By: Laurie Budgar and Lisa Marshall

For most of today’s students, the Peace Corps has always existed. But when President John Kennedy launched the program in 1961, it was considered visionary - and not a little risky. We were sending our nation’s youth into service to promote global peace and intercultural awareness - laudable ambitions by most standards - but often to regions of the world where war, famine and unsanitary conditions posed real dangers.

Now, as the Peace Corps celebrates its 50th anniversary, much has changed in the world.

And much has not.

“Volunteers continue to work on pressing issues like poverty and hunger and preserving the environment,” says Janice Laurente, a spokeswoman for the organization. According to its website, the Peace Corps has three goals: helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women; helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served; and helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

Serving in the Peace Corps always has required courage, compassion and commitment. From the start, University of Denver students have stepped up to the challenge.

Beginning with Kevin Dixon (BA ‘62), more than 400 DU students and alumni have participated in projects all over the world; today’s students have worked in countries ranging from Burkina Faso to Ukraine.

In 2011, DU ranked No. 2 among colleges and universities participating in the Peace Corps’ Paul D. Coverdell Fellows program, which permits returned volunteers to pursue master’s or doctorate degrees in more than 60 universities around the country at a reduced cost. The Josef Korbel School of International Studies also sponsors students in the Master’s International program, which allows students to begin coursework on campus, serve in the Peace Corps for two years on projects related to their studies, then return to campus to finish their degrees.

No matter when or why they joined, or where they went, one theme stands out among Peace Corps volunteers: The experience helped shape the direction and flavor of their lives.

“I think I told myself that it was something I couldn’t do; it was something too exciting that I wouldn’t be able to be a part of,” says Sandra Meek (PhD ‘95), who taught English in Botswana from 1989-91 as a Peace Corps volunteer. “You just go and figure it out when you go. It really changed me as a teacher, a writer, an editor and a person.”

You’re never too old

Judy Bennett is proof positive that the Peace Corps isn’t just for twentysomethings. At the age of 52, and with a lifetime of experience in nonprofits, she began serving in Ignalina, Lithuania, in 1999 as an adviser to nongovernmental organizations. On the side, she also helped develop tourism there and taught English to adults.

Though she had toyed with the idea of joining the Peace Corps when she was younger, Bennett says she wasn’t prepared then to commit to the two-year obligation. But when she turned 50, “I rented a little cabin on the coast of Maine for a few days and decided to divorce my husband, sell my house and do some kind of international service work,” she says. “I [still] liked the philosophy of the Peace Corps, the support that it gave, and I was ready for the commitment.”

Bennett says she reapplied for another two-year stint about three years ago, but she did not clear medically.

Instead, she and her current husband now work on water projects in the Dominican Republic with the Rotary Club. “We talk about ways we could do something similar to the Peace Corps. He’s up for the challenge, and I would love to live in another country again. Now that I’m 64, I’d like to be somewhere where I have running water. I’m not as adventurous as I used to be.”

Rebuilding in Botswana

Tony Carroll’s determination to join the Peace Corps grew in part out of a family tragedy. In 1968, his older sister was killed in a car accident. One week after the funeral, her acceptance letter from the Peace Corps arrived.

“That gave me more inspiration,” he says. “I was old enough to remember the creation of the Peace Corps and how much it meant to my older sibling’s generation.”

In 1976, he found himself standing on a dusty African airstrip in the fourth poorest country in the world, tasked with helping newly independent Botswana rebuild after decades of neglect.

“They had a terrific shortfall in human capacity and they realized they were going to have to fill it with outsiders. They could either borrow money from the World Bank and hire expats, or take a chance on young American volunteers,” says Carroll, who served as district officer, spearheading a multimillion-dollar development aid program, including construction of schools, hospitals, roads and clean water systems.

“Here I am, 23, and being asked to right a ship that had been sinking for decades.”

Today, Carroll uses the skills he learned at DU and in Botswana in his work as an international trade and investment adviser specializing in sub-Saharan Africa. He also has dedicated countless pro bono hours to nonprofit organizations working to improve health, ease trade and deter corruption in Africa.

In August, Carroll left for Botswana to take his daughter, a freshman at Vassar College, to the village where it all began for him.

Her plans after college?

She’s thinking of joining the Peace Corps.

Adjusting to Kenyan standard time

Second-year graduate student Theresa Munanga has volunteered in different capacities since she was 14. “I love helping people - it’s one of the things I’m most passionate about,” she says. Her other great passion is computer programming. At DU, she is pursuing a degree in digital media studies; as a Peace Corps volunteer, she created a program that helps people learn to use a computer without needing a teacher.

“It was life-changing, and I decided I want to do that as a career,” she says.

Set to graduate in March 2012, Munanga also wrote and published a book, No Hurry in Africa: Life as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya (iUniverse.com, 2010), about her Peace Corps experience. “Basically, it’s the emailed newsletters I sent home once a month, plus my journal entries during the time,” she says. “It may not be the best book in the world, but it’s the type of book I was looking for to read before I left for the Peace Corps.”

In the book, Munanga writes of the Kenyan concept of time:

“They have a saying in Kenya that ‘the watch is yours, but the time is mine.’ In the Peace Corps, we were trained that if we want to set up a meeting we must keep in mind that they will be late. Kenyans are very polite people and won’t want to disappoint you, so they’ll say, ‘Yes, I’ll be there at noon,’ but what they don’t tell you is that at noon they first have to feed their children, hang the wash on the line, etc., before they can leave their homes. So they will come when they can.”

Helping developing countries move forward

Mary Jane Parmentier was already hooked on international travel by the time she was 20. She had spent her junior year (at Southern Connecticut State University) abroad in Spain. “My year there sort of woke me up politically, and this propelled me on into graduate school focusing on international studies,” she says.

So it didn’t take much to convince her to join the Peace Corps when the opportunity arose. She spent two years teaching English to 11th and 12th graders in a rural village outside of Marrakesh, Morocco. That’s also where she met her husband, Bill, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer. When she returned to the U.S., she joined the DU community, first as a study-abroad coordinator, then as a PhD student. Since earning her PhD in 1999 she has been on staff at Arizona State University, where she teaches graduate-level courses in international development at the school’s Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes.

In her classes, Parmentier focuses on the role of technology in international development, which she says is just as important as basic needs like food, shelter, clothing and medicine.

“If you ignore new information and communication technologies, then countries are going to move further and further behind the rest of the world,” she says. “In Malawi, infant mortality began decreasing just because of a program that would allow women to text when they were going into labor, and an ambulance would come and get them. Education is the real key to bringing a society ahead. You also can’t go into a village without clean water and food and say, ‘Here is a computer.’ You need both.”

Blazing a trail for Pioneers

Kevin Dixon (BA ‘62) is pretty sure he’s the first Peace Corps volunteer from the University of Denver. He didn’t know that when he signed up in 1962, but about a decade after he returned from service, he was in town for a conference.

“I went to DU and talked to my old basketball coach, Hoyt Brawner. He was so enthusiastic that I was the first volunteer,” Dixon says. “He went into great detail about how the FBI had come out and interviewed people at the school about me - whether there was anything negative about me that would embarrass the United States if they sent me overseas.”

Dixon wasn’t an obvious choice for the Peace Corps. He had never traveled outside the U.S. He attended DU on a basketball scholarship and played on the baseball team, and he majored in physical education and recreation - not English or pre-med or any of the other skills that were in high demand in developing nations. He was an all-star first baseman in an amateur league, but “nobody was knocking on my door,” he says.

So he applied for the Peace Corps, and in the early summer of 1962 he was accepted, with an assignment to set up sports programs at the University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia.

When the university was on break, Dixon and his fellow volunteers traveled elsewhere in Colombia, hosting basketball clinics and exhibition games.

Today, Dixon’s family has deep connections to Colombia. He met his wife - also a Peace Corps volunteer - in a barrio there. And his now-grown daughters are returned volunteers themselves.

The experience, he says, “opened up a lot for me in the world,” including a lucrative job in Saudi Arabia, where he set up women’s programs and Little League teams to help retain contractors.

“I didn’t think anything of going - didn’t even give it a second thought,” he says. “I knew how easy it was to travel, and how to be a guest in a foreign country.”

A poetic Peace Corps experience

Sandra Meek (PhD creative writing, 1995) has published three award-winning books of poems. Each explores aspects of travel and human behavior, fascinations that Meek developed as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana. Though her most recent book, Biogeography (Tupelo Press, 2008), is a collection of poems about environmentalism and its connection with politics, it draws, in part, on her meetings in Suriname with Desi Bouterse, the country’s deposed dictator. The book won the coveted Dorset Prize and a $10,000 purse in 2006.

Meek’s first book, Nomadic Foundations (2002), was largely about her time in Africa with the Peace Corps. “I think the challenge as a poet with that material was to not let it be just telling people stuff about Botswana, but at the other extreme, I didn’t want it to be just language that was disconnected from the world and didn’t evoke this experience,” says Meek, whose fourth book of poems, Road Scatter, is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2012. “The challenge was trying to write what would be good poetry, good art-not just information about Botswana with line breaks.”

Meek-currently a professor of English, rhetoric and writing at Berry College in northwest Georgia-certainly accomplished that. She tells stories in her poems that portray the realities of Botswana and layers them with shadows and light, emotion and truth. When read cover to cover, Nomadic Foundations conveys the totality of her Peace Corps experience: the hope and the desolation, the fear and the love, the richness and the poverty.

The book won the 2003 Poetry Prize from the Peace Corps Writers, a forum for returned volunteers to share their experiences.

A librarian’s perspective

Brenda Grove Stenger (MA ‘76) finished her master of library science degree at DU a couple of weeks early so she could enter the Peace Corps as a librarian. Her adviser cautioned her against it, noting the library science program’s excellent placement rate for its graduates, but she was undeterred. Years later, her first boss told her it was her Peace Corps experience that had set her apart from other candidates. “I wish I could tell [my adviser] that,” she says.

Q: What inspired you to join the Peace Corps?

