San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Peace Corps, at 60, readying return to global mission after virus hiatus
DEDZA, Malawi — More than a year after COVID-19 began sweeping the world, abruptly cutting short her Peace Corps stint, Cameron Beach is once again living in rural Malawi — this time on her own dime.
The Peace Corps, a U.S. government program marking its 60th anniversary this year, boasted 7,000 volunteers in 62 countries in March 2020. They were given little time to pack before being put on a plane and sent back to the United States that month.
“It was especially painful for me because I was given 24 hours to leave a place that I’d called home for almost two years,” Beach said during a recent video call from her home in Malawi, a landlocked country in southern Africa.
Beach was trained to speak Chichewa and had been teaching English at the Mkomera Community Day Secondary School in Dedza, located in a compound about 25 miles southeast of the capital, Lilongwe. The 25-year-old Greenville, S.C., native paid her own way back to her post nine months after evacuation and is living on savings, but says she would “absolutely” rejoin the Peace Corps if it became possible.
It might be: The organization hopes to begin returning volunteers to the field late this year or early next year.
While Peace Corps volunteers would be required to be vaccinated, sending them back will depend on the situation in individual countries. Initially, about 2,400 evacuated volunteers expressed interest in going back and there are about 10,000 applications on file, said Acting Peace Corps Director Carol Spahn.
“Immediately after the evacuation we had tremendous interest from volunteers who were evacuated in returning to their country of service,” Spahn said. “Clearly, as time goes on, you know, people do move on with their lives, but I will say we have a robust pipeline of both people who were evacuated as well as those who were invited, but were unable to go and those who are expressing new interest.”
How soon they can be sent overseas depends on the worldwide fight against the virus, complicated by the recent emergence of the more transmissible delta variant and the slow rollout of vaccines in developing countries — many of which host Peace Corps programs.
Spahn estimates it will be several years before the Peace Corps is back to its full strength. After all, while volunteers in select countries had been evacuated before, March 2020 marked the first time since the organization was founded by President John F. Kennedy that it had to evacuate all its volunteers at the same time.
Since its creation in 1961, more than 240,000 Americans have served as Peace Corps volunteers in scores of countries. The goal is to help the countries meet their development needs with a wide variety of programs — from education to health and agriculture programs — while helping promote a better understanding of Americans.
Typical service lasts two years after a training period. During the pandemic most Peace Corps staff, both U.S. citizens and local hires, remained in place and, in some cases, kept up some programs.