Holloway shares life experiences with Wingate

Kevin Goode
Staff Writer

Kris Holloway, author of this summer’s common reading book, Monique and the Mango Rains, arrived on campus Monday to share her Peace Corps experience with Wingate students.
Holloway said, “When I was in school I was studying environmental science and I was learning a lot about global poverty, world hunger and how the developed nations were actually un-developing the other countries. We’re sort of feeding off the lower income countries.”
She continued, “Most people in the world would never live at the level of wealth that I was living. So knowing that the rest of the world lived differently, I really wanted to know what that felt like and broaden my horizons before I went into some narrow career. I remember feeling really claustrophobic about the thought that I would go from college into some sort career and never know what the world was like.”
Holloway was originally assigned to Mali to work as a resource manager, helping to build mud stoves to conserve firewood for cooking, planting trees and building anti-erosion rock lines to protect the fields from the erosive rains when they came.
“I started doing that work but I was placed in my village where Monique lived,” said Holloway. “She was assigned to me as a host and I was assigned to live with her, but not work with her.”
“As I started to get to know her, it was clear that she was so gifted at the work she was doing. If I could just help her, sort of bring more resources to her work, I could have a much greater impact and also work within the culture in a way that planting trees with 19 year old guys as a western white woman was not going be quite as easy culturally to do.”
The desire to write Monique’s story was born from the loss of Monique, but grew more into a need to keep Monique’s life alive to readers, said Holloway.
“I realized that her story really stood for so many women’s stories in West Africa and if I didn’t let the world know that she had lived, why would anybody cared that she’d died?” she said.
“I mean a woman dies every minute in child birth around the world and we don’t care, because we don’t know them. So if we can know one, suddenly she becomes someone we know and we have to care.”
“Ironically, I don’t think I would have ever written the book if I still had her in my life. Because I’d be satisfied, she’d be in my life, we’d be friends, and we’d be visiting each other,” she said. “There would have been no sort of fire and pain to get me to do the work that’s necessary to write a book.”