Is it possible to quit the peace corps. I assume it must be, but i would assume its not an easy thing to do. Are there special instances when one may return home early, such as being pregnent?
thanks
kaos
I heard of someone who was sent home after he became extremely ill.
I have a friend who got to his country and decided he’d changed his mind. He spent a week swimming at the Embassy pool and was flown home.
So, I think it’s possible. He’d never made it to the village where he was meant to work, though.
If you quit the Peace Corps, they will hunt you down and kill you.
No, wait … that’s the French Foreign Legion.
It is relatively easy to quit the Peace Corps. All you have to do is say, “This isn’t for me. I can’t take it,” or something similar to your country office and they have you fill out a handfull of forms and put you on the next flight home.
The feeling is that if you are in a foreign country hating it. You aren’t going to accomplish anything and further, you could cause more damage than provide help. So they want to get you out as much as you want to get out.
The problem arises in getting you out sometimes, however. In very remote locations this can can be extremely hard. When I was in the Peace Corps, I was on an island in the middle of the Pacific that only got ships from the outside world about every three months or so, and the ship took about two or three weeks to get back into the main island where there was an airport. So if I would have wanted to quit, it could have taken me quite awhile to do it.
The country office will attempt to get transportation to you but they can’t really reroute commercial vehicles like merchants ships.
I do know in places that have roads to where volunteers are, they sometimes send a car or truck. But if you are in someplace like extremely rural Nepal, you’ll have to trek into the place where the road is. And the roads being what they are, you might have to wait for a couple of days there before the vehicle can make it.
TV
TV time is exactly right. A Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) who is miserable does no one any good. PCVs “early terminate” (“ET”) all the time. A few do it within days of getting off the plane, when they are usually in training. Then a few weeks after training ends and PCVs have had a chance to see where and how they will be living for the next 18 months or so there is another mini-rush to leave. I think that Xmas is also time when people get homesick and are more likely to “ET.” ET rates vary by country but, without checking with PC, I’d guess that the rate is between 5 and 25% for most countries.
A lot of PC countries are not easy places to live and work. It takes a special kind of person. Anybody who can spend two years in Mauritania eating goat’s heads and organizing cooperatives (or whatever they do there) is the kind of person I’d want working for me.
An old gf quit her assignment. She was in, I can’t remember the name, some little Caribbean country, and quit after about 8 months.
Another guy I know was sent back from Malawi I think it was, he got bit by a viper and had a medical evac. I wouldn’t sugest that route though.