Peace Corps, the Next 50 Years

Fifty years ago, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy called on young Americans to offer their talents and energy to the world in what would eventually be called the Peace Corps. Technicians or engineers -- how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? Courtesy of Gene Schreiber hide caption.

I think it can. And I think that Americans are willing to contribute," he added. In 50 years, more than , volunteers have answered that call. The Peace Corps, created after Kennedy took office in , is tasked with promoting world peace and friendship. American volunteers to the Peace Corps have served in countries. Ghana and Tanzania were the first countries to welcome them.

Peace Corps volunteer Alison Stow works with students in Ghana in Sarah Buss hide caption. He tells Morning Edition host Linda Wertheimer that the experience changed his life. He says he had no idea the Peace Corps would still be going strong 50 years later.

Alison Stow, 28, just returned from volunteering in West Africa, where she taught art to deaf students. She cites the "severe cultural isolation of being a Peace Corps volunteer. Both Stow and Schreiber say it is an experience they would recommend for young people who are considering joining. I worked with a Cameroonian Hans MVONDO in the department of Agriculture, where we would take a motorcycle into the jungle and visit small villages that he knew had potential water projects. During the two years, we constructed or repaired six spring boxes in three different villages. We also implemented a pump on a family well that was made with rebar, tire, and flip flops.

It was a great experience and I still talk about my time there almost every day. I received a package from home one day filled with all sorts of "western" candies. One of my landlord's kid, Joel, came over and he started asking me questions about all the candy like all curious kids would do.

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Usually I would covet all the candy and not really pass it out to Cameroonians since they wouldn't really understand the sentimental value to a Starburst or Reese's Peanut Butter Cup; to them it's just a "bon bon". Since he'd never seen a jelly bean before much less a Harry Potter one , I had to explain the whole concept of the variety of flavors. THEN I had to explain this Harry Potter guy, which really sounded bizarre when you're talking to a kid who's main goal in life is to make sure he does his chores and gets his fare share of food at night.

But Joel's a good kid I asked him what he thought of it and he replied, "c'est un bizarre gout" it has a weird taste. That's when I mentioned it was supposed to be vomit and we both laughed.

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It turned out he was really interested in Harry Potter's story, so I had my sister mail me the French version of the book and read to him the story. Of course he got hooked and to this day I'm sure he still reads the book to his younger siblings. Maggie Woods; Taken in: They are using the donkey to draw water from what we called the "dirty well. However, it was utilized for animal and crop water. The water table in my village, Yallal Tankonjala, was at around feet.

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Thus, it was a rather arduous task to draw water up with solely human power. I served in The Gambia from in the natural resource sector. During my first year I mainly worked on developing a demonstration plot on half a hectare During my second year I taught classes of teens and twenty-somethings at the Chamen Development Center. Sometimes this provided perks, such as when I was able to get much cheaper prices on items at the outdoor markets.

Other times it proved problematic, particularly in relations with the opposite sex. The part of the experience I appreciate the most is having been able to be a part of the village community and developing close ties with my host family. Having extended family living in the same compound, kids being able to run free throughout the village because everyone knows everyone else--these are things that Western culture has lost and is much the worse for.

Being part of those connections--even for just a few years--part of that type of true community, is something that I will never forget. Scott Stadum; Taken in: Guyana I served in Georgetown from - I loved Peace Corps, one of the best experiences of my life. Every year, there is a rodeo in Lethem, located in the Rupununi Region 9 region of Guyana.

It's pretty much like any other rodeo, with great feats of strength, skill, horseriding and so on. Peace Corps volunteers go down every year and have a great time I'm not sure if they do this every year, but the locals challenge the volunteers to a match of tug of war. Men vs men, women vs women.

I was one of the head editors of The Gaff, a volunteer quarterly magazine. I was working with St. Joseph's Mercy Medical Hospital and secured them a full time volunteer from Trinidad to update their filing system. I was working with other volunteers and the UN Volunteers program to develop an umbrella organization for all volunteer groups in-country. Those are just a handful of the projects I did.

We continue the work we did as volunteers through microgrants given to Peace Corps volunteers, returned volunteers RPCVs and host country nationals. Fred Johnson; Taken in: It was literally a hovel as you can see from the photo. I believe our language teacher, Shivaji Upadhyay, took us there to practice our language, to interact with ordinary Nepalis, and to appreciate the culture and food of Nepal. The boy in the picture: Gopi, was an orphan of about 7 years old.

Like kids everywhere he was fully of life and questions. Talking with us and entertaining us during our meals of daal bhat, which was very delicious much better than the westernized food that we got at the big hotel. The Hotel Bam Bhola it really had no name placard but that is what the people who worked there called it is long gone replaced by big concrete structures.

I think they called it a Hotel only because the staff and perhaps a traveler or two slept on the 3 or 4 tables at night. This place and people are fondly remembered after all these years as the spot we volunteers fell in love with Nepal and her people. Peace Corps was one of a couple of volunteer organizations in Nepal in the 70's the Germans, British, and Japanese were also there But we were the ones who worked on the grassroots level.

And in that way we did touch the lives of ordinary Nepalis and were also enriched. In this way we did promote peace and understanding among people and in the process we were changed, too. Scott Schmidt; Taken in: Belize This photo was taken on July 4, during pre-service training.

