Peace Corps is not for whining, little wimps says Kata Alvidrez - Afghanistan RPCV
In 1967, my friends and I were protesting the Vietnam War with peace signs hung around our necks and sewn to our ragged bellbottoms.
We wore flowers in our hair and pasted flower stickers on everything with a smooth surface, including our cars and our refrigerators.
We talked about love and peace and flower-power while our parents talked about the length of our hair and the amount of skin we were showing. And still, a war raged on. Maybe it was that youthful aversion to war that made me want to join the Peace Corps, I don't know. I was an incurable idealist and I still am.
It started on October 14, 1960. John F. Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency when he first proposed the idea of the Peace Corps to a group of 10,000 college students at the University of Michigan.
Some say it was a late night brainstorm that turned into a viable program, but it gives new meaning to his well-known words: "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country ... "Since that time, over 150,000 people of all ages, races, religions and ethnicities have served in the Peace Corps in 132 countries.
While I am a great admirer of Kennedy, I'm not sure that he truly believed that placing young Americans in developing countries was going to promote world peace.
I'm not even sure he believed that the contributions we Peace Corps volunteers might make in our individual assignments would make a significant difference in the lives of the people we met in those countries.
But I am sure, because Kennedy was a man of vision, that he believed living overseas and participating in the lives of people whose lives were different than ours would teach us something important about ourselves.