WorldView Magazine: Evacuation
Coming Home: Nepal
Nobody wanted it to happen this way. Evacuation stories and the unfinished business of Peace Corps Volunteers around the world. Nepal | Jim Damico Home: Kansas City, Missouri I am a three time Volunteer. I previously served in Thailand (2014–18) and Mongolia (2018). In Nepal I had just finished my first school year. When I sat down to tell this story, I was in a hotel in Kansas City in my 14-day quarantine. After a year you have made connections; you see where you can go. I had an awesome host family that I miss dearly. I miss...
Coming Home: Mongolia
Nobody wanted it to happen this way. Evacuation stories and the unfinished business of Peace Corps Volunteers around the world. Photo: Ceremonial first haircut for a young girl. Volunteer and photographer Antonio Mercatante was invited to observe. Mongolia | Lucy Baker Home: San Francisco Bay Area As Volunteers were being evacuated from China, in Mongolia, Lucy Baker and others watched their country go into lockdown. The government declared that February celebrations for Tsagaan Sar, the Lunar New Year, would be suspended. There were no confirmed cases of coronavirus, but the government wasn’t taking chances. And Volunteers were told to “stand fast.” Baker lived in...
Coming Home: China
Nobody wanted it to happen this way. Evacuation stories and the unfinished business of Peace Corps Volunteers around the world. Photo: Family portrait with Andrew Avitt, right, and his host family, Mr. and Mrs. Zhen and host brother Yanyu. “We received a lot of instruction during training about language, culture, and teaching. Perhaps the most invaluable part of that experience was getting to know my host family,” Avitt writes. China | Maura Joul Home: St. Cloud, Minnesota My cohort came in summer 2019. We had one semester teaching, three to go. All China Volunteers served in the education sector: teaching English...
Evac Support via Facebook
A group to link evacuated Peace Corps Volunteers with the help they need. Sometimes that’s just someone to listen — and hear. By Steven Boyd Saum The day after Peace Corps informed Volunteers around the globe that they were being evacuated, a new group took shape to help them: Returned Peace Corps COVID-19 Evacuation Support [Community-Generated]was launched by returned Volunteer Joshua Johnson. The group had 200 members within the first hour. By the end of the day on March 16 that number had grown to 2,000. Soon nearly 10,000 returned Volunteers and parents joined. And a dozen administrators began to...
Coming Home: Morocco
Morocco | Joshua Warzecha Home: Clayton, California Joshua Warzecha was an Arabic studies and linguistics major at Dartmouth College before joining Peace Corps in September 2018. He was on vacation with his family in the northern part of Morocco when he got the evacuation message and had to race back to his post in Tata, a province in the southwestern part of the country. He worked in the youth development sector, spending much of his time teaching English to teens and young adults. Back at his parents’ home in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the weeks under self-quarantine he...
Our Peace Corps Evacuation Journey
The Director of the Peace Corps chronicles the events that led to an unprecedented global evacuation of Volunteers. And the hardest decision she’s had to make in her life. By Jody Olsen I will always remember 2 p.m. on March 15, 2020, as the moment I made the most difficult decision of my life. I had just received a call from Patrick Young, the Peace Corps’ Director of International Operations, who himself had spent the previous 24 hours in phone conversations with almost every one of our country directors around the world. Each told him of impending host-country...
