NAME — Amy Weisenbach
AGE — 2008
GRADE —
Mike Finnerty and his wife, Colleen, learned about native customs quickly. Arriving in Honduras on Christmas Eve, they found that their house wasn't ready. They found a man who knew the landlord, and they swept out the single room for them. Still without furniture, they laid out their sleeping bags to settle in for the night.
Little did they know their sleep would soon be interrupted. The Finnertys suddenly learned one way that people in Honduras celebrate holidays - with firecrackers.
"The neighborhood kids were really intrigued to see these strange people moving into this house that had been empty for four or five months," Finnerty recalled. "In the process of celebrating their Christmas Eve, they managed all night long to run up to our door and slip lit firecrackers under the door."
The Finnertys spent two Christmases in Honduras as Peace Corps volunteers. Children's Express recently talked with Mike and three other former Peace Corps volunteers about their experiences.
These Indianapolis residents had very different cultural experiences. Finnerty served twice in the Peace Corps - he first went to Ethiopia to teach English and social studies at a junior high school and to work in a leper colony, then re-enlisted to work in Honduras with schools and teaching gardening and cooking skills.
Jim Maher also is a two-time volunteer. He first taught metalworking skills to high school students in Tunisia and later taught construction methods in Costa Rica.
Jo Diane Ivey taught preschool students and teachers in Tunisia. And Nathan Amsbury enlisted to train teachers in Mali.
Why join the Peace Corps?
Amsbury said people have many reasons for joining.
"I think everyone that wants to get into the Peace Corps, their primary goal is that they like to help people. But there's a thousand other reasons . . . people trying to find themselves, the adventure of it, the challenge," he said.
For Ivey, a desire to travel was her motivation. She first learned about the Peace Corps in college, and she realized that joining would allow her to travel and to use her teaching skills.
Before she could pack her bags though, she had to go through an extensive application process in which prospective volunteers are interviewed, evaluated and compared to other applicants. The Peace Corps recommends that applicants send in their forms nine months before they wish to serve.
Once accepted, volunteers go through an 8- to 14-week training, usually in the host countries, where they learn the local language, customs, and any technical training they may need in their work.
The Peace Corps was started by an executive order issued by President John F. Kennedy on March 1, 1961. Since then, more than 131,000 Americans have served as Peace Corps volunteers in more than 90 countries that have friendly relations with the United States.
The need for volunteers
According to Maher, "The purpose of the Peace Corps is to recruit skilled people - various skills from farming skills to medical skills to education or whatever - to work in countries . . . which request that kind of skill.
"For example, a country might realize they're going to need 100 special education teachers. And they might request some of them from the Peace Corps."
Recently, the Peace Corps has started sending volunteers to countries that aren't necessarily developing countries, but that need help in establishing capitalist methods. Russia and Poland are examples of newly serviced countries.
Although most volunteers are in their 20s, the Peace Corps encourages older people to volunteer. In the countries that the Peace Corps helps, age is greatly respected and can only help the volunteer find his or her place in the community.
Most volunteers serve for two-year periods. "The basic philosophy of the Peace Corps is you go in and live with the villagers at their level," said Amsbury.
Each volunteer believed that he or she grew and changed because of the Peace Corps experience. In Ivey's case, she says that by teaching her young students, she learned Arabic.
"I think it might be universal when working with smaller children, they help you learn. And it made the language easier to learn because they would help me and I wasn't threatened by them. If I made a mistake, they would just help me out, as opposed to criticizing me. . . .
"It's a learning process every single day, every minute, every day when you're living in another culture, in another country. The whole time is a learning process."
Learning one language is tough enough, but Peace Corps volunteers have to learn not only the national languages of these countries but also the local dialect or tribal language. For Ivey, this meant learning both French and Arabic.
Becoming part of community
The goal of the Peace Corps is for volunteers to live directly as members of their communities.
"It's usually up to the volunteers to find your own housing and learn how to get along with your neighbors," said Maher. "The idea of the Peace Corps is not to set yourself apart from the people, but to participate in the life of the community.
"And part of that is being a neighbor, subject to the same bad water, lack of electricity, or whatever the people of the country might be putting up with," he added.
Not all native customs were alien to the volunteers.
"They might speak different languages. They might dress differently," Ivey said. "But in general, they still have love for one another, they have the institution of family, they work, they play.
"And it just sort of reinforced that, you know, we're people - people are just in different places and different situations. And we're just all the same."
Not for everyone
One thing that each volunteer discovered is that the Peace Corps isn't for everyone.
Maher said people sometimes romanticize the corps.
"It's easy, sitting in our home here in Indianapolis, looking at National Geographic with a story from Peru, and see someone working with the people there, and say, `Wow, that's great, I ought to go do that,' " he said.
"So it's very easy to romanticize about it. But . . . getting there, with strange food and having diarrhea for three weeks, and losing weight, and a six-month rainy season. The reality of that kind of stuff can get to somebody.
"But for someone that wants to expand their horizons and really probably change their life from then on, I would say the Peace Corps is an excellent vehicle for that," Maher added. "And few people who have been volunteers have the same attitude toward their own culture after serving than they did before."
Unrealized expectations also cause some volunteers to return home early.
"Many of the people that were in the program that I participated in, and some of the others, did not stay the whole time," Ivey said. "And I think one of the reasons that happened was the expectation they had when they first came, that they would be able to make a lot of changes in the country, or with the people."
Ivey said her goal was simply to share information with the Tunisian teachers, not convert them to her ways. She doesn't know whether they adopted any of her methods.
Finnerty left Ethiopia frustrated that the kids he taught had limited opportunities to use their education.
"I was working with a group that was a minority within Ethiopia, and they did not have a chance to go on to any higher education, and there were no jobs for them," he explained.
"I liked a lot of the kids and a lot of the teachers that I worked with. But I felt really sad that they weren't going to be able to do a whole lot despite the education they received."
Back in the USA
While most volunteers are excited to return to the United States, the transition can be surprising and frustrating.
"You think: `Well, when I go back to the United States, that won't be any problem, because I know the language. I have friends there, I know the behavior clues.'
"But, you've been not only away from that, but absorbing the values and traditions and behavior patterns of another culture," explained Maher. "So you bring those back to the United States, and they don't work here."
No matter what the volunteer comes back feeling about the experience, they all share a similar thought.
"You know, it's amazing, it's very humbling, when you see people who have nothing. And yet what little they do have, if you were in need of something, they would gladly give it to you," said Amsbury.
EDITOR: Abby Ladd, 17.
REPORTERS: Anne Coffey, 13; Ashley DeGroff, 11; Peter Ryan, 13; Nicole Woodson, 11; Sarah Lawson, 11; Christina Galliani, 10; Whitney Ford, 12.