By Admin1 (admin) on Thursday, June 28, 2001 - 2:44 pm: Edit Post |
Clarence Weaver shows Age is no barrier to volunteers in Philippines
Clarence Weaver shows Age is no barrier to volunteers in Philippines
Age is no barrier to volunteers
By DAVID KROTZ, Of The Globe Gazette
MASON CITY - Peace Corps volunteers come in all ages.
Clarence Weaver certainly saw a lot of life before he joined a Philippine rural reconstruction project as a bank and agriculture consultant in 1976.
Born in 1925, Weaver was an infantry platoon sergeant in World War II and a military police sergeant in the Korean War and was comfortably pursuing a career as a loan supervisor for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Wisconsin in 1975.
"I just kind of got tired of the loan supervisor thing," he said.
"In the Philippines, I was a supervisor at the farmers bank of the Central Bank of the Philippines. So I sort of got the same thing," he said.
But he also branched out by assisting the start-up of animal husbandry projects and the planting of ipil-ipil trees. The goal of one project was to help people get loans to buy "at least two goats" so every family could get milk."
Following the Peace Corps, Weaver worked with the Gideons for many years, raising money for Bibles.
"We were pretty well-accepted in the Peace Corps in the Philippines," Weaver said. "We were seen as good guys. We were respected."