Peace Corp
by Lorine Parks
What is a slender blond white woman, an only child from a small family in America, doing in middle of the vast southwest Pacific, living with a large extended native family in the Kingdom of Tonga?
She’s Nora Graves a Peace Corps volunteer, and loving every minute of it. Twenty-one years old and just months out of college, she’s been teaching English, math and science at a local Tongan school. And now that Jan has finished her two year stint, she has come back home to tell us about it.
The Peace Corps, founded in 1961 by John F. Kennedy and originally administered by Sargent Shriver, is a volunteer program run by the United States government. The mission of the Peace Corps includes providing technical assistance, helping people outside the United States to understand American culture, and helping Americans to understand the cultures of other countries.
Each program participant, a Peace Corps Volunteer, is an American citizen, typically with a college degree, who works abroad for a period of two years after three months of training. Jan told us she had no idea where she would be sent: it might have been Central America or Mexico; Eastern Europe or Asia; one of many countries in Africa; or the Pacific Islands.
Jan lived with a fisherman’s family on a small island, where she learned to be “in an environment where there was no washing machine.” The Peace Corps provides each Volunteer with housing and a living stipend that enables him or her to live in a manner similar to the local people in the community, covering food and incidentals. It also covers the cost of transportation to and from the country of service.
Not all volunteers are necessarily recent college graduates: an increasing number are either seasoned professionals taking a humanitarian service break or retirees with a wealth of experience to offer. President Jimmy Carter’s mother Lillian served as a nurse in the Peace Corps and said it was the most glorious experience of her life.
The Peace Corps in Cuba? It may be the next development in furthering relations with this country. Cuba needs aid that workers could bring in technology in public health, agriculture and infrastructure. As Jan says, ’it’s a chance to give back to the world.”