Roderick S. Hooker
Please meet our Monthly Spotlight for March: Roderick S. Hooker!
Rod Hooker served as a Peace Corps Volunteer, in Tonga, from 1973-1976. He arrived with Cynthia J. Adler as a part of Group 12, lived in the capital city of Nuku'alofa, and wore many hats as a PCV. Rod accepted a PC assignment to undertake an environmental impact statement on the lagoon, in Tongatapu. Unfortunately, there was no support for that initiative and instead pivoted to teaching biology at Nuku’alofa High School. Later he helped out at the Vaiola Hospital and led outreach initiatives to rural villages to discuss the merits of birth control as part of a World Health Organization initiative.
Prior to Peace Corps Service, Rod was drafted in the Navy during the Vietnam War as a corpsman (1965-69). When he was discharged, he moved back home in Saint Louis and earned his undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Missouri. He then followed up with graduate studies in tropical biology. In St. Louis he met Cindy, who was a chemist. While working on his graduate degree, Rod moved to Costa Rica and invited Cynthia to join him, which she did.
As he was nearing his time in Costa Rica, he applied to the Peace Corps. For Rod, entering the Peace Corps seemed like a natural fit to do something opposite from wartime experience. “I applied to the Peace Corps and was given three places to choose from; I chose Tonga. Cindy also applied to the Peace Corps but was invited to serve elsewhere (not Tonga). We quickly married to serve together in Tonga as a spousal unit.” They found their time in Tonga to be meaningful and everything they did seemed to have a beneficial impact on their lives and thinking.
During their time as PCVs, they lived on the api of the Puloka family. The family provided them with a fale and their commute to work was short (Tonga High School and Tupou College). He recounts, “The Puloka famil] had a nice little house for us and as a result we were able to ride a bike or walk to work, which was less than a mile away. We got to know the Puloka family well. Two of their children were our students and were bright.” Their oldest son, Sione, would accompany me when I met with villagers to drink kava and discuss about size of families.”
Rod and Cindy visited many of the islands throughout the island groups to work on various projects. One was wiring part of the ‘Eua Island for electricity! Over a holiday, he and another volunteer secured a church grant and were able to purchase electricity wiring. They went to ‘Eua to wire the Hango agricultural school and a few other buildings. Before heading over to moonlight as a lineman, he contacted his engineer father. At great cost, his father put together a toolbox and shipped it from St. Louis. The toolbox was filled with hand tools (saws, brace ‘n bits, levels, etc.). All the tools were used at the agricultural college along with other projects and bequeathed to his Tongan father afterwards.
Rod’ father also sent him the very first handheld computer: TI-64 calculator. He laughingly recalled the story: “My father wrote to me and told me that he just came across a new gadget. It is called a TI-64 and it is a handheld pocket computer. In Tonga, during that time, copra was a big industry, and the workers did all accounting by hand. With this TI-64, after using it for some computations, he gifted it to a copra board accountant. “It was an absolute boon to be able to calculate in the field what the crop would be! I was really happy to be able to give it to them.”
Rod and Cindy were instrumental in quadrupling the number of students who qualified for university in New Zealand during their two years – teaching biology, math, chemistry, and physics. Another role that he found both challenging and rewarding was an outreach to rural villages to discuss birth control. He said, “At the time, Tonga was outgrowing their population’s ability to sustain themselves but had resisted birth control. One of the roles that I had was that I would drink kava and talk about birth control to various villagers; it was a real cultural issue. To find a way into this delicate topic, I would tell a story about a sea captain who dropped off goats on an island and left them. When the captain came back to check on the goats, they had eaten all the food and died. It was a nice segue into population management.”
One of the challenging aspects of living in Tonga at that time was drinking clean water. “I contracted Hepatitis A presumably due to sewage seeping into well water. I had dengue fever twice, developed shingles (zoster), and painfully became more attuned to healthcare services and public health.” Gout (abundant in Polynesians), diabetes, hypertension, dengue, and filariasis were endemic.
As they were winding down their Peace Corps Service, Rod and Cindy stayed on to help with the transition to the new volunteers. For a two-month period there was no US representative in Tonga, so they were somewhat de facto American representatives to Tonga in that capacity. That stint also transitioned for Rod as a recruiter for the Peace Corps, back in the United States. After the Peace Corps, Rod returned to St. Louis to attend Physician Assistant School and Cynthia as a chemist. They decided to sponsor Sione Puloka to come to the United States and go to the university nearby. Sione lived with them at first then moved in with Rod’s parents who liked having a young man in their home. Sione graduated from the University of Missouri, worked as a chemist, moved to American Samoa, then back to Tonga. Sadly, he passed away at a young age from cancer leaving a wife and daughter.
Ultimately, Cynthia and Rod went separate ways and he moved to Portland, Oregon where he worked for Kaiser Permanente as a rheumatology PA and as a health services researcher. He earned a PhD in health policy and divided his time as a clinician and a researcher. He spent 3 decades as a clinical PA and researcher then transitioned to the Department of Veterans Affairs in Dallas, Texas and as a university professor. At the VA he inaugurated a rheumatology research center and database. After a decade in Texas, he accepted a senior directorship with The Lewin Group, a Washington, DC think tank. The focus of his work was and continues on the medical workforce and labor economic research. Now retired he lives in Vancouver, WA (near Portland, OR) where he and Donna raised a family. Rod spends his days hiking, trail work, restoring salmon streams, and keeping an eye on the Mount Saint Helens volcano. He still takes on economic projects and serves as an adjunct professor of health policy at Northern Arizona University.
When asked how Tonga impacted his career and life (I know. It is a big question), he offered this reply: “I had an epiphany in Tonga, and it is about the world and the diversity of culture created everywhere. Who has the right to say their culture and customs are in the best interest of everyone? I admired the Tongan culture and as a result I became a rainy-day anthropologist. To this end I selectively read Polynesian literature. Fortunately, I had a career opportunity to visit many of the major Polynesian islands and cultures. Today there is new excitement about Polynesia. This is the just emerged (2020) genetic understanding there was Polynesian and Native American pairing up 800 years ago from the South Marquesas and Colombia, South America. Such new findings keep me in awe what phenomenal navigators the Polynesians were.”
Rod can be reached at:
Rodhooker6@gmail.com
