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Weighing 240 pounds and scared of heights, Ailton Coleman needed encouragement to climb a 50-foot coconut tree — a required skill for any male on a Micronesian island in Kiribati, where the Peace Corps sent him to teach in 2001.

His new friends directed him to the island nation's most accomplished motivator, who turned out to be a gray-haired, toothless man with a sharp stick.

Coleman, now a Peace Corps fellow at the University of Arizona, said he still carries a mental image of that old man, and it has proved useful in many circumstances where he needed a little prodding.

Motivation was just one benefit cited by returned Peace Corps volunteers Friday at a UA forum seeking new recruits and celebrating the 45th anniversary of the executive order that created the corps.

More than 178,000 volunteers have served in 138 countries since President John F. Ken-nedy created it. Volunteers spend at least two years in education, health and other programs in developing nations.

Guy Consulmagno said his two years in Kenya "changed my life. It gave me the confidence I needed and a sense of purpose."

Consulmagno had a doctorate in planetary sciences from the UA and spent five years as a "post-doc" before joining the Peace Corps. He didn't think he'd go back to the science, but when the Kenyans he lived among insisted that he teach them the heavens, he found a new joy in it.

He came home with a love of Kenya, a renewed love for his own country, and a new zeal for both his science and his religion. He became a Jesuit brother and a Vatican astronomer. He spends most of his year now at Castel Gandolfo, home of the Vatican Observatory and summer home of the popes.

It's not all fun and fulfillment, said Debra Pinkney, who spent two years in the African nation of Niger and figures she vaccinated 6,000 children in addition to staffing other public-health programs. "It made me happy; it made me angry. I never wanted to leave. I wanted to leave now."

When she did return, the array of choices made her head swim. She spent three hours in the supermarket wondering where all these cereals and soft drinks came from. "They didn't just have Coke and orange Fanta," she said.

"Beans and rice" were Heidi Reukauf's staples in Murra, in the cloud-forest region of Nicaragua.

"Every meal was the same."

But she and Lisa Luttbeg, who worked in the same region, said they grew to love the diet and to appreciate the work of growing and preparing it. There were tortillas with every meal, but only if you ground the corn in the morning.

They rose with the sun and bedded down when it set, and walked or rode horses to the outlying areas where they worked in nutrition and health programs.

The Peace Corps can be more effective than Weight Watchers, as evidenced by Coleman, who once weighed 300 pounds but appears lean and healthy these days.

He credits his stay on Kiribati, where he had a diet of fish and vegetables and the only sweetener was a 50-foot climb away on those coconut trees.