Peace Corps Volunteers Fired, Brought Back Home Without Insurance [Updated]

As an RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) I feel compelled to note here that some 7300 active Peace Corps volunteers were brought back home to the US because of the Corona Virus. So far, so good.  But they were also fired and cut off from their health insurance.  Some were at the end of their two year assignments, others at various stages.

Peace Corps Volunteers don't get paid much anyway so keeping on salary for a few months wouldn't have been a big deal.

Glassdoor says the average monthly pay is $314 for Peace Corps Volunteers.  Their total pay is higher because an amount is set aside as a cash payment when they return to the United States.  There also may be other variables such as pay for housing, but that depends on each country's situation.

These are folks who have been representing the United States as teachers, sanitation engineers, forestry experts, and a wide variety of similar jobs.  They range in age from early 20s to 60s and 70s. Bringing them back and just cutting them off like that in the middle of a pandemic just seems mean spirited.

Here's more from Talking Points Memo - with a detailed report of evacuation from Peru.

[I got this update today that there's money in the emergency stimulus bill for Peace Corps evacuees.

"Late Wednesday (March 25), the U.S. Senate passed an emergency stimulus bill that includes $88 million for Peace Corps. The legislation now heads to the House of Representative for a vote expected Friday (March 27). That’s just the first step in a long-term effort to keep Peace Corps funding strong and support evacuees. That is why we are issuing a challenge to our community to send 100,000 messages to Congress. Learn more
Peace Corps volunteers come into country after learning the local language and training to improve their skills to do serious work in country.  The 'victories' of volunteers are the people they help to improve their lives or the health of their communities or the economic strength of a community.  The statistics are in the hearts of the people whose lives they touched, only occasionally being articulated."]

At the 45th Anniversary celebration of Peace Corp Thailand the Foreign Minister of Thailand told the group that his life as a poor Northeaster village kid was transformed by a Peace Corps volunteer who taught him English in school and got him into the AFS program which had him live with a US family for a year. I had a former student come to me - someone whose life I thought I'd messed up by getting him into a Bangkok school where I figured later, he'd just be a misfit - to say it had transformed his life and enabled him to live a much richer life than he ever could have had I not been there.  The director of Peace Corps in Thailand at that time (45th Anniversary) and the  US Ambassador to Thailand (both former Thai Peace Corps volunteers) each told stories of returning to their villages and finding out that they were still remembered fondly because of projects that had greatly improved the villages.

And this doesn't count all the RPCV's who return to the US speaking languages from all over the world, with a close understanding of the countries where they volunteered.  They bring this knowledge back and it transform how they do their jobs when they get back home and how they inform public debates on local as well as international issues.

Just had to make sure this was noted.