Out of West Covina : Peace Corps Worker, 78, Goes to Africa

Olive Green’s 1926 high school yearbook characterized her as the student most likely to become a missionary to China.

Although the idea seemed ridiculous at the time, she said, her classmates were not far off the mark.

Green, a West Covina resident who will turn 79 next month, is leaving for Africa on her second assignment with the Peace Corps.

“I’m determined to make life worthwhile for someone else,” said Green, a small, energetic woman.

She said her current trip to Sierra Leone, a country on the west coast of Africa, “looks a little bit harder” than the 25 months she spent as a Peace Corps worker in the Philippines from 1978 to 1980. “But I’m sure I’ll love it,” she said.

The trip to Africa marks more than 40 years of volunteer work; she has received a number of awards and commendations for her activities. And she was told that her record of service improved her chances of being chosen for a Peace Corps assignment.

“People are my glue,” Green said. “Volunteer work holds me together.”

After the death of her husband in 1976--she was living in Pittsburgh at the time--Green began contemplating the concept of peace and the fact that her name, Olive, is associated with peace, she said.

‘A Crush on Peace’

“I sort of got a crush on peace and started cutting things out in newspapers that had ‘peace’ in them. . . . Then my nephew suggested I go into the Peace Corps.”

At the age of 69, Green applied to the Peace Corps, starting a process that usually takes six to nine months. She filled out a 12-page application, passed a physical and was interviewed and placed in a pool of applicants being considered for community service positions in other countries.

Her age was not a problem.

“Age is an asset in the Peace Corps,” said Joseph Permetti, a spokesman for the Los Angeles office of the Peace Corps. “In many Third World countries, age is respected. . . . She’s seen a lot and experienced a lot, and when she goes up and talks to mothers about their children, she will have the experience of raising a child and they will know it.”

Green, who was born and raised in Punxsutawney, Pa., about 90 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, indeed found during her Philippine assignment that older people there were respected more than in the United States.

Permetti said that more than 500 of about 6,000 Peace Corps volunteers around the world are 50 or older, but not many are as old as Green.

She went to the Philippines in 1978 and spent 25 months as a health worker in Jasaan, a village on one of the southern islands.

Fish for Breakfast

Although most people there lived in huts, Green stayed with two older women who had electricity and a television set.

She said she had little difficulty adjusting to the native customs and “got used to eating fresh fish for breakfast.”

“I was just one of the family,” she said. Before long, she was attending graduations, birthday parties and community celebrations.

As a health worker, Green helped set up feeding centers for malnourished children and worked as a nutrition adviser with the National Nutrition Council.

She also periodically set out on foot to barangays, or mountain villages, in search of malnourished children.

Green’s volunteer work started after the death of two of her four children in the late 1940s. One son died in 1943 of a cerebral hemorrhage, and five years later, a daughter died of Hodgkin’s disease, which at the time was usually incurable.

Salvation Army

Between 1948 and 1963, Green worked as a volunteer for the Salvation Army, teaching unwed mothers to sew. “That’s when I really had the heavy heart because of the death of my daughter,” she said. She also collected donations for the organization, including cloth for the sewing classes.

Other volunteer work included organizing church bazaars, fund raising for the Girl Scouts and working as an aide at a hospital in Pittsburgh for about four years. “If there was someone who wanted to find out about a family member in surgery, I would be the contact,” she said.

In 1979 in the Philippines, Green spent several days in the hospital with pneumonia. But most of the time there she felt good and experienced no major health problems, she said.

She returned to the United States in 1980, moved in 1981 to West Covina to be near her son, Leonard Green, 47, and the pattern of volunteerism continued.

At the same time, Green started commuting twice a week by bus from her home in West Covina to the Federal Building in Westwood, to help out around the Peace Corps office. She would leave her apartment at 7 a.m., work from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., and arrive back home at dinner time.

Applied Once More

Her renewed contact with Peace Corps workers and her adventuresome spirit prompted her to apply to go overseas again.

Her Sierra Leone job is as a community health worker, submitting reports on the health and educational needs of communities. She will not administer medical services, but will advise mothers on child care, sanitation and nutrition.

According to the Peace Corps manual, Green is likely to be posted to an area without electricity, running water or toilets. But she says she is not worried about that.

“It’s just another adjustment you have to make,” she said. “It will take me back to my childhood, when I would visit the farms and go to my aunt’s outhouse.”