Peace Corps Deputy Director Jody Olsen talks about volunteers making a difference
Caption: Jody Olsen, deputy director of the Peace Corps, addresses a crowd in Wanamaker Hall at Principia College in Elsah Monday. Olsen said volunteers make differences that might help entire countries.
Read and comment on this story from the Telegraph on Deputy Director Jody Olsen who was in Elsah, Illinois speaking to college students at Principia College, a school for Christian Scientists. She said that while many people who are interested in joining the Peace Corps wonder how they will know if they’re making a difference, Olsen said they might not always know, but they can make great differences. Read the story at:
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Peace Corps means sharing self, college students told
SHAWN CLUBB, The Telegraph January 28, 2003
ELSAH -- The Peace Corps is all about understanding others, Jody Olsen told dozens of students Monday at Principia College.
Olsen was appointed nearly a year ago as deputy director of the organization, but her involvement with the Peace Corps stretches back to 1966, when she served as a volunteer in Tunisia.
The service of a Peace Corps volunteer is one that builds mutual respect, Olsen said.
Three goals are at the core of the organization -- providing technical support, sharing yourself and taking what you learn and bringing it back with you, she said.
The technical support comes in teaching and helping with the environment, agriculture, forestry, nutrition, math and other things.
Olsen said she was a woman from Utah, with British and Scandinavian backgrounds and Mormon heritage, who went to serve the Peace Corps in a Muslim country.
"I was sharing me," she said, "but to share is to have understanding."
Volunteers learn about families, culture, food and religion and bring it back, she said.
"We spend our lives sharing what we gained from that experience," she said.
While many people who are interested in joining the Peace Corps wonder how they will know if they’re making a difference, Olsen said they might not always know, but they can make great differences.
Olsen told a story about one man in Ivory Coast who said he was declared retarded when he was 10 years old and he sat in the back of the classroom with no connection and wanting to drop out. She said the teacher was a Peace Corps volunteer, who learned the boy could not see, so the volunteer got him glasses and tutored him. The boy grew up and became the minister of health for Ivory Coast.
The minister of health told Olsen he was now making decisions about HIV/AIDS education in the country and thanked the volunteer that had helped him, she said.
"That volunteer has no idea the impact that he had," she said. "The decision he made saved hundreds of lives years later."
Olsen also spoke of a young boy in Peru who had invited a Peace Corps volunteer to live with his family. The boy had 15 brothers and sisters and was a "semi-street kid," she said. The volunteer later married another volunteer and he also moved in with the family.
The volunteer couple became intrigued by the boy, Olsen said, and they helped him learn and later kept in touch with him after their two-year terms were over. They sent him tuition for school and later helped him to come to the United States, where he attended Stanford and Harvard. The boy in the story is Alejandro Toledo, president of Peru.
Toledo recently re-established Peru’s involvement with the Peace Corps.
Olsen said the volunteers have no idea that they are making differences that might help entire countries.
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