Archive - February 2010

Early training for the Peace Corps–this was in 1961–was on college campuses like the University of Michigan, but for some Trainees it also meant “field training” in Puerto Rico, the Rocky Mountains, and other locations. The first Puerto Rico site ws located in the mountains south of Arecibo. This training came about, or so it seems, because Shriver in February and March of ’61 reviewed the British Volunteer Service Overseas (VOS) program. These schools exposed their student to unexpected challenges and the students were judged by how well they reacted to new situations. This method, I understand, was developed during World War II and was later adopted by the British industry as a technique for training potential leaders. Shriver got in touch with the Outward Bound Trust, governing body of the schools, and got the help of two of their members, Sir Spencer Summers, chairman of the Trust, and Captain Frederick Fuller, Headmaster of the oldest Outward Bound . . .

Training I Ordinary Americans had rarely been trained systematically for service overseas. As assistant Secretary of State Harlan Cleveland pointed out in his study, “The Overseas American,” attempts at orienting Americans to overseas service had usually been casual and totally inadequatee. As a result many Americans living abroad, whether privately or as officials, had not had a real understanding of the society in which they found themselves. Fewer still had learned the local language. These were the errors the Peace Corps resolved to avoid when they began Peace Corps Training in the summer of 1961. When the Peace Corps was established on March 1, there were few guidelines on how to train PCV effectively for service in the Third World. Faced with this dearth of precedents, Associate Director Larry Dennis sponsored a series of Peace Corps Institutes which brought people together from Government agencies, universities, foundations, business, labor and professional and . . .

SELECTION II The test battery was only one phase of the selection process. Selection began when an applicant filled out the questionnaire and returned it to the Peace Corps. This process of volunteering represented a kind of “self-selection” and it was in no small part responsible, or so Peace Corps/Washington thought, “for the generally high calibre of Peace Corps applicants in those early days.” Further “self-selection” occurred when and applicant was offered an invitation to train for a specific project and was free to accept or decline the invitation. Potential Volunteers listed various references on the questionnaire and they were contacted. What was learned (and this surprised the Peace Corps selection staff) was that the attention paid to the recommendations by referents provided a “valuable tool for selection.” [In later years, when doing studies on how ‘successful’ PCVs were overseas, the Peace Corps found that the evaluations by PCV’s mothers proved to be the most accurate of all on . . .

Selection [PCVs today fill out applications for the Peace Corps, mostly on-line, and have a quick one hour interview, in person or by phone. with a recruiter; they supply a list of 4 references, and take a physical examination and that is how they get into the Peace Corps. Today’s PCVs have no idea of the elaborate selection process that took place in the early days of the agency. Here is a brief summary (over the next few days) of what happened in D.C. (and across the country) to select and train the first generation of Peace Corps Volunteers.] In March 1961, in developing a way to find the right Volunteers for the right job, there was no margin for error, or so they thought at Peace Corps HQ in the old Maiatico Building. The Peace Corps, at the time, was a  highly visible, well reported operation of the government. A considerable body of public opinion was already . . .

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 . . .

According to the 1st Annual Report to Congress for the Fiscal Year that ended on June 30, 1962 there were 7 major problems facing the Peace Corps in March 1961, the day President Kennedy signed the Executive Order establishing the agency.   1) Were there enough qualified and talented Americans willing to respond to the Peace Corps invitation to service? 2) Would foreign governments request these Volunteers to fill their middle-level manpower needs? 3) Could the right Volunteers be selected? 4) Could they be adequately trained to avoid the pitfalls of Americans who had failed overseas before? 5) Would they have the stamina to stay on the job? 6) Could the Peace Corps undertake its mission independently or would it be entangled in existing red tape? 7) Would Congress approve the Corps at all, an even if it did, would enough money be appropriate for a new world-wide undertaking involving thousands . . .

A small group of Peace Corps planners began to gather in the two-room suite at the Mayflower Hotel in February 1961 to develop the concept of a Peace Corps. At first with Shriver was Harris Wofford, then a Presidential Aide, and Richard Goodwin, also a Presidential Aide who went onto become a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. They were soon joined by others recruited by Shriver and Wofford: Edwin Bayley, Executive Assistant to the Governor of Wisconsin; Bradley Patterson, Jr., Assistant Secretary of the Eisenhower Cabinet. He would become the Peace Corps Executive Secretary. Gordon Boyce, President of the Experiment in International Living; Bill Moyers, then Vice President Johnson’s Administrative Assistant; Lawrence Dennis, the Vice President of Pennsylvania State University, William Haddad, a newspaper reporter and former assistant to Robert Kennedy and Estes Kefauver; Atlanta lawyer Morris Abram; Al Sims, Vice President of the International Institute of Education; psychologist, Dr. Nicholas Hobbs, state government executive . . .

Dr. Jack Allison (Malawi 1967-69) is back from Haiti, but the Malawi Contingent of RPCVs and Peace Corps Staff continue their work in-country. Dr. Tom Powers (Malawi 1967-69) and Andrew Oerke (PC Staff: Tanzania, Uganda, CD Malawi, CD Jamaica 1966-71) with Dr. Anitra Thorhaug are still on the ground. Jack has returned to raise funds for their work. Over the weekend, Anita wrote me, “Today the United Nations water and food started flowing to a group of more than 500 families in the epicenter village of Gressier where no supplies or medical care had previously occurred since the quake. Dr. Powers, who is assessing medical needs, has recently been in disasters in Central and South America. We have disaster coordinator Livio Valenti on the ground from FAO who was instrumental in mapping groups and getting the food and water flowing. From Dr. Jack Allison I hear, “we literally treated hundreds of . . .