Connie Kreiss

— 25th — (1996) Bill Clinton

IN the three-and-one-half years after graduation, I worked in rural Tanzania as a community organizer. This experience, though now long ago, is still a powerful experience in shaping my perspectives on how to live.

When I returned to the U.S., I took pre-med courses, went to medical school and became a family practitioner. I have now worked eight years in Southeast Alaska as an Indian Health Service physician. I work longer hours than I would ideally like, but enjoy the work.

Balancing work and family is a constant challenge. Floyd does much of the parenting of our two sons, ages six and thirteen. We must be the only family in Sitka without a microwave, VCR or functional TV. We hike, do subsistence fishing, pick wild berries and read late into the night.

— 45th — (2016) Barack Obama

I retired two years ago, after twenty-five years with the Indian Health Service in Sitka, Alaska, working as a hospital-based family doctor serving primarily the Tlingit Alaska Native community. I then plunged into community volunteer work, restoring the hundred-year-old buildings of the former Sheldon Jackson College, now home to Alaska Arts Southeast. That, other community involvement, friends, family, and a number of long-distance walks in Europe (the Camino Frances, Via de la Plata, Camino Norte/Primitivo, LaVoie d'Arles, Geneva to the Pyrenees and the Chemin de Robert Louis Stevenson) have kept me very busy and reasonably content since retirement. I just finished my longest walk, the Via Francigena, the two-thousand-kilometer walk from Canterbury to Rome following the historic pilgrimage route documented by Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury in 990 AD. These walks, done simply and usually alone, are satisfying cultural and historical immersions. I probably do them partly to ignore American politics, but almost any European I meet along the way reminds me of our flawed democratic system.

I remain happily married to Floyd and immensely proud of our sons.

— 50th — (2021) Joseph Biden

I am one of the lucky ones during this pandemic. My retirement pay continues, I have food and shelter, and I live in small-town Alaska, where I can walk in the mountains or go ocean kayaking from my backyard. I miss the kind of socializing I used to do, but it will come again, and in the meantime, I have my husband with me and both of our sons in town, who visit us outdoors, masked and at some distance.

But I am sickened by our country's response to the pandemic, the tens of thousands who have died needlessly, and by our country's broken system of health care, which preceded the pandemic. My twenty-five years working in Alaska's native health care system were years somewhat protected from the dysfunction of the larger society's health system.

I am currently working a bit on political issues: trying to get more progressive local, state, and national folks elected and learning about the growing decolonization, social justice, and racial equity movement in our town. I fear that our generation, despite great initial hopes, did not accomplish much. I keep trying in small ways.