A: My undergraduate degree was in French, and I had done my junior year abroad in Switzerland. I had also lived for a year in Sri Lanka when I was 14 with a family my dad knew. I had that wanderlust. It never dawned on me that there would be an opportunity for me in the Peace Corps. I thought the Peace Corps focused [primarily] on nursing and agriculture until I saw a posting on the library’s job board that said, “Peace Corps wants librarians.” I thought that would be so cool, and decided to investigate. I wasn’t sure I could handle Africa, but when I found out it was Brazil, I was really interested.

Q: What were your first impressions of the differences between American and Brazilian cultures when you first arrived?

A: It was a whole different way of life. Back then, in Brazil, they did not have the conveniences that we - or they - have today. Our diets consisted of a lot of rice and beans and many tropical fruits. The Brazilian passion for soccer, Carnival and samba became part of our lives too. In my small town, foreigners easily stood out. At first that was comforting, and I made many friends, but after a while it felt confining. So when I went to the second assignment, I [asked for] a bigger city.

Q: What were your assignments in Brazil like?

A: At the first place, a small agricultural college, they didn’t have a professional library staff, so I helped them understand library processes. I set up a gift and exchange program so they could connect with other libraries around the world and expand their collection. The second two years was at a larger university about two hours north of Rio. We cataloged all the collections; we also had to weed out their collections. I weeded it quite heavily. About eight years after I was out of the Peace Corps, I went back with my husband. As we were walking down the hall, one of the professors looked up and said, “I remember you. You’re the one who threw away all our books.”

By NANCY COOK LAUER

When the federal government sought a training area to transition volunteers in the newly forged Peace Corps to posts in Southeast Asia, the Big Island was a natural choice.

Waipio Valley, Pepeekeo, Honomu, Ninole, Rainbow Falls and Waiakea-Uka became home to more than 12,000 volunteers between 1962 and 1972. Waipio Valley, in fact, was President John F. Kennedy’s first Peace Corps training camp, as opposed to universities and other facilities used in other areas.

The resemblance to Southeast Asia, the climate, plants and animals, even the languages, helped acclimate mainland volunteers to what they could expect at even more primitive posts overseas.

“Hilo was like a Third World country when we came here in the ’60s,” said Bill Sakovich, a former Peace Corps volunteer and trainer who came to Hawaii shortly after he earned his geography degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.

“We were pretty much the only haoles,” Sakovich added. “Many people did not speak English. But the community just really opened up to us in the Peace Corps. They always took us in. We were part of their families.”

Sakovich is coordinating a 50th Peace Corps Anniversary Celebration that will bring 300 to 400 people to the Big Island this week. Events are scheduled for Hilo and Kona and along the Hamakua Coast as former volunteers make new friendships and rekindle old ones with fellow volunteers and the legions of former staff and community members who helped ease their transition to a foreign country.

Among the highlights: Potlucks Tuesday at Old Kona Airport Park and Friday and Sunday at Wailoa State Park, blessing and grand opening Wednesday of the University of Hawaii at Hilo North Hawaii Education and Research Center Heritage Center featuring a Peace Corps anniversary exhibit honoring local residents who worked in Waipio Valley.

Susan Taylor Wehren, who along with her husband, Al, and son, Jeff, own Kona Shoji Design, is coordinating Kona-side events. Wehren, who served as an English teacher in Micronesia from 1968 to 1970 after graduating from the University of Oregon, didn’t train in Hawaii, as the Peace Corps was transitioning to in-country training.

But she is struck by the number of former Peace Corps volunteers who have subsequently made the Big Island their home, including herself and her husband, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer in Micronesia.

“I’m always running across them,” she said. “There are at least 400 on our mailing list, and that’s not everybody.”

But Wehren understands the lure.

“We always wanted to live in the tropics,” she said.

Sakovich married Jean Cushnie, a Big Island plantation girl, during his Peace Corps stint. He served as a volunteer in Indonesia, where leaders there called for a swimming coach in an effort to build an Olympic team. Sakovich returned as a trainer in Hilo and Waipio Valley, served a stint in the Army’s 442nd Regiment at Schofield Barracks, spent a few years in Micronesia working for Bank of Hawaii and ultimately returned to Hilo, where he continues working as a swim coach.

Waipio Valley, says Sakovich, proved a perfect training camp because of its remote location and the Peace Corps’ ability to build two Philippine-style houses, two houses patterned after Rural Resettlement homes in Thailand and a longhouse using a Borneo design.

The Theroux lecture is $20 for the public and $10 for MIIS students. The proceeds will benefit the institute’s Peace Corps Scholarship Fund.

The celebration will take place from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the McCone Building, 499 Pierce St. in Monterey. Theroux will speak on “The Humility of Travel” at 4:30 p.m.

Information: Contact Barbara Burke at 831-647-3513 or email to: bburke@miis.edu.

Tickets for the Theroux lecture and reception may be purchased online at http://miispeacecorpscelebration.eventbrite.com.

  Peace Corps 50^th Anniversary Celebration

Saturday, October 8, 2011

10:00AM - 11:30AM Screening of “American Idealist:  the Story of Sargent Shriver”

12:00PM - 1:00PM     Registration Opens/Peace Corps Photo Displays

1:00PM - 1:45PM       Introduction/Welcome Session, highlighting MIIS connections to the

                                    Peace Corps w/faculty and staff RPCV stories

• Sunder Ramaswamy
• Congressman Sam Farr
• Peter Grothe

 1:45PM - 2:45 PM       Panel Discussion #1:  Peace Corps Trailblazers From the Early Years

                                    Moderator:  Phil Morgan

• Howard Anderson
• David Elliott
• Larry Horan

 2:45PM - 3:00PM       Break

 3:00PM - 4:00PM       Panel Discussion #2:  Peace Corps and its Impact on Careers

                                    Moderator:  Eric Goldman

• Peter Laugharn
• Maureen Orth
• Priscilla Wrubel

 4:00PM - 4:30PM       Transition Break with Coffee & Music

 4:30PM - 5:30PM       Paul Theroux Keynote Address

Peace Corps  at 50

By Richard Lipez (Ethiopia 1962-64)

Although the Peace Corps has been one of the notable successes of U.S. foreign policy since its inception in 1961, a question left hanging at the end of a recent 50^th anniversary get-together of 5,000-plus former staff and volunteers was whether the low-level aid and mutual understanding organization could even get off the ground today.  The agency Richard Nixon and others ridiculed at the time as “Kennedy’s Kiddie Corps” barely made it through Congress.  H.R. Gross, the Iowa Republican isolationist and deficit hawk, dismissed it as “a haven for draft dodgers.” He wouldn’t even talk to the corps’ first director, John F. Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver.  Democrat Otto Passman of Louisiana asked Bill Moyers, whose job it was to sell the idea to Congress, “Now, this organization isn’t going to be racially integrated, is it?”

It was Moyers, the author and television journalist, who at the September Washington event seemed most dubious that today’s Congress would establish a government program that supported “the unrealized potential of ordinary people to go out and do good.”  He told a breakfast gathering of Peace Corps old-timers at the Mayflower Hotel that they were living in a time when nearly half the country had “seceded” from the social contract laid out so beautifully in our founding documents, and a reactionary Congress reflected that turning away from our most generous and far-sighted values.  It’s a testament to the soundness of the idea of the Peace Corps that it survives at all, with 8,655 volunteers working in 76 countries, down from a peak of 15,000 in the mid 1960s.  The annual budget of the Peace Corps is what the U.S. spends in Iraq in five hours. 

Barack Obama promised before he was elected to double the size of the Peace Corps, and the stories Moyers told show how important White House leadership was and is.  Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who had brought Moyers from Texas with him, urged Moyers not to try to sell the idea of the Peace Corps to Congress; he said they’d never get it.  LBJ had gotten to know Shriver, and the old Texas hill country progressive had hit it off with the old Maryland Catholic progressive.  Johnson advised Moyers to promote the man, not the concept.  He said “all the outer-office secretaries will swoon” over Shriver, and all the congressmen who want a favor from the Oval Office will line up to vote yes.  The strategy worked, although when Representative Passman complained that the organization would likely “promote miscegenation,” Shriver, the well-prepared charmer, reminded the old racist of the high rate of interracial marriage in his own Louisiana district.  Passman still voted no.        

A man who might feel right at home with much of today’s U.S. Congress was the Peruvian landowner that Peace Corps Latin America chief Frank Mankiewicz sat next to at a formal dinner in Lima.  At the Mayflower breakfast, Mankiewicz, later Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary, described how the big man declared that Peru was desperately in need of more and better large universities.  Perhaps hinting that the rich man might found one himself, Mankiewicz replied that many of the best American universities were private.  “How much would it cost to start one up?” the Peruvian wondered.  Taking a stab, Mankiewicz said $50 million.  “And what,” the landowner asked, “is the return on such an investment in the U.S.?”

As with universities, the return on investment in the Peace Corps has not been in cash.  It’s been in the education of millions of youngsters around the world, in more opportunities, in better health.  Just as importantly, it’s been the understanding of the larger world that over 200,000 volunteers have brought back to the U.S. 

In the current bitter right-left budgeting imbroglio, the Peace Corps 2012 budget has been cut to the point where the corps not only won’t grow, it’s likely to shrink to around 8,000 volunteers.  Sadly, administration efforts to save the Peace Corps have been wan and ineffectual.  Some Senate supporters will soon try to restore funding for a modest increase for the agency.  Will the reactionary, inward-looking spirits of H.R. Gross and Otto Passman prevail?  That will be up to the Senate.  John Kerry?  Scott Brown?  An American institution needs your help.

Novelist Richard Lipez writes mysteries under the pseudonym Richard Stevenson. He was an early Peace Corps Evaluator. Currently, Dick and his partner are traveling in the Middle East.

Writers From The Peace Corps 

One of the most important books of the late 1950 was The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. The book’s hero was a skilled technician committed to helping at a grassroots level by building water pumps, digging roads, building bridges. He was called the “ugly American” only because of his grotesque physical appearance. He lived and worked with the local people and, by the end of the novel, was beloved and admired by them.

