Peace Corps Worldwide

C Payne Lucas, leader of relief efforts across Africa, dies at 85 Payne Lucas, who died Sept. 15 at 85, led Africare for more than three decades. (Dudley M. Brooks/The Washington Post) By Emily Langer Payne Lucas, who was credited with improving lives across Africa as a founder and longtime president of Africare, a Washington-based relief organization that has constructed roads and wells, established schools and literacy programs, and improved health care in some of the neediest countries in the world, died Sept. 15 at a hospital in Silver Spring, Md. He was 85. The cause was advanced dementia, said his wife, Freddie Hill Lucas. Mr. Lucas, one of 14 children born to a lumber mill worker and his wife, was once described by The Washington Post as an “accidental idealist.” He grew up in poverty, achieved an education through scholarships and rose through the ranks of the fledgling Peace Corps before . . .

From the website at the National Archives: “Act of September 22, 1961 (Peace Corps Act), Public Law 87-293, 75 STAT 612, Which Established a Peace Corps to Help the People of Interested Countries and Areas in Meeting Their Needs for Skilled Manpower, 9/22/1961” Read the Act  here: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/299874 Coincidentally, RPCV Chris Matthews (Swaziland 1968-70) host of MSNBC’s Hard Ball, ended his show last night with a tribute to his Peace Corps group, from whose reunion he had just returned. He spoke of  pride in his fellow RPCVs and his affection and appreciation for them and all the people of Swaziland, who had welcomed and helped them.  What a fitting way to commemorate the 57th!

  C. Payne Lucas, early Peace Corps Director in Togo (1963)  and co-founder of Africare, passed away peacefully on Saturday, September 15th. His stewardship of Africare for many years build the organization to unparalleled status in the African development community. It all began for C. Payne in the Peace Corps as CD for Togo. In November 1963 Payne arrived in Togo on temporary orders from PC/HQ. He had been there for a few days, living in the Benin Hotel, when the Acting Director, Robert Haves, decided to return to L.A. and rescue his law practice. This left Lucas in command of a complicated program. He quickly showed that he could handle it. Payne had come to the Peace Corps after being a research intern with the Democratic National Committee. He saw the Peace Corps, he said at the time, “as an instrument of foreign aid in areas where AID had . . .

Ed Corboy, from Hyde Park, Mass, packed a rifle in the infantry from 1943 to 1946. With the war’s end, he returned to Massachusetts and completed a business course at Bryant and Straton school in Boston. The Foreign Service School at Georgetown attracted him to Washington, and he studied there at night for the next five years while working days as a secretary to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1956, shortly before he received the degree of Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service, he was invited to work as a law clerk for the Washington law firm of Covington and Burling. This firm, involved in the Dupont-General Motors anti-trust action, came to Georgetown to hire 30 people, of whom two were asked to stay on when the anti-trust suit was concluded. One of the two was Corboy, “and a lucky thing, too,” he now says. For it was at . . .

This is a extraordinary effort by the RPCV Friends of Korea and Gary Fedrick (K-6) to collect and preserve the important history of Peace Corps in Korea.  Now, the University of Southern California has accepted the collection for their library.  Please read this announcement: http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15799coll86 “Between 1966 and 1981, more than two thousand Americans served in Korea as Peace Corps Volunteers, working as teachers, health workers, engineers, agricultural advisers, etc. Living in rural and urban communities across the country, they learned the Korean language and participated in Korean life on a broader and deeper level than any other group of Americans before or since have been able to do. Once returned to their homes after their service, they formed an alumni group called Friends of Korea to continue their friendships with Korea and one another. Many went on to build careers as Korea experts as diplomats, educators, scholars, policy makers, consultants, etc. To . . .

After establishing the Peace Corps Headquarters on a eucalyptus-covered hillside above Addis Ababa, Wofford concluded that in a nation twice the size of Texas, the program should be administered on a regional basis. With Canby assigned to the former Italian colony of Eritrea, two other Associate Representatives (APCDs) were posted to the rest of Ethiopia although both were assigned houses in Addis Ababa. William White was given primary responsibility for Volunteers in the north and west country which included the capitals of Gondar and Axum and the vast canyon of the Blue Nile. William Kruse was assigned to the south and east, the land of the Rift Valley, the Ogaden desert and the cities of Harar and Diredawa. Although he was born and raised in Cleveland, Bill White enrolled in Atlanta’s Morehouse College for one semester, this at the insistence of an aunt in Alabama “who wanted me to experience . . .

Peace Corps has published a Legacy Book for Peace Corps Burkina Faso honoring the 22 year accomplishments of Peace Corps Volunteers and the communities and people with whom they worked.  The program was suspended in late 2017 for security reasons. In preparation for the suspension of the program, the country staff began to collect examples of the work done by Volunteers and their communities over decades.  The stories ranged from the building of a computer lab for a school to programs seeking to eradicate guinea worm disease.  It became a collaborate effort when: “U.S. Ambassador to Burkina Faso, H. E. Andrew Young described the need to collect and immortalize the history of Peace Corps/Burkina Faso after the suspension became official in December 2017. Additional ideas for content and format were provided by the Peace Corps Acting Regional Director for Africa, Mr. Tim Hartman and the Country Desk Officer for Burkina . . .

And from the wreckage of world War II, we built a post-war architecture, system of alliances and institutions to underwrite freedom and oppose Soviet totalitarianism and to help poorer countries develop. American leadership across the globe wasn’t perfect. We made mistakes. At times we lost sight of our ideals. We had fierce arguments about Vietnam and we had fierce arguments about Iraq. But thanks to our leadership, a bipartisan leadership, and the efforts of diplomats and peace corps volunteers, and most of all thanks to the constant sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, we not only reduced the prospects of war between the world’s great powers, we not only won the Cold War, we helped spread a commitment to certain values and principles like the rule of law and human rights and democracy and the notion of the inherent dignity and worth of every individual.

Harris Wofford was born in Johnson City, Tenn., and raised in Scarsdale, N.Y. While still in high school, he founded and became the first president of the Student Federalist Movement, after he was inspired by Clarence Streit’s Union Now. Enrolled in the University of Chicago’s accelerated student’s plan, he took Chicago’s famed great books curriculum and received his degree in two yers, after which he became the first holder of an accelerated degree to be admitted to Yale University Law School. He also became the first White student to be admitted to Howard University Law School since suffragette days when some White women sought to dramatize their demands for the vote by enrolling there. In 1954, he received law degrees from both Yale and Howard. In 1948, the year in which he graduated from Chicago, Wofford attended a World Youth Festival in Prague which he also covered in three articles . . .