by LEENA RAO Oct 29, 2011 3:01AM
To celebrate the fifty years of the Peace Corps’s work in 139 countries, journalist and former Peace Corps volunteer Maureen Orth has created an online platform, called PeaceCorpsPostcards, for former volunteers to contribute their own stories, pictures and “Video postcards.”
In case you aren’t familiar, The Peace Corps is a volunteer program run by the United States Government. Post-college grads work abroad for two years; volunteering in building schools, infrastructure development, government, agriculture and more.
Orth has been traveling to Morocco, Colombia, Mongolia, Costa Rica and Mexico to film volunteers in action to add content to the new site. Stories are captured in digital ‘postcards’ on the site. For example, a young woman named Stephanie is featured helping an orphanage in Mongolia to become more self-sustaining by building a greenhouse and growing produce to sell for profit. A volunteer herself in the sixties, Orth helped build a school in a mountain village in Colombia.
The project, which is funded by American Express and Bank of America, is looking for additional volunteers from the past 50 years to contribute their own stories, pictures and videos.
