February 3, 2010 – Peace Corps Worldwide

100 Days (Or Less) Part Eight: Day Three

Feb 03 2010

Day Three Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense. Mark Twain Most novels are written to a formula, especially big best sellers. For example, John Baldwin, co-author of The Eleventh Plague: A Novel of Medical Terror, developed a simple formula that he used to structure his novel. His ten-step formula is: 1. The hero is an expert. 2. The villain is an expert. 3. You must watch all of the villainy over the shoulder of the villain. 4. The hero has a team of experts in various fields behind him. 5. Two or more on the team must fall in love. 6. Two or more on the team must die. 7. The villain must turn his attention from his initial goal to the team. 8. The villain and the hero must live to do battle again in the sequel. 9. All deaths . . .

Peace Corps At Day One, # 4

Feb 03 2010

In the very early days of 1961, the experts had concluded that a Peace Corps of 300 to 500 Volunteers would be a realistic and worthwhile pilot program. The estimate was revised when Shriver and a Peace Corps “team” (then Presidential Assistant Harris Wofford and Peace Corps Assistant Franklin H. Williams and Edwin Bayley, among others) returned from a trip to Africa and Asia in May of 1961. Requests from world leaders for Peace Corps Volunteers, plus demonstrated interest at home, led to a revised estimate of 500 to 1,000 Volunteers by December 31, 1961, and 2,400 by June 30, 1962, the end of the Peace Corps’s first fiscal year. The governments of Ghana, Nigeria, Tanganyika, India, Pakistan, Malaya, Thailand, Colombia, Chile, St. Lucia and the Philippines were the first to request Volunteers. These requests covered much of what, in the first years, had come to be considered the Peace Corps . . .

Archive - February 3, 2010