A celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the American Peace Corps programme was held by the US Ambassador to Slovakia, Theodore Sedgwick, and his spouse Kate in the Banská Bystrica-based State Scientific Library on April 18, the TASR newswire reported. Sedgwick said the Peace Corps is primarily targeted at improving people's lives, as it focuses on those parts of the world where people face hardship.
The ambassador also praised the programme’s benefits for Americans as it enables them to travel and get to know new countries. A total of 350 American volunteers were active within the programme in Slovakia between 1990 and 2002. The period after the fall of communism in 1989 and prior to Slovakia's accession to the European Union in 2004 must have been very hard for Slovakia, Sedgwick said.
The ambassador added that the programme’s importance, however, is that not only Slovaks learned from Americans but the same was also true the other way round. Areas such as the environment, English-language teaching and support of small and medium-sized entrepreneurs were in the forefront of the Peace Corps’ volunteer work in Slovakia.
Source: TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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