TIME HAS NOT DULLED THE SENSE OF LOSS,  nor blurred the timid, sympathetic faces asking if my family would be safe — since my President had been killed. Time has not obscured the events of that November evening so long ago or erased the pride I felt at being an American and a Peace Corps Volunteer. In retrospect, few of us realized how profoundly the events of the summer and fall of 1963 would affect us.

Life magazine, in their June 21 editorial characterized the class of 1963 as “probably the best prepared, stablest, and most promising class in U.S. history . . . combining high morale, seriousness of purpose, commitment to a life of the mind and a careful balance between idealism and realism.” When faced with the choice between excellence for its own sake and the sake of humanity, between the good life and the useful life, many of us chose the latter.

June was also marred by two deaths whose repercussions would mark us forever. The week before our group began training at UCLA, a series of shots shattered the Mississippi night and Medgar Evers lay mortally wounded on the walk in front of his home. The civil rights movement had taken an ominous turn. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, 73-year-old Quang Duc sat patiently as saffron robed priests doused him with gasoline. With a purposeful match in  a Saigon street, he ignited a revolution which would eventually inflame passions as great as those created by the drive for civil rights. Two disparate forces were gathering momentum; forces which would lead not to simple ideological differences but protracted battles of conscience.

Our training for the peace Corps ended the day of the March on Washington, and we sat spellbound at our television set 3,000 miles away as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. At our graduation dinner that evening we stood, linked arms and sang “We shall Overcome.” It was indeed, a season of hope; an era of rising expectations both at home and abroad temperred by the prospect of power without purpose, of means without ends.

spurred on by President Kennedy’s example Volunteers had scattered to the corners of the earth. Our group dispersed throughout the breadth of the Ethiopian Empire. We meant to change the order of  things; we knew we could. We were forceful, inconsiderate, intemperate and boisterous and they were patient. We were inexperienced, and they accepted us. We taught their children, healed their sick, built their schools and they were grateful. And I have never doubted tor even a fleeting moment that we got the better of the deal.

Because those of us who volunteered share a rich legacy of service to our nation and commitment to others less fortunate than ourselves; pride in doing a good job and a touch of saddness, perhaps, in not being all that we could be. I deeply believe that there is within each of us a strong sense of justice — and with resolve and love — we shall prevail.

Perhas the spirit of this occasion can best be summarized with a excerpt from the speech  that President Kennedy was to deliver in Dallas the day he was shot.It was true then; it is true today.

We in this country, in this generation, are — by destiny rather than choice — the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: “except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”

Monday, November 21
4:39 pm

Martha Dunlop Peterson and her husband, John, served in Bo and Freetown, Sierra Leone, both were music teachers. They also taught in the School for the Blind, teaching all subjects, as well as taught at the Milton Margai Teachers College. She read from a letter home to her father dated February 6, 1984. It is excerpted here.

Dear Pa,

I’ve met a missionary who has a library so I’m plowing through her books. I feel like a slouch after reading about David Livingstone in Africa - missionary, discoverer, geologist, botanist and surgeon. In my small way I’m throwing out some good vibrations. I’m feeling OK. Despite sore throat, sore feet, stiff arm, sore stomach, I just “keep on truckin’” as this too shall pass.

I’m coaching a lovely school teacher in advanced piano. She’d like a scholarship to study in America so I wrote her a letter of recommendation but have no silver or gold to help her.

There’s a sighed boy with a speech problem deposited here at the Blind School - perhaps there is no other facility for him. He was being taught Braille, so I’m teaching him A-B-C instead of dots. Our apartment is popular. The kids like to float in and crash on our soft sofa. Gilbert wanted to sleep overnight on it and Kadie had to be pried off at bed time. I get requests for hot water (to make tea in the boys’ dorm), thread for hemming dresses, reading poetry on tapes to be brailled off for secondary students, teaching time on a Braille clock (the students take off the glass case and feel the dots - clever), teach the abacus, bandage sores, hold Sunday Night Bible Class for girls, etc. The choir is asked to go to Canada and the USA on tour in September - a big secret still - hush, hush.

