Archive - January 11, 2012

Lost Touch: Peace Corps In Search Of 100,000 Old Volunteers January 11, 2012 by Corey Flintoff   Paul Vathis/AP Five Peace Corps trainees look at a map of the Philippine Islands in University Park, Pa. on July 31, 1961. The trainees will go there upon completion of training as teaching assistants in rural elementary schools. The National Peace Corps Association says it’s looking for about 100,000 good volunteers. They’re people who served in the overseas development program at some time in its 50-year history but later lost touch with their former colleagues. NPCA President Kevin Quigley says there’s no complete list of the 200,000 Americans who volunteered for the program, in part because key records were lost during its early days. “When the agency was in its infancy [in the early 1960s], a lot of systems for tracking former volunteers just didn’t exist,” Quigley says. The Peace Corps’ first director, . . .

I have written before about the Peace Corps’ first photographer, Rowland Scherman.  I got to know Rowland  in Ethiopia in the winter of 1962-63 when journalist Jim Walls and Scherman toured many of the Peace Corps countries writing about and taking photos of new PCVs. After his Peace Corps years, Rowland went out on his own as a free-lance photographer and became famous in other arenas. Here is one story of a famous photo he took on a sunny day in 1963. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhuSyFHGes0