<p>Would really like to hear some more current stories (so those of your sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, etc.), but would love to hear some personal stories as well.</p>
<p>I had a friend who volunteered in Senegal back in the very late 70s. Was not such a good experience for her. Now my own D is thinking a couple years from now (after college) that she might be interested. It’s Peace Corps week, so there’s been quite a presence these last few days. It’s got her thinking.</p>
<p>Got a story you’d like to share? I’ll be sharing them all with her. And yes, she knows I’m posting. This board is a wealth of knowledge, and I’m not ashamed to tap into it.</p>
<p>My friend’s daughter is in Peru right now. She is staying with one of the wealthiest families in a large town, but the living conditions are still poor. They own the only telphone in the town and make money when people need to use it. A large loudspeaker is used to announce incoming calls throughout the whole town. Can you imagine? The daughter is working with the people on diet, introducing refrigeration and vegetables. They eat a lot of “rotting fish”.</p>
<p>When my s showed interest in the Peace Corps I sat him at the computer, googled death/suicide in the peace corps and left him to read. You get the idea. He is now considering some volunteering mission wthin the United States. There are probably some great places to help and some great stories being told but I am very concerned for the safety of these young, idealistic volunteers.</p>
<p>I wanted to join the Peace Corps after grad school and found out I was ineligible for ten years due to my job in the military (in an intelligence field). I think I can get in now that enough time has elapsed, so my husband and I plan to join together after the youngest graduates from college. I therefore would enjoy hearing other’s stories as well.</p>
<p>I did an internship in Mauretania (which borders Senegal) during grad school (early '80s) and hung out with some Peace Corp folks who were in Nouakchott for either medical treatment or leave. They seemed to be loving their experience. There was one guy they were trying to send home because he had caught some bad bug and he was doing everything he could to be sent back into the field. I traveled extensively “into the bush” with an AID worker and we saw some of the peace corps volunteers out in the field as well. They all seemed happy. A lot of the AID workers had been former Peace Corp and had learned their languages (Pular and Zenega) that way. (Not sure of the spelling on the languages, but those were the popular dialects that I remember. The Arabic spoken was Hassaniya, which was so different from the Cairo dialect I knew as to be useless to me; everybody pretty much used French as the common language.)</p>
<p>The villages seemed to be pretty nice places to live. Only Noackchott had electricity, so the stars were amazing at night. Water was gotten from a central well and most people lived in canvas tents, just as you would imagine a bedouin camp. Cooking and often sleeping was done outside. It hadn’t rained in 17 years when I was there. There was absolutely no ability to grow anything in that climate, so the whole country seemed to live on food aid. (There was a real structure, with a door to house the food donations in each place we stopped.) The primary activity I witnessed was people preparing and cooking food (rice figured prominantly in every meal) and otherwise just sitting around, drinking strong tea or coffee and telling stories. The kids did not seem to attend school but perhaps I just didn’t see it. The sand storms could be bad, so the men unwound their turbans and covered their faces and the women all had something to use as a veil. (Men also soaked the turbans in water to keep cool.) The typical african dress was a bolt of tie dyed material (about 4 feet wide by 10 feet long) folded in half, with a seam sewn up each side about 8 inches from the edge, stopping about 18 inches from the top for the armholes. A hole is cut in the top for the neckline. The more expensive dresses had elaborate needlework around the neckline and the less expensive ones basically just had a cut out. It looks like a kaftan. Then a long scarf was used for a headcovering and to protect against sandstorms. I don’t think most people had more than one dress. Going inside the tent, you would see a few persian type rugs on the ground and a chest to keep the cooking utensils. There was no evidence of extra clothes or shoes or anything else and it would have been visible since the whole tent was usually around 15x15. The bottom 18 inches was kept up on three sides to let a breeze through. </p>
<p>People kept a few goats and camels, which presumably ate the same food aid the people ate. There was little green stuff in that dessert–just shifting dunes. Death Valley looks like a paradise of living stuff in comparison.</p>
<p>Definitely no phones or radios or anything like that, but that was in the early 1980’s. Maybe it has changed since. We didn’t even have phones in my house in the city. The embassy contacted people with two-way walkie talkies, if needed, although there were phones inside the embassy.</p>
<p>Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and would go back in heartbeat.</p>
<p>The stories from toledo & TheAnalyst are quite inspiring, and Sax, I will share yours as well. Like I said, I’d like to hear the good, the bad, and the indifferent.</p>
<p>I have a friend who is a Missionary and travels to Timor and parts of Cuba on a regular basis to deliver clothing, reading glasses and books; and teaching Christianity. She’s usually away 6 weeks at a time, living in tiny huts in very small villages, most without running water and electricity. She and her husband are in their late 60s, and are Holocaust survivors. I’ve suggested that my D go with them on a couple of trips just to get a feel of what that type of experience can be like. We’ll see where all this brings her.</p>
<p>Adding to the Peru girl’s experiences…She goes running every day with her ipod and one day she was “robbed” of it, while running. She put out the word that she was offering a reward for it’s return. The amount was something ridiculous, like $1. She ended up getting it back “because no one would be able to sell it for more than $1” in that town.</p>