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Peace Corps Stories Section: Main Page (Introduction and Contents) PCV FAQ, questions I've answered on Yahoo about my experience and the Peace Corps in General I Was (Almost) Tattooed by Headhunters Quentin, the World Traveler Stalking Extremely Small Game The Christians and the Pagans We Visit the Land Dayaks Snippets Maps of Malaysia and Sarawak Related Sections: Pictures of Sarawak Peace Corps Links Sarawak Links Other Sections: Home Site Map Christmas News Letters Misc. Essays Genealogy Web Design Questions, comments, compliments or complaints? E-mail: tedpack@thevision.net |
Yahoo! introduced Yahoo Answers in 2006, a web site which allows people to ask questions and others to answer them. I search the site for "Peace Corps" (and "Peace Corp" - not all YA users can spell properly) every once in a while. These are the questions that have come up. Some ("What was it like?") come up 3 - 5 times a month. Some ("Is the Peace Corps a good place to meet chicks?") only came up once that I saw. I arranged them in four groups. Note that I am not an official Peace Corps spokesman, that my experience is old (1971 - 1972) and that I served in Sarawak, Malaysia as a teacher. Newer volunteers, volunteers in other countries and volunteers who did not teach may not have had the same experiences. Note also that some of my fellow PCVs who were also in Sarawak, also in 1971 - 1972 and also teachers didn't have the same experiences I did. Several left during training. One left after the first year. I was so happy I wanted to stay for a third year. Some had electricity 24 hours a day, and a small community of ex-pats to talk with on the weekend. I didn't. Finally, if you read all of the questions, you'll notice some duplication. I left it in for those who just read one or two.
Q: What was it like? It was the most exhausting, exhilarating and educational period of my life. I taught English and Literature in an upcountry boarding school in Malaysia, on the island of Borneo for two years, 1971 and 1972. We had running water 24 hours a day, electricity for 12, and 500 students. I had a 3-room shack all to myself (5-room if you count the tin kitchen and tinier bath); two 8x8 bedrooms, an 8x10 living room, a 4x8 kitchen, 4x6 bathroom. It was a frame hut with plank siding, no sheetrock, no ceiling and a tin roof. At night, four miles from the town, the tropic sky was a broad swath of warm black velvet, littered with a bucketful of diamonds. Indoors, I would watch geckos wait, upside down, next to my light bulb. They'd eat the flying insects until their little bellies were distended. One of them laid eggs in my paperclip box. I put it to one side, in the windowsill so the eggs would keep warm. One learns to live with Gecko poop; each little black dropping was a couple of dozen mosquitoes who wouldn't be biting you. It doesn't smell and it is dry enough, if you wait, you can brush it aside. If one lets fly above you when you are correcting papers, you wipe it off as best you can and tell the student you are sorry. Several of my former students now write to me via e-mail. The PC has problems; any organization that size does. Once in a while a PCV comes to grief. Not often; there have been 160,000+ volunteers over the years. Murder, rape or robbery happens, but it is rarer than in some places. I once walked through the jungle for eight days, carrying a month's pay, trusting that people in longhouses along the way would offer me a place to sleep and dinner, out of the goodness of their hearts. I would not want to carry that much money for eight hours through some parts of New York or Chicago. I did not pay people for their hospitality, but I gave them "hostess gifts" of pressure lantern mantles. When I planned my trek I figured those were things most people would need, that were sort of expensive and easy to carry. My administrators got annoyed at me because early on I resolved to answer all vague questions with as specific answers as I could. They asked what I "expected in terms of support", for instance. I answered they should make sure my living allowance got into my checking account on time and they sent out the fluoride every month. (We had a mouth guard like athletes wear; we were supposed to put a fluoride solution in it every day and soak our teeth for five minutes.) I think they wanted me to say they could "be there for me", or to hold my hand if I got the vapors. One month I got a thick packet from PC Headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, with
With its minor flaws, no other organization will put you in an
interesting place, pay you to work your tail off and provide medical
and dental care while you do it. The language and cultural training
is first-rate. I can still remember how to say
