Photo by Juan Garcia/DMN, from the Dallas Morning News

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"How am I ever going to learn a language at 59, live through winters with no heat and no water?" Eileen Marin (left) thought before she joined the Peace Corps and moved to Armenia two years ago. "Well," says the former market research consultant and three-time cancer survivor, "it became my life very quickly."

Baby boomers are fueling an increase in Peace Corps applications as economic uncertainty looms, President-elect Obama's administration takes shape and a generation of retirees turns to overseas service in their encore careers, The Dallas Morning News reports.

Reporter Jessica Meyers writes that baby boomers now make up 5 percent of the Peace Corps' 7,876 volunteers and 9.2 percent of applicants, the highest percentage in the agency's 47-year history. In Texas the number of 50-and-older applicants has doubled in the past year.

J. Tom Ashley III, 66, a semi-retired McAllen, Texas, architect who has accepted an assignment to teach environmental education in Romania starting in May, told Meyers he's "getting a bit bored" and "ready to roll up my sleeves and get back into working mode. … I'm just ready to kind of go and see a different sunrise."

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