Students honor former Peace Corps teacher

For teachers, the ultimate compliment is to have a former student return years later with heart-felt words of thanks.

For John Haack of Maple Lake, those former students didn’t just thank him. They flew him to San Francisco for a reunion of a school in the Phillipines where Haack taught nearly 40 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Haack had just graduated from Mankato State in 1967 when he signed up with the Peace Corps for a two-year tour of duty in the Phillipines, teaching English as a second language to seventh and tenth grade students.

“There was no electricity and just dirt roads,” Haack said of his first teaching experience at Ilagan in the Isabela Province. “It was very remote and the bus that we took to get there was a flat-bed truck with church pews on it.”

Haack said there were 50 kids in a class at the school and some of them walked great distances to attend.

“But they tell me that now that’s all changed,” he said.

And that information comes from his former students, who planned a reunion from June 26 to 30 at the Embassy Suites in San Francisco for the Centennial Celebration of Isabela National High School. Not only did his former students track him down in Maple Lake, they insisted that he come.

“It doesn’t seem possible that it was 37 years ago,” Haack said. “And for them to find me after all that time and send me a plane ticket. I couldn’t believe it.”

Those students who once walked barefoot to school are now doctors, lawyers and professional people, some living in the U.S, some in Canada and some in the Marshall Islands. Two of Haack’s students who also served as reunion organizers are now nurses.

In San Francisco, Haack said there was plenty to talk about. “There was a lot of catching up,” he laughed. “Who’s doing what, where they ended up, what their kids are doing.”

Haack said he kept letters all these years written by his students containing their hopes and dreams for the future and he brought them with him to San Francisco. “When I read some of the things they said, they’d laugh,” Haack said. “But so much of it came true.”

As a way to offer thanks for helping to make those dreams come true, the reunion organizers presented Haack and three other Peace Corps volunteers with an Outstanding Service Award. And there were also plans to hold a reunion every two years, with the next set for New York.

The only disappointment for Haack was the fact that his accordion couldn’t be repaired in time to make the trip to San Francisco, a situation that he said will take steps to correct at the request of his students before the next reunion.

“They said, ‘Your accordion better be going to New York, or else.’”

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