Long after official service has ended, the Peace Corps is a lifelong mission

On a sunny Saturday in May, Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Long Island gathered in the parking lot of the United Church of Christ in Middle Island to revive an outdoor tradition canceled by last year’s COVID-19 shutdown.

Wearing masks and social distancing, the 11 volunteers loaded a truck with 57 used bicycles and 34 sewing machines collected for Pedals for Progress, a New Jersey-based nonprofit that ships the items to needy people in developing countries, members said. Since 2003, Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Long Island have sent 1,668 bicycles and 261 sewing machines to the charity.

"Getting a bike in developing countries is almost like getting a car here," said Kathleen Williams-Ging, 70, of Huntington Station, a retired Brentwood Schools bilingual educator who has organized the Suffolk effort. "I get calls from people year-round" who want to donate items, said Williams-Ging. She stores the donations in her garage and attic until the annual pickup, scheduled around Earth Day to take advantage of spring cleaning. A bicycle "makes a tremendous difference in people’s lives in getting to work, to school or a medical clinic, or to get your goods to market," she said.

"We felt a little bit bad that we hadn’t been able to do anything the year before, but it felt good to be back together in a relatively normal way," said Bette Williams Bass, 76, of Massapequa, a Peace Corps volunteer who taught biology and general science in Ethiopia from 1966 to 1969. Williams Bass handles Nassau County collections.

The annual Pedals for Progress drive is publicized with flyers and announcements in local media. People across Long Island respond by dropping off kid’s bikes, English racers and sewing machines. When donors can’t afford the requested $20 to defray shipping costs, "members make up the shortfall," Williams Bass said.

Volunteerism continues

Helping to change lives near and far remains a goal of the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Long Island decades after service abroad stretching back to the agency’s origins in the early 1960s. As a group and individually they continue to volunteer — in soup kitchens and food pantries and social services programs. The group mostly suspended its activities during 2020, but members are now vaccinated and have resumed volunteering, they say.

"Returned Peace Corps volunteers tend to be the type of people who keep volunteering," said Williams-Ging, who served in the Peace Corps in Huancayo, a city 10,000 feet above sea level in the Peruvian Andes, from 1971 to 1973. "I was assigned by the Ministry of Education to go out to small towns and work with elementary school teachers developing classroom materials in math and science," Williams-Ging said. Retired from teaching but not volunteering, she has delivered library books to homebound Long Islanders and, until COVID-19 interfered, helped out for 15 years at the St. Hugh of Lincoln Roman Catholic Church’s food pantry in Huntington Station. "I like having some structure in my life, even though I’m not working for money," she said.

Williams Bass and Williams-Ging also make annual trips to Washington, D.C., to meet with Long Island’s congressional delegation. Last year they met with then-U.S. Rep. Peter King and the foreign affairs staffs of U.S. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer to "advocate for the Peace Corps budget and for issues that will affect serving Peace Corps volunteers, which is especially important at this time when there are no volunteers currently in the field," Williams Bass said.

In March 2020, for the first time in the Peace Corps' 60-year history, all 7,000 volunteers from 62 countries were evacuated from host nations because of COVID-19, according to Joe Nava, Peace Corps public affairs specialist in Chicago.

Many returned volunteers stay in touch with their former host families, either via social media or visits in safer times.

"In the family I lived with in a compound, there were many children, and to this day I still communicate with them on Facebook," said Linda Restaino-Merola, 76, of Eastport, who taught English as a second language in the Philippines with the Peace Corps from 1967 to 1969.

The alumni organization, founded in 1994 as an affiliate of National Peace Corps Association in Washington, D.C., maintains a mailing list of about 200 people, several dozen of whom are active members, said member Lyn Dobrin of Westbury.

Last month, the group held its first post-lockdown social in a member’s Huntington Station home. They ate a potluck including grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, reminisced about Peace Corps years and shared memories of Franklyn Dunne, a former resident of Coram and Sea Cliff who served in Somalia in the late 1960s, and who died this year after a long illness. Afterward they toured a neighbor’s English garden.

"It’s great to be with people who are still committed to the goals that first drew us to join the Peace Corps — that means learning about other cultures and devising ways that we can still effect positive change in the world," said Dobrin, who served in Kisii, Kenya, from 1965 to '67 with her husband, Arthur Dobrin. He helped farmers’ cooperatives market crops; she established a national women’s group branch and collected folk tales published in a book still used in schools in Kenya and Tanzania.

