In the early 1980s, Gordy Mengel served as a Peace Corps volunteer in an isolated community in what was then called Zaire, now Congo. 

“I was placed somewhere in the middle part of the country,” said Mengel. “And in the small community where I lived there was no post office, so getting letters out, which was basically the only means of communication, was very challenging.

Letters would take weeks, or months, to arrive.

But now, thanks to technology, that is no longer the case. Computers, cells phones and the Internet have changed the way Peace Corps volunteers do their work and stay in touch.

Now a Peace Corps programming and training officer in Rwanda, Mengel says improved communication technology has changed how people serve in the Peace Corps.

Back when he was a volunteer, he lost track of friends and family back in the United States so he had no choice but to integrate into the community.

“These days, with the advent of the internet and cell phone service and so forth, I still see volunteers having some of that experience but again, when they go back to their homes, instead of turning out the kerosene light and going to bed,” says Mengel, “they can get on Skype and they give a quick call to mom and dad back at home. And that part of the experience has changed.”

Sonia Morhange is one of about 100 Peace Corps volunteers now serving in Rwanda. The San Diego native works at an organization in Kigali called Never Again Rwanda, organizing plays about the country’s 1994 genocide that left 800,000 dead. 

She catches up with friends in California over Skype, talks on the phone with her mom and e-mails her dad. She hasn’t mailed a single letter through the postal system and can’t imagine waiting months for one to arrive. 

“I know, I can’t believe it. I can’t imagine having been a Peace Corps volunteer in the 70s or the 80s or even the early 90s,” said Ms. Morhange. “I’m just so used to everyone having a cell phone that works internationally. I’m very, very lucky in the fact that where I live I have wireless internet and that makes it a lot easier.”

The U.S. Department of State is providing $1 million to support Peace Corps volunteer efforts that increase rural access to energy, mitigate the effects of climate change, and support the use of renewable energy and energy efficient technologies in Central and South American communities, in support of the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas.

With this funding, Peace Corps volunteers will work with international experts, local organizations, businesses, and community members on the ground to create efficient and green solutions to energy challenges in the Americas, said the U.S. State Department, adding:

Under the partnership, Peace Corps volunteers will work
with members of local communities to build infrastructure to support environmentally-friendly energy and to educate communities on climate change and energy conservation. Volunteers will train host-country citizens in the use of alternative fuels and to install, operate, and maintain energy-efficient technology, including biodigesters, solar water heaters, photovoltaic devices, solar and fuel-efficient stoves, and wind or mini hydroelectric power generators.

These efforts will make clean energy more accessible to rural communities, reduce carbon emissions, improve public health, and provide opportunities for individuals and small businesses to generate income.

Peace Corps efforts will begin in Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panamá, Perú, and Suriname.

Until fairly recently, joining the Peace Corps usually meant living in a remote location and leaving behind family, friends and way of life. But mobile devices and the Internet are changing how volunteers serve — and how they keep in touch with home. This connectivity is helpful for the volunteers, but not always for the Peace Corps staff.

Parents today know their kids never leave home, even when they are off at college, what with texting, emails, and Skype. Whatever happened to separation? Growing up? Out on your own?

Still, there are advances of these strong family connections. I saw that when I was running the New York Recruitment Office. The whole family joins the Peace Corps when a child goes overseas. That’s not a bad thing.

Shriver always said it would be the children of RPCVs who would benefit the most as they would be raised differently because their parents would have a new view of child-rearing based on having lived two years in the Third World.

Also, young people today are more engaged in the world than we were at their age. They have traveled more, been there, done that.

Still, with technology it seems they still haven’t left home.  The cord has not been cut. This isn’t good or bad. It is just the way things are. I remember in the early Sixties when it took 4-5 days to get an aerogram from Africa to the Mid-West. We never thought of calling home. And ‘official Peace Corps business’ was done by cables.

Now, of course, the Peace Corps staff doesn’t want ‘mom’ dropping in to make the boy’s bed while the PCV is on the job. But the Peace Corps does let PVCs go home after 12 months overseas.

When I was in Africa, we weren’t allowed to go to Europe, let alone home. I do remember an Ethiopian PCV getting permission from Shriver to meet her mother in Greece because the widowed mother wrote Shriver a hand written letter saying how this was her only child, and her husband had passed away, and she couldn’t bare to live two years without seeing her daughter.

Even Sarge couldn’t deny that request.

In Ethiopia, in the old days, we couldn’t have refrigerators, a car, or use the PX that was around the corner from our house in Addis Ababa. I remember when I was an APCD in Ethiopia and the Empire was being mapped by the US army and driving up the Dessie Road I stopped at Kombolcha, which was about 375 kms north of Addis Ababa. There was a small grassy field airport just beyond the town and set up at the end of the runway, in a grove of eucalyptus, was a US army field camp.  I stopped off  to say hello to a handful of young GIs, and being friendly, and wanting a chance to talk to another American, they asked me to stay for lunch. We had basically an  American picnic of hamburgers and hot-dogs and cold Buds, all from home.