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My training group visited Benque Viejo del Carmen in western Belize to learn about the culture and traditions of the Maya Mestizo. Marimba music often accompanies traditional Maya dances, such as the Hog Head Dance. After a cultural performance, these two Peace Corps Trainees interacted with one of the young marimba players. In addition to my primary project, I instructed an after-school music class at a local elementary school, collaborated with other Peace Corps Volunteers and 4-H Belize to implement an environmental summer camp, and assisted the Belize Red Cross with disaster relief efforts following Hurricane Dean.

While I have returned home, my mission continues as I impart a better understanding of Belize to the people I meet. I enjoy sharing my photographs, knowledge, and even cooking up a nice pot of rice and beans every once in a while. John Duffell ; Taken in: I taught English and Life Skills at a small school in the village of Namitembo place of corpses While I was there I really took an interest in the environment; it seemed to be one of the few areas where my hard work visibly paid off.

For several weeks before this picture was taken I spoke in my Life Skills classes about planting trees: Then I went to the nearest town up and over Zomba Mountain to a nursery where I bought 25 trees, for a dollar or two each. I brought them back to the school and had each class pick the trees they wanted to plant. There were oranges, mangoes, lemons, and several other local medicinal trees. Like most Peace Corps projects, I think, I started out with very big hopes and was pretty happy with a small achievement.

The day of the planting, it was hard to get the students to dig the holes deep or wide enough. The ground is hard clay which makes for some tough digging and a poor tree environment. In the picture I'm showing these boys how wide the hole must be as long as their hoe handles.



After the planting it was hard to keep the trees watered. I tried various attempts to coax students into doing it- asking each class to elect waterers for their own trees, asking some of my most reliable students, offering to pay for part of a student's school fees It was a constant struggle.

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John went back to the school about a month ago and said a few of the trees are still alive, which is more than I had thought. Bill Coyle; Taken in: Colombia I served two years in Colombia as an extension agent, working in tropical crops, primarily with coconuts and rice. As a city slicker from outside the Washington D. I was assigned to a remote tropical island, San Juan de la Costa, along Colombia's Pacific coast, between Buenaventura and Tumaco, and was affiliated with a Colombian agricultural institute.

Along with my Colombian colleagues, we introduced a new rice variety to the region and combated a nematode infestation in local coconut groves. My Peace Corps experience had a life-long impact. It inspired me to study agricultural economics and later embark on a year career as a USDA economist. Jonathan Garro; Taken in: Paraguay I am still a volunteer, for a few more weeks at least.

My service was or is - My project is Urban Youth Development. That means working in schools to improve the educational system by introducing new lesson plans for both elementary and high schools. The Paraguayan school system is severely underfunded, so I tried to introduce the teachers and students to new types of curriculums outside of basic language and math, including history, art, and health ed.

Outside of schools I've worked with local youth groups and community centers where I did career counseling and English training. That particular photo was taken at a very important soccer game here against Argentina. The national team beat them, and in doing so qualified for the World Cup. The entire country was so thrilled by the victory that the President declared that a national day off from work the following day. At the time I was living in a city called Concepcion and staying with a family in my site.

Those two guys on the right are their sons, who live in Asuncion and are studying at a large university. I had met them before, and they seemed rather timid, but after that game, their real personalities broke through. We spent the entire night partying in the street until well after the sunrise. I think I'll probably be analyzing my experiences here for the rest of my life, and I'm not sure that I've distanced myself from it all enough yet to really reflect honestly, considering I still live here in Paraguay. Off the top of my head, I think that the most profound lessons I will be taking away is a refined definition of the word "need.

We "need" another pair of shoes, we "need" a new TV, etc. People here in my site are incredibly poor by any developed-world standards, yet they do not fill their lives with unnecessary things. It would certainly be naive to call the lifestyle here quaint, because living in poverty is often a very stressful existence.

But when you don't fill your life with foolish waste, you suddenly appreciate the little things in ways that so many of us always talk about fondly but rarely practice personally. Chris De Bruyn; Taken in: Mongolia I served in Mongolia from ''09 as a teacher trainer.

About six months through my service I moved from the capital city Ulaanbaatar to the much smaller city of Darkhan about an hour south of Russian on the trans-siberian railway. I took this photo early one morning shortly after moving to Darkhan, just as the sun was coming up. I would often go hiking in the hills before school started for exercise and to meditate. In this photo I was walking around an owoo sacred rock pile. It is a custom in Mongolia to walk around the owoo three times in a clockwise direction, throwing stones from the base of the mountain onto the pile each time around.

I took the shot with a tripod and remote timer. On this particular morning it was roughly forty degrees below zero oddly enough that is the temperature at which the Celsius and Farenheit scales meet. Working as a teacher trainer in a Mongolian school with the Peace Corps was quite an experience. By the end of my two years there, I had developed a deep rapport with many of the teachers: I designed workshops for the language teachers, I wrestled the gym teachers, sipped moonshine with the training technologists and worked on paintings with the art teacher.

Andrew Courtney; Taken in: I was there from The rainy season had just begun, and the El Nino was strong so there was tremendous flooding everywhere.