"How many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? . . . on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete," Kennedy said.
Nearly 50 years later, there are fewer volunteers - about 7,900 today compared to the 1966 peak of 15,000. They are finding ways to do their jobs with less federal funding.
Volunteers blog. They build computer databases. They get cell phones for fun and work.
In fact, more than 90 percent of all volunteers use cell phones at their site, according to a 2008 Peace Corps survey. About 94 percent connect weekly to the Internet and 43 percent write a blog.
"Right now, I'm sitting in my house. I don't have electricity or running water but, yeah, I have a cell phone," said 23-year-old Gwen Kehr, speaking over that phone from her Peace Corps post in Lesotho, in southern Africa.
The Chalfont native also has a laptop computer and a newly acquired wireless modem, which she uses to post entries on her blog. In it, she is describing her two-year stay in Lesotho and her job teaching biology and English at Mphaki High School in the country's south.
"I wanted to keep in touch with my family and friends at home and let them know what was going on faster than regular mail," Kehr said.
She writes about the food: "Two of the main traditional dishes are papa and moroho. Papa is maize meal and water cooked over the stove (or fire) until it gets puffy and sticky. . . . Moroho consists of cabbage that is finely chopped and cooked over the stove with oil and, sometimes, a bouillon cube."
She writes about work: "Our school's computer lab is connected to the principal's and secretary's offices and it is powered by a generator that they turn on and off as needed for classes and administration stuff."
