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Jones, now a 64-year-old U.S.-Cuba trade consultant living in Bethesda, was among masses of early Peace Corps volunteers who settled in Montgomery County after returning to the United States. Along with their Washington, D.C., and northern Virginia counterparts, they make up the largest cluster of former Corps volunteers in the United States. Their numbers grow each year; in 2006, Maryland sent 226 volunteers to third- and second-world countries, for a total of about 5,000 since the 1960s.

Current and former Peace Corps volunteers will celebrate the program’s 46-year anniversary during events this week — including an American University panel discussion Thursday night — as part of Peace Corps Week.

For Jones, the decision to join Peace Corps was brought on by Kennedy’s ‘‘call to service,” the idea that young Americans could forge a new path in Cold War-era foreign relations. Jones also liked the idea of traveling to an exotic, faraway place. He wanted to do some good. Being eligible for the draft didn’t hurt either.

‘‘It was either the Peace Corps or join the Army,” he said.

Global conflict is once again a strong motivator for volunteers, according to Jody Olsen, deputy director of the Peace Corps and Silver Spring resident. Olsen said the program has seen an increase in applications during the last few years.

‘‘I think that since 9⁄11, and with the international world much more in our headlines, that people think about wanting to serve in some way,” she said.

Jones chose against the military, opting instead to join a government-run organization that promoted peace.

As it happened, he found himself in the middle of a war zone anyway. Less than six months before his scheduled homecoming to the United States in 1965, a rebel faction staged a coup against the Dominican Republic’s sitting government.

‘‘You walked outside, and airplanes were in the sky dive-bombing, and people were running around in the streets with guns,” he said. ‘‘Friends of mine got killed, and their bodies were in the street.”

As American forces arrived to quash the fighting, Jones said it was not his home country’s military that protected him in the end. It was the armed rebels — his neighbors and friends, men with whom he played baseball.

‘‘In fact, shortly thereafter, the leader of the faction announced on the radio that the only Americans — and the only foreigners — allowed in some parts of the city were Peace Corps volunteers,” Jones said. ‘‘It proved the Peace Corps worked; we were viewed as part of the community.”

Meanwhile, another businessman’s career was being launched in Ecuador. Bernie Fisken, a 68-year-old Bethesda resident, joined the Peace Corps in 1964 after a stint in the U.S. Army. He was sent into the Andes near Ambato, Ecuador. His task as a trained accountant: Teach the indigenous Salasaca tribe to keep good financial records.

‘‘Then I discovered they had other problems,” he said. ‘‘Syphilis.”

Fisken’s role morphed quickly to that of a public health worker, as he recruited a group of Catholic nuns to tackle the syphilis outbreak with blood tests and medication.

He also taught the Salasaca artisans to successfully market their tapestries overseas — Sears, Roebuck and Co. ordered hundreds — and they are still exporting today.

Fisken and Jones are now passing the torch to a new crop of Peace Corps volunteers representing Montgomery County, like Walt Whitman High School alumnus Rory Schember.

Schember graduated from Whitman in 2001 and arrived in Peru armed with a business degree from a Swiss college. He joined because he wanted to live in another country, he said, after having visited every continent except Antarctica. He said the possibility of not being accepted into the Peace Corps tormented him, because he was unsure of his other options.

‘‘I probably would have ended up spending months searching for a job, perhaps unsuccessfully since I had very little practical experience,” he wrote in an e-mail from Peru. ‘‘Even if I had found a stable ‘9-to-5,’ I don’t think I would have been very satisfied. After living outside the United States for five years, the hardest thing would have been going back and adjusting from the international life I was used to and living like a home-grown American again.”

Now he guides villagers in Chota, Peru, as they build small artisan businesses. Eventually he will teach them how to market and export their crafts, he said. He hopes his work will ‘‘leave an impact, no matter how small” on his Peruvian neighbors. He also hopes Peace Corps can offer some direction in figuring out what he wants to do with his life. But most important, he said, is socializing and cultivating relationships in Peru.

‘‘I think that is the most important goal in the Peace Corps,” he wrote, ‘‘because as one fellow volunteer put it: ‘People don’t remember you for the amazing training workshop or English class you did, they remember you for the amazing, fun, interesting person you are.’”

Schember is unsure what his future holds when he returns from Peru. Graduate school, maybe, or an international business career that takes him to Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If his predecessors’ lives are any indication, his work will probably be guided by his work in Peru. Fisken and Jones returned to the United States to work in Peace Corps training and in politics, respectively. Both men went on to careers that were a direct result of their Peace Corps work, a common story among former volunteers.

Fisken left Ecuador in 1966, the same year that his future wife, Kate Fisken, left her Peace Corps post in India. The couple would not meet until years later, but Kate Fisken had been stationed across the globe from Bernie Fisken, living on a poultry farm in Calcutta, India. There, she developed nutrition curriculum for Indian schools, arranged for vaccinations when a smallpox outbreak began killing villagers, and played host to 2-foot-long roundworm parasites.

Now the Fiskens live in Bethesda, where Bernie Fisken runs a financial management company and specializes in expatriate taxes. They say the Peace Corps is different now. Bernie Fisken remembers psychological testing and stateside training as a boon to early Peace Corps volunteers, and he said it helped to prevent volunteer dropout. He said volunteers are older now — the average volunteer is 27, and the oldest is 79 — and professionally experienced. His son considered joining, he said, but the Corps said ‘‘No, they were not accepting 21-year-olds with liberal arts business degrees.”

Kate Fisken said volunteers now have different expectations and ‘‘see this as a practical experience” for a career.

Jones said the basic Peace Corps experience of parachuting into a country with ‘‘no parents, nobody looking over your shoulder” still forces young Americans to grow up quickly, though he said Peace Corps jobs require more specific skills now, like agriculture or small business training.

Jones left Santo Domingo in August of 1965. In the years since, he settled in Bethesda, and his life continued on the path set by the Peace Corps. Now he runs a trade consultancy firm that draws on his decades-old relationship with Fidel Castro. He credits the Peace Corps with changing his worldview and redirecting his life.

‘‘Often, I’ll turn on the faucet in the kitchen and remind myself, ‘Isn’t it great to be able to turn on a faucet?’” he said.