Greenwood couple fulfills 36-year-old dream by joining Peace Corps - Second Military Careers - Military Times

Greenwood couple fulfills 36-year-old dream by joining Peace Corps

GREENWOOD, S.C. (AP) — In February of 2005, Virginia and Mark Pulver embarked on a 27-month adventure when they joined the Peace Corps and went to the Ukraine.

Mark had been teaching at Emerald High School, where he was the computer technician and taught a class in television production. Virginia had taught Junior ROTC at Emerald High School, but before going overseas had taken a sabbatical.

“I wanted to think about life and figure out what I wanted to do next,” Virginia said.

Joining the Peace Corps was something the Greenwood couple, each now in their 50s, talked about since they were first married 36 years ago.

“After we first talked about this, things happened,” Mark said. “Virginia joined the Air Force, I had a career and we had kids.”

It wasn’t until the year before they left that three incidents occurred that forced them to reassess their lives.

“First, we went to Africa to visit my brother who lives on a mountain top with no running water,” Virginia said. “We spent about a month there, and it was just a remarkable experience. A month after we came back was 9/11, and that changed a whole bunch of people’s lives. Then several months later we lost our son in a motorcycle accident. We then started thinking that life is really short and you have to do the things you really want to do.”

Spotting an ad in the paper for a Peace Corps seminar, they went, sent in their application on April Fool’s Day, and were accepted a year later.

Instead of asking the Pulvers where they would like to go, the Peace Corps asked them to list which places they would not like to go.

Among those the Pulvers chose not to go was anywhere on a mountaintop or anywhere on an island.

The Peace Corps then told the Pulvers they were going to Eastern Europe or Central Asia.

Six weeks before they left, they were told they were going to Ukraine, a country in Eastern Europe, which borders Russia to the northeast. After a brief period of independence following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Ukraine was absorbed by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and became independent again after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.

“Everybody who joins the Peace Corps thinks they’re going to Africa, so I didn’t know why they were sending us to Ukraine, which I thought was a developed country,” Mark said. “But it’s not.”

The Peace Corps then told them, in general terms, what they would be expected to do there in their role as non-governmental organization facilitators.

The Peace Corps has three goals, the couple said.

The first is to go to countries that have asked for our help.

The second is to present to the people there what an American is really like.

The third goal is to have the volunteers come back to the United States and let Americans know what they did overseas.

“Our role there was to consult and advise,” Virginia said. “You’re not actually there to do the work; you’re there to help people to develop.”

What the Pulvers did was help the library in Kiev develop a computer system, become computer literate and help the people of Kerch gain confidence in themselves. They helped them not by telling people what to do, but by actually doing it.

For the first three months they were in Ukraine, the Pulvers lived with a host family in a small village to learn the language and customs of the area. Those customs were quite different than living in Greenwood.

“In our village, on a lake, the man went out every day and ice fishes, so we had homemade fish soup for breakfast. Because their host family spoke no English, the Pulvers soon learned to converse in their host family’s native tongue.

During the first three months, the Pulvers attended Russian language classes and visited schools and businesses. They also learned the social graces necessary to survive.

“You just can’t walk into a school office and say you’d like to talk to somebody,” Mark said. “You have to go through the Ministry of Education, then work your way down through the mayor and lower levels because it’s not a direct culture.”

After three months, the Pulvers wound up in the town of Kerch.

“The library there had been around for 150 years, and had almost been completely destroyed during World War II,” Mark said. “When I got there, there were no public access points for anyone to go to the Internet.”

When they left, after building a computer system and conducting classes on how to use the Internet, the residents of Kerch had discovered the joy of e-mail and were using the Internet to search for relatives who had emigrated to other countries.

When they returned to Greenwood in May of this year, the Pulvers once again underwent culture shock.

“Just going to Wal-Mart scares me,” Virginia said.