Q: Once you are recruited, what happens next? You apply. They take one applicant out of four. Once they decide you would be a good PCV, they look for a match between the requests they have from the developing countries and your skills. If you are, for instance, a math teacher who speaks Spanish, and Peru has asked for a dozen math teachers they ask you if you'd like to go to Peru. If you decline they look again. (You get to pick regions, but not countries.) If you decline too often they drop you. The key is the skill match. People with noble aspirations won't get an invitation if their skills are not in demand. Once you accept an invitation you get half a dozen shots and head to your country for three months of training in language, culture, history and your job. Up to a third of your training group may drop out before they complete their training. (Our group had a person who didn't get off the plane that took us to Kuala Lumpur.) Once you complete your training you take the oath and become a Peace Corps Volunteer. Before that you are a Peace Corps Trainee. This is the proudest moment in many PCV's lives. You get a short break and head out to your job. There you work harder than you will the rest of your life, make life-long friends, learn about an entirely different culture and change the world. You won't change much of it, and you won't change it much, but you will change the world. Most PCVs change it for the better. If the people in your area practice ritual tattooing, you may get one. There is a good chance you will learn a language that no one else in your county back home has heard of. Quechua, for instance, or Iban. When you get home you'll spend the rest of your life either starting sentences with or biting your tongue to avoid start sentences with "When I was in the Peace Corps . . .". In my day, I spent a goodly amount of time looking for audiences willing to sit through my slides. Today it is Power Point presentations. You may put up a web site. Q: Was the Peace Corps Experience worthwhile? I was a PCV during the Viet Nam war. I cost the
US Government as much as two 500-pound bombs, delivered. I wrote
and asked. Several of my former students and a lady whose family I visited
while on vacation liked me enough to look me up on the Internet and
write, 30 years later. Two of the students and the lady have PhD's now.
No one who had a 500-pound delivered to his village wrote to the pilot
30 years later to thank him. I wrote about how much it meant to me elsewhere on this page. Q: What sort of qualifications does the Peace Corps want? You can join right out of high school if you have a skill you are
really good at and can teach - like farming or small engine repair.
Note I said "Teach", not "do". The PC is big on "Give a man a fish,
he'll be hungry the next day; teach a man to fish and he will feed
his family for the rest of his life." So, just knowing how to do
something isn't usually enough; you have to be able to teach it.
Q: How difficult is it to get in the Peace Corps? They take about one out of every four applicants these days. The biggest factor is how many host countries have asked for the skills you have. All the motivation, desire and spirit in the world won't help if, for instance, you are a butcher, a baker or a candle-stick maker and the host countries want English teachers, nurses and civil engineers. Talk to a recruiter, in your area (most large cities have one) or
via the 1-800 number on the
Q: What is the Peace Corps interview like? The big one is "Why do you want to work for us?", just like any job interview. The interviewer will be friendly. They want to weed out idealists with no skills and skilled people with no ideals. If you are, say, a teacher, the answer to "Why?" will be more important than if you were interviewing at five different school districts in your county. They will probably ask you if you have a boyfriend / girlfriend and how he / she feels about you leaving for two years. Two people in my training group of 30+ left during training because they could not bear the separation. They are going to want to see if you would be a good fit with the PC; it is better for them and for you if they can eliminate problems early.
Q: Any advice for potential Peace Corps Volunteers? Try for a country with a reasonably honest government. You'll be working for them, and if their main goal is to keep 90% of the wealth in 10% of the hands, you will be doomed to failure. Try for a specific job, like nursing or teaching or farm advising. "Community Development" means you'll lack focus, IMHO.
Q: How can I best prepare myself to be a Peace Corps Volunteer? The best way would be to graduate from college with a degree in Civil Engineering with an emphasis on sewage and water systems. 500,000 children die every year because they catch a disease from their water. You could save a couple of thousand lives. It would be a long, slow process, but extremely rewarding. I taught English. Two of my former students now have PhD's and write to me. Their parents were slash-and-burn farmers who only wore shoes for festivals. That is rewarding. I didn't save anyone's life.
