And the exchange of skills during this cross-cultural experience is what the Peace Corps has been providing to American volunteers for more than four decades. As the Peace Corps celebrates its 43rd anniversary on March 1, two Willow Glen residents, Betsy Gilliland and Anne Hartman, remember how their service was like a boot camp for life.

Unsure of her career direction and unable to get a job at Barnes & Noble Booksellers after college—having never worked a cash register—Gilliland looked for a way to enter the work force. But unlike many of her college friends, who found jobs near home, Gilliland chose to join the Peace Corps and begin her vocational training in a city along the Silk Road.

As a Russian major at Brown University, she had spent a semester in St. Petersburg, and she was eager to return to the former Soviet Union. When she left for Uzbekistan in 1998, she saw her service as an opportunity to become familiar with a foreign culture, learn about a teaching career and complete her master's degree with a Peace Corps program called Master's International.

Before arriving in Uzbekistan, she had visions of starting an English language library in the community she was going to. While she wasn't able to begin a library there, because one already existed, Gilliland says she was able to add to it and help with the English club. And she and other Peace Corps volunteers created a leadership camp that focused on girls, because Uzbek girls do household chores in the afternoons while the boys play soccer and watch television.

"I feel like I made more of a difference than I thought I would," she says.

Although what she accomplished exceeded her expectations, Gilliland learned that flexibility was required in day-to-day life.

"It's the main requirement," she says about being a Peace Corps volunteer. "You have to learn to cope with disappointment. If you didn't laugh, you'd be crying."

While the living conditions in Uzbekistan were considerably better than they would have been in an undeveloped country, having the infrastructure in place but not functioning was even more frustrating, she says.

Gilliland says she and the other 60 Peace Corps volunteers in the country learned they couldn't rely on the pipes to always work or enough buses to run during rush hour.

"It took a while to get used to the rhythm of life," she says.

Another cultural difference she found was that the Uzbeks were very spontaneous about setting wedding dates, and Gilliland says that she received many wedding invitations just the day before the wedding was to take place.

After she began teaching English at the state university in Bukhara, she was shocked that two weeks into the school year all the students had to leave the school.

The Uzbek government sends students and government workers to pick cotton for two months of hard labor every year, working for low wages.

"It's part of the Soviet heritage," she says. "It's a huge waste of potential of the people who the country's future relies on."

The attempted coup against the Soviet Union's leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 sparked a fervor for independence among Soviet republics, including Uzbekistan, which was one of the first Central Asian countries to break away from the Soviet Union.

While it was difficult to understand the workings of a foreign government, Gilliland says she was able to get to know her students, host family and herself better over the two years she was in Uzbekistan.

From her Peace Corps experience, she gained "self-confidence as a professional," she says.

And that overseas teaching experience quickly translated to a job once she returned to California.

While she was being interviewed for a job at San José State University, the department chairperson said, "Oh, you've never taught writing? That's OK. You were in the Peace Corps, so you can do anything." So she was hired at San José State University, where still teaches composition.

Like Gilliland, former Peace Corps volunteer Anne Hartman found that her time abroad—she was in Nepal from 1984 to 1986—related to what she would do in the future.

As a civil engineering major from Santa Clara University, she went into the Peace Corps to bring water to remote villages in the middle hills of the Himalayas.

"You can have a lot more impact right out of college [going into the Peace Corps] than you'd have here," Hartman says.

In the dry season, the Nepalese walked four hours a day to reach a water source, but in the wet season, they could hold cups out of a window to collect enough water for the day's use, she says.

Hartman says she was lucky to be offered the water resources program in Nepal, because Nepal is one of the countries most requested by Peace Corps applicants.

She also says the country had physical challenges. Every fourth day, she had to hike between the field office in Lamidanda to the village—an 8-hour hike at approximately 7,000 feet. Yet she describes the country as exotic. "It's the top of the world," she says. It gave her a lot of appreciation for the wealth, knowledge and technology back home.

Being on top of the world also drove her and other American volunteers crazy, she says, as they watched the mountain people's acceptance of life's hardships.

"They had a phrase in Nepali, 'What to do, life is like this,'" she says. "We probably drove them crazy trying to change everything."

But both groups celebrated when progress was made. When she finished a water-supply system in six months, she and the once-skeptical villagers had a party at the faucet.

Looking back, she recalls her motivations for joining the Peace Corps were a desire to travel and see the world and to help people.

What she received from it was maturity, increased understanding of the world and "getting over the first-job jump," she says.

After completing her two years in the Peace Corps, she returned and applied her experience to a job with the Santa Clara Valley Water District. Today, Hartman is a mother of three children, ages nine, six and six months, and she recalls the time spent with Nepali woman who were raising their children.

Peace Corps San Francisco office public affairs specialist Dennis McMahon says the Peace Corps no longer mainly attracts recent college graduates. The number of retired people and mid-career professionals who enter the Peace Corps is growing, he says.

People who are unsatisfied in their jobs or want to begin work in the international field are becoming Peace Corps volunteers later in life.

While the idea of serving one's country through humanitarian efforts rather than through military service is no longer considered revolutionary, as it was in the 1960s, McMahon says the mission to bring skills to host countries and broaden one's worldview is the same as it's always been.

And for participants like Gilliland and Hartman, the experience has generated a broader view of the world and its habitants that has become part of the fabric of their lives.

For more information, visit wwwpeacecorps.org. An information meeting open to the public is being held March 11 at 5:30 p.m. at San José State University in the Student Union's Guadalupe Room.