DAMASCUS, PA — “I was very scared of not working,” said Colette Ballew, when asked how she felt initially about retirement. “I kept thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’”

Since that point, the Damascus resident turned her retirement into almost a second career, where days range from helping local seniors to attending sacred ceremonies in Nepal.

In 1985, a friend extended an invitation to “come help beautify Callicoon.” Ballew would come up on weekends from Westchester. “You’ll move here if you see this community,” her friend said. “And she was right.” Ballew and her husband moved to the Damascus area in 1989.    

Ballew was born in France to an American mother and Tunisian father. She didn’t travel much as a child, but went to France in 1975 to spend some time with her father, who lived there. “That’s when I got the bug to travel,” she said, “I went for the summer and stayed for 18 months.”  

She began her work in education in France as a teaching assistant and tutor. In the U.S., she worked with the Job Corps in Callicoon as an after-school coordinator. She worked at a Montessori school, and in her 30s, decided to go back to school for her teaching degree.

When she went for her master’s degree in education, she studied French but also wanted a new challenge, so learned to teach Spanish as well. She spent 22 years working in public schools, between Delaware Valley Central School in Fremont and Wayne Highlands in Honesdale.

In Honesdale, as the French and Spanish teacher, she and a colleague noticed how students thought some cultures were “weird.” “We were beginning to realize we needed to get them out of Wayne County and get them to see something else,” Ballew said.

Thus began a 10-year tradition of bringing 12 to 15 students to Costa Rica each spring for 10 days. But this was not your typical trip. “We never went to the beach. I didn’t want them to think they were on vacation,” Ballew said. Instead, the group lowered their carbon footprint by doing water testing, installing greenways, and building living fences around schools to shield them from roadway debris. At night they would have lectures about native flora and fauna. “They got to have a whole different view of life,” Ballew said.  Some students even took the trip twice.

In addition to this annual trip, she also found a way to travel and teach during the summer, part of a program in China. “China got me thinking about teaching English in another country,” she said.

In 2017, Ballew decided it would be her last year teaching full-time. She felt financially stable enough to retire, and there was a proposition from a school in Nepal to come and teach there.

In January 2018 Ballew landed in Kathmandu en route to a four-month teaching stay in Butwal, Nepal. Her luggage was loaded onto the top of a Range Rover.

“We’re sitting four to the middle bench and there’s already five in the back,” Ballew said. She “intimately squished” into the person beside her—who turned out to be the school principal.  Soon the car broke down, and they unloaded all of the luggage and people to another bus—which also broke down.  

“It’s the Nepali experience!” cheered a fellow traveler, indicating the breakdowns that are part of the typical charm of traveling through Nepal. “It took us 12 hours and it was midnight, but we did get [to the school],” Ballew said, chuckling.

One memorable part of the trip was an invitation by a student to his grandparents’ house for a religious ceremony. The ceremony was separated by gender, so Ballew didn’t even get to attend the ceremony the boy invited her to—“We both hadn’t asked enough questions,” she laughs of their miscommunication—but the trip resulted in a hike with two other women, where it looked as though the entire mountainside was moving. “It was girls cutting the grass for hay. These two girls came down with these haystacks on their back that were three times their size. It was very impressive.  

“They do a lot of things honoring people,” she added. “There was a big parade in the city for an 85-year-old, because she had reached 85. It was a wonderful, interesting experience.”

Nepal helped prepare her for her next journey, to Kenya and Uganda, in January and February of 2020, after she had spent the months in between those two trips on a yoga retreat in Italy, seeing family in France, and visiting an old friend in Turkey.

“When I went to Kenya, they were contact-tracing and taking temperatures in the airport. They kept saying ‘the virus,’ and I thought, ‘What virus are they talking about?’” Ballew said. She went on a safari and stayed with a friend at the University of Chuka, teaching in some of her classes.  

“In Africa, the water came from a tank on top of the building. I got a little hot pot and would fill that up and boil it for brushing my teeth and washing my face. I had to boil water if I was going to use it, or I would walk to the little bodega and he would sell me two or three gallons for a dollar,” she said.  

She returned to the U.S. on March 8.

But what to do when travel ground to a halt that spring? Ballew’s call to action extends to the domestic community as well. The thrift shop, IOU on Main Street in Callicoon, which she helped start in her early days in the area, seemed stocked with volunteers, so Ballew turned to Growing Older Together, an organization that helps seniors 60 and up to be independent at home. Their services range from organizing transportation for shopping to finding someone to help change a lightbulb. She once helped a car-accident victim to vacuum her house and change her bedsheets when the patient was too sore to do it alone. She also volunteered as a call-center manager during the pandemic. “We would call members to check in on how they were feeling, so they weren’t quite so isolated,” she said.  

She also serves on the community advisory board for WJFF, volunteers in a community garden with the NAACP, and participates in a book club that addresses awareness of privilege.

“It’s a second career,”  Ballew said, adding that it can be hard to say “no” to another volunteer opportunity.

Ballew has also taken up felting, writing, more reading, and daily exercise. “Usually you stuffed your hobbies into the day while you were doing other stuff,” she said of her working life. “I was always thinking I never have time for things but now I am enjoying [things like] cooking again because I have time. I don’t have to panic that tomorrow morning I have to be up at eight.”  

Even with all of her volunteer commitments, Ballew has the ultimate say in how her day goes.  “[Last week] I woke up and was like, ‘I don’t feel like doing any of that,’ so I chopped up vegetables, made a soup and spoke to my friends in Nepal.”

She is also prioritizing her personal relationships in retirement, making sure to visit a friend who has a rare blood disease. That friend recently moved from New York City to South Carolina, and that is where Ballew is headed now, on a month-long roadtrip.  

Where to next in the world for Ballew? She has her hopes set on visiting her sister in France this summer, and perhaps teaching in Ghana or Peru when the chance arises again.

And in September, you can catch her right here on the Delaware River, avoiding the crowds of July and August, when boater after boater floats by, till sometimes the entire river seems alive with rafts and tubes. “September is such a great time to be on the river,” she smiled.