The hundreds of students who travel to developing countries each year as part of their Cornell education can't know how their international experiences will inform their lives, but a group of some 150 Cornellians from the 1960s do.

Their summers in Honduran and Guatemalan villages through Cornell United Religious Work (CURW) had far-ranging impacts, from Peace Corps stints and international and service careers to inspiring a Peruvian teenager who would one day become president.

Forty of these alumni will reunite in Ithaca June 13-14 toward the end of Reunion Weekend. They started to reconnect after reading in February that Isao Fujimoto, 76 and one of the team leaders, had just earned his Cornell Ph.D., which was 50 years in the making.

The trips were the brainchild of Rev. Paul Jaquith, director of CURW from 1958 to 1965, who got the Rotary Club on board as a sponsor.

Engaging primarily in literacy and building projects, the experience was immediately sobering for many of the young Cornellians.

"The little girl was about four, lying on a table -- dead from polluted water. She was one of several children who had died in recent weeks," recalls Elizabeth Dallas Harrington '65. "That was my first afternoon in June 1964 in La Venta, a small town down a dirt road ... my first day of learning that this was not a CURW 'summer adventure' and 'do good' project -- it was a real classroom in improving life through education and economic development," such as teaching mothers to boil water and use iodine pills. "[We learned] that going to school was a joy for the local children. They loved building a school with us. It was their hope for the future."

After a long career in international business, Harrington, now retired, serves on boards of directors of various companies. She helps U.S. companies increase their business in China and Chinese companies to invest in the United States "and help strengthen our economy. The irony of world history is that we are now the country that needs economic development," she notes.

After her Honduran experiences, Nancy Deeds Meister '63 went into the Peace Corps to Peru, where she met "a young high school student, Alejandro Toledo, who convinced his parents to rent me a tiny room in their barriada, which didn't have sewer, water or electricity. We spent time talking about the wider world and working together." In 1965 she would help the teenager come to the San Francisco Bay area to study. He became Peru's president in 2001. Meister had a long career as a medical social worker. Now an ordained deacon, she works on issues surrounding immigration reform and the effect of public policies on families.

Carolyn Heiser Smith, School of Nursing '66, said her trips to Honduras and Guatemala were experiences that "most influenced the rest of my career," which included three years in the Peace Corps in Chile and decades of providing "health care to underserved populations: migrants, underinsured and homeless."

Mari Bingham Wesche '63 would become a professor of second language acquisition; Richard J. Peters, M.S. '63, functional in seven languages, would have a career in agricultural development with International Voluntary Services and USAID.

Alice Michtom '65, who spent three summers in Honduras, would study in Brazil on a Fulbright scholarship, teach Spanish and Portuguese at Cornell and become a physician. Over the years, she found many patients were "stunned and delighted to find a 'gringa' able to communicate with them easily in their own language. ... It is in this way that the project had its most profound effect on me. ... Speaking someone else's language can transform personal encounters dramatically and make a huge difference."

And the stories and reminisces will go on later this weekend. The Cornellians' legacies, however, have already resonated far and wide.