Q: What does the Corps look for in an applicant? Assuming you have a skill that Costa Rica or Malawi has asked for, (see above) they look to see if you can survive in a world with no take-out pizza, cell phone, cable TV; in some cases, no electricity or running water. (Or maybe running bath and drinking water but an outhouse.) Closely related to that but not quite the same, they look to see if you will be comfortable in a culture that isn't like your own. Different food, different attitudes towards women, children and animals, different body alterations, etc. (If you have piercings, you are strongly urged to get rid of them. My generation had to shave and get a haircut.) There will be more of them than there are of you. Your job is to teach / nurse / advise, not change their culture. You will have to accept the fact that they, for instance, see nothing wrong in staging a cockfight. If you have a piercing, you will have to conform to the fact that they think anyone who has an eyebrow stud is a stupid, lazy, degenerate, drug-addicted freak who should not come within 300 yards of respectable people. You could spend 60 hours a week trying to convince people that wasn't true, but your teaching, nursing or engineering work would suffer. It isn't fair; you are not allowed to campaign against cockfighting but you have to take out your eyebrow stud. If you can't accept that sort of uneven situation, you probably won't be a good candidate.
Q: What are the pros and cons of going into the Peace Corps between college and graduate school? Some of the pros are that you will be able to practice the occupation you trained for in college, you'll learn about another country, you'll learn about yourself, you'll have a lifetime's worth of stories. Some of the cons are intestinal parasites, the fact you may get out of the groove as far as writing term papers and taking classes, and the attitude towards American women that many people in the third world have.
Q: What problems do women Peace Corps Volunteers have? Many third world citizens get their knowledge of our customs through TV and movies. Their tastes run to special effects and buxom blondes - in that, ordinary Kenyans and Peruvians are no different than ordinary Americans. In the movies, James Bond looks over his martini glass, raises one eyebrow at the blond knockout, and in the next scene he's in bed with her. Many third-world men think that's all you have to do to have sex with American women. (Some people in Iowa think that's all you have to do to have sex with women in California. We Northern Californians resent the ignorance; that sort of thing happens in Los Angeles, but not here.)
Q: Is the Peace Corps intensive training difficult? I learned two languages - Malay and Iban - enough to get along. I learned Hokkien later on my own. We had language lessons 4 hours a day, six days a week for 6 weeks, except for Wednesday afternoon, when we had shots. After that I practice taught in the morning and had language lessons in the afternoon, for four weeks. It was hard. Boring at times, interesting at times. We lost about 25% of our original group during training due to, in no particular order,
Q: Is the Peace Corps dangerous? I taught English and English Literature. It wasn't dangerous. It wasn't pain-free, either. I had food poisoning, with cramps, diarrhea and nausea, two or three times. I passed a 27-inch intestinal parasite a year after I came back. (The parasite was just interesting, not painful.) When I was cutting pegs to lay out the lanes for a track meet, my machete slipped. The ones in Borneo are pointed. It dug a cube of meat about as big as a chickpea out of my leg. One of our girl shot-putters shouted "Watch out" a bit too late at track and field practice, and an 8-pound shot hit me in the shoulder. (Track and Field accounted for most of my injuries.) It didn't break anything, but sometimes at night it aches. I still have faint scars from leech bites that got infected while I was walking in the jungle on a week's vacation. You can't buy memories like that!
Q: Any advice for serving Peace Corps Volunteers? Brush your teeth religiously. In the USA you get some natural brushing every time you eat a good crisp apple or a raw carrot. Over there you'll be cooking everything except bananas and tangerines. Our school treated the staff to tea with sugar in it and cookies every morning at 10:30 am. I had 3 cavities after the first semester. I started brushing with just water in the staff bathroom right after elevenses. It helped.
Q: Is there anything like Peace Corps but not as long? There are, but expect to pay them, not receive a living allowance. As an extreme example, if there was a school house in Peru that needed painting, it would make more sense to hire a crew of Peruvians to do it than to fly you down there for two weeks. If you want to drop in and fly back after a couple of months, you will be limited in what you can do. The PC training (Language, culture, history and vocational skills) takes three months. So, if you go somewhere for a short time, you'll either have to go to a place where you already speak the language, or hope someone there speaks English.
