Wednesday, February 16, 2005
When Betty Baron decided to enter the Peace Corps, her family tried to talk her out of it.
But when she told her father she was getting married, he said he’d prefer she enter the Peace Corps.
What she hadn’t explained yet was that she was going to do both.
She had only agreed to marry her husband because he offered to go with her to the Corps. His condition: She had to wait to join the Corps until he finished graduate school.
After turning down four countries while waiting for her husband to graduate, Baron and her husband finally left for training the day of his graduation. Once trained, they went to Ethiopia.
Baron, a Peace Corps coordinator for University Career Services, was one of four speakers at the alternative career panel last night at the Big 12 Room in the Kansas Union.
The volunteers spoke to about 20 people about their experiences with alternative service careers. The panel represented the Peace Corps, Teach for America and AmeriCorps*VISTA.
Steven Wallace went to hear the panel after seeing an advertisement in The University Daily Kansan.
“I played basketball with a lot of underprivileged kids and I just want to do anything to help people,” Wallace, Olathe junior, said. “I don’t care if it’s teaching or building a house.”
The three organizations are non-profit service groups that send volunteers to areas in need of education, infrastructure and business development, heath awareness and youth development.
The Peace Corps is an international organization and both AmeriCorps*VISTA and Teach for America are domestic organizations.
Baron said she suggested the Peace Corps as an alternative to students who didn’t want to go straight into a job in the corporate world.
“Employers look at these kinds of things as internships and as service,” she said.
Volunteers spend one to two years in assigned areas, depending on the program, and then continue their career path.
“The goal is that after you teach, you will go into the field you were ultimately interested in and affect change in that sector,” Rachel Balzer, Whitewater senior, said. Blazer will be leaving for Mississippi in August to begin her two-year stint with Teach for America.
It takes people in all sectors of society to influence change, she said.
Teach for America volunteers are paid the same salary that starting teachers would make in their districts.
Teach for America also has partnerships with many businesses that recruit Teach for America alumni.
Peace Corps volunteers are mainly stationed in Third or Fourth World countries. Participants like Robin Corindo would be placed in a country that asks for the skills they can provide, such as teaching or technological advancements.
Now a state program specialist for Kansas, Corindo went to Namibia, Africa, in 1994 to teach English and physical science to elementary school students. She lived in a hut with a community well as her resource for water. She was given a stove and refrigerator as part of the accommodations the country must provide for Peace Corps volunteers.
Conditions varied.
Corindo’s colleagues in Africa had brick homes, and the capitol city had an Olympic-size swimming pool and an Internet café.
“That was our purpose,” she said. “To help bring consistency to a nation.”
Corindo was also an AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteer in Houston and an AmeriCorps*VISTA leader of six counties in London, Ky. As a volunteer, she helped develop educational programs for both elementary schools and an adult literacy program.
AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteers are paid $800 a month and they live in the area where they work.
“You live in poverty,” Corindo said. “If forces you to understand the area you are serving and you gain much more experience.”
Volunteers in all three organizations are given health benefits, tuition deferment or assistance paying off student loans, and money for relocation expenses.
...
Get Packing
For more information about alternative careers, call or visit:
Peace Corps
1-800-424-8580
Teach for America
1-800-832-1230
AmeriCorps*VISTA
1-800-942-2677
Source: University Career Services
Edited by Ross Fitch
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