(Updated October 2022)
So who is this Dan Robrish guy?
I was born in Washington, D.C., in 1971 and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, where I graduated from Walt Whitman High School in 1989. Later I lived in Los Angeles, where I ended up studying at Los Angeles City College; after that I was in Minneapolis, where I was at the University of Minnesota. I worked for the student newspapers at both of those places. I dropped out of the University of Minnesota to take a job as the only reporter at the Ely Daily Times in rural Nevada. After that, I worked at The Journal in New Ulm, Minnesota, and The Mercury in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, before getting hired in the Philadelphia bureau of The Associated Press in 1998.
My normal career path ended when I quit that job in 2010. I did so to start a new weekly newspaper, The Elizabethtown Advocate, in a town near Harrisburg, about 75 miles west of Philadelphia.
I ran the paper pretty much singlehandedly for seven years before selling the business. At the buyer’s request, I signed a three-year employment contract to remain the editor. But I concluded that after 10 years in Elizabethtown, it was time to move on, so I applied to the Peace Corps.
When I applied in 2019, the Peace Corps was getting about six times as many applicants as they had openings for. But it turns out they get really excited when middle-aged people apply. Most applicants are in their early 20s and recently completed a bachelor’s degree. Many of them have never held down a job for a year, which is perfectly normal at that age, but it does make it hard to judge how well they can handle a long-term difficult assignment like Peace Corps service. In the Peace Corps, you have three months of training followed by two years of service. Some of their volunteers freak out after a few months and have to be talked out of resigning. Some actually do resign — it’s not like the armed forces, where they can throw you in jail if you try to quit.
With my record of sticking with something difficult for a long time, they decided to have me train elementary school teachers in The Gambia, a country in western Africa that’s most familiar to Americans as the home of Kunta Kinte from “Roots.” They were going to have me be the only foreigner is a remote village where I would be bicycling 10 kilometers a day and carrying all the water I use from a pump in the middle of the village. I was all set to leave on June 2, 2020.
Then COVID-19 hit and all the Peace Corps volunteers were recalled worldwide. I’d already given notice that I planned to quit my job at that point. The Peace Corps first told me to continue planning for a June 2 departure but to understand that it could be delayed. At that point, I asked my mother if I could stay with her in Ohio for an extended period and she was happy to have me do so. I started a freelance editing business when I left my job at the newspaper.
As delays dragged on, I decided to look at other options and I made plans to move to Ecuador. I took an exploratory trip there from December 2021 to February 2022 and improved my Spanish a lot. I made arrangements with a visa processing company to get a long-term residence permit and was looking at opening a business in Ecuador.
But at the end of April 2022, I heard from the Peace Corps again. They wanted me to serve in North Macedonia, a country north of Greece that used to be part of Yugoslavia. I spent a week gathering more information before accepting the offer on May 6, 2022. After months of going through medical clearance, I was approved to serve.
I left for service in late September 2022 and I’m scheduled to complete my Peace Corps service in early December 2024.