 At Milton Margai Teachers College I’m teaching Physics of Sound and “Peter and the Wolf” music. Transportation is the biggest unknown here. Will I get a ride to school! Will I get a ride home! I have to beg, hitchhike, or snare a taxi if one comes by this out-of-the-way place. I don’t worry any more. I just take all problems to the Lord in prayer.

I’m living in the Old and New Testament literature now. As books are scarce, John and I get our strength and inspiration direct from the Bible.

The weather’s hazy now as the Harmattan wind is blowing the Sahara dust around. March is the hottest month, then Rainy Season again in May.

Having nothing else to do, I broke the code for MOON used on books before Braille was invented. Only old blind ladies in England can read it and England sent their library rejects to Africa.

I recently went to a COS (Close of Service) Conference on how to get out of the Peace Corps! Take care of yourself, Pa, and have fun!

Marty

In the spring of  1963 while a senior at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, I joined the Peace Corps. Your vision of the future, words of encouragement and faith in the ability of volunteers like myself presented too great a challenge to pass up. I was part of D.R. VII, the first Urban Community Development group in the Dominican Republic.

Training, which began in July, was to end in October, but was extended until mid-November due to a military coup and resultant uncertainty about that country’s readiness for a seventh volunteer group. On the Friday of the first week home between training and leaving the United States I head: “President Kennedy has just been shot in Dallas,” as I prepared to shop for things I was told I’d need in Santo Domingo. In retrospect, the shock and national tragedy of that fatal event underscored for me the need to do well overseas, to not disappoint others, but to inspire them as you had inspired me.

I arrived in Santo Domingo one week after your assassination. Gazing out the window of the plane, the darkness of the sky that night paralleled the darkness that had descended temporarily over our collective national conscience. “What could I do that could possibly make a difference in view of the magnitude of your senseless assassination a few days ago in Dallas?”

By contrast, in 1961 Dictator Rafael Trujillo had been assassinated after 31 years of ruling the Dominican Republic. Celebrations had ensured. In December 1963 your picture hung in every barrio home - draped in black. They told us you were their president, too. They called us, ‘Sons of Kennedy’.

Teaching residents of a squatter barrio to organize and work together to achieve common goals was the most memorable, rewarding and frustrating of all my Peace Corps experiences. Two of us working as a team while building a house in the barrio had identified residents with leadership characteristics. We invested in these people our time and knowledge of how to form an organization, elect officers and conduct business in a democratic way.

Another revolution, this one in April, 1965 cut short our tour of duty by about three months. By the time we left, the Club Porgresista de La Surza had already experienced several successes. Residents themselves had provided the labor to bring drinking water to the barrio - one tap which would run from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m. and served 2,000 residents - and also had been involved with hand-washing, immunization and how-to-cook-with-CARE-food campaigns.

On a trip to La Surza in 1972 I learned Peace Corps Volunteers were no longer needed there. As we had instructed, the house we built and turned over to the officers of the Club to manage in trust was used as a school by day and a community meeting place and entertainment center at night. Additional classrooms were being added.

For establishing the Peace Corps, all it symbolizes, all its accomplishments, all worldwide whose lives have changed because of it - thank you - we remember.

MY NAME IS BETH OPRISCH. I live in Toronto, Ohio. I am a residential counselor at a group home for adolescent girls and currently working on my Master’s degree in Counseling. I was a Community Health Volunteer in Sierra Leone, West Africa from 1984 to 1986.

What a difficult task. To talk for three minutes about one event that crystallizes my Peace Corps experience. How to select just one. I went through journals, read old letters, looked at pictures, watched my slides and finally a common theme emerged. That theme was Yeabul Kamara.

