DATE: Monday, September 15, 1997            TAG: 9709130132

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY ERIKA REIF, staff writer 

                                            LENGTH:   93 lines

VOLUNTEERS UNITING VIRGINIA WESLEYAN PROFESSOR BRINGS TOGETHER THOSE WHO SERVED ABROAD.

AFTER WORKING for two years in a foreign land, Peace Corps volunteers are sent home to America with a $5,400 re-adjustment allowance, some career guidance and a mental backpack of experience and memories many Americans will never know.

The load is sometimes heavy. Long after friends and relatives tire of listening to their stories, many of these 150,000 ambassadors of American goodwill still need to talk about their overseas odysseys.

The returned volunteers find each other. By chance or through local organizations, they link up for annual picnics or meet for hors d'oeuvres, cocktails and chit-chat.

``Schmooze sessions,'' Clayton Drees calls them. The assistant history professor at Virginia Wesleyan College has been gathering with a group of former volunteers for about three years.

But it's time to get serious, said Drees, who believes his loose-knit group is a resource that should be available to respond to community needs in an organized manner. They need access to directories with names of Peace Corps volunteers around the country with expertise in specific areas who could help each other and others as well.

It means becoming official members of the National Peace Corps Association. The association has about 16,000 members in 120 chapters, with a database of about 60,000 names, said NPCA membership director Meredith McLanahan.

The association's primary function is ``matchmaking,'' McLanahan said. It provides instructions on how to start a group and access to databases and regional leaders that help keep a group running.

``Starting these groups takes a lot of time and a lot of energy,'' McLanahan said. ``There's a lot of burn-out among group leaders.''

Drees has begun the process. He has a list of about 50 former volunteers, mostly in South Hampton Roads and some on the Peninsula. About half met this summer in Norfolk at the home of James Brown, an assistant history professor at Norfolk State.

Virginia does not have any formal returned-volunteer chapters. A Peninsula group meets several times a year in Williamsburg but has no immediate plans to join the national organization. The largest chapter nationwide is in Washington, D.C., with about 1,500 members.

``We are a little embarrassed here in Virginia that we don't have one,'' Drees said.

By becoming available to the community, the members are completing the cycle of service outlined by President John F. Kennedy when he created the federally funded corps in 1961. It begins with a foreign country's requesting help in a particular area. Along with donating their time and skills, volunteers become representatives of America to the rest of the world.

And in keeping with the mission Kennedy set, many former volunteers want to bring back to America some of what they've seen and learned abroad.

``In other words, link Hampton Roads to the world,'' Drees said.

Peace Corps people tend to have volunteerism in their blood, he said. Many choose service professions such as teaching, social work or nursing after returning. On an individual basis, some already volunteer their knowledge by lecturing and mentoring for school, church and civic groups.

What Drees envisions for his group is joining the national system that catalogs the members' specialties and makes them more accessible to everyone. They could join programs in place that link classrooms to volunteers overseas. And they could raise money and recruit new volunteers.

``I have shown myself willing over the years to do whatever I can, because I think that the Peace Corps is a very valuable experience,'' Drees said. ``It was for me. . . . It changed my life.''

In some ways, only former volunteers can understand such experiences, said James Brown, who is helping Drees organize the members. Like the informal groups of returnees, the Tidewater chapter would continue its role as something of a support group.

Brown was one of the first thousand volunteers sent overseas by Kennedy in 1962. In a Nigerian rain forest, he taught English, math, history and other subjects. For two years, his daily life involved using wooden stoves, kerosene lamps and water carried in buckets from a spring. There was no telephone.

Brown finds kinship with volunteers who have witnessed Third World poverty - and the site of natives there wearing America's throwaways - fraternity sweat shirts or men in ill-fitting women's sweaters.

For Drees, meeting with the group might give him a chance to wonder aloud about the fate of a chicken farm he helped start in Sierra Leone, West Africa, as a volunteer in the late '70s. And a nagging doubt that the townspeople had no money or interest to keep it going.

Or Drees' fear that the boys he taught English and economics, and coached in basketball and track, might, as a result, never settle for life in their diamond-mining town. They had seen Eddie Murphy in the movies and knew that black Americans were becoming doctors, lawyers and bankers.

The stories of such people, their languages and even artifacts, are some of what Peace Corps members have to offer locally.

``We're all experts on these countries,'' Drees said. ``We can bring the world to the classroom. . . . That's the network I'd like to establish here.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Tamara Voninski/The Virginian-Pilot

Clayton Drees, a Peace Corps volunteer... KEYWORDS: PEACE CORPS

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