“I was the kid who always wanted to join the Peace Corps and live in a mud hut. Always.”

Little did Suzan Bellincampi know that at the age of 23, that’s exactly where she’d end up.

“Termites like to eat the straw off thatched roofs, so basically the whole roof of the mud hut was covered in termites,” Ms. Bellincampi said of her time in Niger, Africa. “I put on a huge straw hat, took a stick, and pounded on the roof and all the termites came down inside the hut.”

It was one of many memories she recalled in a conversation with the Gazette on Tuesday, the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps. On March 1, 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order creating the corps to promote volunteerism abroad by helping foreign countries meet urgent needs for skilled manpower.

It was his hope to have 500 people in the field by the end of the first year. There are currently 8,655 volunteers abroad, including two Vineyarders – Nathaniel Edmunds is teaching English in Ukraine and Elizabeth Edwards is serving in Kenya as a community development volunteer.

Ms. Bellincampi is one of a handful of Vineyarders who shared their stories this week about their experience volunteering abroad. Some of the stories were funny, some heavyhearted, many had to do with snakes.

It was an experience none of the Vineyard volunteers can forget, but it was what they learned about themselves upon their arrival back home that changed them forever.

Ms. Bellincampi was in Niger from 1993 to 1995, working with a small community in relation to a nearby national park where hunting and fishing was prohibited. Projects included training park guides and selling honey to promote tourism in the area.

She had one near death experience.

“I was sleeping and I had a cat and she came and woke me up,” Ms. Bellincampi said. “I got my wits about me, found my flashlight because there was no electricity, and all of the sudden I see a snake slither into my hut. It was halfway in my doorway.”

Ms. Bellincampi had no other way out except through her small window.

“I was running through the village, screaming ‘snake’, and no one knew what snake was,” she recalled, then had to remember how to say snake in Zarma, the native language. “It was a black spitting cobra. They killed it and gave me the skin to remember it by. It lives in my basement now. They said it was good luck because I survived the snake.”

Suzan Bellincampi worked Niger, Africa. — unspecified

Ms. Bellincampi admitted the experience was isolating, and recommends those considering joining the Peace Corps to think really long and hard about it. But she guarantees it will be “the coolest thing you’ll ever do.”

“It’s absolutely the toughest job you’ll ever love,” she said. “What I took away was honestly an understanding of the things that really matter, how most people live and what’s important. There’s a connection to place and to the simpler things.”

Sitting in her office at the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary where she is currently the sanctuary director, making a connection between Africa and Edgartown isn’t too difficult.

“We’re looking and seeing and being a part of something here,” said Ms. Bellincampi. “It’s the Island way. We’re more aware of our place in the world and what it means.”

For Martha’s Vineyard Commission chairman Chris Murphy, fishing off the coast of Orissa, India in 1966 reminded him of the Menemsha fishing fleet. But instead of a having two people to a 35-foot dragger, Mr. Murphy was one of 11.

“Looking back on it, it certainly was a formative part of my life,” he said. “It was rewarding and challenging in many ways.”

Mr. Murphy was 19 when he got a cable while on a ship in the Caribbean working for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, letting him know he would be going to India.

“Did I feel at the end of it that I’d given a lot to people? I felt that I had gotten a lot,” Mr. Murphy said. “I’m sure it’s changed and influenced every thing that I do. I appreciate people who live differently than we do, I’ve seen what poor looks like.”

But one of his fondest memories happened when he was back on the Vineyard renting sailboats at the Harborside Inn in Edgartown. An Indian family was walking on the dock, and their child was crying ferociously.

“Without thinking I scooped him up and said, there, there, don’t cry, in Hindi,” he said. “And the parents couldn’t figure out what had happened. Here they were looking at a very American person and the kid had understood him. It was one of those high points that made me smile.”

John Early worked in northern India around the same time as Mr. Murphy.

“I’ve been told that I still speak Hindi in my sleep,” Mr. Early said. “I was part of the India 70, the seventieth group to go into India.”

Mr. Early joined the Peace Corps in 1968 after graduating from Cornell. “We were the first technical groupdoing well drilling. It was an immensely rewarding time in my life. India is such an incredible country.”

India had experienced a terrible drought at that time and President Lyndon Johnson had devoted a group of volunteers to assist in the crisis. Mr. Early was sent to the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh province. While there, he also worked with USAID and CARE to provide low interest loans to the farmers to give them enough capital to begin to build an infrastructure.

He too has a snake story, one that involved a type of deadly snake called a krait. “They call it the two-step snake because it’s all you get after you’ve been bitten by one,” he said, remembering getting on his hands and knees under his truck to see what had brushed by him.

Mr. Early hasn’t been back since he left 25 years ago. “I almost prefer to remember the way it was when I was there,” he said.

Robert Arcudi hasn’t been back to Ghana either, where he was stationed for a year with his wife, DiAnn Ray, and their three kids in 1971. Returning to Ghana is on his bucket list, he has promised himself at least that much.

Mr. Arcudi taught accounting to high school students; today he is an accountant in Vineyard Haven.

“We lived on a compound provided by the school,” Mr. Arcudi said about their house outside of Accra, the capitol. “We were advised to hire a night watchman. His name was Joseph. He slept on a pad by the front door with a gun and a club. His only instruction was if anyone comes in, shoot them. If you miss, you’re fired.”

Mr. Arcudi recommends the experience of living in another culture. One of the hardest parts about living abroad, though, was the reentry.

“We came back here and walked into the supermarket and it was a culture shock,” he said. “Appreciate what is here,” he continued. “Until you experience something like that, you don’t know what you have.”