Peace Corps

They're not exactly going to be sending out pink slips to volunteers - I mean, it's kind of hard to lay someone off who's living in a yurt a million miles from nowhere,  and who's only making $2,500 a year to begin with - but the Peace Corps is cutting back. (Boston Globe, August 23.)

Like every other global operation, they're impacted by the weak dollar, which:

...inflates expenses for overseas leases, volunteer living costs, and salaries for staff abroad, most of whom are paid in local currencies.

As a result, there may be 400 fewer volunteers brought along next year. (The total number in field at present is 8,000, who serve for 27 months.)

Frankly, I haven't given much thought to the Peace Corps since Jimmie Carter's mother, Miz Lillian, volunteered when she was in her 80's.

That is, until I went last week for the first time to the Kennedy Library in Boston, which has a display dedicated to the Corps.

Which brought back how exciting it was when the Peace Corps was launched in the early 1960's.

Although I was just a kid at the time - about a decade short of eligibility - it was thrilling to see those stories about all those idealistic college students digging irrigation ditches, doling out quinine, and teaching the alphabet - in far away places, mostly hot, often dangerous.

I had a fleeting fantasy about going in, but, like Dick Cheney with respect to Viet Nam, I had other things to do. Although unlike the Veep, I don't know if what I had to do was all that much better than going into the Peace Corps or VISTA.

VISTA - Volunteers in Service to America - not to be confused with the MSFT operating system - was the US equivalent of the Peace Corps. (It's now doing business as AmeriCorps.) I was more drawn to VISTA partially because I felt that charity begins at home, and more partially because if I stayed in the US there would have been more of a chance that I would have served in a climate that wasn't as hot as sub-Saharan Africa.

Well, it's never too late to join either organization - both welcome mid-career and oldsters. (I'm somewhere in between, I suppose.)

All that's holding me back is my love affair with that Tempur-Pedic mattress, a stocked fridge, A/C, the pile of books next to my bed, and the fact that I'm not quite ready - financially or, more important, psychologically - to stop working at marketing.

And I don't imagine that here are a lot of B2B technology marketing-related positions available in the Peace Corps or in VISTA.

But what a good idea - the Peace Corps (more so than VISTA): sending Americans who are carrying neither guns nor outsourcing contracts to help "on the ground" in small yet important ways. Showing an American face that's not Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, or some other vacu-lebrity.

What a shame that we may have 400 fewer of them out there next year.