It was a real treat, but I felt slightly guily, not eating off the economy. Where was the injera and wat and the tedj and tela?  These soldiers would never know any local food. They hadn’t left America really, regardless of how far they had traveled away from home.

Stein was writing about a new spy drama on USA Network, and how the Smithsonian was used as ‘cover’ for a CIA agent.

He asked Melvin Gamble, a retired high-level CIA official, about that episode. And Gamble replied that it was ‘possible’ that the ‘cover’ with the Smithsonian.  Gamble spent four decades in the operations wing of the spy agency, retiring in 2008 as chief of the Africa division. However, Gamble said, the Smithsonian would have to agreed to the arrangement. He then went onto add that like any other U.S. government or quasi-government agency (with the exception of the Peace Corps), the venerable institution is fair game for use by the spooks.

Now another (nameless) source who ended his career as a station chief in a major capital, added, “I never heard of an incident where we ever considered using [the Smithsonian] as cover, for the same reasons we stay clear of the Peace Corps, whose value to U.S. foreign policy is too great to risk by entangling it with the CIA. ”

Now, that was my column which led RPCVs to have all sorts of comments….Now what do you have to think? Has (or is!) the Peace Corps Agency being used?

I do know from my four years of experience in Ethiopia that whenever an ‘incident’ happened in some town, i.e., a school strike or the alike, the Charge or someone of that elk, from the Embassy would drive out afterwards on a ’sightseeing’ trip with the wife and kids, throw a small party at the local hotel, and inviting the PCVs in town over for a drink. And you know how PCVs like to talk, especially if someone else is buying the beer!

Now, nothing gets lost faster in the Peace Corps than its history so I thought (since I was involved!) I would detail how the Franklin H. Williams Award came about in the first place.

At the time, I was the Regional Manager of the office and one of my recruiters,  Leslie Jean-Pierre (Guinea 1967-69), came to me with the suggestion of having an event in New York City that would highlight minority recruitment.

I suggested the Schomburg Center in Harlem as the site for the event. Their famous Director, Howard Dodson, Jr., was an RPCV from Ecuador (1964-66). Leslie and the other Recruiters picked five minority RPCVs who had helped us with recruitment, and had interesting and successful careers.

I suggested “Franklin Williams” as the honorary name for the award as I knew Williams slightly from the early years, and he was from Queens, New York, and had gone to Fordham Law School in the Bronx.

I called Chuck Baquet (Somalia 1965-67), the former Ambassador, and then the Deputy Director of the Peace Corps, and asked Chuck to come up to New York to present the awards which we designed in our New York Office.

Going back to Franklin Williams and his history with the agency. He was a high-profile minority in the Peace Corps in those early Mad Men Days of the agency. His first job at the agency was Chief of the Division of Private Organization. This office was involved with private agencies (CARE, Experiment in International Living, YMCA, etc.) and he negotiated with them on training programs and overseas administration.

Williams was a tough guy, one of the famous Mad Men, who had been an assistant to Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP in New York before going to San Francisco as the NAACP director on the West Coast. He was a friend of Harris Wofford and through Wofford came to the agency. One story that Wofford told me, and to show you how difficult it was for African-Americans in the U.S. in the early Sixties, was that when Williams wanted to buy a house in Maryland, Harris and his wife, Claire, pretended they were the buyers, as white owners won’t sell to blacks in Chevy Chase or Bethesda.

Wofford and Williams had become friends when Wofford was teaching law at Notre Dame (this was just before the Kennedy campaign) and Harris invited Williams to ND to give a series of lectures called “The Changing Legal Status of the Negro in America.”

Wofford then got Williams involved with the Kennedy campaign where William ran the voter registration drive, and when Harris went to work in the White House as special assistant to President Kennedy for civil rights, Harris called Franklin to D.C.

Williams had been offered jobs with the Civil Rights Commission and the State Department in the new Administration, but considered both jobs boring. Wofford wanted him in the Peace Corps, however, Williams wasn’t particularly fond of Shriver.

In her book, Come As You Are, Coates Redmon quotes Williams, who was then working for the attorney general of California, Stanley Monk. 

“I didn’t want to see Sarge particularly,” Williams recalls, “and I said so. Harris knew why. He’d taken me to see Sarge during the campaign when Sarge was running minority affairs. There he was, up in this big hotel suite with all these blacks and Chicanos. That turned me off. Special segregated treatment was not my style.

“But I figured, what the hell, I’m here. Might as well see where Sarge is now. Well, he was at the barricades. And boy! He began pounding his desk and saying, ‘This is where the action is. You gotta come with me!’ He made it sound so damn exciting.  I said, ‘Like when?’ He said, ‘Oh, now. Today. Well how about tomorrow?’ I saw he wasn’t kidding. I said. ‘But Sarge, I can’t leave the attorney general’s office just like that.’

Sarge said, ‘Yes you can.’ And he picked up the phone and called Stanley Mosk in California. He said, ‘Stanley, we gotta have your assistant, Williams.’

From the Peace Corps Williams went onto work for the UN, then was the US Ambassador to Ghana, and from 1970 to his death in 1990, at the age of 72, he was the head of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, that is an educational foundation working for minorities in the US and Africa.

To our event in New York in 1999, we invited, among others, Mrs. Williams, Franklin’s widow. She graciously came and remarked that this was the first time the Peace Corps had remembered her husband and the work he had done for the agency in those early days.

After the  Schomburg Center event in Harlem, I talked to Chuck about making the Frank Williams Awards national by moving it to Washington, D.C. Chuck agreed and the Frank Williams Awards went national.

Now, I hope that those in D.C. who are putting on this year’s Franklin Williams Award will be gracious enough to note when they gather on September 9, 2010, that it all started  at the New York Peace Corps Recruitment Office with a suggestion from Leslie Jean-Pierre (Guinea 1967-69).

This month, Teach for America won a $50 million federal grant that will help the program nearly double in the next four years. Teach for America was founded in 1990 by a Princeton graduate who hoped to expose future leaders to the problems of education.

The program resembles the Peace Corps: two years in low-income urban and rural public schools.

Applications are up by a third, but only about 12% are accepted. The new college grads make  $49,000 this year, and possibly more if they participate in a voluntary performance pay program.

That’s better than the Peace Corps’ readjustment allowance. The young people I’ve seen selected for this program are first rate. I’m sorry to see them ‘pass up’ the Peace Corps, but they tell me it is easier to get into Teach for America than the Peace Corps and the agency’s lengthy application process.

Or as one young friend at the college where I worked asked, “is there still a Peace Corps?”

How far off the radar are we anyway?

He isn’t the first person to use the Peace Corps as the shining star on a resume and get ahead in Washington, nor will he be the last.

Remember Barbara Zartman? She was the deputy director, then Acting Director of the Peace Corps with the departure of Elaine Chao, and took advantage of her few remaining days as a Bush political appointee by immediately flying off to visit Russia and Tunisia under the guise of Peace Corps business.

Unfortunately, there is a long tradition of such official boondoggles at Peace Corps/Washington. This sort of junket was captured by Peace Corps Evaluator Fletcher Knebel in his 1966 novel on the Peace Corps, The Zinzin Road.

Knebel’s PC/W character was Maureen Sutherland, “….a slim, willowy young women, stylishly dressed…She wore elongated dark glasses, and a sheaf of black hair fell loosely over one eye. Her skin, as creamy as enameled china, hinted of regular facials and a variety of expensive oils and ointments.”

Sutherland was based on a legendary Africa Region desk officer of the early Sixties who would frequently fly into a West African country for a brief, whirlwind fact-finding trip, which she breezily referred to as a ‘look/see.’

Knebel describes his PC/W official on a visit to Africa–”Miss Sutherland lifted on for half an hour, festively dropping names from Lagos to Washington…she gave a glittering panorama of the world of great affairs, its intrigues, its grand policies and even its illicit loves…She concluded on a pitch of finishing-school breathlessness and looked about brightly as thought waiting for applause.”

Still waiting for applause, Zartman, a small town in upstate New York GOP chairwoman, had hoped to become the Director of the Peace Corps if Bush won a second term. She outlasted Coverdale; she oulasted Chao. And she ended her Peace Corps career in dramatic fashion. Before Clinton took over, and while she was running the show in the closing months of the Bush Administration, she rushed into place several Peace Corps projects in Eastern Europe, and a congressional investigation of sorts ‘removed’ her from Peace Corps HQ within hours, I’m told!

Barb did not move back upstate to the cold wintes of Rochester, her hometown. Instead, she settled in with the Liberals of Georgetown and ran (and lost) for a local political office.

Like the famed fictional Peace Corps character ‘Maureen Sutherland’ Barb’s glory days, as the Boss once sang, were gone in the ‘blink of a young girl’s eye.’

Timed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps (launched in March 1961) and of Wisconsin’s African Studies Program (founded in September 1961), the conference will include opportunities for celebrating, reminiscing, and socializing (see the preliminary program online, e.g., a keynote address by Peace Corps Director Aaron Williams, story booths, the ultimate Peace Corps dance party in Memorial Union, etc.), but the core of the conference will be several evaluative panels featuring research and commentary by scholars and writers bringing a variety of perspectives on the Peace Corps and the experience of volunteer service.