Q: Can you do the Peace Corps for just a few months? It should be two years. The PC will spend quite a bit of time and money training you to be a good volunteer - three months of language, history and culture, plus vocational training. They (and the country that is hosting you) want a decent return on their investment. The school, clinic or department you are working for wants some stability. You are free to leave at any time (See below). One person in my training group didn't get off the plane after it landed in Kuala Lumpur. If you leave early you don't get the benefits and for the rest of your life you will know that you let people down. You may have had a teacher who left in the middle of the school year. That's the sort of feeling your host country will have about you. On the bright side, the two years whizz by, full of new and exciting experiences. When you are 22, 2 years is 1/11th of your life, so it seems like a long time. When you are 60, 2 years is 1/30th of your life. The two years zip by. Do you remember how fast your junior and senior years of high school went by? Imagine you were doing something useful, in a foreign country. There are hundreds of other volunteer organizations that accept shorter terms; the Student Conservation Association, for instance. You spend six weeks working to make a National park a nicer place. Many churches have deals whereby you and a group fly somewhere (at your expense) to paint an orphanage or repair a church. Most of the short-term volunteer opportunities cost you or your sponsors money. The PC does not.
Q: Can I leave early? Yes; you can leave at any time. One person in my group didn't get off the plane that took us to our country. Six out of the original 36 in my group went back during training. One left after a school year. The rest stayed for the whole two years. The PC will even fly you home. The only restriction is that you can't dilly-dally on your way home; you must go back in 3 days or less, or pay your own way. If you serve your full term, the Peace Corps gives you the cash equivalent of a regular-class airline ticket home and you can go home as slowly as you like. Several people in my group went home through India and Europe, instead of flying back across the Pacific.
Q: How much does the Peace Corps pay? It varies with the country. They call it a "Living allowance". You live at a modest scale. It is higher in countries where the standard of living is higher, lower where it is lower. When I was a PCV, 30 years ago, it was $110 (US) a month, which put me in the lower middle class. I taught at a high school. I made about as much as my fellow (new) teachers. You won't have color TV or cable. You may have a laundry lady, oddly enough. In the country I served, people with a regular cash income were expected to share with those who didn't have it, usually by hiring someone to cook, clean, do laundry or garden. (Not all of the above; I paid a woman to do my laundry and would sometimes "hire" a student who was short of cash to hoe weeds.) You don't starve - I could go out to the equivalent of Denny's once or twice a week for lunch or dinner. I worked my way through college and I didn't own a car in high school or college, so not going to fancy French restaurants or having a car in the PC was not a change.
Q: Did you have readjustment problems, when you came back? I spent 2 years in Sarawak, on the north-west coast of Borneo, 1971 - 1972. I didn't see roads wider than 4 lanes or go faster than 40 MPH for two years. (on the ground; I took a couple of plane trips.) I came home to California. Traffic made me nervous for about a year. I noticed children were rude to their parents and/or teachers for two or three years. I lasted less than 60 days trying to teach 8th-grade math. (I'd taught 10th - 12th grade English in Malaysia.) I'd developed an accent in Malaysia. People in California made fun of me if I didn't pronounce the "d" in words like "Water" and "forty". My clothes looked funny too; in Malaysia if you were rich enough to afford shoes and socks you showed them off. In California at the time (1973) it was the practice to buy pants so long that your heel wore a hole in the back of the cuff, at the bottom. I still miss Hokkien fried noodles and durien fruit.
Q: Any advice for returning Peace Corps Volunteers? When you come back, trade all but a few souvenir bills for American money over there, or, better yet for AmEx traveler's checks in the local currency. The demand for Kenyan Shillings or Malaysian Ringetts is small in the USA, so the exchange rate is horrible. The exchange rate was 3 Ringetts to US$1 in Malaysia, 4:1 in San Francisco. I lost 25% of the money I hadn't bothered to exchange there.
