For years, I thought about and admired those Americans who volunteered for the Peace Corps, sacrificing two years of their lives to work without pay in some far-flung Third World country.

In the late 1990s, while I was living in Boston, my curiosity reached such a point that, even though I had a high-profile job at a large financial services company, I attended a Peace Corps information session and quietly followed up with recruiters. But I deemed the timing bad and worried that I didn’t have the right skills — just a journalism degree and several years as a newspaper reporter and a corporate spokesman. What the heck could I do in a developing nation?