Brenda Hollis Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Background

Colonel Hollis, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you very much.

Tell us about where you were born and raised.

I was born in Washington, D.C., but I'm told I lived there only about eight weeks; I don't actually recall that myself. I lived in the South, in Alabama; for a short time in Georgia; and then when I was in my pre-teen years, I lived in Ohio, and I went to university in Ohio.

In retrospect, how do you think your parents shaped your character?

I didn't know my father, and I think my mother was probably the person that shaped my character. The way that she shaped it is that my mother, like many women, was a woman who had more strength than she thought she had, and had a very quiet strength and authority. And also was very accepting of all of the crazy things that I did as a child. So I think she instilled in me a sense of fairness and honesty, and dislike for people who aren't fair and honest.

Did you have any other mentors in your youth that made an impact, teachers or others?

In my youth, I guess I'm somewhat ashamed to admit it, but I didn't like school very much. I found it very boring, it was very slow. So I found a lot of guidance in books. I began to read early, I read all kinds of books. I read history. I read books that were philosophical. I read books that dealt with the injustices of our time in the form of a novel. I think those were a very important influence on my life.

Any book that stands out in your mind even today?

Even today, I would say a book that had a great impact on me was the book To Kill a Mockingbird.

What about that, in particular? I mean, it moved us all. Was it the courtroom or the relationship of the young girl to her father?

I think the relationship of the girl to her father was important to me, but the most important thing about the book for me was that there was such an obvious injustice in the societal structure, and yet people lived so complacently within that injustice, and it provoked a real sense of outrage and indignation in me, and almost wonderment as to why they couldn't realize how unjust the system was in which they were living and actively participating.

Were these kinds of concerns further developed as an undergraduate? You went to the University of Denver as an undergraduate?

No, actually, I went to undergraduate school in Ohio, I went to Bowling Green State University, a small university near where I lived. I was a Liberal Arts major. I was very interested in all sorts of topics. My majors and minors included political science, history, philosophy, sociology. So I was very interested in how people relate to each other, and the rationalization by which we support our prejudices. It was a thing of interest to me that I further developed in the university, I think.

And then you decided to enter the military after your graduation?

No.

Tell me what you did.

Certainly. When I graduated, I had two job offers: I had a job offer from the CIA, and I had a job offer from the Peace Corps. Some people think that those are really incompatible services. I saw them both as a service to my country and the international community. I chose to go in the Peace Corps. I wanted to travel outside the United States, so I went into the Peace Corps as a public health worker in West Africa. I served in Niger second, but first I served in Senegal, in West Africa.

What out of that experience stands out in your mind even today, that public service for your country in an undeveloped part of the world?

I think when you're doing it, at least when I was doing it, I didn't think every day, "I'm doing a service to my country, in this country." But the things that impacted me were two things. Number one, as a Peace Corps volunteer, you live with the people with whom you work, and so it truly opened my mind and my philosophy to other ways of life, other perspectives. Even the richness of different languages, and how that adds to who you are as a person. The second thing that struck me was the poverty in which they lived. I come from a background that's a relatively poor background, but the abject poverty that I saw in Niger and the inability of people to do things at the most fundamental level to protect their children from diseases and death, because they simply didn't have the means to do that, taught me a lesson that I never forgot. But also, the dignity with which they dealt with almost insufferable conditions.

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