Worldview Magazine - Fall 2007 - (Page 16)

Letter from Rumbek served as a Peace Corps volunteer in India, showing the whole world it’s never too late. The Atlanta office of Peace Corps has bestowed 10 Lillian Carter awards on Americans who served as older Peace Corps volunteers and then came back and to serve even more. Some volunteers won’t wait for retirement. Richard Fisher, an orthopedist on the University of Colorado’s health sciences center staff, has been going overseas as a volunteer for about 30 years. He went to Mozambique for 18 months on a Health Volunteers Overseas project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to train orthopedists in Maputo in their rehabilitation program for amputees, most of them landmine victims during the civil war. That was in 1990. His first volunteer work took him to Bangladesh. His wife, who is an English as a second language teacher, usually goes with him and works in classrooms wherever they go. And when their children were young–aged seven and nine–they went to Peru with their parents. His wife finds work teaching English wherever they go. His children are now grown, but he and his wife continue their volunteering. They volunteered in Viet Nam for several threeweek trips in 1993 and 1994. In 1998, they spent a month in Bhutan, where he worked at the Jigme Dorji Wangchuck Referral Hospital in Thimpu, training staff in the treatment of traffic accidents: cars, motor scooters and bikes. In September, the Denver couple traveled to Sri Lanka on a Fulbright fellowship. Peace Corps has lots of experience sending older volunteers overseas, too. They like older volunteers so much the recruit- ing and placing of those 50 and older has become a high priority in an era when the need is great, our economy is strong, retirement comes sooner and good health lasts longer. So we’ve asked some of the experts in the field–old hands at volunteering–to tell their stories and offer advice about what it’s like when you decide to serve the world a little later on in life. We also offer Agents of Change, a sampler of the hundreds of agencies that will take your applications, young or old. It turns out that almost everyone has a skill to share and there is probably someone looking for yours. GeekCorps might send a website designer to Lebanon. ACDI/VOCA sends accountants, middle managers and agribusiness types to dozens of countries. Volunteers in Economic Growth Alliance takes volunteers in many of these areas, as well. And pretty soon you’ll probably find Peace Corps recruiters scouring the agriculture, business, engineering, education and law conferences looking for someone who wants to take their skills somewhere else in the world for awhile. Our letters from around the world in this issue are reports from the largest delta in the world, an orphanage in Romania, a country whose farmers fought a civil war for two decades, a remote gem of nature near a town called Ridder, a city built by Peter the Great and some Venezuela mountains where rains swept away entire villages, thousands of lives and enough mud, rock and boulders to fill Grand Coulee Dam. Some of these authors started their volunteer careers in the Peace Corps. Others just discovered the experience. David Arnold POST-WAR SUDAN Advice from a short grandmother teaching business to tall veterans W by Beth Oliver e all have bad days. And sometimes it really hits the fan. So much so that I sometimes question the impact of my workshops and projects on the participants. Will they remember cash flow or a selling price that makes a profit? Will these agricultural extension officers be better able to serve their farmer clients? Did being a qualified female senior citizen with a sense of humor meet their needs and expectations? I went to Rumbek in southern Sudan to provide business planning and management training to county agricultural extension workers who would teach these skills to farmers with limited literacy. Challenging to say the least in a country where, as a result of over two decades of war, most farmers in southern Sudan are subsistence farmers with no formal schooling. Thirteen months after the peace agreement was signed, I arrived to help the ministry of agriculture and forestry transform subsistence agriculture into agribusiness. The Rumbek airport was a hive of activity with planes loading and unloading people and supplies. You could time your wake-up call to the U.N. helicopter’s takeoff. Customs was a relatively simple matter. Car and driver were there to meet me and no one was overly interested in my luggage. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement’s leader, John Garang, had designated Rumbek as the capital of Southern Sudan. Someone said, “Rumbek will be like a small London.” However, Garang died in a plane crash and Juba became the new capital. No paved roads or multi-storied buildings here in Rumbek. Most people live in traditional-style thatched huts without electricity or running water. The empty shells and rubble of brick attested to the fierce fighting that had left an estimated 1.5 million dead. But what really got my attention on arrival was the height of the inhabitants, both male and female. I’m barely five feet and the Sudanese seemed to start at six. Tall and slender. I felt like a crone from an English fairy tale. However, as a volunteer I bring experience to my work. Peace Corps Botswana, where 16 Fall 2007

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Worldview Magazine - Fall 2007

Worldview - Fall 2007
Contents
Presiden'ts Note
Lafayette Park
Introduction
Interview
Commentary
Editor's Note
Letter from Rumbek, Sudan
Listings
Letter from Yekaterinburg, Russia
Letter from Codaesti, Romania
Letter from Catia La Mar, Venezuela
Letter from Gumare, Botswana
Letter from Ridder, Kazakhstan
Letter from Rincon, Cape Verde
Letter from Port Au Prince
Another Country
Community News
Giving Back
Opinion

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