Q: What can you give a Peace Corps Volunteer as a gift? As always, the best gifts are gifts of time; time you spend on the person. My grandmother cut out my favorite comic strip and sent them, with a short, chatty letter, every week. If nothing happened during the week of special interest, she wrote about her childhood in Kansas before the first world war. I still have those letters, and I treasure them. Your PCV will appreciate a one-page letter once a week a thousand times more than an expensive piece of hardware. Several people gave me small things when I went. I'd suggest either the Swiss Army Knife that they call the "Camper" - it has the standard useful blades plus a small saw - or one of those flashlights that doesn't use batteries. They have some you crank and some you shake. One thing I wish I had done, still recommend to any potential PCV and would suggest to any PCV's family - take pictures of the normal stuff; your house, the street you live on, your family, the main street of your town, a grocery store (meat, produce, bakery sections) and a hardware store. The medium of choice back than was color slides; it may be CD or prints now. Your PCV can then show his/her neighbors that he/she doesn't live like the people in the TV shows and movies. Keep any gift small and simple. My parents sent me some instant chocolate pudding, for instance. It was one of the things I missed. (I also missed walking through a grove of redwoods on a chill, foggy morning, wearing an friendly old wool sweater, but you can't mail that.) 12 small packages every 2 months would be better than one big one. If you send pictures, label the package "PERSONAL PHOTOS - NO COMMERCIAL VALUE". Write a separate letter telling your PCV when you sent the package. Some postal employees are not as honest as others. The things I liked were paper-back copies of books by authors that were hard to find in Borneo; I was a science fiction nut, back then. Newsweek gave us all complimentary subscriptions, back then. If they don't now, a subscription to it or Time would be nice. Don't send anything too expensive. A PCV shouldn't live above the level of the hosts. To take an extreme example, if Donald Trump's son went into the PC, it would be physically possible to send him a generator, a 42-inch plasma TV, 55 gallons of gasoline and a boxed set of the 500 greatest movies on DVD. That would tend to isolate him from his neighbors.
Q: How do Peace Corps Volunteers end world hunger? I didn't solve the problem of world literacy. I taught English and English Literature to about 150 students over the course of 2 years. I increased their fluency a little and exposed them to some good books. If I had been a farm advisor, I would have tried to convince the local farmers to try some different crops - slowly, so if they didn't work, their children wouldn't be hungry. I would have investigated chicken farms and ponds for raising fish. I would have looked for new cash crops. PCVs do not solve the world's problems. They help people, one person or one classroom or one village at a time.
Q: Why does Peace Corps Service disqualify you from certain military jobs? To avoid even the APPEARANCE of impropriety. The PC doesn't want host countries to think their volunteers are a front for the CIA, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, etc. etc. The Defense Department has agreed to the restriction. There is an old Chinese saying - "If you are walking through your neighbor's melon patch, don't stoop down to tie your shoes." It means that even if your heart is pure, don't do something suspicious. Most host country nationals have a hard enough time wondering why someone would leave the land of fast cars, blondes in red swim suits and easy living to teach Biology in an upriver secondary school. (An appalling number of HCNs get their information about the USA from TV shows; "Bay Watch" is still a big hit overseas.) If people routinely went into the CIA or Army intelligence from the Peace Corps, HCNs would doubt their motives even further. if you hunt in the USA, you can't take your guns with you, even if you go to Kenya and the greater kudus make pests of themselves. If you are a ham radio operator in he USA, you can't take your radio with you either. Again, avoiding the appearance of impropriety.
Q: Is the Peace Corps a good place to pick up chicks? No. Two of the 30 people in my group got married, to each other. A PCV occasionally marries a host country national. Some male PCVs rent a woman's services on occasion. Mostly they are celibate. If the pressure becomes too great, they "handle" it appropriately. The number of women in the USA who were fascinated by my adventures, once I got back, was about 99% less than I thought it would be before I went. Your question is obviously made in jest, if not in the midst of a drug-induced question frenzy, but I thought I'd give a thoughtful reply for the benefit of others. Your spelled and capitalized it properly, so you're probably over the age of 14. |
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Visits since 11 November 1998. I updated this page on 14 Apr 2008 |