A few years ago, Chris Dodd visited the bedside of a Caribbean woman in the Bronx. She was in her 90s and lay in a coma, dying.

Dodd, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, told her stories about people they had known 40 years earlier. He even asked her to dance.

"I think we saw a little smile on her face when I suggested that a good merengue would perk her up," Dodd said.

But the woman, Dona Alicia, did not awake. Dodd was with her and her son when she died.

In 1966, she had welcomed Dodd into her previous home, in a mountain village in the Dominican Republic. During his two years volunteering there with the Peace Corps, they grew close, sharing breakfast every morning. Dodd's goal was to help the local people by building schools and teaching more efficient small-scale farming. But Dodd says he benefited from the experience as well. He came back to the United States more mature, according to his family, and with a greater understanding of the world.

Forty years later, Dodd credits the experience with making him a more effective leader. As president, Dodd would

make service central to his administration. His plans include expanding AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps's domestic cousin, from 70,000 to 1 million volunteers. He would create a rapid response volunteer corps to respond to domestic emergencies, would require high school students to serve 100 hours in their communities in order to graduate and would reate a Cabinet-level service adviser.

In today's political climate, he believes that Peace Corps volunteers could do important work, helping to spread American goodwill in the Middle East. He wants to expand the program there, to give more people the opportunity to represent America abroad, as he did as a young man.

Peace boot camp

The Peace Corps, created by President Kennedy in 1961, was designed as a challenging opportunity to serve. Dodd says it was Kennedy's call to service that spurred him to join.

When Dodd was a volunteer, the training was demanding, as if he had joined the Army. Members of his group prepared in Puerto Rico, where they awoke early, ran and then studied intensive Spanish for the day. They also embarked on team-building exercises, where small groups were dropped off in the forest with a map and a compass and ordered to blaze a trail to a distant pickup point.

Once in the country, Dodd and most of the other volunteers were assigned to work in villages as links between the local people and an agency of the Dominican government, called the Office of Community Development. Dodd was assigned to Dona Alicia's village, Moncion. There, he was to organize committees and hold meetings to gather consensus on what projects the locals needed.

Dodd stayed with another volunteer, John Epler, as he looked for a place to live on his own. Epler introduced Dodd to Dona Alicia. From that point on, Dodd started every morning with breakfast in her home. It had a corrugated tin roof and no running water. Dona Alicia cooked over a charcoal fire. The food was always the same - something between oatmeal and porridge, Dodd recalled. It did not taste very good.

Epler said Dodd was more outgoing and comfortable than the other volunteers with talking to the poor "campesinos" in the villages, even if his Spanish was less than fluent.

"He was the kind of guy that didn't really have the language hold him back," Epler said. "People got tickled by his sense of humor, his kidding around."

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