Should You Join the Peace Corps or Not?

Meandering through a rural village in an exotic place where no one speaks your language, palm trees and romantic monsoons, elephants and water buffaloes lumbering past your front porch. Grass huts and smiling children looking up at you adoringly, all comes in one when you stereotypically you think about joining the Peace Corps. Well here's a reality check: what appears to be adoration in those children's eyes may simply be a look of amusement, as in, "Who is that freak with the ugly sandals?" Also, there's as much chance that you'll find yourself in the urban center of Kazakhstan as in a grass hut in Fiji. Two potentially equally rewarding, but vastly differing environments.

Basically, joining the Peace Corps means that you'll go to a foreign country and do some kind of service there at the request of its government. Whether it's teaching, or helping sick children, or working with the government on cleaning up an urban city, it's probably not going to be the kind of work we usually think of as glamorous.

The world has changed since John F. Kennedy founded the Peace Corps in 1961. Although many volunteers still live and work in rural villages, and haul their drinking water from a nearby river, it is now just as common to find a volunteer giving computer training to university staff in a city and going home at night to electricity and running water.

What hasn't changed is the fact that joining the Peace Corps is a JOB, and volunteers still work, teach, and learn while completely immersed in another culture for two years. They have the chance to participate in a professional and cultural exchange that can have life-long benefits for all parties involved. Volunteers have the opportunity to prove that Americans' lives are not identical to those of the characters on movies and other television shows. Likewise, the country's citizens can prove that there's more to a country than what you see on CNN.

Joining the Peace Corps is not a decision to be made lightly. It basically involves you giving up to years of your life with little or no pay, with the fundamental goal of helping people in less fortunate areas of the world. So if you're interested in joining the Peace Corps purely for the travel, then we suggest that you find a job that will allow you to save enough money for a two-year backpacking stint around wherever it is your little heart desires instead. The Peace Corps should not be thought of as a place to sling up your hammock for two years and groove to Phish tapes, either. It would be much easier to just become a groupie for your favorite band. The Peace Corps will definitely work.