GREENBRIER COUNTY W.Va. (WVDN) – On Saturday, March 1, Returned Peace Corps Volunteers will join the nation in celebrating Peace Corps Day. This annual day of recognition honors all past and present volunteers, each of whom has dedicated years of their lives to promoting world peace and friendship through community-based development and intercultural understanding.
Greenbrier County resident, Pamela Barry is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer and also serves as the group’s Regional Coordinator for Southern West Virginia. She fondly recalls her volunteer work in Korea in 1977, the summer of which she would embark on an adventure that would change her life forever. “You go over there thinking that you’re going to be teaching and helping them, but they give back so much more,” Barry says. “I learned from them and they learned from me. It’s the way the Peace Corps is designed – to allow people from different cultures to understand and respect each other,” she adds. “The Peace Corps changed my life completely and in the most amazingly positive way.”
As a young college student, Barry knew right away that she wanted to travel. “When I was in college, it was just something that I was interested in,” she says. “I hadn’t traveled much and I was thirsting to go overseas. I thought the Peace Corps would be the best fit for me because I would actually be doing something productive instead of just traveling.” And that she did. After submitting an application, Barry met with a recruiter in Boston, completed her paperwork and was on her way to Korea in July 1977. Upon arrival, she underwent two months of intense language and cross cultural training. From there, Pamela Barry would spend the next two years living in a small village and working as an English teacher for Tae Chon Girls Middle School in South Korea. “I was one American, a woman by myself and surrounded by Koreans. Everyone was kind and respectful,” she says. “My village had been waiting for a volunteer for 5 or 6 years, so they were very excited.”
Barry later returned to the small town in which she taught, but more than a decade would pass since her service had ended. During that time, the area underwent significant changes. “When I was there in 1977, it was all dirt roads and you had to get your food at the market every day,” she says. “When I returned in the early 90s, it was a big city.”
Currently, the Peace Corps is active in over 60 countries with 7,300 volunteers, three of which are from West Virginia. There are currently six sectors in which volunteers exchange skills and knowledge with community members, including agriculture, community economic development, education, environment, health and youth in development. The Peace Corps focuses on three goals, including to help the countries interested in meeting their need for trained people, to help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served and to help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.
Since being founded in 1961, the Peace Corps has served and worked in 140 countries with more than 240,000 volunteers. If you are interested in learning more about becoming a Peace Corps Volunteer, would like to attend an event, connect with a recruiter or to submit an application, visit www.PeaceCorps.gov.
