At age 25, Valerie Arent has already been to Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Thailand and back. And if all goes as planned, by the time summer rolls around she'll have added India, Egypt, Morocco and more to the list of foreign lands she has explored.

Such travels were once things that Arent, who graduated from Horlick High School in 2001, only dreamed about. That all changed a few years ago when she was researching some career options online as part of an International Mediation class she was taking at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

One of the Web sites that caught Arent's attention was that of the Peace Corps. After watching a video about the U.S. government agency and learning about how its volunteers help countless individuals to build a better life for themselves and their communities, she decided to apply.

"A month later I was called for an interview," Arent said during a recent stay in Racine.

At the time, she still wasn't sure the Peace Corps was the right option for her. Yet she forged ahead with the process and in the end, "It turned out to be one of the best things I've ever done."

On-site training

Just a month after she graduated from UW-Milwaukee with a degree in communication, Arent was off to Kazakhstan, the Central Asian country she had been assigned to by the Peace Corps. Once there, she went through three months of intense training.

"We had nine-hour days, with six hours spent on language (Russian) and three on technical studies," she said.

It was her work that followed, however, that left the biggest impression on Arent. Most of her 2½ years in Kazakhstan were spent working with OCAP - Organizational and Community Assistance Program - the purpose of which is to ensure that people's basic needs are met.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of the money in the area she was living in had been put toward developing businesses, Arent explained. Social programs were few and things such as women's rights and help for disabled children seemed to be forgotten, she said.

"Disabled children were kept at home and were hardly ever seen in public," she said. "If you didn't fit the mold, you never left home."

Arent worked with a couple area mothers who opened a center called Children Without Borders where disabled kids and their parents could get support. By the time she left, there were about 15 kids with a range of disabilities involved. And, between that and the work she did involving women's rights in the area, she felt like she had made a difference in at least a couple people's lives.

Sense of self

While Arent's time in Kazakhstan brought her many positive experiences and close, lasting connections with people, it also posed some challenges - perhaps the least of which was adjusting to the frigid winters.

"The hardest thing was deciding how much to assimilate with the culture there and how much of myself I should keep," she said. "Eventually I decided that this is who I am. I will live here and respect you, but I'm still an American."

Life lessons

Along the way, Arent says she also learned skills that will be useful in the workplace, no matter what career she chooses. Among them are being able to go into an unstructured atmosphere and figure out what needs to be done; dealing with varying viewpoints and cultural influences; grant writing; finding funding resources; and the value of teamwork. On top of it all, she also learned to speak Russian which, when added to her seven years of studying French, makes her multilingual.

Eventually she hopes to find work in a field where she can use her language skills - perhaps as a translator, a foreign tour guide, or teaching English abroad.

"I'd really like to do some kind of humanitarian work," she said.

But first, she is off on another adventure. This time, she and a friend she met through the Peace Corps are taking their own six-month journey that will lead them to Morocco, India, Egypt, Jordan, Tibet and Nepal. The two women traveled to Cambodia and Thailand during their leave from their Peace Corps duties in Kazakhstan and those experiences gave them both the travel bug, Arent said.

"I want to travel and see things before I settle down," she said. "I want to see the Great Pyramids and swim in Cleopatra's Pool. I want to do stuff I never really thought I would."

About the Peace Corps

The Peace Corps traces its roots and mission to 1960, when then-Sen. John F. Kennedy challenged students at the University of Michigan to serve their country in the cause of peace by living and working in developing countries.

From that inspiration grew an agency of the federal government devoted to world peace and friendship. Since that time, more than 195,000 Peace Corps volunteers have served in 139 host countries to work on issues ranging from AIDS education to information technology and environmental preservation. The agency's three main

goals are:

- Helping the people of interested countries meet their need for trained men and women.

- Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.

- Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

This information is from the Peace Corps Web site at http://www.peacecorps.gov

About Kazakhstan

Location: The ninth largest nation in the world, Kazakhstan is a Central Asian country that covers 1.05 million square miles. Its terrain extends east to west from the Caspian Sea to the Altay Mountains and north to south from the plains of Western Siberia to the oasis and desert of Central Asia.

Neighboring countries include Russia, Uzbekistan and China.

People: Kazakhstan is a very ethnically diverse country with an estimated population of 15.6 million (January 2008). Only a slight majority of Kazakhstanis are ethnic Kazakh. Other groups that populate the country include Russian, Ukrainian, Uzbek, German and Uyghur.

Language: Kazakhstan is a bilingual country where the Kazakh language is considered the "state" language, while Russian is declared the "official" language.

Climate: Continental, cold winters and hot summers; arid and semi-arid.

Government: A republic that declared its independence from the Soviet Union on Dec. 16, 1991.

Source: The U.S. Department of State's Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs