Peace Corps to evacuate Mongolia volunteers

AKIPRESS.COM - The Peace Corps plans to evacuate its 94 volunteers in Mongolia, including 26-year-old Betsy Pickhardt, missoulian.com reports.
Pickhardt had been serving as a Peace Corps English teacher in Mongolia since 2018. There have not yet been any reported cases of coronavirus in that country, but its government has imposed severe restrictions on movement and public gatherings in an effort to prevent the spread of the virus.
On Tuesday, Pickhardt's mother, Nancy Pickhardt, told the Missoulian she was extremely disappointed with the Peace Corps' handling of the situation, and said she wanted her daughter and the other volunteers to be evacuated while travel was still possible.
She got her wish Wednesday morning, when Betsy called to tell her that they would be evacuating.
"She had just gotten an email," Nancy said at about 8:20 a.m. on Wednesday. "Betsy called me around half an hour ago and she said all her friends are like, 'I don't know how your mom did it.'" In addition to speaking to the Missoulian, Pickhardt had also reached out to the office of U.S. Sen. Jon Tester.
Further details about when and how the other volunteers will return home were not immediately available, although Pickhardt predicts it will take some time to remove them from this vast, sparsely populated country. "She's at least a 24-hour drive from the capital," she said of Betsy. With air travel limited by the coronavirus outbreak, "they're going to have to send out cars to all the different provinces."