her husband, Richard Vacco '62, a professor at Suffolk University Law School. The Vaccos have a son and daughter in New Hampshire and two grandchildren. Jeanie Vacco has settled back into Springfield College teaching and her private practice, where she is often the last resort for teenagers before they are placed in state custody.
With the troubled teens she finds another universal dynamic at work. Basically they have communication issues, Vacco said. Parents don't talk to kids and kids don't talk to parents. Those things remain the same.

-Gerry Boyle '78