KIRKLAND, Wash. — Among the millions of people looking for work right now are Peace Corps volunteers.
More than 7,000 were evacuated from their posts last month, including 23-year-old Ben Dulaney from Kirkland. He was volunteering in Botswana.
"My position was as a clinic and health volunteer in a village called Kazungula,” he said.
Dulaney helped the clinic organize and improve storage of their commodities and medications. Working with his counterpart Dimpho Sebele, he also gave a variety of health talks covering topics like HIV/AIDS, malaria and other communicable diseases.
But he never imagined one of them would be a new, deadly virus.
"We received a notification from the Botswana government around early to mid-February that said we would need to - and these are the words they used – ‘sensitize the community’ to the COVID-19 virus,” he said. “The government very early on recognized the severity of what this would mean in sub-Saharan Africa and what it would mean in the country. Botswana was really fortunate to get ahead of the game.”
Dulaney and Sebele began reaching out to local businesses and delivering health talks about how to protect against the virus and properly wash hands. They also addressed 700 children at the local primary school, speaking in both English and Setswana.
Then, in late February, Dulaney received news from his hometown of Kirkland.
"I think I heard about it as soon as the first article was posted about the (Life Care Center) nursing home that had coronavirus,” he said. "It was surprising and shocking, hearing about how it was slowly spreading out and the early lockdown that went into place. And just being able to tell some of my counterparts and coworkers in the clinic, 'Hey this is what's going on, I wanted to let you guys know this, the coronavirus is in my home town,' and they were all very supportive of me in that time."
By mid-March, the Peace Corps decided to evacuate all volunteers. Dulaney left Botswana, likely for good.
“Now no volunteer is there at all, and they're not really sure when a volunteer will be coming back,” he said.
The loss of the position in Botswana also means the loss of a job for Dulaney. But neither he, nor any other volunteers, are currently eligible to receive unemployment benefits.
Bipartisan legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate last Friday would allow Peace Corps volunteers to qualify for unemployment and continue to serve in programs like AmeriCorps.
Dulaney believes the experience they gained overseas can now translate into valuable service at home.
"I know there are a lot of volunteers who want to leverage their experience in Peace Corps, whether that was the health sector or the education sector or even the agriculture sector, to then apply those skills to the work that they would do in America,” he said. “And for me, that means working with COVID-19 in whatever capacity."