Blue-Ribbon Spirit: Kate Fournel '04

Release date: May 14, 2008 |

Kate Fournel has spent the last two-and-a-half years in the northwest mountains of El Salvador, in a village called El Limo, helping farmers plant corn and tend bees, mixing cement to construct a community center, and picking cotton. She also has hiked through the mountains to help her neighbors grow chili peppers or tomatoes and has worked to organize youth camps.

"I live in one room of an adobe house, have a futon for a bed and table-top gas cooking stove," she says of life in El Limo. "I have a latrine not too far from the house and a ‘pila’ or sink to wash my clothes and bucket-bathe. Visiting a neighbor can mean passing waterfalls and seeing flocks of toucans fly overhead. The rainy season brings overflowing greenness to everything, but even the dusty roads of the dry season hold their own special beauty."

This is her life as a Peace Corps volunteer, an experience that was bred from her Goucher education.

Born in California, Fournel grew up in Madison, CT, and Raleigh, NC, competing in national equestrian events. She came to Goucher with horses on her mind and by her junior year was elected head of Goucher’s equestrian team.

"I had an amazing coach who taught me the true fundamentals of communicating with another
animal, patience, and balance, always with a laugh. It wasn’t always about the perfect course; it was about overcoming a chip to a fence or buck afterward, moving on and continuing what you started, a blue ribbon in spirit if not necessarily in its physical form. I suppose this motto flowed over into my classes, and my zeal to keep challenging myself in life became evident and necessary." 

Fournel spent the fall semester of her senior year studying cancer biology, nutrition, and conservation at Great Britain’s University of East Anglia and returned to Goucher feeling, as she describes, consumed by her desire to pursue the world. Working in the Peace Corps and in El Limo has given her a chance to fulfill some of those desires.

"It’s through exploring a different culture that I explore more about myself," she says, "whether it be through studying abroad, the Peace Corps, or something as simple as the different cultures that come together on the campus of Goucher. There’s so much out there."