Wow! I can hardly believe it’s been nearly 10 years since I returned from my work as a Peace Corps volunteer English teacher in Turkmenistan. Connecting flights in Azerbaijan… ah those were the days.
But I digress…
Something I saw on telly last week made me think of all kinds of odd, unusual and wonderful Peace Corps memories. It was Barak Obama in a public service announcement, asking all Americans to volunteer. I, like so many others, have been annoyed to the point of distraction by the fact that President Bush never asked us to do a damn thing. Not after 9/11, not after Katrina, not as we’ve sunken deeper and deeper into the war in Iraq.
As President John F. Kennedy said:
The logic of the Peace Corps is that someday we are going to bring it home to America.
I was sitting at the table with my husband and I looked at him and said, ‘We’re going to find something meaningful to do.” What that ‘something meaningful’ is has yet to be determined, but we’ve been looking around at the folks in our community, subscribing to more service-oriented blog feeds to see what each of us might find fulfilling.
I hope you do the same… and consider the Peace Corps. It stands as one of the most valuable experiences of my life. I cannot wait to go back to Turkmenistan again, this time with my husband, but I hope to share more stories with you over Peace Corps Week.