I knew Yeabul was different from the start. She was spirited, feisty, sarcastic, assertive - not the typical characteristics of the women in the male dominated Sierra Leoneon society. Her firey temperament contradicted her slight, almost frail appearance. I’ll always remember her smile - those incredibly white, straight teeth, highlighted by her dark, clear complexion, illuminating even the darkest of the Sierra Leoneon mud huts. And that infectious laugh - always evoking a similar one from me. I still remember the delight she found in watching me struggle with the native language while she, knowing very good English, would rather watch me struggle than help me.

I’ll never forget the time she was bitten by a poisonous snake. I kept an all-night vigil by her side; assuring her, trying to comfort her, and praying for her recovery. I had only been in country for a few months but had already witnessed three deaths resulting from snakebites. I was scared and ready to catch the next plane home if Yeabul died. But she was a fighter and somehow survived. That incident brought us closer together.

For the rest of my time there, our friendship continued to grow. We prepared meals together, beat clothes on rocks together, and gossiped together. Yeabul taught me gardening, the tribal language, and the customs of the Sierra Leone culture. I taught her English, some basic health practices, and Yahtzee. We shared ideas, dreams, and philosophies about life. About a year into my stay, she became pregnant. Two days before I left Mapaki, she gave birth to her second child. She told me she intended to name the baby after me but since it was a boy, it wasn’t really feasible. (Beth isn’t the most popular of the Sierra Leoneon male names) I was touched just the same. Instead, she named her baby Carl - Carl Kargbo - after my father. When I left, I didn’t know if I would ever see Yeabul again, but I left hoping that someday, somehow our paths would cross again. Perhaps that hope was a defense mechanism to lessen the pain of goodbye, but as long as we were both alive, I felt the possibility existed.

About a year after my return to the States, I received a letter from the Peace Corps Volunteer that had replaced me in Mapaki. She was writing to tell me that Yeabul Kamara had died. Pneumonia. Something so treatable; so incredibly curable - in this country anyway - had taken the life of my best friend in Sierra Leone. I kept re-reading the letter, hoping for a different conclusion, that perhaps I had misread something. But I hadn’t. Yeabul Kamara had died.

For days that was all I thought about. But I think it was by working through the loss of Yeabul that I realized just how significant my Peace Corps experience had been for me. By living with Yeabul and the other people of Mapaki I learned so much about myself. From chats under mango trees to walks to neighboring villages, I learned by their simple examples. I learned how selfish I was, how impatient I could be, and how dogmatic my thinking could become. I truly did my best in providing health education but what I gave them and taught them paled in comparison to what I learned from them. I learned Christian values living among Muslim people.

I can never repay the people of Sierra Leone, but I can take those lessons, that personal growth, that broadened perspective and apply it to my work back here. So many people questioned my motivations for joining the Peace Corps - why go overseas, we have so much that needs to be done here? That statement is hard to dispute. But I believe that we do have a responsibility to help other nations of the world. As President Kennedy said in his inaugural address 27 years ago, “we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves . . . not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.”

It is right to help other nations less blessed than ours. And I feel fortunate that I had an opportunity to serve in an agency that does so. But it is equally right to help those in this country. Any accomplishments that I might contribute, any difference that I might make in even the smallest sense in improving conditions in this country will in some way be shaped by my experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone.

1959-1960. I was 20 and a college junior when I spent a school year abroad in Grenoble, France. Experiences of that year exposed me to conditions of poverty that my sheltered American life had prevented, and which left me with troubling questions about my life choices.

Fall 1960. A young presidential candidate offered the possibility of an American “Youth Corps” that would be a source of aid to third world countries. Thousands like myself responded to the idea with an overwhelming enthusiasm. At Colorado State, my university, three professors were selected as an advance study team to s survey prospective governments in Asia, Africa and South America about their perceived needs for a “Youth Corps”; and I joined a student committee which distributed questionnaires soliciting attitudes about such an organization to many campuses. The vision that I had longed for had been articulated by John F. Kennedy, and I vowed to become a part of it.

