Nathan Ford introduced Grant Matthews who is in town recruiting at UWF for the Peace Corps. Grant noted that Karen Pace’s son Jacob was a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, and Jerry Kuenn served in Nigeria soon after the Peace Corps was founded.
Grant is a University of Oregon grad (theater) who taught English to young Romanian students beginning in 2011. There were 34 in his group of volunteers in Romania.
The Peace Corps, organized in 1961, is a volunteer organization that has currently 6,800 plus participants ages 20s to 80s serving in more than 50 countries around the world – 43% in Africa, 23% in South America, and the remainder scattered.
The Peace Corps’ mission is to meet certain needs of the host country, provide other countries a better understanding of America, and provide Americans with a better understanding of foreign nations. Volunteers may choose to focus on education, health, economic development, agriculture, youth development or environment, but they also choose a secondary project which is then supported by the Peace Corps. For instance, Grant’s focus was education, but he sponsored a Haunted House for the community he lived in so that they could experience an American tradition (he didn’t anticipate that many parents would believe that he was introducing “Satan”!).
Benefits of serving include: student loan deferment, medical/dental services, Perkins loan cancellation, immersion training in language and culture, federal employment advantages. You can find out more at www.peacecorps.gov/competitive . Peace Corps has recently partnered with Rotary International to promote sustainable projects that are common to both groups – water, sanitation and literacy. You can find out more at http://www.peacecorps.gov/media/forpress/press/2370/
Grant is a University of Oregon grad (theater) who taught English to young Romanian students beginning in 2011. There were 34 in his group of volunteers in Romania.
The Peace Corps, organized in 1961, is a volunteer organization that has currently 6,800 plus participants ages 20s to 80s serving in more than 50 countries around the world – 43% in Africa, 23% in South America, and the remainder scattered.
The Peace Corps’ mission is to meet certain needs of the host country, provide other countries a better understanding of America, and provide Americans with a better understanding of foreign nations. Volunteers may choose to focus on education, health, economic development, agriculture, youth development or environment, but they also choose a secondary project which is then supported by the Peace Corps. For instance, Grant’s focus was education, but he sponsored a Haunted House for the community he lived in so that they could experience an American tradition (he didn’t anticipate that many parents would believe that he was introducing “Satan”!).
Benefits of serving include: student loan deferment, medical/dental services, Perkins loan cancellation, immersion training in language and culture, federal employment advantages. You can find out more at www.peacecorps.gov/competitive . Peace Corps has recently partnered with Rotary International to promote sustainable projects that are common to both groups – water, sanitation and literacy. You can find out more at http://www.peacecorps.gov/media/forpress/press/2370/
