Students find freedom in joining Peace Corps

College represents freedom to many students. There is an invigorating rush that comes from moving out of one’s parents’ house, having no curfew and arranging class schedules so you wake up no earlier than 11 a.m.

As hard as it might be to believe, however, some IU alumni say even more freedom can be found outside college life.

For most students, once they receive their diploma, they want to apply what they learned outside of an academic setting. The Peace Corps puts students in situations where they have to use their skills, said Rose Galer, IU’s Peace Corps recruiter.

“You go through classes and you have exams and you always have somebody telling you what to do,” said Arthur Westneat, an IU alumnus. There is more liberty to be gained from escaping the “confines of academics,” he continued. The Peace Corps, he said, presents that opportunity.

The Peace Corps aims to transfer technical skills to other nations, provide volunteers and natives with a cultural exchange and encourages volunteers to return to the United States after their term to teach others what they’ve been exposed to, Galer said.

Alice Luck, the president of IU Return Peace Corps Volunteer program, traveled to Bolivia in 2004, where she taught environmental classes, worked in a tree nursery and taught English.

“You think of other people of the world as being very different from you, and really they’re very similar,” she said. “At the end of the day, we all care about the same stuff.”

Westneat said he enjoyed traveling from the lowest level of society to the highest in little time. He’d be in a village hut drinking local beer with natives during the day, but attend events at the presidential palace that night, giving him an understanding of various classes, he said.

Westneat said he spent his time in West Africa’s Burkina Faso as an agricultural extension agent.

While doing that, he became interested in agricultural journalism and helped establish a local news magazine to connect the capital, Ouagadougou, to remote villagers to educate them in farm development. Written word allowed the people to reread information over and over again, which Westneat said is vital in technological education.

Westneat recalled days where he would travel from village to village on motorcycle, trying to find ways to be constructive. Volunteers were “asked to make our own way, and of course we knew very, very little about what that meant,” he said.  

“You’re not expected to go in and change a country, or change a community, or even a family,” Galer said.

She added the Peace Corps is about “education from a grassroots level.”

While having a basic education is necessary to join the Peace Corps, it can’t fully prepare volunteers for the experiences they will have, Westneat said.

“All of the sudden, you’re thrown out in the plains of Africa, and they don’t speak the same language. They don’t eat the same food. You can’t communicate with them,” Westneat said. “You have to learn how to interpret the world through other indicators. Once you start doing that, you have to make the psychological adjustment to things that are totally different. On top of that, you’re supposed to do something constructive.”

Westneat said the Peace Corps provided him with a freedom that he’s never had before or since.

“There ain’t nobody,” he said. “Just you.”