Archive - February 23, 2011

About 6 months ago Marian Beil, the publisher of this site,  met with one of the top organizers at the Peace Corps for the 50th celebration to share some ideas on how the Peace Corps might mark the occasion. One of Marian’s suggestions was to have an evening of dancing for PCVs and RPCVs to music played by bands from around the world — the kind of music that gets us up out of our seats — with a partner or not — to bask in the joy of having been able to embrace the world through our Peace Corps service. The response from the non-RPCV Peace Corps employee was 1) Peace Corps was being looked at closely by the GAO about expenditures from the Chicago 45th and they needed to be very careful [as far as I know the NPCA paid for that event in Chicago, not the Peace Corps]; 2) . . .

I got an interesting email over the weekend from a woman friend who was an early PCV. She was responding to the posted I put up about the two events on March 17 that profiles the ‘founders’ of the agency. She made a valid point, speaking about the Peace Corps HQ panel discussion, saying: “With all due respect to these folks, do you find it as perplexing as I do that none of these  panels ever includes early Volunteers–there are some fairly accomplished people around town who were part of Ghana 1 or Chile 1 or Colombia 1 or even Philippines 1! “I would think that audiences may want to know what it was like from the perspective of the Volunteer.  These guys–and you do notice that  with the exception of Mary Ann, they are all guys (shades of 1961) –provided lots of vision but they had little idea of the realities faced by the . . .