Bay Area residents find each other 7,000 miles from home while serving in Sierra Leone

It was midsummer and Anna Plante, a recent college grad, had just touched down at an airport in Sierra Leone.

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A class of 2022 Tamalpais High School graduate and brand new member of the Peace Corps team, Plante was picked up by Tim Miller, the Peace Corps’ country director in Sierra Leone.

“The first thing Tim said to me was ‘How is Marin County?’” Plante said. “It was just awesome.”

“The first thing the country director says is ‘How is home? How is our home because you saw it more recently than me?’ It was very welcoming. Off the bat it gives you something to connect over,” she said.

Miller was inquiring about home because Plante’s home is extraordinarily close to his own. Plante hails from Mill Valley, while Miller and his wife, Lara Magnusdottir, who is working at the U.S. Embassy in Freetown in Sierra Leone, are from Santa Rosa.

“I got the roster of who is coming and I thought, ‘Marin, that is pretty great,’” Miller said.

The local connections in the west African nation of 8.5 million people run even deeper.

Tyson Maurer, a 2025 Analy High School grad whose home is in Santa Rosa, was getting a tour in July of his new work digs in Freetown, Sierra Leone, when he had an exchange very similar to Plante’s.

“When I got there one of the Staff Sergeants at the time was walking me around the Embassy so I can get familiar with the faces,” Maurer said.

Sure enough, there is Miller from Santa Rosa greeting Maurer, also from Santa Rosa. After the initial greetings came the requisite questions of where Maurer was from.

His reply? Santa Rosa.

“He said, ‘There’s no way, there’s no way,’” Maurer said.

It was like old home week approximately 6,880 miles from home.

Miller, who signed on in 2025 for a five-year gig as country director for Peace Corps Sierra Leone, gave credit to both California and the giving spirit of Northern California for what feels like a disproportionate representation of service in one of the poorest nations in the world.

California is the top provider of Peace Corps volunteers, Miller said, and anecdotally, he believes that Northern California is a big provider to that body of volunteers.

“We punch above our weight in terms of volunteers per capita, particularly through universities,” he said. “I think Northern California, Sonoma County, Marin County, would like to think we are service-minded. I think it’s just great.”

And for both Plante and Maurer, that little connection with home was welcomed even as both expressed appreciation and fondness for their new posts.

“It really did feel like the world is pretty small,” Maurer said. “It was kind of nice that there are people from home and I’m not the only one that is going to be here.”

That said, Lance Corporal Maurer, assigned to protective duty at the U.S. Embassy in Freetown, has a different gig than those in the Peace Corps, and even that of Magnusdottir, who, after two decades at the Sonoma County nonprofit 4Cs where she was director of operations, is a political assistant at the U.S. Embassy.

“My job is way different from them so I haven’t really interacted with them too much,” he said. “I know they are there, but it’s different jobs and different interactions.”

Maurer, like Plante, said the experience has been positive. The food, the people, the landscape are all extraordinary, he said.

“I was just excited to get out here and experience it,” he said.

In a ceremony in Freetown Friday, Plante graduated from a 10-week training program during which she lived with a host family for a portion of that stretch and also taught summer school to elementary-aged students. Now settled into a single-occupancy home — and living without either electricity or running water — on the school campus in the Port Loko District, her primary focus for the next two years will be teaching English to elementary schoolers.

“I grew up teaching swim lessons for years and years and have always gravitated toward children,” Plante, who played four years of Div. 1 water polo at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, said. “I wasn’t really surprised when they said I’d be a primary English teacher.”

But her assignment to Sierra Leone was a surprise, because Plante left her placement up to chance.

In late 2025, as college graduation ticked ever closer, Plante decided to apply to the Peace Corps. Her father served in the Philippines in the 1980s and spoke of it fondly.

While she could have selected a nation she most wanted to serve, Plante opted instead to let the Peace Corps decide where she might be of best use.

“My head was spinning a little. How do I choose one?” she said. “I just thought, why not have somebody else make the decision for me, tell me where my skills would be needed most.”

Another strange twist to this “it’s a small world” tale? Plante’s dad Chris and Tim Miller both served in the Philippines at the same time but did not know each other. Another thread of connection to home.

“It’s not like every time I see Tim we are talking about the Golden State Warriors or the fog in the Bay Area, it’s just there,” she said. “It’s cool that he was in the Peace Corps with my dad. Just having that presence here is nice.”

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For Miller, the return to the Peace Corps decades after his first stint felt like logical next step in career and in life.

“Ultimately, I’m closing out my career,” he said. Re-upping with Peace Corps was kind of a full circle move.

For Magnusdottir, the move made sense both personally and professionally.

“The kids were grown and gone and, for me, I wanted to kind of challenge myself and expand my views and have my brain explode a little bit on a daily basis in my last working years,” she said. “I wanted to learn and expand and do something crazy and different.”

For Plante, living in a tiny village on the west coast of Sierra Leone is not as crazy as it might sound.

She lives without electricity and has let her daily rhythm fall in line with the rhythms of nature.

“I wake up at 5 or 6 in the morning with the sun, I kind of like it,” she said.

She’s found a way to work out without a gym.

“Anything is possible, I have learned,” she said. “You can’t do all of the things in the same type of ways but you can get close, you just have to be creative. Which is cool, I’m grateful for that.”

She has faced down her reticence about learning another language and has embraced Krio — the main language spoken in Sierra Leone.

“I was definitely really nervous when I got here, I was so stressed, language is so important,” she said. “But Krio has a lot of similar-sounding things to English so it wasn’t as hard for me to learn.”

She hired a carpenter to build her a bed frame to lift her mattress off of the floor and uses her mosquito net for more than protection against malaria.

“I have the mosquito net which I really like because there are a whole bunch of other things that can crawl around,” she said.

She stores water in a large bucket in her home.

“There is a pump on the school grounds, maybe 15 yards from my house, so I fill up my buckets,” she said.

She uses it to bathe and clean dishes. She has a toilet that works with the aid of water from her buckets.

“I kind of like understanding how much water I’m using and where I’m getting it from,” she said. “You use a lot less.”

Plante takes her phone and power bank to a charging station a five-minute walk from her home about every other day. She picks them up after work.

“You start to make friends with the people who charge, which is great,” she said. “I really don’t mind it.”

That is a key component to Peace Corps, Miller said, immersion in the community: Shopping in markets, eating meals with neighbors, taking day trips with locals.

“We follow a cluster model,” he said. “We try to put one volunteer within an hour of each other. There is no such thing as two volunteers in the same village or the same community. We want you to have an individual experience… It’s really to build relationships within the community. We are not here as an aid group, handing out blankets, we are here as a partnership to build capacity.”

Miller said the Peace Corps can be, and is often, a life-changing experience. But it’s not for everyone.

“You sweat a lot, you get bitten by bugs, you get tummy problems,” he said.

But the work, he said, is good and important. Working in education, working in health care clinics, in building agriculture infrastructure — it’s all valuable and needed service.

“It’s something you look back on after you have done it and you are proud of it,” he said.

Plante, who studied sociology as well as film and media studies at Bucknell, is already convinced.

“It’s been incredible,” she said. “I have no regrets and no doubt that this is the place that I’m supposed to be.”

And that feeling is evident nearly 7,000 miles away, all of the way home.

“My mom and dad say when they are on the phone with me it makes it easier, they say ‘We see how happy you are, it radiates through the phone,’” she said. “My dad was so stoked for me.”

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or [email protected]. On Instagram @kerry.benefield.

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