Justin Andrews has spent the past two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fatick, a small regional capital in the dusty, hot interior of Senegal



Hanging proudly above a doorway in his host family’s home is a framed picture of Andrews with the entire family—grandmother, aunts, cousins. His host-mother, Binta, who has no children of her own, calls him her “white son.” “The hardest thing will be leaving them,” says Andrews. The experience, he adds, “can’t not change you.”

Justin Andrews has spent the past two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fatick, a small regional capital in the dusty, hot interior of Senegal

Corps Values

The Pennsylvania Gazette
University of Pennsylvania
Sept/Oct 2006

[Excerpt]

Successful Peace Corps service is not easy to define. Justin Andrews C’04 has spent the past two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fatick, a small regional capital in the dusty, hot interior of Senegal, West Africa. He works on small-business-development projects, helping people write business plans, develop marketing strategies, and apply for funding.

Andrews lives in two dark rooms in a tin-roofed concrete house. While the bathroom is a closet-sized space off his bedroom, with a squat toilet and a showerhead, he’s lucky to have indoor plumbing. Across the street, his host family gets its water from an outdoor tap.

Another luxury rests on the desk across from his bed: a laptop, connected to high-speed DSL. And so, sitting in air-conditioned offices in Manhattan, Andrews’ friends read postings on his blog about his life in Fatick and swap emails with him. One of his friends just bought a new BMW. Andrews, who graduated from Penn in 2004 with a double major in economics and international relations and a minor in French, watched his friends take Wall Street jobs, complete with signing bonuses and impressive salaries.

The fact that he doesn’t know anyone else from Penn who joined the Peace Corps strikes him as odd, considering that the information session he attended in Huntsman Hall his senior year was packed with other students. He suggests that few Penn students, with all the lucrative options available to them upon graduation, would choose to spend two years for practically no pay in some remote, underdeveloped corner of the globe.

Yet since the Peace Corps was founded in 1961, Penn has sent 786 students into the program—enough to rank Penn easily among the top 50 contributing schools in the Peace Corps’ history. This year alone, there are 47 volunteers with Penn degrees serving somewhere in the world, the eighth-highest number among similar-sized universities. Most are recent graduates, though not all, as Raupp will attest. Among the Ivies, only Cornell has more alumni currently serving. Like Penn, the Peace Corps is selective about the applicants it accepts.

It’s obvious that Andrews wouldn’t trade his experience in Fatick for a life supply of brand-new BMWs. He knows exactly how this fits in to his long-term goals. “One day, I’ll maybe be in the World Bank,” he says, sounding determined to eliminate that maybe. “And I’ll see a report, and I’ll be able to have a feeling about how it could really play out and what the numbers represent in reality.”

When Tamsir Sall, a telecenter owner in Fatick, came to Andrews with a plan to expand his telecenter into a cyber café, Andrews helped him revise his business plan and apply for funding—successfully, even though months later, the check has yet to arrive. Sall is unfazed, and his cheerful demeanor only turns serious when asked if Andrews had really been helpful.

“Yes,” he replies forcefully. “He helped me a lot. They wouldn’t have given me the money without him.”

Hanging proudly above a doorway in his host family’s home is a framed picture of Andrews with the entire family—grandmother, aunts, cousins. His host-mother, Binta, who has no children of her own, calls him her “white son.”

“The hardest thing will be leaving them,” says Andrews. The experience, he adds, “can’t not change you.”

When this story was posted in September 2006, this was on the front page of PCOL:




Peace Corps Online The Independent News Forum serving Returned Peace Corps Volunteers

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He served with honor One year ago, Staff Sgt. Robert J. Paul (RPCV Kenya) carried on an ongoing dialog on this website on the military and the peace corps and his role as a member of a Civil Affairs Team in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have just received a report that Sargeant Paul has been killed by a car bomb in Kabul. Words cannot express our feeling of loss for this tremendous injury to the entire RPCV community. Most of us didn't know him personally but we knew him from his words. Our thoughts go out to his family and friends. He was one of ours and he served with honor.

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PCOL readership increases 100% Monthly readership on "Peace Corps Online" has increased in the past twelve months to 350,000 visitors - over eleven thousand every day - a 100% increase since this time last year. Thanks again, RPCVs and Friends of the Peace Corps, for making PCOL your source of information for the Peace Corps community. And thanks for supporting the Peace Corps Library and History of the Peace Corps. Stay tuned, the best is yet to come.

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