For the first time in its 44-year history, the Peace Corps is allowing its volunteers to work domestically. Longtime Great Falls resident Nancy Osborne, 60, is one such former Peace Corps volunteer who decided to seize the opportunity to lend a hand stateside. As such, she has found herself working in Gulf Port, Mississippi for the last few weeks, helping with the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
"We're seeing a lot of people every day that need assistance," said Osborne. "The devastation down here is really immense."
In early September, the Peace Corps activated its "Crisis Corps" to aid the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) relief operation in the gulf coast region.
"If you've been a volunteer you're eligible for Crisis Corps," said Osborne.
She received an e-mail notifying her about the opportunity to help out in the South, and decided to offer her services. Peace Corps Director Gaddi H. Vasquez says that "while the Peace Corps is an international volunteer organization, the Peace Corps' spirit of giving has no borders."
"Therefore, as thousands of Americans are suffering tremendous hardship, it is imperative for Peace Corps to respond and provide support to the relief efforts."
Osborne was sent down to Mississippi on Sept. 9 and will be returning to Virginia Oct. 9. Osborne estimates that she and the other relief effort workers deal with approximately 300-500 displaced victims a day. According to Osborne, there are 10 other Peace Corps volunteers working alongside her in Mississippi. By her estimate, some 130 former Peace Corps volunteers are participating in Crisis Corps.
"We're working as individual assistants and we are helping to answer questions," said Osborne. "We're very busy and have been working from 8 a.m.-6 p.m. or later every day."
Osborne has also been spending some time working in the small day care center that she and the other volunteers created for the smaller children. She says the most difficult part of her experience has been to see so many people who have lost everything.
"Some people, their houses are completely gone, so they have to find a place to live, and they have to find shelter and food," she said. "They lost all their memories."
Osborne says that although there are some who are moving out of the state, the majority of people she has encountered plan to remain where they are.
"A lot of people love it here because it's where their family and their home have been for years, so they would rather stay… they've been through a lot of hurricanes," she said.
OSBORNE, WHO HAS lived in Great Falls for 24 years and has a master's degree in business administration from Marymount University, served as a Peace Corps business development volunteer in Armenia from 1996-98.
"I was very lucky because I was very centrally located in the city so I got to do lots of different things," she said. "I worked with a lot of different businesses and farms, I taught marketing at a fashion design school and I helped small businesses get grants. I also helped to get money to rebuild a medical center, so every day was different."
She says that joining the Peace Corps was something she had "always wanted to do when she got out of college," but didn't. Rather than totally abandoning her dream, she simply did it later in life. Osborne says that the most rewarding aspect of joining the Peace Corps has been "the experience of going off and having something completely different every day, and being able to make some impact in a small way."