Well, I made it. It took more than three years after I first accepted an invitation to serve, but this week I took the oath and officially became a Peace Corps volunteer. And now I’ll share some information about how I got this far and what you should do if you want to do it too.
It was late 2019 when I first accepted an invitation to serve. The big delay was due to COVID-19, which caused an evacuation of all Peace Corps volunteers worldwide in March 2020. At the time, I was scheduled to leave in June 2020 to serve in The Gambia as a teacher trainer. But that got delayed repeatedly. Eventually, I reached the conclusion that the Peace Corps probably wasn’t going to work out, so I was making plans to go to Ecuador and start my own business there. After I got back from an exploratory trip there, the Peace Corps contacted me about serving in North Macedonia.
Once I accepted that invitation, the big issue was medical clearance. Then I had to get my affairs in order and get to the hotel near Washington, D.C., where we gathered for staging. After two nights there, we got on a plane to Vienna, Austria, then on a connecting flight to Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia.
Then it was time for Pre-Service Training. People who have served in the recent past have told me that PST is the hardest part of Peace Corps service. I won’t know for certain if that’s true until my service is over (scheduled for December 2024), but I won’t be surprised if that turns out to be the case. They describe this as an intensive 11-week training program and I can vouch for the accuracy of that.
And finally, we were sworn in on Wednesday, Dec. 7. We raised our right hands and repeated after Ambassador Angela Price Aggeler (who is a returned Peace Corps volunteer herself) the oath: “I, (state your name) do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.”
(We had been cautioned a couple of days earlier that we should state our names instead of repeating the words “state your name.” Apparently there are people who get nervous enough that they do that.)
So, how can you get here?
Part 1: The Application
The minimum requirements are pretty slim. You need to be a U.S. citizen. You need to be at least 18 years old. (There is no maximum age; plenty of people have served in their retirement years, although most are in their 20s.) And you need to either have a bachelor’s degree or five years of professional work experience. I’m not sure exactly how they decide what counts as “professional,” but if you have five years of experience doing work that’s normally done by someone with a bachelor’s degree, they’ll probably accept that.
However, they’re looking for people who go well beyond meeting those requirements. At least before COVID-19, they got six times as many applications as they had positions available. They really like to see substantial work experience; a great many applications are from people whose only work experience is summer jobs and part-time work while in high school and college. Working full-time at one job for multiple years shows that you can take on the long-term work needed for two years of Peace Corps service.
For some assignments, you need to already know the language of the country of service. If it’s a language that a lot of U.S. citizens know, such as French or Spanish, they probably won’t pick you to serve in a country that speaks that language unless you already speak it quite well. (If the language is Albanian or Vietnamese, they’ll be thrilled if you speak it, but they don’t expect you to.)
You’ll need to decide whether to apply for a specific assignment (e.g. teaching English in Vietnam) or whether you want to “serve where you are needed most.” Picking the “serve where you are needed most” option increases your chances of getting picked to serve. But you should be prepared to serve in absolutely any country where the Peace Corps operates if you pick that option. That’s what I did.
You’ll need to write a statement about why you want to serve. It helps, of course, if you were a professional writer, but I think they’re more concerned about what motivates you to serve than about your technical skills as a writer.
You’ll need to get references from three people; they prefer references from employers. I got two former bosses of mine and the person who invited me to join the Rotary Club to serve as references.
And you’ll need to be interviewed. It’s not a whole lot different from a job interview. They did mine by phone after we had some technical difficulties with the planned video interview.
After all that, you might get an invitation to serve. You then have the chance to accept or decline the invitation. Assuming you accept it, you go on to clearance.
Part 2: Clearance
Your invitation to serve is pending medical and legal clearance. If you’re like me and you’ve never had anything more serious than speeding tickets, legal clearance won’t be a problem. You’ll need to be fingerprinted and have your information submitted to the FBI for a background check. (I think the cop who took my fingerprints was pretty happy to deal with me. They don’t get a lot of people who are happy to be fingerprinted.)
Medical clearance, on the other hand, is a real pain. Maybe it’s not big deal if you’re in your early 20s and have very little medical history. But I first applied in my late 40s and was 51 when I entered training. Here are some tips for medical clearance:
Have a relationship with a physician and a dentist when you apply. This way you won’t have to go through the nuisance I did of finding a doctor and a dentist who will accept new patients. Get a checkup from both the physician and the dentist before you finish your application to the Peace Corps if you can. Follow any advice they give you about improving your health. Then when it’s time to get the Peace Corps physical exam and dental exam done, it won’t be a big deal.
