Peace Corps Provides Travel, Work Experience
Volunteers Find Both Challenges and Opportunities
The Peace Corps can provide an opportunity for college students who seek adventure, love traveling to exotic places and being immersed in a culture very different from America. Currently, 7,000 Peace Corps volunteers are serving in 70 countries, working to bring clean water to communities, teach children, help start new small businesses and stop the spread of AIDS.
Volunteers face many challenges while helping others around the world in a very different position than the military. Two such volunteer candidates seeking the chance to help out others are Vicrum Puri, an industrial and systems engineering major and Catherine Ampagoomian, a crop and soil environmental sciences graduate, both from Virginia Tech. Puri was nominated by a Peace Corps recruiter and is currently waiting for an invitation to a country.
Although he requested a location in the South Pacific region in the information technology program, until he gets an official invitation, Puri will not know his destination or assignment.
He is, however, eager to go and has been looking forward to it for some time.
"As soon as I found out what it was, I knew it was for me," Puri said "Hopefully, it's just a beginning."
Ampagoomian has received her invitation to Mauritania, an Islamic country in North Western Africa. She chose the Peace Corps because she wanted to get "hands-on" work experience.
"I will be working with returned refugees on gaining food self sufficiency," she said.
Going into an Islamic country, Ampagoomian realizes the experience will be challenging.
"It will be harder to gain respect not only being an American in an Islamic country, but being an American woman in an Islamic country."
President Bush is pushing for more volunteers to go to Islamic countries, she said.
Former Peace Corps Volunteer Treasures Experience
Puri and Ampagoomian will join the long list of current and former college students who have made foreign public service an important part of their scholastic experience. Virginia Tech graduate Heather Switzer, assistant director in the school's service learning center, served as a Peace Corps volunteer 1994.
"I wanted an opportunity to live and work in another culture, in a country outside of the U.S.," Switzer said. "I wanted an intensive cultural immersion and I wanted a program that would support me (provide health care, etc.)."
Switzer was a professor in the Virginia Tech English department at the time she joined the Peace Corps, she then became an English teacher in Ethiopia, Africa.
"My experience in Ethiopia was wonderful, enlarging, amazing, difficult, frustrating, and life-changing."
"I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to learn from and live in one of the oldest cultures in the world," Switzer said. "I miss Ethiopia and my friends there everyday -- still."
The Peace Corps is always looking for volunteers, Puri adds.
"I've never heard any negative experiences," he said. "Those looking for adventure, travel and life-changing experiences should look into the Peace Corps."
For more information about the Peace Corps, call 800-424-8580 or visit http://PeaceCorps.com.