To present at the conference, whether in one of the panels you see on the preliminary program or in a panel that you think we should create, please write an email message to us at <events@africa.wisc.edu> describing your work and interests and outlining briefly the subject that you might be prepared to address in a 15-20 minute panel slot. Please use the subject header “Potential Participant” in your email message.

To attend the conference please send us an email. All are welcome. We especially welcome anyone who ever served in the Peace Corps in Africa or elsewhere, Africans and others who knew Peace Corps volunteers during their service, and anyone who is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. To express tentative interest in attending the conference, or to inquire about it, please send your email message to that same address, <events@africa.wisc.edu> and use the subject header, “Interested in Attending.”

Online registration begins in September or October, 2010, but we’re eager to gauge national (and international) interest now. Blocks of hotel rooms have been set aside, and former Peace Corps volunteers in Madison are ready to put up guests at no charge, so if a late March weekend in Madison to mark 50 years of the Peace Corps appeals, please let us know!

Conference Planning Team
African Studies Program
University of Wisconsin-Madison
web: africa@wisc.edu
email: events@africa.wisc.edu

Preliminary Program

March 24-26, 2011

Memorial Union, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Thursday, March 24th

5:00-7:00 Welcoming reception,co-hosted by the UW-Madison African Studies Program, the Chicago Peace Corps Recruiting Office, and Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Madison. Off-campus venue: Promega Corporate Headquarters, 2800 Woods Hollow Road, Fitchburg (15 minutes from Memorial Union; bus transport provided by the organizers). Promega is the site of a month-long exhibition of Peace Corps memorabilia and reflections, curated by Donna Page, who, after welcoming remarks by the organizers, will briefly describe the exhibit. Refreshments provided in the gallery.

Friday, March 25th

8:15-8:45 Coffee

8:45–10:15 Panel 1: Fifty Years of the Peace Corps in Africa: Presentations and discussions featuring scholars

10:30-12:00 Panel 2: The Past and Future of International Development, Humanitarian Aid, andPresentations and discussion featuring scholars, observers, and critics of international All Day Story Booth: Peace Corps Reflections: Record your Peace Corps story (it does not have to be Africa-connected); audio and video options available, ten-minute maximum; stories will be edited and assembled for posterity and available for web access; selected clips will be included in an expanded (late 2011) version of the Dan Banda documentary (see below)

12:00-1:00 On your own for lunch

1:15-2:45 Panel 3: Fifty Years of Return: Former Peace Corps Volunteers in America: Presentations

3:00-4:00 African Politics Today, a lecture by Crawford Young

4:15-5:15 Friday Keynote Address 1: C. Payne Lucas, Peace Corps Assistant Director, Togo; director, Niger; and Director of Returned Volunteers, 1961-1971. Co-founder of Africare

5:30-6:30 Friday Keynote Address 2: William Josephson, founding staff member (with Sargent Shriver and Bill Moyers) of the United States Peace Corps.

6:30-8:00 On your own for dinner and sociability in Madison.

8:00-10:00 Peace Corps in the Telling: Two prepared stories of 20 minutes each, told by professional writers who served in the Peace Corps, interwoven with 5-minute spontaneous (or not-soUpdated spontaneous) open-mike presentations by RPCVs willing to come to the stage from the audience, Frederick March Play Circle, Memorial Union

Saturday, March 26th

All Day Story Booth: Peace Corps Reflections: Record your Peace Corps story

12:00-1:00 On your own for lunch

1:15-2:15 Film Premier, Peace Corps Africa, Peace Corps Wisconsin, a documentary film by Emmy Award winning documentarist Dan Banda (includes discussion with Dan Banda)

2:30-4:00 Panel 6: The Peace Corps and American Foreign Policy: Brief presentations and discussion featuring Senator Russ Feingold (unconfirmed), Governor Jim Doyle (unconfirmed), Congressman Thomas Petri, Ambassador and former Congressman Mark Green, Ambassador John Lange (unconfirmed), and two African ambassadors and/or former heads of state (to be announced).

4:15 Welcome and Introduction to the Keynote Program, Carolyn (Biddy) Martin, Chancellor, University of Wisconsin-Madison

4:30-5:45 Saturday Keynote Address: The Peace Corps in the 21st Century, Aaron Williams, Director, United States Peace Corps

6:00-6:30 Reception for Director Williams and Returned Peace Corps Volunteers

6:30-8:00 On your own for dinner in Madison

8:00 pm - 1:00 am The Ultimate Peace Corps Party, music, dance, and sociability, featuring bands from at least two African countries, Great Hall, Memorial Union