1962 and 1963. Because of teaching commitments, I asked for postponement to two invitations to Peace Corps training. In the meantime, I met the man I would marry and decided that he’d jolly well better become interested in the Peace Corps if he wanted to continue our relationship. Roger’s application to train was soon on file as well.

1965. One late August night, shortly after our wedding, we reported to training in Peepekeo, Hawaii, where we joined EIGHT(!!!) also recently wed couples of the Malaysia XII trainees in an elementary school that was to be our bedroom for the next three weeks. So much for a romantic Hawaiian honeymoon! Eventually, we would move to the Hilo training center and separate bedrooms, but until then, communal rather than connubial bliss would have to prevail. What better introduction than this to test the unofficial Peace Corps motto: “Be flexible!”?

August, 1968. We returned to the families we had left three years earlier and began the graduate school, professional and community lives that would take us to homes across the country the next 18 years.

September 1986. The 25 Anniversary of the Peace Corps in Washington, D.C. One aspect of that celebratory time stood out most unexpectedly for me: the two-hour briefing with Malaysian nationals and U.S. State Department personnel about present day Malaysia. As we sat in that room, I realized that our questions and concerns represented those of hundreds of Malaysian RPCVs who still cared very deeply about the past, present and future of a country to which we owned deep allegiance and love. In concurrent sessions for over 100 other Peace Corps nations, similar concerns and emotions were being expressed and felt by their returned Volunteers. What, I thought, could be a stronger source of global thinking and local action than these thousands of women and men who represent an adoptive expatriate cadre of world citizenry for our country?

The answer to my original concerns 28 years ago I’ve found as much in this country as I did in Malaysia. They are the result of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s inspiration to articulate a vision that still grows with an ever-vibrant American Peace Corps. Our two teenage daughters are considering becoming a part of that vision one day. We couldn’t be more proud.

I AM JAMES H. McAULEY from Cleveland, Ohio. I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer from 6/62 to 6/65 in LaCeiba, Honduras with the Honduran National Social Welfare Agency.

John F. Kennedy gave each of us as citizens of this (great) country and to each Peace Corps Volunteer a gift, his vision that people from around the world could interface with each other in a personal, human way for their mutual betterment.

President Kennedy has given us an energetic, vibrant, living vision of hope that people who would dare to risk sharing divergent values and cultures could improve the human condition of all mankind by working to solve social/economic problems through relating to each other as other human beings.

A vision of people of one country sharing with people of another country life’s joys and sorrows. A vision that people who stumble through language barriers and customs to care about each other so that each could grow and develop. From the vision evolved an unreserved and unrequited personal regard for others by host country nationals, co-workers and Peace Corps Volunteers.

The instrumental job of nurses, social workers, educators, agronomist, etc., has been shadowed with the spirit of hope that the dove of peace and the harvest of mutual endeavors is a far greater attribute to mankind than disregard, competition or conflict.

President Kennedy’s vision created a new political tradition that people can come together to sow, to reap, to labor, to share in a meaningful caring respectful peaceful way to enrich each of us.

President Kennedy’s Peace Corps vision has touched us all at home and aboard to make us richer in our personal endeavors to use peace and development to effect social policy, to resolve common problems, and to develop programs that benefit us all.

President Kennedy has given us the vision, the 120,000 Volunteers have established the tradition of peace and development.

Today, we honor President Kennedy’s memory. Today and tomorrow and all the tomorrows we continue his vision and our tradition, our struggle for world peace.

STEPPING OFF THE PLANE in Rio de Janeiro more than 20 years ago as newly trained Peace Corps Volunteers, most of us felt we were going to change things for the poor people of Brazil. After all, we had been trained in basic health skills and community development strategies. The formula for success was simple. All we had to do was make sure everyone boiled their water and sent their kids to school each day. And, of course, we would work to identify community leaders so that they could organize the poor to have a better life.

Much, much later we would realize the formula for success was infinitely more complicated - that, in fact, the Brazilians had taught us much more about our own country than we had managed to teach them about overcoming poverty and powerless in theirs.

