The Peace Corps: Giving back

March 25, 2010  
Filed under News

After you pass through the rudimentary grade levels of your youth and pass into your adulthood you are face with many options of what you want to do with your life. Do you want to join the work force? How about the military forces? Or, are you headed towards a higher education that college provides? What do you want to do throughout the timeline of your life?

Everyone has things they want to do or accomplish. Maybe that is getting married and starting a family, maybe it is making a lot of money, maybe it is becoming famous or maybe it is giving back to the world in some way. Whether it is through volunteer work, your job choice or money donations, people are volunteering their time and money to give aid to the rest of the world.

A way that you could contribute to the good of mankind and Mother Nature is through the Peace Corps. Originating back to March 1, 1961, when Senator John F. Kennedy challenged the students of the University of Michigan to benefit their country by helping others. Today the Peace Corps has grown by a substantial amount.  Close to 200,000 volunteers have traveled to 139 host countries to serve others.

The Peace Corps is helping promote information technology, AIDS education and environmental preservation according to peacecorps.gov. The three main goals of the Peace Corps: are to provide people in need of assistance in other countries with trained men and women, to educate those people about Americans and to educate Americans about other cultures and ways of life.

Although 34 percent of Peace Corps volunteers go to Africa to offer their assistance, you could also go to Latin America, Eastern Europe/Central Asia, Asia, North Africa/ Middle East, Pacific Islands and the Caribbean Islands. Volunteers can help educate the youth of their selected country, help develop the community by aiding adult literacy and informing people about HIV and AIDS, promote good health by informing people about malnutrition and diseases and there are still many other ways that volunteers participate in the Peace Corps program.

The Peace Corps is not for everyone. You are giving up a year or more of your life and the comfort of your home to go and volunteer in a country/community that is in need of your assistance. The conditions will be rough at points and it is not a vacation. You are there to serve a purpose, and that is helping others. If you are interested in joining the Peace Corps in the future you can visit peacecorps.gov and find the facts about applying to be a volunteer. If you want to give back to the world, the Peace Corps is a good program to do that through.

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Dana Peterson

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