Photo courtesy of Peace Corps Antonio Alejandro, a Liberty resident, will begin his service with the Peace Corps in Paraguay on Tuesday.

LIBERTY — For Antonio Alejandro, being itinerant was the norm for him growing up, as the son of someone serving in the Air Force, but it also gave him an idea of what he wanted to do with his future.

“A lot of my childhood was spent traveling; my dad was in the armed forces, so the idea of service is very much a part of our family,” Alejandro said. “I remember looking into the military and then hearing (about) this thing called the Peace Corps.”

Alejandro, the son of Rudy and Helen Alejandro, is a 2024 graduate of Miami University with bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and finance. He admitted that despite this, he never expected to end up serving with the Peace Corps, as his initial interest dated back to elementary school, and he had forgotten about it.

He will depart for Paraguay Tuesday to begin his three months of training as a community environmental promoter.

He’ll serve in a host community for two years following that training, receiving a living stipend, housing, language and technical training, and financial benefits that can include graduate school fellowships upon completion of his service, according to a news release from the Peace Corps.

Alejandro ​will join the 115 Ohioans presently serving in the Peace Corps, a group that has had 7,385 from the area serve since 1961. 

With the Peace Corps offering numerous roles in Paraguay, such as being a youth health promoter or community health facilitator, Alejandro said his time with the AmeriCorps Forest Corps, a 10-month program providing hands-on experience in wildfire mitigation and reforestation, pushed him toward focusing on the environment.

Alejandro said during his time with them, he served across the western United States, going from Sacramento to work on the Tahoe National Forest in the American River District for a number of months apiece.

He was present for the Palisades fires in L.A., which claimed more than 23,000 acres and destroyed 7,000 structures in the Pacific Palisades area.

“During that time — obviously in college, I had cultivated this desire to become a better steward of our environment and our world. That passion eventually led me to want to pursue law school,” Alejandro said. “Due to personal reasons and just not feeling ready, I wanted to dedicate my service in a more direct way — where I found AmeriCorps.”

Alejandro said his time with AmeriCorps “really defined” his purpose and passion, and the Peace Corps gave him different options in many countries for serving in the environmental sector.

“Initially looking into Paraguay, there’s three sorts of sectors — missions — in Paraguay; that’s including waste management, education and tree plantations,” Alejandro said. “And that third one, working with the Paraguayan National Forest Service, (was) something that really interested me and I think set Paraguay apart from the opportunities that there were.”

Having traveled so much his entire life, Alejandro said his experiences across the world — meeting individuals in Utah, California and Wyoming — have helped foster an “open mind.”

“Just being okay with not knowing, being okay with the ambiguity and being okay to kind of let discomfort come to you. I think that it’s scary,” Alejandro said. “It can be lonely, in taking these steps to do something bigger than yourself, and for one, that should be applauded for being brave.”

Alejandro said he found comfort in embracing the unknown and having a general sense of “this is going to be OK.”

“Every single time, it has been a significantly better experience than anything I’ve ever worried about or anything that I had been unsure or maybe a little afraid at first to do,” he said. “And I look back on those memories very fondly.”