Life's Rich Pageant

Janet Reineck MATESOL ’92 says her classmates knew her as a “tweener”—someone whose academic program trained her to teach English to speakers of other languages, but who also had a deep interest in development work. Inexhaustibly curious and adventurous, she arrived in Monterey after earning a BA in dance ethnology from UCLA and spending four years living in Kosovo, working on her master’s thesis for UCLA and doctoral dissertation in anthropology for UC Berkeley. (She walked in PhD ceremonies at Berkeley while a student in Monterey, with her two-year-old son in tow.) In 1994, Reineck returned to Kosovo for another three years before coming back to California and later founding her own NGO, World Dance for Humanity, which supports grassroots development projects in Rwanda. Here are a few of the lessons she has learned along the way.