The village in Africa, where life seemed to move slowly and people would treat a stranger like a close friend, is no longer the same place it once was.
When Cindy Chalou worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland from 1980-82, the African country was virtually untouched by AIDS.
"I have no recollection of even talking about HIV or AIDS," said Chalou, who now is an associate director for MSU's study abroad office.
A few decades later, in 1996, the program closed.
More than 2,000 MSU alumni have volunteered abroad for two-year commitments during the Peace Corps' 45-year tenure. Currently, 71 MSU alumni are serving in the U.S.-run organization that serves 74 countries.
"The majority of the people who go into the Peace Corps are right out of college," said Courtney Cunningham, a recruiter for the Peace Corps regional office in Chicago.
But as the world has changed — from the fall of the Soviet Union to the discovery of the devastating AIDS virus — different programs in the Peace Corps have been created while others have ended.
Sometimes, the Peace Corps closes programs because of political unrest, such as in Haiti two years ago. Other times, a nation asks the Peace Corps to leave if the foreign government no longer needs the additional help.
This year, Ethiopia and Cambodia were added as more volunteers seek to work in health-related fields.
"Now every volunteer — it doesn't matter if they're going to Latin America or Africa or the Pacific Islands — they're going to be trained (about AIDS awareness)," Cunningham said.
As the AIDS pandemic hit full force, Swaziland reinstated the Peace Corps in 2003.
Nearly 25 years after saying goodbye to Swaziland, Chalou still remembers Florence, a woman in her 20s, who tutored her in the native language.
The two women forged a friendship, and Chalou even attended Florence's wedding and visited her in the hospital after she gave birth.
But Chalou said she doesn't know the fate of her friends and colleagues in a country that now has a life expectancy rate of 32 years.
"I lost touch with her, so I don't know how she was impacted," Chalou said.
Where it's been
Eli Fenichel's Peace Corps experience didn't include an underprivileged, developing country.
"Nobody was digging holes," Fenichel, 29, said. "Nobody was teaching anyone to wash their hands."
Instead, the current MSU doctoral student worked as a business consultant in Slovakia, a country about the size of West Virginia in central Europe.
After the fall of communism with the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, countries in Eastern Europe needed Peace Corps volunteers to boost small businesses and nonprofits, said spokeswoman Christine Torres from the Peace Corps regional office in Chicago.
Fenichel, who worked in Slovakia from 2000-02, during the country's last years of the Peace Corps, helped organizations write their own strategic plans.
Instead of brainstorming his own projects, Fenichel said he helped the locals plan their ideas, such as constructing a bicycle path through a national park.
But working in an already developed country posed unique problems for many volunteers.
Sometimes, Peace Corps volunteers found themselves competing directly with the Slovakians for work, Fenichel said. By using inexpensive Peace Corps volunteers, the country's government had little incentive to hire local consultants.
"You saw a steady increase in the number of frustrated volunteers," he said. "Not all Peace Corps volunteers went through that, but some did."
Fenichel was among the last volunteers to work in Slovakia after the government made the decision to stop the Peace Corps in 2002.
A foreign country must invite Peace Corps volunteers in, and if the government no longer feels that there is a need for American help, then the program can close, Cunningham said.
"It was anti-climactic," Fenichel said. "It was a little bit strange all of a sudden not having official contacts."
But after the Peace Corps was terminated, the country kept emerging into the modern world.
"Some of the traditions are there," said Fenichel, who will return to the country for the third time in May. "Some are fading away.
"The country has just changed so much. It's a developed European country. There's more cell phones than people."
Just as the Peace Corps in Slovakia has disappeared, so has the program in South Korea, where Marian Mitchell was a volunteer when she was fresh out of college in 1975.
While Mitchell oversaw about 150 patients as a health volunteer, she watched the country slowly develop.
Bit by bit, more roads were paved. Speed bumps even appeared to slow drivers down.
"It was so fast you really felt like it was changing a lot," said Mitchell, a doctoral student who works as a recruiter in MSU's Peace Corps office.
Instead of oxen plowing rice fields, farmers replaced them with small motorized tractors.
And the gray cement homes in the countryside where people lived were painted bright colors, casting a modern look on the village.
"It took me a moment to figure out which (village) was mine," Mitchell said.
In the country's capital city, Mitchell worked side by side with Koreans who had been trained at American universities.
"They didn't need to have a Peace Corps volunteer do what I was doing," Mitchell said. "Up in Seoul, I had colleagues who were Ph.D.s and M.D.s."
The Peace Corps ended in South Korea in 1981, because the country no longer requested volunteers.
Where it's going
Set to enter the newest generation of Peace Corps volunteers is Nicole Hedquist.
Two trips to Latin America in 2005 were enough to make the zoology senior put her plans of becoming a veterinarian on hold.
In the Peace Corps, Hedquist will return to that region by volunteering with an environmental education program. What's left is filling out her medical paperwork and then waiting to learn her exact destination and departure date.
"All I know, so far, is I'll be working with school-age children in Latin America," she said.
For those interested in joining, they must go through an extensive acceptance process, which includes a FBI background check and three letters of recommendation, Cunningham said.
"The best thing for people to do is go to our Web site and apply," Cunningham said. "It usually takes anywhere from six months to a year to go through the entire process."
Afterward, volunteers are placed by Peace Corps recruiters in foreign countries that have voiced specific needs. Now, more countries are needing college graduates who have degrees in such fields as engineering and computer science.
As Hedquist finishes the rest of the semester, she said every once in a while the thought hits her that she could be living in a foreign place in only a matter of months.
"I have nothing holding me to Michigan or the United States," she said. "I'm really excited to have a change in scenery."
