Peace U.: UVA Corps vets tell tales
"I was feeling really negative about being in America, the war and the presidency, so I wanted to get out and see an alternative," says John Teschner. So the 2003 UVA grad did what UVA students have done more than any other comparable University graduates in the past five years: join the Peace Corps.
The foreign service organization, which turns 45 years old this year, was created by John F. Kennedy as a way of combating anti-American sentiment during the Cold War. In the 21st-century, the volunteers face a whole different set of world problems. Teschner, for instance, found himself in Kenya, asked to serve as an AIDS educator in a country where the destruction caused by the disease had been officially declared a national disaster four years earlier.
"A lot of money goes into Kenya to fight things like HIV, and a lot of it is wasted," he says, "Education and awareness are cheap."
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Full Stories List for July 27th, 2006 issue #0530
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