Staff writer Jamie Ward served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Yo Creek Village, Belize, from 2002-2004.
Rex Casey, an IU graduate student and returned Peace Corps volunteer, experienced first-hand what volunteers nationwide refer to as "The Peace Corps Experience."\n"It's somewhat like you are dying in the states and starting over again in another country. And when you come back, you have to be reborn again," Casey said. \nIn celebration of the organization's 45th anniversary March 1, returned volunteers at IU and across the nation will carry out the Peace Corps' third and possibly most lasting goal: "helping to promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of all Americans." \n"It's priceless," Casey said of his Peace Corps experience. "It will give you a whole different perception. But until you've done it, you just don't know."\nAccording to Peace Corps statistics, more than 182,000 volunteers have served in 138 countries since the organization's founding in 1961. In that time, 1,341 volunteers have come from IU, according to an Indiana Daily Student article. Currently, 33 returned Peace Corps volunteers attend IU-Bloomington. \nWhat follows are the tales of four returned volunteers, from the western coast of Africa to the highlands of Central America.
Genevieve Pritchard, Honduras\nGenevieve Pritchard describes her Peace Corps village as if it were one of the most majestic and magnificent places on Earth.\n"It was amazing," she said. \nPritchard reminisced with pride about the work she did as a water and sanitation volunteer in El Corpus, Honduras. \nShe said she felt needed in her village, nestled atop the mountains of southern Honduras with views of El Salvador and Nicaragua.\n"I got lucky in my village in that everyone wanted help," she said. "I had villages coming to me and asking me for help. They wanted it so bad."\nWhat these villages wanted was running water and electricity. And for her two years as a volunteer she designed water and electrical systems in addition to starting a Spanish language school. Pritchard said she views her work and its significance more in terms of the human capital she helped develop.\n"Ten years later and thinking about it, the main thing I did was teach people how to do a project, teaching people to be more assertive," she said. "They were so willing, and in that sense I was very lucky." \nPritchard said she never felt she was in too much danger and said most volunteers forgot about the potential health \nhazards.\n"It was sort of like the Wild West in that everybody had guns," she said, laughing. "It got to the point where the guns would come out, and we would just keep on talking except maybe we'd get under the table. \n"One time some fighting started and the guns came out so we went to hide in the back. This guy was all messed up and shooting off his gun. That was scary. I almost peed my pants right there."\nOriginally from Bloomington and with an undergraduate degree from IU, Pritchard is now in the first year of the MBA program at the Kelley School of Business. She aspires to work in the developing world again, "teaching people to fish without giving them the fish," she said. \nPritchard admits she had no clue what to expect going in. But she realizes now that entering the Peace Corps without expectations is part of the beauty of the experience.\n"I had this idea that I would live in a stick, round, thatch hut and that I would be digging ditches," she said. "I thought I would go to the bathroom in a hole in the ground." \nInstead, she had indoor plumbing with "cold-ass water from the mountains," a pool table in her living room and children poking their heads through her windows jokingly shouting gringa, or foreigner. She also never realized how much on her own she would be. \n"I didn't understand that Peace Corps was so independent," she said. "I thought that I would be told what to do and how to help. I didn't realize that it was all up to me to figure out how to do that."
Jeremy and Nancy \nRothgerber, Gambia\nFor Jeremy Rothgerber, a second-year SPEA graduate student, his Peace Corps experience changed his life and offered him a career. Now serving as the IU Peace Corps recruiter, Rothgerber has worked for the organization since completing his service in the West African country of Gambia in 1998. He someday hopes to return there as the country director. While serving as the associate Peace Corps director in Gambia from 2001-2004, he met his wife, Nancy, now the community development director for Bloomington's American Cancer Society. \nLiving in a traditional Gambian family compound, which could consist of multiple wives for the father and upwards of 40 family members, the Rothgerber stories depict the cultural aestheticism that often resonates with Peace Corps service in Africa.\nNancy says her Gambian name was "Tuma" and vividly recalls the ceremony in which she was given it. \n"In Gambia, once a child was born, on the seventh day they would have a celebration for the naming of the new child and the father would announce to the village the name of the new baby," she said. "It was sort of like a rite of passage." \nThe same process was \napplied to newly arrived Peace Corps trainees, Nancy said. \n"When we got to our training villages, they did it for us just like you were a baby," she said. "And it's ironic because at that point, you are like a baby."\nRecollecting an experience of his own, Jeremy mentioned the agro-forestry work he did with his African counterpart, "Jim," and how the simplest tasks done in Peace Corps can alter and improve the lives of others.\n"Jim's problem was that he didn't have enough water for his garden," he said. "So we built a rope-pulley, very crude water system. It had a rubber tire -- it wasn't much." \nJeremy said the simple project had a profound effect.\n"This one little thing improved Jim's entire family's quality of life," he said. "When it worked, he was so excited that he was clapping and dancing around. Just seeing him so excited is something I will never forget."\nOne hardship Nancy can't forget is the reality of African malaria. She tells about one of her African sisters who had thought she contracted the disease. Riding her bike to a British research clinic, she had them take her blood to be used on her sister through a transfusion. She then biked back the hour-and-a-half to the clinic where her sister was bedridden.\n"I'll never forget looking around when I realized she would probably make it," she said. "But I will never forget the clinic at that moment and seeing 50 women sitting around with their babies who had malaria and fevers and were going to die." \nNancy describes this as the "worst moment" of her service in Gambia.\n"I just went home and cried," she said.\nStill, Nancy has positive recollections: her Gambian sisters' tongues turning blue from Kool-Aid, their fascination with the inside of a cookie package which acted as a mirror and being accepted by her community for the first time, a significant turning point in a volunteer's service. Nancy remembers her Gambian mother telling her what to do as the harmattan moved in, an annual wind storm that comes in from the Sahara.\n"She just started barking at me in my Gambian name: 'Tuma, get that goat tied up,' or 'Tuma, put that inside here,'" Nancy said. "When she was just yelling at me like one of her own children, I knew I'd made it -- I'm part of the family now."
Rex Casey, Belize\nRex Casey speaks fondly of his service as an information technology volunteer in Belize. He still longs for the diversity and communal life he experienced in the town of San Ignacio, near the Guatemalan border.\n"It was a small town where everyone knew each other," he said. \nCasey said he immediately felt like a part of the community in Belize.\n"I was always getting invited to functions for food: weddings, funerals, dinners, birthday parties, soccer games, the whole gamut," he said. "I really didn't want to leave -- I felt that welcome."\nConsidering a possible return to Central America someday, Casey said he believes the Peace Corps benefits America because it lets people around the world see different types of Americans. \n"It's just a great plan, a great story," he said. "It doesn't work with any political groups and it attracts the best type of citizens -- people who really care, people who aren't quitters."\nCasey describes the program as one of the nation's biggest successes.\n"It's one of the few things that America can point to across all lines and say, this really worked," he said. "Forty-five years and we're still going to all these different countries. It's an amazing thing."\nCasey knows his experience in the Peace Corps changed his life forever. \n"I had so many good experiences -- riding in the back of a pick-up thinking you might be this close to death, watching soccer games, getting bit by mosquitoes, drinking beer, drinking rum, talking about Castro," he said, smiling. "I was able to be around so many good people, and I learned so much." \nCasey said he won't soon forget his experiences in the Peace Corps.\n"When you live there and build with these little kids and adults, it's just hard to forget it," he said. "I could live until I'm 90 but I'll never forget that time there. I have a lot of great memories"
