As someone who grew up in Marshalltown and graduated from high school a year after the tornado and a year before the derecho, Monica Carroll has firsthand experience with natural disasters, and she’s spent the last few years traveling the country and doing her best to help others affected by tragedy as a team leader with the Americorps Conservation Corp.

Back home for the holidays, Carroll, who graduated from the University of Northern Iowa earlier this year with a degree in Geography, reflected on the unconventional journey she’s taken and how it’s managed to broaden her horizons in the process. It started with the Extended Learning Program (XLP) at MHS and instructor Susan Fritzell, who ran the Envirothon team. Then, while at UNI, she attended a career fair and met her current boss.

“She kind of sold me on the Conservation Corps and what I would end up doing, like burning stuff, going to fire school, doing some disaster response stuff,” Carroll said. “That first year, we did a lot of invasive species removal and management, so a lot of Cedar tree cutting to restore remnant prairies.”

She got on with a crew that mostly works in Iowa and Minnesota and was especially focused on the Driftless Area around Decorah initially, and in 2023, she became the leader of a water trails crew based in the Des Moines area removing logjams for paddlers, doing a lot of chainsaw work at Four Mile Creek. Another project was mapping every single riverboat access point in the state.

“We’ve been to 83 counties doing, I think, 619 boat accesses,” she said.

Since she joined the Corps in 2021, Carroll had been primarily working within her region (occasionally venturing to a neighboring state like South Dakota), but in July, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to assist with typhoon relief in the South Pacific U.S. territory of Guam, where America’s day begins, arose.

“That was definitely the most eye-opening experience just because, you know, you hear of Iowa Nice and everything, and we’ve had the tornado and derecho and I thought I knew what it’s like after a disaster,” she said. “But they just blow everybody else out of the water.”

The crew was part of the first wave to assist the people of Guam, and Carroll was struck by how generous they were — quick to offer lunch after the crew would take damaged coconut trees down with chainsaws.

“It is really true that the most humble people are the most in need, and it’s just crazy,” she said. “You never really know how people are gonna react to you — someone foreign who’s never been here before, ‘Why are you coming to help us?’ But they were more than grateful for everything, so that was really fun. It kind of made me nervous, but I’m really glad I went.”

Several months later, Carroll and her crew ended up in Hawaii in the aftermath of the devastating Maui wildfires and worked out of a warehouse on the island of Oahu sorting out donations. Although they were the third wave of relief for that disaster, she felt they were still able to be highly productive cleaning up and managing all of the charitable contributions.

“It was warehouse work, so I didn’t get a tan,” she said. “It was different than Guam with the fact that we weren’t talking to people on their properties (and) helping with them.”

There were still plenty of memorable experiences, however, as their forklift driver invited the team to his farm and gave them a more authentic view of the islands — emphasizing the relationship between the people and the land — than they otherwise may have gotten just seeing the standard tourist attractions.

For a girl in her early 20s, Carroll has already seen areas of the world that most people only visit on vacation, albeit in a decidedly different context. Guam, in particular, provided some unique culinary options as a “melting pot” for all of the cuisines of the region and a popular vacation spot for Japanese tourists.

Looking forward, Carroll’s goal is to keep doing conservation work around the country and at some point work in a field more directly tied to geography and/or Geographic Information Systems (GIS), so the experience she’s already gained will be a strong resume builder when the time comes to apply for jobs.

For now, her plan is to serve a third term with the Conservation Corps, this time for a full year, and have some more say over which trips she takes. Carroll recounted traveling to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan early on and hopes to return someday, and otherwise, she’s interested in anything in the West and Pacific Northwest — singling out Glacier National Park in Montana as a top potential destination.

And no matter where she ends up, she’ll never forget where she came from.

“Going through the tornado… We weren’t necessarily greatly affected in that specifically, but we had gone around town and I had done cleanup stuff through school and sports,” she said. “But being a part of that before, it kind of makes you understand the gravity that some people face, and you can’t always prepare for this kind of thing.”

To learn more about the Conservation Corps, visit https://www.facebook.com/conservationcorps or https://conservationcorps.org/.