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County official working for peace
Published August 23, 2004
ANGLETON — For the third time in his life, Brian Courts is going to give peace a chance.
Courts, 53, will leave his post as assistant Brazoria County engineer to join the Peace Corps, in what will be his third stint in the service.
Courts and his wife, Mickey Chapman, will spend 24 months in the African country of Togo.
“My wife is going to be working for community health and AIDS prevention,” Courts said. “I’ll be working in a program in girls’ education and empowerment, which is to promote opportunities for women to more fully participate in the development of their country.”
Neither is a stranger to working with impoverished communities. The couple met in their first Peace Corps stint in Zaire in the 1970s. In the 1980s, they signed up again, this time going to Honduras.
“We feel a great blessing and rewards from working with people who are working to improve their lives,” Courts said. “It doesn’t feel like a burden over there.”
Chapman, a nurse who has worked with hospice patients, said she’s prepared for the death she’s going to face going in a place where one in four people has AIDS.
“I’ve been thinking about my students when I was in Zaire,” she said. “I was 20, 21, a lot of the students I taught were two years younger than I. A lot of my students are probably dead.”
Chapman said her biggest challenge will be to bring the disease into the open so people can get tested and treated. “I think one of the big things in Africa is it’s hidden,” she said. “People don’t realize their neighbor has AIDS.”
Chapman said generic drugs are difficult to find in Africa, and several foundations are working to solve the problem so impoverished victims can afford the drug cocktails used to treat AIDS.
Courts and Chapman said they’ve always planned to go back to the Peace Corps, and the timing seemed right. Their daughter, Kimeya, just graduated from the University of Houston and their son, Andy, has been at UH for two years on scholarship. The move didn’t surprise the kids, Courts said.
“They kind of think, ‘Yeah, they’re finally going,’” he said.
Neither child was born in the United States. Kimeya was born in Honduras and Andy was born in Papua, New Guinea, when Courts and Chapman were working for Habitat for Humanity.
“They have some understanding of life in developing countries and the benefits and drawbacks of living there,” Courts said.
Chapman said she’s not worried about anti-America sentiment. On a trip to Egypt to celebrate Kimeya’s graduation, she found that while some people might not like President Bush or support the war in Iraq, they still admire the United States.
“Once they get to know you on a personal basis, they still admire a lot of the things we’ve done,” she said.
Chapman said the people she’s worked with have inspired her.
“People pretty much have the same hopes and dreams everywhere,” she said.
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