Peace Corps Director Ron Tschetter is making increased recruitment of the 50-plus demographic – Baby Boomers, active seniors and mid-career professionals – a central theme of his tenure. He spoke of this at his confirmation hearing a year ago, and more recently he dropped in on Evangeline “Van” Shuler, an old friend from his India days who just happens to be the oldest living returned Peace Corps volunteer. Click here for the Peace Corps press release.
It’s a wise move. To a younger generation, Peace Corps is just one among countless overseas volunteer opportunities available these days—and most of those don’t require a two year commitment. It can be a hard sell.
But for older Americans, Peace Corps resonates. They remember Kennedy’s inaugural speech, the pictures of the first volunteers shaking the President’s hand in the Rose Garden, the days when there were 20,000 volunteers in the field and talk of tens of thousands more. Perhaps Peace Corps didn’t fit in their life plans then, but it was something they always hoped to do. Now many are doing it. Peace Corps offers the chance to fulfill a dream, give back, have an adventure, but with the reassuring safety net that a government agency can provide.
Older volunteers are not a new phenomenon in Peace Corps, just one that hasn't received a lot of attention. I remember fondly the spunky cohort of women who served in the nursing education program in The Gambia in the late 1980s. One had retired as Dean of Nursing from the University of Minnesota. Another went on to consecutive Peace Corps stints in Nepal and Jamaica. In each case they brought invaluable experience to the job and garnered deep respect from their host country counterparts. They also served as inspiration – and occasional check to – many a younger volunteer. The 78-year old female trainee who piped up “Marcus, put a condom on your tongue” during a lecture on sexually transmitted diseases became something of an in-country legend.
I'm delighted to hear of increased recruiting efforts for mature Peace Corps volunteers. I began my service in Togo at the age of 45, and completed it two years later in 2001, and am considering another period of service in the next five years. I see many positive comments about the value of older PCVs, but nothing about the hardship created by the Peace Corps in designing their programs and policies on the assumption that volunteers are 20-somethings from upper middle-class backgrounds. For myself, my 12-year-old daughter's father died in the U.S. while I was in Peace Corps service. My daughter was living in his custody at the time. This was an extremely serious family crisis which demanded the loving attention of a mother. But PC policy did not recognize "father of a dependent child" as an offical relationship. As a matter of fact, "child" is not so recognized, in the assumption that no volunteer could be the parent of a dependent child. In other words, my child could have died and PC would not have recognized this as an emergency. In this case, I applied to Peace Corps administration in Washington for emergency leave, and was denied. I hope that in renewed interest in recruiting older volunteers, built-in bias of this nature will be appropriately reviewed.
Posted by: Uintah Shabazz | July 12, 2007 at 05:21 PM