Lisa Reitmeier and B.J. Whetstine of the Peace Corps at the World AIDS Day panel
By Marea Pariser (Kagoshima-ken, 2003-04) for JQ Magazine
What comes to mind when you think of the Peace Corps? Is it the image of young, daring humanitarians performing HIV/AIDS work across Africa? Or how about the ambitious environmentalist who flocks to third-world Latin America to build aqueducts in the locals’ backyards? Sure, we all know the stereotype—adventurous, somewhat-experienced travelers willing to spend two years out in the bush roughing it with the locals as a result of their passion to see the world and underlying desire to help others.
Perhaps we’ve thought about the opportunity for ourselves. And it’s likely that we all know at least one person who’s a current or returned Peace Corps volunteer. What probably doesn’t come to mind, though, regarding this nearly 50-year-old program—founded in 1961 by the Kennedy administration—is the image of native English speakers flying abroad to teach English as a second language to locals in over 70 countries where the Peace Corps has presence.
Sound familiar? It should.
And recruiters at the Peace Corps New York Regional Office hope that it’s this familiarity that will lure promising JET alumni across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania (the region’s territory) into their office for an interview, which is part of the yearlong application process.
“We really have to reach out to organizations that have a like interest such as ours with respect to people interested in teaching and interested in an international focus,” said Peace Corps New York Regional Manager Vincent Wickes from his office on Varick Street in Greenwich Village. “And certainly, JET represents that.”
Wickes said education makes up the largest component of current Peace Corps programs overseas with 36 percent of volunteer jobs taking place in the classroom, from preschool to college-level instruction. It’s the greatest area of need “as identified by the countries asking for Peace Corps assistance,” with a majority of the jobs in ESL, according to a Peace Corps brochure given to JQ last December. In fact, it’s in more demand than health and HIV/AIDS work, which trails in second at 22 percent of all overseas programs.
It’s not surprising, then, that the largest presence of Peace Corps volunteer positions is in Africa. However, Wickes and his staff of eight recruiters want applicants to know that there’s a whole world out there beyond Africa that needs help.
“A lot of people see the Peace Corps experience as being so reflective of what Africa provides… But we have people serving in Eastern Europe and people serving in countries that are very developed,” Wickes said. “I mean Bulgaria as an example. They’re serving in environments, which are not so much what you and I might call developing countries, … but they have a lot of areas that are underdeveloped and that’s where we’re needed.“
B.J. Whetstine is an example of that. A Peace Corps recruiter in the New York office since late 2008, Whetstine served as a university English teacher in Guizhou Province, in Southwest China, from 2006 to 2008 with his wife. While his primary job was teaching English, Whetstine said he did promote HIV/AIDS awareness around his town: “Pretty much every Peace Corps volunteer, regardless of what their primary assignment is. does HIV and AIDS awareness work.”
For Whetstine, that meant spearheading a campaign at his university, where a group of about 200 student volunteers worked together to promote HIV/AIDS awareness. He said his biggest project was for World AIDS Day, when his group of student volunteers spent three months making thousands of AIDS ribbons, each woven in a traditional Chinese knot pattern, which were passed out on campus and around town. As a recruiter, Whetstine remains enthusiastic about teaching English in Asia and appreciates the similarities his experience on the Peace Corps has with the JET Program.
“I have a good friend who did the JET Program and loved it,” Whetstine said. “I had always wanted to do it myself, but ended up teaching English in China with the Peace Corps.”
The friend he’s referring to is William Childress, a fellow returnee who served in a nearby town in Southwest China. Whetstine said the two became close friends and traveled together with their wives throughout Asia during vacations (Peace Corps volunteers get 48 vacation days over two years).
“I think the experience William had in Japan—both through teaching and just living in a pretty homogeneous Japanese community—really prepared him for what he faced in China,” Whetstine said. “Because a lot of the things he said were the same. He stood out; he’s not Asian. So people took notice of that and since he was a JET [prior to Peace Corps], he had gotten used to it.”
In fact, Whetstine said his friend’s JET experience proved to be beneficial in more ways than just preparing for cultural immersion; he feels it opened the door to a new dialogue.
“In China there are a lot of preconceived notions about Japan,” Whetstine said. “There’s still a lot of friction there since World War II. And so William was bringing a pretty unique perspective to China….He lived in Japan so he could talk about what real Japanese people were like.”
Whetstine added that his friend’s time in Japan helped him learn Chinese, as he was already “familiar with a lot of the characters.”
Like the JET Program, Peace Corps volunteers sent to China are placed in educational institutions to teach ESL. Unlike JET, though, most of the programs in rural China are at the university level.
“There’s a huge teacher shortage in China right now,” Whetstine said. “We’re going in and teaching basically at teachers’ colleges. So the idea is that the [students] who go to those schools will go on and become teachers in middle and elementary schools.”
Whetstine said most JET alumni already qualify for a teaching position in the Peace Corps: an applicant must have a bachelor’s degree in any subject and at least six months of teaching or tutoring experience in English, literacy or English as a second language.
Such teaching experience will be useful for any facet of the Peace Corps, Wickes said. “Truthfully, the educational program constitutes about 36 percent of the total volunteers, but ultimately most of the volunteers who serve will end up in some type of capacity where they’re teaching.
“And that may not be in a classroom, but it’s teaching health education, or teaching business advising.”
Such was the case for returned Peace Corps volunteer Lisa Reitmeier, who is now, along with Whetstine, one of Wicke’s eight regional recruiters.
While Reitmeier served as a health volunteer in a rural community in Africa’s Burkina Faso from 2002 to 2004. Caring for patients suffering from elephantitis, malaria and HIV, she said education was a large part of her service.
“When I left Burkina I had obviously done a lot of health education and so when I came back to America I decided I wanted to teach in high-needs schools. And I worked at a high school in the South Bronx for three years before having this job.”
Teaching in the South Bronx, she said, “was way harder than two years in the Peace Corps… I can easily recruit Peace Corps volunteers. I’d have a harder time recruiting teachers to teaching in high-needs schools.”
Education is such a strong point for the Peace Corps that the organization offers scholarships, assistantships, college credit and stipends to those volunteers seeking graduate school opportunities.
The Peace Corps has partnered with both Master’s International, a program that allows participants to start their graduate degrees on campus then serve overseas with the Peace Corps (while earning academic credit), then return to school to finish their graduate work; and Fellows/USA, which awards returned volunteers with financial benefits like reduced tuition, assistantships and stipends to over 45 participating graduate schools upon completion of the Peace Corps.
Reitmeier completed her Master’s in education at Columbia University with the Fellows/USA program.
When asked about the best part of her Peace Corps experience, she said it was “definitely the relationships that I made with the people in my community. My best friend at the time was 24 years old, she was the third wife of her husband and she had never stepped foot inside a school. She had had four kids, two of whom had died. I mean we just had nothing in common. But we were really best friends… It was a really wonderful experience to be in a relationship with people who just came from a totally different viewpoint in everything.”
It’s this interaction, Wickes says, that makes the program two years in length.
“Really, if you’re there on a short-term basis you’re a tourist. And we’re not tourists,” Wickes said. “We’re there really as a part of their culture.”
Peace Corps’ New York Regional Office is located at 201 Varick Street in Manhattan. For more info, visit peacecorps.gov.
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[…] 2010 January/February – Peace Corps profile (talks with those who joined Peace Corps after the positive experience they had on JET) by Marea Pariser […]