Charlotte Cambier said her two years in the small Malawian village turned out to be something like self-directed graduate school, career training and school-of-life all in one
Peace Corps offers opportunities for young people in transition
Sunday, February 13, 2005
By Paula M. Davis
pdavis@kalamazoogazette.com 388-8583
Charlotte Cambier didn't decide to volunteer for the Peace Corps from a years-long burning desire. After graduating from college with biology degree and not having landed the permanent job she wanted, she decided to give volunteerism a try.
Now she's telling others that two years as a health care worker in Malawi, a tiny country in southern Africa, was life-changing and career-clarifying.
"As all of you know, it's hard to get a job with just a bachelor's degree," Cambier recently told students at a Peace Corps presentation at Western Michigan University.
She and Peace Corps recruiter K. Courtney Cunningham gave a presentation to several dozen WMU students in early February.
"It has helped me so much. It motivated me to come back to the states and go on," said Cambier, a Marquette native now living in Kalamazoo, taking classes at WMU and planning to become a physician's assistant.
The Peace Corps and other similar organizations may be an option for recent college graduates looking for the same kind of personal growth.
"There are a number of what we refer to as transitional opportunities. Peace Corps is one. AmeriCorps is another. Teach for America is a third," said Richard Berman, dean of experiential education and director of career development at Kalamazoo College.
AmeriCorps and Teach for America are domestic-service organizations.
"There are lot of students who look for a transitional opportunity before going to grad school, before determining a more permanent direction for their career," said Berman, who was not a part of the Peace Corps presentation.
The Peace Corps, a federal program that dates back to 1961, matches volunteers' skill with a two-year assignment that places them into one of 72 countries where the agency has volunteers.
Cambier said her two years in the small Malawian village turned out to be something like self-directed graduate school, career training and school-of-life all in one, she said.
Based on her experience working in clinics in the states during the year following her college graduation, Cambier developed projects as her new African community needed them: immunizations, voluntary HIV counseling and testing. "A huge variety of things," she said.
She said she feels her experience in the village was akin to that of a medical student working in a hospital.
"People in the remote village I lived in all thought I could work magic. So they would come to me with all kinds of questions," she said.
"I got a lot of experience I could never have gotten here in the states."
The basic requirements for Peace Corps are that volunteers must be at least 18 years old and U.S. citizens. A degree isn't required, but it helps with acceptance, Peace Corps officials said.
The volunteers hail from various backgrounds.
Cambier noticed that other volunteers who went through the three-month training that precedes the two-year assignment were English majors, social workers, psychology majors and nurses.
Cunningham, who was also a volunteer from 1998 to 2000, spent her two years in Paraguay, working as a beekeeper in an agricultural program because of her experience in gardening.
"I was hesitant at first because I didn't know anything about bees," said Cunningham, whose degree is in Latin American studies.
The Peace Corps may not be a good fit for everybody.
Volunteers have to be ready to live thousands of miles away in foreign culture, be separated from family for two years, experience a drastically different lifestyle and learn the language native to the area they'll be staying in.
Any of those requirements might be deal-breakers for some, making the domestic-service organizations more appealing. For others, those are just the type of circumstances that makes the Peace Corps attractive.
The remote village Cambier stayed in near the border of Mozambique, for instance, had no running water and no electricity.
She had her own small brick house, but virtually none of the comforts of home life she was accustomed to in the states. And the next-closest Peace Corps volunteer was 10 miles away.
"I had to learn to grow things so I could eat," she said.
She said it was a difficult dealing with that transition at times, and there were a lot of emotional ups and downs.
"At first, it was really hard, I'll admit," Cambier said.
The application process to Peace Corps is lengthy and takes between six months to a year to complete, as the agency reviews applications, and conducts a background check, personal interview and medical check.
Volunteers get a monthly living allowance -- about what a teacher in the community they live in would make -- and a $6,000 check to help them readjust when they come back to the states.
During the time volunteers are in the Corps, student loans are deferred.
Cambier made about $80 a month in Malawi, she said. But it went a long way. As an example of the cost of living there, she said, a beer cost about 25 cents.
n On the Net:
www.peacecorps.gov
www.americorps.org
www.teachforamerica.org
