There’s been a lot of talk about the future of the Peace Corps. Let’s clear things up a bit.
First of all, the Peace Corps is still accepting applications for volunteers and is continuing to send new people out into training. It is continuing to swear in new volunteers.
Some countries of service are shutting down their Peace Corps operations. And, as much as I hate the attacks on the Peace Corps, I have to agree that there are some countries that ought to shut down. This month, they’ve announced that they’re closing the Peace Corps programs in Ethiopia and Mozambique. They’ve announced that they’re “pausing” the cohort scheduled to leave for South Africa this summer, and that they’re cancelling the cohorts scheduled to leave in June for Cameroon and the Kyrgyz Republic. But the announcements say these actions do not impact agency operations in those host countries.
There will undoubtedly be more cutbacks. For example, Ukraine hasn’t had any volunteers since the March 2020 worldwide evacuation of all volunteers due to COVID-19. By the time the Peace Corps was willing to send volunteers anywhere, Russia had invaded. It’s now been more than five years with no volunteers there. Unless there’s some reason to believe that war will end soon, it seems prudent to shut down the office in Kyiv. But as of this writing, they haven’t announced that they’re doing that.
But for the most part, I’d still encourage people to apply. However, if you are transgender, be aware that the Peace Corps medical office won’t be allowed to provide you with certain gender-affirming care. For example, I read about a current volunteer who is a trans man (i.e., was assigned female at birth but has transitioned to male). From what I read, the Peace Corps doctor told him that he wouldn’t be given any more testosterone. Since volunteers aren’t allowed to get health care from anywhere but the Peace Corps medical office, he couldn’t get testosterone elsewhere.
The medical office appeared to be doing everything possible to treat this man humanely within the limits set by the Trump administration. They told him he could continue to serve without getting the testosterone he’d been getting before, or that they would give him a “medical separation.” That means he’d be taken out of the Peace Corps, but given paperwork saying his early departure was for a medical issue that was no fault of his own.
I don’t know enough about transgender issues to have an informed opinion about whether it’s worth serving now if you’re transgender. I’d suggest getting firsthand information from transgender people who are serving now. Reddit has a useful group called r/peacecorps where you can get a lot of information (and where I read the anecdote above about how the trans man was treated).
For everyone else, I’d encourage you to apply. The basic requirements are pretty simple: You need to be a U.S. citizen who is at least 18 years old and you need to have either a bachelor’s degree or at least five years of professional work experience. It helps if you have experience volunteering in some manner, but it doesn’t have to be volunteering abroad; that can be in your own community. My experience as a Rotarian helped with this. If you have experience living in another country, that helps, but again, it’s not required. I had never lived in another country before I joined the Peace Corps (although I had traveled in Latin America extensively, which helped).
If you’re like I was and you’re more interested in serving than in a specific assignment, I suggest you apply for the “serve where you are needed most” option. With this, they look at your resume and decide where your skills would fit best. But be careful: This often gets you in some of the roughest assignments. Before COVID-19, they planned to put me in The Gambia in western Africa to train elementary school teachers. They said they wanted me for this because they had a lot of trouble with people leaving this job early, and my experience starting a small-town newspaper and running it as a one-man band for seven years showed I had tenacity. They eventually sent me to North Macedonia because it was one of the first countries to reopen for service as the pandemic was winding down.
But if you’ve got your heart set on a particular assignment, by all means apply for that. Just don’t be too disappointed if they tell you that assignment is full, but they want you to consider serving somewhere else.