Peace Corps, Third Goal

The Peace Corps has three main goals. Straight from the Peace Corps website, here they are:

The Peace Corps' mission has three simple goals:

Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.returned.thirdgoal.whatis

Third goal activities are basically meant to educate Americans about the peoples, cultures, etc. of the countries that we served in as Peace Corps volunteers. On a small level, I've engaged in this goal by talking about my experiences, telling stories and educating friends and family about Mongolia and Kazakh and Mongolian culture in short exchanges. Up until recently though, I didn't do anything official or on a larger scale to educate Americans about Mongolia and Peace Corps in Mongolia. A few months ago, my best friend's sister, who works as a teacher and also works with a Girl Scout troop after school, asked me if I'd be interested in helping her Girl Scouts earn their World Citizens badge by teaching them a little bit about Mongolia and what I did with the Peace Corps there. Of course I agreed and Hanna agreed to help me out.

We prepared a short presentation with some activities and brought some of our souvenirs from Mongolia to share with the girls. I prepared the information and slides anticipating that the girls were mostly in fifth grade. To my surprise most of the girls were quite a bit younger so I had to make some adjustments in how we presented the info. Despite the confusion, the presentation went pretty well. First we talked a bit about Peace Corps, its history, its mission, where volunteers work and what they do. Next we asked the girls if they knew where Mongolia is or if they knew anything about the country. None of the girls had ever heard anything about or knew anything about Mongolia but we were pleasantly surprised when one of the girls was able to point out Mongolia on an unmarked map. :)

We let the girls check out our Mongolian schwag, out of which the Mongolian wrestling hat and the Kazakh caps generated the most interest. We provided them with some basic information about Mongolian demographics, cultural norms and differences and even taught them some Mongolian numbers and phrases. At the end of the session, we played a 'Jeopardy' style game and quizzed the girls about information we provided on Peace Corps and Mongolia. The girls did well and seemed very pleased with themselves.

Overall the presentation and activities went well, though in the future I'd like to be better prepared. The girls seemed to enjoy meeting with us and hearing what we had to teach them and it felt good to finally engage in a more official third goal activity. I'd like to do some more of these in the future and of course, Peace Corps or not, I'd like to teach Americans about other countries I plan to travel to and work in, in the future.

Here are a few pics from our session with the Girl Scouts: