This Knoxville woman will be among first Peace Corps volunteers deployed since COVID

Natalie Eilerman began to cry when she read the letter. But these were happy tears.

The Knoxville native who graduated from Knoxville Catholic High School in 2018 will be among the first wave of Peace Corps volunteers to serve abroad since March 2020 when more than 7,000 volunteers were evacuated from 60 countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It's crazy, honestly,” Eilerman told Knox News. “It just meant a lot to me that this could happen because it just wasn't really looking like it was gonna happen.”

Eilerman, 23, felt her odds were slim to join the competitive program because volunteers who were evacuated and volunteers whose applications were postponed due to COVID were prioritized in returning to service.

But at the end of August, she will head to the Dominican Republic for the next two years, live with a host family and work with 10- to 24-year-olds as a youth development facilitator.

She says this is her dream position and the experience will help with her future goals of helping immigrants at the border as a social worker.

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She will serve the youth in her assigned area on life skills, boosting their employability skills and mentoring them through open and honest conversations. She especially wants to help address the limited access to sex and reproductive education in the Dominican Republic.

“I hope that I can just be real with the youth,” she said. “Even about sexual reproductive health, I feel like so much of education on that is blurred or omitted because people don't really want to talk about it. But (they) should be given this education because it's biological; they should know about their body.”

But Eilerman is not trying to save anyone. She just wants to provide a little bit of help when people say they need it. In fact, she wants to avoid the “savior complex,” something she says has historically been a problem in volunteer work.

“I'm a white person with a ton of privileges going into a space where it's mostly people of color in the Dominican Republic and I want to acknowledge my privileges and help in ways that people express they need because I don't want to come in and think that my way of doing things is great. Like, no, everybody does things differently and it works for everybody.”

Eilerman, who speaks Spanish, and the other volunteers will have three months of in-country training that will cover Dominican Republic culture, cultural values, language and linguistics, as well as health and safety tips and protocols. A host family helps volunteers acclimate and integrate with the community during this training period.

Eilerman – whose parents live in Knoxville – says helping people is her passion. She volunteered regularly at the Love Kitchen and delivered meals to people who couldn’t leave their homes. She’s helped with the Special Olympics and worked with an aquatics program for people with multiple sclerosis.

And through a summer program while attending the University of Dayton in Ohio, she lived with a family in rural Kentucky and was able to lead camps for children and teens, volunteer at a home for elders, and other service work within the community.

A volunteer fair her freshman year in college sparked her initial interest in the Peace Corps. She remained in touch with the recruiter and regularly attended virtual meetings to learn more about the program until she finally applied before graduating in 2022. She was even preparing to log onto a Peace Corps Zoom call when she learned that she’d be one of its newest volunteers.

“I hope that, first and foremost, I make good relationships and good ties with the people of the community there, and (with) my fellow Peace Corps volunteers and the Peace Corps staff,” Eilerman said, ready to embrace the immersive service experience abroad.

The Peace Corps is recruiting volunteers to serve in 48 countries around the world.

At the invitation of participating governments, Peace Corps volunteers work alongside members of a local community on specialized projects with the intention of making lasting change in the areas of education, health, environment, agriculture, and community. More info can be found at peacecorps.gov.

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This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Knoxvillian among first Peace Corps workers deployed since COVID