The bitter message of the novel, however, was that Americans diplomats were, by and large, neither competent nor effective, and the implication was that the more the United States relied on them, the more its influence would wane. The book was published in July 1958. It was a Book-of-the-Month selection in October; by November it had gone through twenty printings. It was so influential that the cover of later paperback editions proclaimed that “President Kennedy’s Peace Corps is the answer to the problem raised in this book.”

And that is true enough.

But for Peace Corps writers the connection to books and literature goes further back in time. It goes back to the 1920s; it goes back to Paris, France; it goes back to the Lost Generation.

After The Lost Generation

In the 1920s Ernest Hemingway took the phrase “the lost generation,” coined by his friend Gertrude Stein, and used it in The Sun Also Rises, his novel of Paris that described the novelists, poets, artists, and intellectuals who rejected the values of post World War I America and moved to Europe.

These Americans relocated to France where living was inexpensive and where they quickly adopted a bohemian lifestyle of excessive living and messy love affairs, all the while creating some of the finest literature ever written. You might have seen lately how Woody Allen used those years and those characters in his romantic comedy Midnight in Paris.

Subsequent generations — from the Beats of the 1950s to Generation Xers in the 1990s — have produced artists who have in some way had the same reputation for hedonism and headiness as did those expatriates in Paris.

Well, for the last fifty years, Peace Corps writers have built an equally important and impressive literary movement–perhaps without the messy love affairs.

These modern expatriates with true grit, Peace Corps writers, have produced novels, poetry, travel books and memoirs that today can rightfully claim their own space on America’s literary book shelf.

A Literary Bridge

As readers we envision places and events in the world through the eyes of the artists and writers who depict them - a striking sunset on canvas; a moving musical movement; a page of colorful prose. So it is with Ernest Hemingway’s bittersweet perspective on Paris in The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast, two books published decades apart that caught a moment in time and captured it forever in words.

For nearly ­­­100 years, countless travelers, students, and aspiring writers who have yearned to experience their own version of the City of Light have relied on Hemingway’s descriptions to give them a sense of what life was like in Paris in the Twenties.

Other literary giants were part of that Lost Generation: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, John Peale Bishop, Kay Boyle, e.e.cummings,  Paul Bowles and many, many more.

So, how do I make a connection - a literary bridge - between the Lost Generation of Paris in the 1920s and over one thousand Peace Corps writers who have written about life in more than 140 Peace Corps countries over the past fifty years?

I do it this way.

Peace Corps writers are like their predecessors in two important ways.

Both groups wrote about a country in which they lived as expatriates, and explained the place to an American audience. Hemingway wrote of Paris and Spain; Mark Brazaitis writes of Guatemala; Hemingway wrote of big game hunting in East Africa and Norm Rush writes of white racists in Southern Africa; Fitzgerald wrote of wealthy, bored Americans on the French Riviera; and Simone Zelitch writes of survivors of the Holocaust leaving Hungary for Haifa.

Paul Theroux writes of Indians in Kenya in his first novel set in Africa; Richard Wiley of Korea and Koreans; P. F. Kluge writes of islands in the sun in the Pacific; and Mark Jacobs, who was a Volunteer in Paraguay and a foreign service officer in his Peace Corps country as well as in Turkey and Spain, has written about these places, and more.

Both groups are award-winning writers. A partial list of Peace Corps awardees includes Bob Schacochis, who was a PCV in the Eastern Caribbean and won the National Book Award in 1985; Kathleen Coskran was a PCV in Ethiopia, and won the Minnesota Voices Prize in 1985 for her collection of fiction; Shay Youngblood won both the Pushcart Prize for fiction and a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award; Melanie Sumner and Marnie Mueller both won the Whiting Award from their fiction about service in the Peace Corps. Norm Rush won the National Book Award for his stories set in Botswana. Ann Neelon won the 1995 Anhinga Prize for poems written about West Africa. And add to that list such wonderful writers as our guest speaker, Sarah Erdman; Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong; Peter Hessler and George Packer for these books on China and Mali and their reporting in The New Yorker. The list goes on and on.

Let me mention a few authors who are in the room today. Mike Tidwell, who wrote a book about Zaire, The Ponds of Kalambayi. Sargent Shriver told me that it was the best book he had ever read on the Peace Corps. Larry Leamer was in Nepal and told the story of his famous early Country Director, Willi Unsoeld. Tony D’Souza lived through a bloody coup in the Ivory Coast and turned that experience into his novel,Whiteman. In much the same way, Jan Worth-Nelson, out in Tonga, wrote Night Blind, about a real-life murder of a PCV.

I would be remiss if I did not add to this list four books of stories, collected and edited by Jane Albritton and her talented group of RPCV editors. These books are 50 years of Peace Corps stories and an amazing addition to Peace Corps literature.

An Edge And An Itch

In my years of watching people join the Peace Corps, I have found that the most obvious PCV candidates are those who have an itch about them. They want more - whatever the “more” is - and are not satisfied with what America has to offer them here at home.

The writers among these Volunteers go into the Third World also because they want something ‘new’ to write about.

And they are, as all of us were, overwhelmed by the experience of these new cultures that awaited them. No one can prepare a typical middle class American for the life in developing countries.

But after the initial culture shock there is a richness of experience that the more talented turn into vivid prose. It is raw material waiting to be shaped into books.

