Joining the Peace Corps after 60: Older volunteers reflect on experiences

When the Peace Corps was established 60 years ago in 1961, most volunteers were young, often fresh from a college graduation.

According to the official Peace Corps website, the average age of recent volunteers is 28, though many are far older, reaching into retirement age.

There are many returned Peace Corps volunteers in Western North Carolina who have joined after 60, including Ana Margarita Cebollero, a native of Puerto Rico who lives in Hendersonville.

Many older volunteers serve after their children have grown — and this was the case with Cebollero. At 65, she served from 2001 to 2003 in a women’s and children’s health clinic in a remote mountain village in Morocco.

“When Kennedy offered the idea of Peace Corps, I had just had my first child,” said Cebollero of the time before she and her husband had considered volunteering. “We were very young, and we had four children.”

Editor's note: This is the second in a three-part series on returned Peace Corps volunteers living in WNC. 

More:Local returned Peace Corps volunteers reflect on 60 years of the program

The couple held onto the possibility of applying together once their kids were grown, but then her husband passed away prematurely. “So, when my youngest daughter got married, I said ‘OK, now I’m free!’” said Cebollero, who is a licensed mental health counselor with a PhD in psychology.

“I wanted to learn about families — to know about how other people take care of their kids,” she said. Even though Cebollero is a native Spanish speaker, program administrators could not successfully assign her to a Spanish-speaking country.

“I wanted to be able to learn about other people, so being (in Morocco) for me was perfect,” she said. As part of her training, Cebollero and a volunteer partner continued to work on learning Arabic for a month with a host family, then headed to the village where they’d serve, located about an hour from the coast.

Because volunteers are encouraged to live like the locals, Cebollero had to make do with less than she was used to, living in the U.S. “They send you to a town where they have nothing, absolutely nothing. We had electricity, but water was scarce,” she said.

Highlights of her time there included getting to know her host family and traveling in the region. She learned how to make couscous and was tutored in Arabic by the local postman. Cebollero’s daughter and son-in-law visited her while she was there as well.

At the clinic, Cebollero learned a lot about the culture and people of the rural, mountainous area. “The women, they were shy about talking about their health,” she said.

Unfortunately, Cebollero didn’t finish her volunteer period because the start of the Iraq War precipitated removal of volunteers from Morocco. Cebollero said that even with the war looming she never felt unsafe; the police checked on them regularly.

“Peace Corps is an incredible opportunity for young people,” said Cebollero. “It’s not easy — it’s far away and the language is difficult—so you have to have an optimistic outlook. If I were younger, I would do it again.”

New horizons

Asheville resident Elizabeth Lynne Pou had thought about the Peace Corps from time to time, and when at 60 years old she felt that she needed a break from operating a successful consulting practice, she took the plunge and applied.

“I wanted to be out of my comfort zone, as far as I could,” said Pou, who has worked as a lawyer and high-level business executive and currently volunteers for Asheville SCORE and Mountain Bizworks. “I had never spent much time outside the U.S., and I wanted to challenge myself, and get to know people.”

Peace Corps administrators managed to match Pou’s experience with her assignment, to Armenia, where she served as a community development and small business advisor from 2007 to 2009.

Pou was sent to the second largest city in Armenia, Gyumri. She said that since the country had been under Soviet rule for four generations, it had been challenging for individuals to build up a business infrastructure following the fall of the Iron Curtain.

In one instance, Pou assisted in acquiring E.U. grant funds for a fish farm to develop their business; she said the grant money was eventually paid back per the grant’s terms so the funds could then go to help another businesses in a similar rural community.

Pou realized that her many years in business had solidified assumptions about how things as basic as the way meetings are conducted. “What I thought was universal was actually quite parochial,” she said. “In Armenia, it’s much more social.”

For Pou, the most challenging aspect of Peace Corps was learning Armenian. Pou struggled with the language in the three-month long training intensive. “It was the only time in my life that I was put in the slow class,” she said.

Being an older volunteer wasn’t so unusual in 2007 — Pou reports that of the 50 or 60 volunteers in her class in Armenia, 10 were over 50 years old. “I had many friends in their 20s and 30s,” said Pou.

Lasting relationships

For returned volunteer Thomas Harvey, who joined at 70, language was also a challenge.

“Right off the bat, they told four of us that were over 60 in my group that we’d never be fluent, but they’d get us where we’d need to be as Peace Corps volunteers,” Harvey said. “Because honestly, every decade after 50 your ability to pick up a language really is much more difficult.”

For Harvey, his Peace Corps experience afforded a great deal of autonomy during the time he served in Moldova, from 2016 to 2018.

A horticulturalist by trade and a self-proclaimed “plant nerd,” in 2015, Harvey had spent 15 years as the manager of the outside gardens at the Atlanta Botanical Garden and was feeling dissatisfied and ready for a change.

A friend of Pou for 50 years, he had already visited her in Armenia and another friend who was serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala.

“I woke up one morning and decided I was going to join the Peace Corps,” said Harvey, who now lives in Asheville. He applied online and was accepted in several weeks, with an original assignment to Nepal because of his agricultural background.

When that fell through, Harvey headed to Moldova in Eastern Europe to complete the final year in the Small Enterprise Development program there. However, the program was scrapped by the time he arrived, as not being successful enough to continue.

“So, we were told to go out and do what we wanted to do, so we did!” Harvey said.

“I did not have the typical Peace Corps experience.” For one, his well-connected host family lived in an affluent suburb of the capital city, Chișinău, in a house with air conditioning and “wonderful bathrooms.”

The patriarch of the family was the vice president of the Moldova chamber of commerce, and his wife was an executive with a German firm that did development in Moldova. “I had an opportunity to work with them… and go around with them and talk about the Peace Corps and business in the U.S.,” Harvey said. “It was a total PR thing, that I loved!”

Harvey accompanied family members to conferences and trade fairs all over the country, making connections and engaging with people that hadn’t had much contact with Americans.

“My program director was quite happy with that,” he said.

Harvey has returned several times “unofficially” to stay with the host family, who have since embraced him as one of the family.

“I have been officially adopted as the grandfather figure for my family,” he said.

Though Harvey said there is a physical exam for older volunteers, he and the administrators did not expect what occurred toward the end of his stint in Moldova. “I suffered Stage 3 heart failure and had to be medevacked to London to have a pacemaker put in,” he said.

Often, Harvey added, volunteers might not stay for their second year, with enthusiasm typically at a low point after a year, which he believes is unfortunate.

“In the second year, you become a lot more attached to what you're doing, and realize that you’re making some accomplishments,” he said. “And you might realize it’s all different from what you thought you’d be doing, while in training.”

Celebration of the Peace Corps’ 60th anniversary

On June 6, a “Summer Picnic in the Park” event is planned for returned Peace Corps volunteers at Carrier Park in Asheville. The open invitation event from the WNC-RPCV group calls for participants to “bring your own picnic lunch.”

To learn more, visit wncrpcv.org or find the group on Facebook at @wncrpcv.