One thing I didn’t have when I was thinking about applying to Peace Corps in 1997 was … YouTube.

Not intended for recruitment purposes, the home movies of Volunteers in action serve as a way to make their experiences more concrete for family and friends at home, everything from village and landscape tours, to videos of students and neighbors, to silly games of Volunteers who are reunited on vacation and need to blow off steam, to talent shows, and slide shows of still photographs, like this collection from a Madagascar Volunteer corrinajs:

Apartment and house tours are a common theme –when you can’t have your family over for dinner, at least you can show them where you eat dinner, as JillKingslea has:

Videos take you inside moments of Peace Corps language training, documenting things like learning to sing love songs in Chinese from garlandrenn:

And…the opposite! Teaching host-country students to sing love songs in English (from nadunn):

The third goal of Peace Corps is to bring the world back home, to educate others in the United States about the people and cultures you learn about while you are abroad. Thanks to YouTube, Volunteers can do this faster and easier than ever before, without even leaving their host country.