Paul Theroux recounts one of the more telling examples of how this happened. In this passage he describes the moment when he realized he had a mother lode of material for his novels and travel books by being a PCV in Southern Africa.

“I remember a particular day in Mozambique, in a terrible little country town, getting a haircut from a Portuguese barber. He had come to the African bush from rural Portugal to be a barber . . . . This barber did not speak English, I did not speak Portuguese, yet when I addressed his African servant in Chinyanja, his own language, the Portuguese man said in Portuguese, ‘Ask the bwana what his Africans are like.’ And that was how we held a conversation - the barber spoke Portuguese to the African, who translated it into Chinyanja for me; and I replied in Chinyanja, which the African kept translating into Portuguese for the barber. The barber kept saying - and the African kept translating - things like, ‘I can’t stand the blacks - they’re so stupid and bad-tempered. But there’s no work for me in Portugal.’ It was grotesque, it was outrageous,’ Paul wrote. “It was the shabbiest, darkest kind of imperialism. I could not believe my good luck. In many parts of Africa in the early 1960s it was the nineteenth century, and I was filled with the urgency to write about it.”

By writing about the developing world and emerging democracies, Paul Theroux and all of you have broadened the landscape of American readers, introducing new countries and new ideas about those cultures and societies, much the same way that the writers and artists in Paris in the 1920s broadened the view of the world for Americans back home.

Poetry in the Peace Corps

This intense cross cultural experience of the Peace Corps has produced in many PCVs a deep well of sentiment that has found its way also into poetry. Poet Ann Neelon, who is here today, sums up her experience in Senegal with one word, “foreignness.”

“Foreignness is important to a poet because it teaches humility,” she writes. Humility is important because without it there is no mystical experience. “In Senegal, I gained many things useful to a poet. These included hours of direct exposure to the oral tradition of West African, caches of exquisite bush and desert images, and French and Wolof syllables, but none of these can compare with the opportunity to have Africa erase who I was. Only after losing myself could I find myself as a writer.”

As Others See The Peace Corps

In September 2001, on the 40th anniversary of the agency, The Washington Post  reported that the Peace Corps community is “churning out enough works - thousands of memoirs, novels, and books of poetry - to warrant a whole new genre: Peace Corps Literature.”

In November of that same year in an issue of Journal of Adult Literacy a reviewer from Penn State University wrote about a collection of stories, Living On The Edge: Fiction by Peace Corps Writers, saying:  

“None of the contributors are protagonists in their chapters, but each chapter is based on some event that the writer witnessed, experienced, or heard about. By telling the stories, the contributors seem to reconsider their experiences overseas and enable readers to consider (or perhaps reconsider) U.S. actions in the developing world. Those actions can serve as a metaphor for readers’ experiences with human and cultural differences. In this way, the book offers a triple treat. Readers learn a little about parts of the world they may never see for themselves, they are entertained by a good yarn, and they can learn about themselves as well.”

Travel Now, Write Later

Anyone who has read The Sun Also Rises knows that this novel is also a wonderful travel book. Hemingway’s description of a bus trip to Spain is classic travel prose: A trip in Spain in the 1920s by Hemingway is something most Volunteers can identify with today from their own overseas experiences.

Paul Theroux, it is generally agreed, reinvented the art of travel writing with The Great Railway Bazaar, published in 1975. He returned the genre to the place it held when Mary Kingsley and Evelyn Waugh were crossing Africa and globe-trotting the world. Many Peace Corps writers have followed, most notably Mike Tidwell, Thurston Clarke, Geraldine Kennedy, P.F. Kluge, Jeffrey Tayler, Karen Muller, among many, many others.

The Peace Corps Memoir

However, the most notable literary benefits are the memoirs that have come out of the Peace Corps. The list is long and worthy, beginning with such early accounts of life overseas as To The Peace Corps With Love, by Arnold Zeitlin; An African Season by Leonard Levitt; The Barrios of Manta, written by Rhoda & Earle Brooks, and Living Poor by Moritz Thomsen. They are wonderful books. And wonderful books continue to be written today by PCVs, most recently Matthew Davis’ When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale that just won the Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Writers Experience Award, and Peter Hessler–our recent MacArthur genius award winner–for his books on China. 

Expatriates And Exiles

Peace Corps writers are, at least for a while, expatriates and exiles from their culture, and from that experience they gain a new perspective, even a new vocabulary, as Richard Wiley recalls from living in Korea. “As I started to learn Korean I began to see that language skewed actual reality, and as I got better at it I began to understand that it was possible to see everything differently. Reality is a product of language and culture, that’s what I learned.”

The late novelist Maria Thomas said of her time in Ethiopia, “It was a great period of discovery. There was the discovery of an ancient world, an ancient culture, in which culture is so deep in people that it becomes a richness.”

Novelist and short story writer Eileen Drew makes the point that writers with Peace Corps experience “bring the outsider’s perspective, which we’ve learned overseas, to bear on the U.S. We are not the only writers to have done this, but because of the nature of our material, it’s something we can’t not do.”

