Archive - April 1, 2020

From NPR Coronavirus Sent Peace Corps Volunteers Home. It Could Also Give Them A New Mission April 1, 2020 ELENA RENKEN Photos by Adam Greenberg Peace Corps volunteer Adam Greenberg worked to develop fish farming in Zambia. He took this selfie on March 23, en route to San Diego, the final destination of his evacuation. Imagine this: One minute you’re a volunteer doing work that you find incredibly meaningful in a faraway place. Then you get a notice – evacuate immediately. Suddenly you’re back home, probably feeling down and definitely jobless. That’s the situation that over 7,000 Peace Corps volunteers found themselves in after an unprecedented evacuation order in mid-March. The reason: fear of coronavirus. The Peace Corps explains that it didn’t want its volunteers stranded abroad if travel became impossible. Yet they’re stranded in a way now that they are back, ineligible for unemployment benefits because of their volunteer status . . .

    Here is the story from Spectrum | News 1 —   Kentuckian in Peace Corps Shares Tale of Evacuation BY EILEEN STREET Published 10:10 AM ET MAR. 31, 2020   LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Peace Corps, a federal program for Americans to volunteer abroad, announced on March 15 that it was temporarily suspending all operations and evacuating all volunteers, a first in its history. According to the Peace Corps’ website, it was because of airport closures globally amid COVID-19, which could restrict evacuations for any non-COVID-19 illnesses for volunteers. One of the approximately 7,300 volunteers evacuated from 61 countries was Louisville native Shelby Durbin. “I was in my dream job, you know, in a culture that I was really connecting to, and that was kind of robbed from me,” said the 23-year-old, who has been back in Kentucky for less than two weeks. “So we got the evacuation notice a . . .