Founded in the 1960s

The Peace Corps was founded on March 1, 1961, by executive order of President John F. Kennedy, who’d proposed the establishment of an international volunteer organization in a campaign speech the previous October. Kennedy had challenged students to "serve their country and the cause of peace by living and working in the developing world," according to the agency’s official history at peacecorps.gov.

Paul Arfin, now 81 and living in Great Neck, was an undergraduate student at what’s now Adelphi University and a member of the U.S. Army Reserve in 1962 when he became one of the first 10,000 applicants to the newly formed corps.

"I was fascinated by the idea of going into the Peace Corps as a way of helping me find my purpose and direction," Arfin said. With a newly minted bachelor’s degree in general business — and a minor in Spanish — he served from 1963 to 1965 in the Colombian Andes, running a nonprofit community movie theater showing Spanish and English-language features and educational films in a former slaughterhouse. "There was no seating, so we built benches for 200 people," he said.

Although Arfin said he had no particular career in mind when he joined the Peace Corps, his time as a community development worker there "changed my perspective on things. It built my leadership skills and self-confidence."

Back home he got a master’s degree in social work with an emphasis in community organizing and spent a decadeslong career developing day care and elder care centers and other social programs. In 2005, he self-published a memoir, "Portrait of a Peace Corps Gringo," to answer the question "why did a kid from the suburbs join the Peace Corps," Arfin said.

Brian Richardson, 76, of Middle Island, a retired social worker, also volunteered in the Peace Corps’ first decade. In 1967 he was among the fourth group of volunteers sent to South Korea, where he worked to control communicable diseases such as tuberculosis.

Richardson had kept to his Peace Corps commitment even after falling in love with a young woman he’d met on a Shoreham beach three weeks before leaving home. He returned home in 1969, earned a master’s in social work and worked with adults and adolescents in the criminal and family courts, retiring in 2000. In 2005, he reunited with the woman (both had earlier married and divorced other people) through a mutual acquaintance. They married, and nowadays he and his wife, Gina, "do volunteer work in the area of hunger," most recently in a Middle Island soup kitchen.

Looking back on his Peace Corps days, Richardson said he is "amazed how today’s Peace Corps has really learned from the experiences of volunteers 30, 40, 50 years ago and adapted. When I joined they were primarily interested in generalists, people coming out of college with a liberal arts degree."

"Today you need a skill," Richardson continued. "They are looking for engineers, people with a computer science background, and the focus is very much on developing the economies of other cultures."

'A for-life thing'

Mary Watros, 62, of Huntington Station, had degrees in geology and secondary education when she served in the Dominican Republic from 1985 to 1987. Previously, she had worked in the geology field in Colorado, but, she said, "it was sitting behind a desk and what I wanted was field work and life experience."

She found both in a rural Dominican village, teaching "very poor subsistence farmers" to build ponds, largely by hand, and stock them with fish (mostly carp). "The ponds were built alongside a pigsty so that the pig manure would create an algal bloom that feeds the fish," Watros continued. "The goal was to make them [the farmers] independent and have a source of protein without having to buy meat."

Although Watros said she had an otherwise "very traditional Peace Corps experience" she also was coming out, meeting her first girlfriend while serving in the corps. But she kept her relationship secret because, she said, "I didn’t feel it was safe to talk about even with people in the Peace Corps."

Watros, and her wife, Laura, have traveled throughout Latin America since then. And now that Watros retired last month after serving for 20 years as director of a Nassau BOCES Outdoor and Environmental Education Center at Brookville, she’s focusing on outdoor education programs for Long Island kids.

Views of sexual orientation have changed since the 1980s, and today’s Peace Corps is "working hard on recruiting a body of volunteers that accurately represent the diversity here in the United States," said Teckla Persons, Long Island Peace Corps recruiter. Persons hosts "diversity and inclusion events that highlight the experiences of … LGBTQIA+, Black Americans, Asian Americans, Muslim Americans, first-generation Americans and first-generation college students to just name a few."

Persons said that health and safety are a top concern as the agency seeks to return volunteers to the field. "The pandemic is constantly changing, so we are keeping up with new information as it comes in to make sure we have a great group of volunteers ready to go when we return to service."

Meanwhile, the members of the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Long Island continue to live Peace Corps values at home.

Mary Myers-Bruckenstein, 75, of Coram, a retired registered nurse, taught anatomy, pharmacology and first aid at a nursing school in Ethiopia from 1968 to 1970. During pandemic school closures she’s been tutoring a neighbor’s 11- and 7-year-old children online, which required her own skills upgrade.

"I had to learn new math," she said.

Said Williams Bass: "Whether we served two years ago or 50 years ago, we still believe in the importance of the Peace Corps. It’s a for-life thing."