Volunteer Army

By Stephanie Clifford/New York

Life has been good to Mervyn L. and Joyce Alphonso: four healthy children, a six-bedroom house, a Mercedes in the driveway. But a few decades ago, life was much bleaker. They were both surviving day to day in Guyana, their families crowded into small cottages without indoor plumbing. Mervyn's father had died when he was 13, casting the youngster into the work force as a messenger who also attended school; Joyce studied furiously in the hopes of getting a job abroad.

Emigration was the only way out--Mervyn left for the States and worked in hospital maintenance before joining a bank, while Joyce got a job as a nurse in Britain, then in New York State. The couple met and married in Albany, N.Y., and finally settled in Springboro, Ohio, where Mervyn's banking career flourished. He worked his way up the ladder to become the president of KeyBank's Dayton office. Joyce worked at local hospitals and raised the children.

When they retired and their kids left home, the couple, always active volunteers, felt dutybound to do even more. "Coming to the U.S. and [having the chance] to capitalize on so many opportunities, we always had the feeling that we'd been given so much blessing, and there was only one reason why--to share with the less fortunate," says Mervyn.

After thorough research and long family talks, the Alphonsos joined the Peace Corps. They shuttered their house and prepared to return to their native land: Guyana. Only this time around, they would be teaching life skills and preventive health care to a downtrodden population that they knew all too well.

It has been more than four decades since John F. Kennedy famously exhorted a generation of young people to "serve our country around the globe," but for many that message is still as fresh as the day it was first uttered. In spite of the rough conditions, travel advisories and the war on terrorism, scores of older Americans are uprooting their lives to help needy nations improve their living conditions. Some journey to dangerous spots like Liberia and Afghanistan, but most seek adventure in relatively safe regions of the world.

Baby boomers seem to be particularly eager to start a challenging new life abroad. The International Executive Service Corps (I.E.S.C.), which matches executives with business-development work abroad, has watched the average age of its participants drop from 68 in the mid-1990s to about 53. Other organizations, like WorldTeach, report increased interest from the retired population.

Gary Myers, 49, isn't a thrill seeker, but this past summer he leaped at the chance to travel to civil war--engulfed Liberia. Myers, who was a surgeon in Oklahoma, had grown frustrated with American medicine's commercialism. With his kids grown and some money saved, he volunteered with Medecins sans Frontieres, which placed him in Liberia. Seeing children with machine guns at the Monrovia airport, "I really thought I was flying into hell," he says. He worked hard, ignoring the mortar fire at sunrise and sunset as patients with serious gunshot wounds stumbled in. Whereas in the U.S. he would have taken care of 10 patients a day, here he was treating as many as 80. "This is a way for me to use all these things I learned and practice a more pure [form of medicine], the way I had intended to in med school," he says.

For former globetrotting executives, international aid work fills the void that can come with retirement. For example, Gillette executive Mark Cutler, 54, had lived in five countries worldwide, becoming V.P. of Gillette's international group before he took early retirement last year. Suddenly the workaholic had nothing but free time. "It was very hard to walk away from Gillette at that age--[I didn't want] to replace those intellectual challenges with golf," he says. He tried traveling, and he puttered around his Longmeadow, Mass., home, but nothing gave him the thrill of international work. Having done some Gillette work in Eastern Europe, he jumped when a former co-worker suggested that he sign up with I.E.S.C., which assigned him to projects in Kazakhstan and Russia. He's now back to fast-paced work, converting biochemical-warfare facilities into peacetime factories and, in tandem with U.S. agencies, finding jobs for former government scientists. "It's incredibly rewarding," he says, being "so closely linked to something that is trying to fix mankind."

Life had also become predictable for Don Ramirez, 53, a financial planner in Canberra, Australia. The former Philippine army officer was itching to work overseas again and signed up with the United Nations Volunteers. He is currently organizing elections in Kandahar, Afghanistan--a hazardous task, as the explosion of a car bomb outside his office in November made obvious. Though unnerved, he wasn't hurt. "Things here are still very unpredictable," he says, but thanks to his life experience, "I am quick to adapt to an ever changing, even hostile, international environment."

Even in safer regions, older volunteers stare down tricky challenges. Feeling restless after her husband's death, microbiologist Bettylene Franzus volunteered in her Tennessee town but felt confined by the work. So she joined WorldTeach and now instructs Marshall Islands high schoolers in science. At 75, she's handling myriad problems, from logistical (her science books crumble in the salt air) to physical (the school has no janitor, so she swabs floors, sweeps coral dust and empties trash bins in her classroom) to intellectual (though she's a science instructor, her students' difficulty with English means she also teaches ESL). "I really believe that because I must use both my body and my mind in this endeavor, I have probably kept myself in greater mental and physical health than might be true otherwise," she says.

Still, it's not an easy job, and it can be especially tough to be away from family. Lyman Echola, 68, a former teacher in Wisconsin, has frustratingly little phone contact with his grown children, though he has talked them into visiting Ecuador, where he's a WorldTeach volunteer. Others just cart their children along, as did Barbara and Ed Dunsworth, 50 and 55, when they moved from Nova Scotia (where Ed had practiced law) to take a position in South America with Habitat for Humanity. The family lives in Buenos Aires, where the Dunsworths are helping establish a Habitat branch.

As for the Alphonsos, their perspective shifted dramatically when they returned to their homeland of Guyana, where mosquitoes, jaded students, frequent blackouts and an irregular water supply were part of daily life. "I learned that you can really live very happily as long as you have good relationships with the people around you. You don't have to have all the amenities that we in this country seem to have," Mervyn says.

The Alphonsos' legacy, and that of most other volunteers, is quite different from what it would have been otherwise. They are no longer just another retired bank executive, another doctor in Oklahoma, another lawyer in Nova Scotia. Instead they have developed a taste for adventure and sacrifice, adjusting to life with little money or Western comforts. The payoff is the chance to use skills honed over decades and see those skills directly improving the world--and their own lives.