Bob Shacochis characterizes Peace Corps writers as “torchbearers of a vital tradition, that of shedding light in the mythical heart of darkness. We are descendants of Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and scores of other men and women, expatriates and travel writers and wanderers, who have enriched our domestic literature.”

Myth And Mythology

Finally we come back to Gertrude Stein’s famous comment to Hemingway. “You are all a lost generation,” she told him. The story is that Stein had heard her French garage owner speak of his young auto mechanics and their poor repair skills, telling Stein that they were a lost generation.

All Gertrude Stein wanted was competent mechanics to repair her car but Hemingway seized the expression, as any good writer might, and identified a literary movement. In one phrase he captured the mood of his generation.

See what a writer can do with one good line?

In fifty years of living on the edge, Peace Corps writers have found new experiences, new languages and new ways to tell their tales. They have–all of you have–an understanding of other societies that very few Americans will ever know. In your writing you are telling stories of cultures with understanding, compassion, and insight.

And in doing so, by sharing your stories of faraway lands with the people back home, you are educating America.

Because of you–Peace Corps Writers–we are no longer the ugly American to the rest of the world.

At the Peace Corps Writers Luncheon, held on September 22 at the Library of Congress to celebrate the establishment of a Peace Corps Collection at the Library, Sarah Erdman (Cote d’Ivoire 1998-2000), author of

Here is what Sarah had to say about her memoir and the works of all Peace Corps writers:

AN AMAZING THINK HAPPENED just after my book came out in 2003.  I got an email from a man who was nearing thirty years in the development field. He had become cynical and bitter about aid work.  His daughter had given him Nine Hills for Christmas, he told me, and as he read it, the two of them corresponded by email. I thought you might like to read our conversation, he wrote, and he tacked on at the bottom their very moving email exchange. Reading Nine Hills had brought him straight back to his days as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia in the early 60’s. He remembered the people who made him want to help; the passion and idealism that drove him into his career.  He thanked me for giving him a second wind.

Over the years volunteers have written from the field to say they’re serving in Fiji or Ukraine but still my experience rings true or to tell me they were inspired to start a baby weighing program after reading about mine.  A woman who left Peace Corps early wrote, I hope as I keep reading, I can figure out exactly what inside me made me leave Africa.

At a book reading in Portland, Oregon a delicate-looking woman stood in line so that I could sign her book.  Her son Zach Merrill had killed himself while serving in Mali. She wanted to understand his life there better.  As a Placement Officer at HQ, I spent an hour on the phone with the mother of an applicant I had worked with extensively.  He had died in an ice climbing accident and his invitation to Peace Corps had arrived in the mail just days afterwards.  She called to say he couldn’t come and to tell me she had buried my book with her son-it brought tangibility to the dream he had had and the future he would not.

This February, I heard from a woman who had asked me to sign a book for her 16-year-old daughter at a book reading back in 2004.  She found me on Facebook to tell me her daughter had read my story and made a plan.  Seven years later, she had majored in international relations and was awaiting her invitation to Peace Corps.  “We are BOTH filled with excitement and anticipation,” she wrote.

But those are just the members of the Peace Corps family. When I was writing my book in rural Montana, I was invited to speak at a women’s club.  I read a chapter I had polished up for the occasion, showed slides of village life, discussed women’s roles, described mask dances and funerals and even delved into the mystery of sorcery.  When I was done, the first question I got from the audience was, “So, let me get this straight.  You were the only white person?”  But they had questions-lots of them.  They had never really thought about what life in Africa was like before.

I am just one Peace Corps author. My book is just my story.  How many Americans have learned the nuances of modern China from Peter Hessler?  How many midwives have broadened their perspectives after reading Monique and the Mango Rains?  How many armchair travelers have crossed continents with Paul Theroux or mused about the idiosyncrasies of island life with Bob Shacochis?

For those who missed out on the eye-popping, mind-blowing, heart-warming, exquisite and impossible experiences that we had, our words unveil the unknown and convey the hope, dedication, and goodwill that Peace Corps embodies.

Within our community, there are RPCV groups all over the world that help keep the Peace Corps flame alight.  But I think it’s fair to say that we as Peace Corps’ writers have a unique ability to touch something deep and elemental, to connect with people one-to-one.  Our voices resonate with the retiree who stepped off the plane in Columbia in 1961 with a crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses, as well as the iphone-toting graduate who is about to step into a Peace Corps recruiting office.  To be one of those voices is greatest honor I’ve ever known.

Bob knows peace to the core

At 73, “Peace Corps Bob” Arias Thrives and Inspires

By Ron Arias

The Arias brothers. Bob Arias, left, with brother Ron

IN 2003, MY OLDER BROTHER suffered an acute stroke while driving a car in Salem, Ore. Before blacking out, Bob Arias, then 65, braked and stopped by the side of the street. He regained consciousness days later in a hospital, partially paralyzed, and unable to walk or talk. Doctors doubted he’d live another year. He vowed to fight back, starting a journey of rehabilitation that ultimately would take him to a remote South American town on the upper Paraguay River. There, my 73-year-old brother now works for the Peace Corps as a consultant to Chamacoco Indians and others on ways to promote and profit from eco-tourism. I hadn’t seen him since his stroke, so I went to Asunción, Paraguay to see the rehab miracle for myself — and to cheer him on. We embrace and I joke that he looks shorter. “You’re shrinking,” I say. “No way,” he says, tilting his head back and puffing himself up. “But I did lose sixty pounds after the stroke.”