After all, how could they follow our advice to boil water when they had no money to buy fuel to heat the water. How could their kids go to school - we’re talking 4-5 kids minimum per family - when the costs of mandatory uniforms, books, paper and pencils had to come from the parents’ own pockets. How could indigenous community leaders blossom when men had to work blistering 10-hour/six-day shifts while women with infants and babies to care for put in dawn-to-midnight work weeks with nary a day’s rest.

While it took a long time for the relentless reality of day-to-day urban slum life to teach us enthusiastic young idealists about the Third World, it did not take nearly as much time for us to receive a new perspective on the comfortably rich and powerful society we had to recently left.

We served in Brazil during the Vietnam War and many times it became the first topic of conversation when people in the favelas learned we were norteamericanos. Some of these poor Brazilians couldn’t read or write, others couldn’t afford the price of a small radio or even a newspaper. Especially interesting was the fact that since Brazil was an anti-communist military dictatorship, whatever the citizens in the street did learn from the media was certainly not slanted against the U.S. Quite the contrary; the U.S. was a strong ally of Brazil.

But despite this pro-U.S. slant by media and government, the poor people of Brazil knew what was going on in Southeast Asia. Invariably they would ask us, “What is the greatest and most powerful country on earth doing in Vietnam, a nation halfway around the world and of no possible importance to you?”

This question was asked without rancor but with total inquisitiveness, as though the Brazilians were thinking “well, I’m finally face-to-fact with a real, live American, a college educated one at that, and at last I’m going to hear the reason for the war.” But then we would shake our heads in response and state we had no idea why our countrymen were burning rice fields and destroying villages. Self-consciously we explained our presence in their country as Peace Corps Volunteers was an effort to do all the things that weren’t being done in Vietnam.

Later on we were embarrassed when a noted university professor refused our invitation to speak at a Peace Corps one-year conference about Afro-Brazilian culture. The reason he gave was brief and concise. With the U.S. wreaking havoc on a poor nation in Asia and his students being tear gassed with U.S.-supplied shells when they publicly objected to the war, he could not participate in a U.S. Peace Corps event and face his students in class the next day.

Through the years we have reflected on our Peace Corps experience, with our friends and family and especially our children. It was the richest and most enlightening experience of our lives. It taught us from the bottom up the experience that four-fifths of the world must live through each day. It showed us that well-meaning idealists from technological societies couldn’t solve all age-old problems in those lands. But most of all it showed us that our own country was making those problems more difficult to solve with its misplaced emphasis on weapons and force as tools of so-called change in the Third World.

Sadly, 20 years later we see the same scenario being played out. Two-thirds of all U.S. foreign aid today goes for “security assistance,” not for food or technical help. More than $3 billion has gone to El Salvador since 1980. But do its citizens enjoy a better quality of life than they did before this so-called security assistance was heaped on their government? Are infant mortality rates down, health service delivery improved and protection against death squads increased? Are the Nicaraguan people better off since U.S.-financed mercenaries began burning health clinics, killing medial personnel and kidnapping farmers? Are the people of Grenada better off today, five years after the U.S. armed forces launched an invasion and occupied that tiny island?

Bringing it all back home - as the Peace Corps slogan goes - are we as Americans better off, more secure and more sound economically, after this decade’s three trillion dollar expenditure for defense?

We left these shores as proud Volunteers in a great new experience. Little could we have realized then that in the two decades which have passed since we returned, the philosophy and ideals of the Peace Corps would do nothing more than flicker faintly in the hurricane of U.S. policy contrary to all we worked for as members of America’s unarmed services.

LESOTHO HIGH SCHOOL SEEMED to be a closely-knit community from 1976-1978. Girls with girls. Boys with boys. Clustered together in groups. They were happy and smiling mainly because they had each other’s support and friendship. For me they were a unique model of poverty of spirit . . . A distinguished feature of character well removed from the Greedy side of U.S. materialism and a learning experience I returned home with.