Expect medical clearance to be a huge pain. They’ve talked about improving the process and I hope they do, but you should still expect the worst. If you don’t experience the problems I did, good for you (and good for the Peace Corps staff for improving).
There were a lot of things that that they didn’t tell me about until long into the process and had no good reason for the delay. For example, it made perfect sense to require me to be vaccinated against shingles because of my age. But they knew my age when the medical clearance began. You’d think they would have told me about that requirement at the beginning, but no. Shingles vaccination was the last thing I had to take care of because you need to get two shots for that and I couldn’t get the second one until shortly before we were scheduled to report for staging. And that’s just one of many examples of them waiting a long time to tell me about a requirement, causing me to have to rush to meet it.
The single biggest thing they can do to improve medical clearance is to have a rule that says once the invitee submits a questionnaire, test results, etc., that the Peace Corps medical office has a 30-day deadline to assign new tasks based on that. With a deadline like that, I bet they’d get a lot better about informing us in a timely manner of tasks to complete.
In addition to medical clearance, you need to get your affairs in order. One thing I didn’t do that you should: Set up a Google Voice number. That way you’ll be able to make phone calls to U.S. numbers to deal with things you can’t deal with online. Maybe you’ll never need to do this, but it’s pretty easy (and free) to set up Google Voice while you’re in the USA and a real pain if you’re not.
Then you need to get to staging. They’ll buy you a plane ticket to fly from your home of record to the staging city. In our case, the staging city was Washington. Since Peace Corps headquarters is in Washington, that’s frequently the staging city. In my case, my mother and I drove from Ohio to the staging hotel, so they paid us a standard mileage rate instead of paying for me to fly from Dayton to Washington.
Part 3: Staging and Training
Staging is pretty simple. You show up at the hotel, check in and say goodbye to anyone who traveled with you. We weren’t allowed to explore D.C. during staging because of COVID-19 concerns; this is usually not only permitted, but encouraged. There are a bunch of things to deal with that will be familiar to anyone who has been through orientation at a university or a big company.
Then you get on a plane. A bus takes you to the airport and you all check in. Normally, about 50 people would be going to Skopje, but my group had only 17 because we were the first group after the COVID-19 shutdown and they were restarting with a much smaller group. We were allowed to check two bags; I only checked one, plus my carry-on and my under-the-seat personal item. (That under-the-seat item contained my essentials – my laptop computer, a change of underwear and prescription pills. That way if all else got lost, I’d be OK until the rest of my luggage was retrieved.)
We had a long flight from Washington Dulles to Vienna, then a short connecting flight to Skopje. When we arrived in Skopje, we were all tested for COVID-19. Suddenly, one person was gone from the group, and with only 17 of us, it was pretty obvious that someone tested positive and we all knew who it was. But because of medical privacy regulations, the Peace Corps staff wasn’t allowed to tell us that.
Under normal circumstances, the trainees would go to a university campus and stay in dormitories while we go through pre-service training. But we had special circumstances because of COVID-19 precautions. We stayed in a downtown Skopje hotel for two weeks – I’m not naming it because of security concerns, but I found it amusing that it had a familiar American brand name. For the first five days, we were confined to our hotel rooms most of the time except for meals. We took classes via Zoom from our hotel rooms.
After two weeks, we went to our communities of service to complete pre-service training there. We continued to take classes via Zoom, but on most Fridays, we would travel to Skopje for “hub days” at the same hotel where we’d stayed for the first two weeks. We would leave our homes early in the morning and return the same evening for most of these, though there was one in which we stayed overnight.
My advice to anyone going through PST: Take it seriously. Two of the 17 people who began PST with me didn’t make it to the swearing-in. One had a medical issue that they couldn’t treat here; the other resigned. People resign for all sorts of reasons, and they don’t have to give reasons when they do. Sometimes people resign because they’re homesick. Sometimes it’s because of family issues. Sometimes they’re offered the chance to resign rather than being terminated. Some resign because they’re offered job opportunities or business opportunities that they feel can’t wait.
All trainees are scheduled for two “readiness to serve” interviews. If the person interviewing you raises any concerns about your readiness to serve during the interview in the middle of training, do whatever you need to do to address those concerns. Most people who start PST complete it and are sworn in as volunteers, but a few don’t, so taking it seriously will help you get to the swearing in.
After the swearing in comes the service itself. I’ll be working for two places: the Language Center at South East European University and the Center for Equal Opportunities Mollëkuqja, a group that fights sex discrimination. In a few months, I’m planning to write in more detail about what I do for those organizations. Also, I plan to ask the other three community development volunteers in my cohort if they’re willing to be interviewed about their work so I can describe it in more detail here.