Thus began, over the next 10 days of my visit, a string of revelations about how he not only rehabbed his body but also resurrected an earlier version of himself, of when he, a Mexican American, first served as a Volunteer in Colombia in the mid-1960s. He’s been so successful at this that the Peace Corps even uses his image in recruiting former Volunteers — especially Hispanics  who’ve completed service and want to serve again.

“Come on,” he says after I check into my hotel, “I want you to meet a potter, see what she’s making for me.” He explains that the idea of putting one big clay pot within another and filling the space between them with wet sand comes from Nigeria. The inner pot is kept cool enough to preserve fruits and vegetables for up to 18 days. They’re called Zeer pots.

Where he works, such low-tech storage is a big deal, since most villages and towns have limited or no electricity. Bob lives in the far north corner of Paraguay near the borders with Brazil and Bolivia. It’s an area of hot, tropical wetlands called the Gran Pantanal. To reach his site, Bahia Negra, it takes him three nights and four days aboard a rustic, 80-foot, diesel-powered riverboat that hauls all kinds of cargo, from passengers to pigs. “It’s like something out of Mark Twain days on the Mississippi,” he says. “You sit on the boxes, bags and crates piled on deck with the motorbikes and livestock. The boat stops at these villages along the way. People talk, sing, sell stuff. Spectacular sunrises, all kinds of birds. I pinch myself. I can’t believe they pay me to do this.” Granted, he adds, his monthly stipend is only about $300, but fortunately he also receives Social Security and a modest pension from his years running Los Angeles County’s first affirmative action compliance office in the 1970s. “I don’t do this for money,” he says. “I do it because I can still contribute, I’m still needed.”

Divorced with a son and two grandchildren, Bob is a Peace Corps Response Volunteer; an experienced former Volunteer responding to a specific host-country request on a 6-to-12-month assignment. About 7 percent of Peace Corps Volunteers are over the age of 50. The oldest volunteer, Muriel Johnston, 86, recently returned to the U.S. after serving  as a health volunteer in Morocco. During her service, Muriel was able to Skype with her great grandchildren.

Before coming to Paraguay, Bob spent a year trouble-shooting the operations of sustainable agricultural projects in Panama. Now, he spends much of his time visiting outlying, riverbank villages, meeting with leaders and merchants, discussing things like Zeer pots, boats for birdwatchers, or raising earthworms to sell to fishermen tourists.

We arrive at the potter’s workshop and are shown the big pots destined for demonstration in the far north. Afterward, we head for a bus to visit the Peace Corps offices. Aside from a slight hitch in his stride, Bob shows no outward signs of his stroke. Eight years ago, what probably caused it was the stress he felt as a security advisor to then-Peace Corps director Gaddi Vasquez, not long after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “My blood pressure spiked,” he explains, “so I took a leave and drove back to Oregon. Two days later I blacked out behind the wheel.”

“Bob is an amazing guy,” Peace Corps/Paraguay country director Don Clark says. “He comes here at 70-plus and goes to one of the toughest, most remote sites we have — after a stroke. He’d already (been) a Peace Corps director in Argentina and Uruguay and had run training camps and language programs. For a guy who’s done as much as he’s done, he still oozes Peace Corps. That’s inspiring for all of us.”

What I don’t know at the time is that a few weeks later my brother will tell me that after his Paraguay tour he’ll probably head for another stint in Colombia. “I can’t wait,” says his email note. “It’s where I started, it’s like a second home.”

This is the link to Maureen Orth’s (Colombia 1964-66) videos celebrating the 50 Years of the Peace Corps. All of the videos she did will be running for the next two weeks on CNN. This video–done in Morocco on a recent trip–was produced by Susan Koch of Cabinfilms. The videos will also be up on YouTube. CNN will be playing the videos done around the world for the next two weeks; they will also be on CNN.com: Peace Corps 50th anniversary video project.

CNN American Morning had the first one–a baseball story in a remote village in Morocco–on this morning. Check it out!

Great job, Maureen and Susan.

Lesole’s Dance Project was the 2003 grant recipient of The Washington Post’s: Bringing the Arts to Our Community, and in 2007, LDP was nominated for the Emerging Performer/Group at the Metro DC Dance Awards. The company creates and performs works that highlight the unique qualities of contemporary modern and Afro-Fusion dance and provides educational residency programs on the movement and history of popular Traditional South African dances such as the crowd favorite Gumboots dance which they will perform at the Peace Corps Bash!

The company has performed nationally at the National Museum of African Art in Philadelphia, Miami International Book Fair, Cincinnati Play House in Ohio, Michigan State University, and The Harris Theater-Dance Africa Chicago and in the Washington DC area at Dance Africa DC-Dance Place, University of Maryland, The Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, and the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts. In August 2009, LDP launched its First Annual International Edu-dance Program, working with local primary schools in the townships of Sebokeng, South Africa