A great many students, out of the two hundred and thirty assigned to my art classes, were capable & talented. It was exciting to work with them because their progress was remarkable. Toward the end of my two years teaching stay I could discern that some students began to realize their own potential for creating and discovering beauty. They were suddenly liberated from a suppressed feeling of being worthless. Some began to recognize proportion in their woodcarvings and that a unified composition was worth striving for. It began to dawn on them that they, too, could invent or design a piece of furniture, a blanket, a child’s toy, a hat or even design a house. They could now articulate what they were looking at or seeing.

The highlight of my two years in Lesotho was the day the Lesotho National Stadium was packed with a crowd of more than 50,000 people gathered there to celebrate their ten years of Independence and self determination from England. I watched the Prime Minister Dr. Leabus Jonathan wearing his leopard skin blanket arrive in his old Mercedes Benz escorted by white helmeted motorcycle police. Then came his Majesty King Moshoeshoe riding in his full military uniform, escorted by a brigade of beautiful brown horses mounted by the National Guard wearing green berets and carrying tall flag poles. He was followed in cars by the Presidents of Gambia and Zaire as well as other foreign dignitaries. Zaire’s famous Mobutu had on his leopard-skin cap.

The King presented medals and inspected the Guard of Honor after several speeches. Then began the traditional dances and attractive displays of calisthenics by more than 100 youths from many Lesotho schools. There was colorful parade while the band played the National Anthem . . . followed by the unveiling of the statue sculptured in memory of this great Basotho warrior of the past Makoanyane.

The Queen was a graduate of Lesotho High School where I was teaching and by invitation I attended some of her beautiful garden parties on the palace grounds. Her Majesty, Queen Mamohato appeared to be a shy person but very cordial. She told me that she attended a school for Home Economics in England while the King was at Oxford studying law. While Basoto waiters in white coats passed around trays of goodies - champagne included - one could also chat with various diplomats from the worldwide embassies appointed to Maseru, the capital of Lesotho.

IMAGINE, President Kennedy has been dead for two years, but it’s amazing how, here on the island of Leyte in the Philippines so many miles away from the United States, you visit barrio homes and there on the wall is President Kennedy’s picture.

People here always want to talk about President Kennedy and it’s nice because they talk about him as if he was a close friend.

I feel so honored to be part of his Peace Corps. I know years from now I’ll look back at my Peace Corps years as my best years.

Jesse and I went walking in the park near the Tacloban capital today. He is becoming very special to me. How am I ever going to leave this place or him.

POSTSCRIPT 1988

I didn’t leave Jesse! We’ve been married now for 22 years and have two wonderful children, Billy and Sarah.

Thank you so much President Kennedy.

MAKING A CONTRIBUTION as a teacher in improving the lives of other human being, particularly young people — this was at the core of my Peace Corps experience in Ethiopia. I never felt better employed in my life as I had teaching Ethiopian history, at a time and place where few Ethiopians were studying their own history. The first semester I was asked to teach Greek and Roman history to 11th and 12th grade students. I was puzzled by this assignment. What in the world were my Eritrean students going to learn from the Greeks and Romans? Why weren’t my students studying Ethiopian and Eritrean history? When I proposed to teach Ethiopian history the following semester, the headmaster eyed me with amusement and asked what qualified me to teach national history. Eventually, the headmaster consented, and during the next year and a half I taught, wrote articles, and lectured on Ethiopia’s history nonstop. When I realized several months later that my students were in the throes of Eritrean nationalist fervor, I decided to write a book on the History of Eritrea, which later was reproduced on a trusty mimeograph machine in the Peace Corps office, and distributed to schools throughout the province. Teaching Ethiopian history proved to be a pioneering adventure. I suppose next to teaching, the opportunity to be a pioneer — oh, so American a longing that we are losing hold of today — introducing new ways of learning and educating was what made the Peace Corps so precious, so rare an experience. Teaching and pioneering — a gift of the Peace Corps, the likes of which I shall probably not see again.