Archive - 2010

I’ve saved this “character” for last in my collection of  Peace Corps Mad Men.  A television producer might think of  featuring this person as a main character for a new series. He wouldn’t be a bad ‘concept’ as they say in Hollywood for a new show.    In those early days of the agency he invented a new way of doing things in the government  that didn’t last, but did propel the Peace Corps from being a minor bureaucracy into a major player in D.C. Warren Wiggins credits Bill Moyers as the key figure in the Peace Corps during those first years, citing Moyers role in creating full bipartisan support in Congress, and how he got Young and Rubicam to develop those award winning ads some of us today are old enough to recall. All true. Warren is right about Moyers. However, recently I read a draft of an essay “Reflections on the Peace Corps” that Robert Textor, a former professor of Anthropology . . .

I recently came across the “Woyingi” blog.” http://woyingi.wordpress.com/ The blogger, a woman, lives in Canada. Her mother is French-Canadian and American German. Her father is Nigerian Ijaw. Her father was deported back to Nigeria when she was a child so she was raised by her mother and her maternal grandparents. She had no contact with her father until she found him in her mid-twenties and have since developed a relationship with him via e-mails. She has yet to meet him in person. She writes on African issues, African writers, and women. She wrote recently about Neshani Andreas who is from Namibia. Now, what is the connection to the Peace Corps here? Neshani trained as a teacher at Ongwediva Training College and taught English, history, and business economics from 1988 to 1992 in a school in rural northern Namibia, where her first novel The Purple Violet of Oshaantu is set. Neshani completed this novel soon after . . .

WASHINGTON, DC – Congressman John Garamendi (D-Walnut Creek, CA) and (Ethiopia 1965-67) who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, today voted for two amendments that would end the war in Afghanistan and set a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. John voted for an amendment authored by Obey and McGovern that requires the President to present Congress with a new National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan by January 31, 2011 and a plan by April 4, 2011 on the safe, orderly and expeditious redeployment of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, including a timeframe for the completion of the redeployment. By a vote of 162-260, it did not secure a majority vote. Garamendi also voted for an amendment by Rep. Barbara Lee that would restrict funding in Afghanistan to only what is necessary to have a safe and orderly withdrawal, protect soldiers and contractors on the ground, and carry out diplomatic . . .

In the fall of 1962, the Peace Corps Volunteers arriving in Ethiopia were reading, or had packed into our carry-on luggage, Catch 22 by Joe Heller; The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone; Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger; Exodus by Leon Uris. And, of course, The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. There were, I’m sure, a few other books being read on that long overnight flight on TWA out of the old Idlewild  Airport in New York to Rome and Athens, and then in the fleet of Ethiopian DC-6Bs into Africa. There were nearly 300 of us crossing Egypt and Sudan to arrive in Addis Ababa at dawn at the end of the “big rains” when the Ethiopian highlands are blanketed with bright yellow Maskel flowers. We stepped from the plane and smelled for the first time the burning of a hundred thousand eucalyptus fires — the smell of Africa . . .

Dick Irish, that old codger, has goosed me into recalling on paper a few more of the grand gals and guys who started the Peace Corps in the winter of  ’61. One woman who I remember fondly, and who was one of the class acts at the agency, was the very young and very charming, Sally Bowles, who was, everyone will agree, the first Peace Corps employee. She went to work for no pay at the Maiatico Building on March 1, 1961. Sally was the daughter of Ambassador Chester Bowles, an honors graduate in history from Smith College where she was named editor of the college newspaper and was elected president of the student body. By the time she arrived at the Peace Corps, she had traveled and lived in Southeast Asia, India, Mexico, Morocco, France and Spain. She had worked for Congressman John Brademas of  Indiana and as an administrative assistant to . . .

In the July 5, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, in The Talk of the Town section, there is a comment made by George Packer (Togo 1982-83) on the firing of General Stanley McChrystal,  Obama, and the nine years of fighting in Afghanistan. First a little history. Packer, as some of you will recall, supported Bush and the Iraq invasion. He was right up there with ‘mister personality,’ Christopher Hitchens himself. I had a falling out with George over his support of Bush and “Mission Accomplished,” not that he seem to notice. No, he just went ahead and wrote his award winning The Assassins’ Gate, and got a full time gig at the New Yorker. But he also came around to his senses when he saw what really was happening in Iraq, and now he is getting as pissed off about what is happening at Afghanistan as I am. Packer knows what he is talking . . .