Archive - 2012

I know I can generate a lot of ‘comments’ and ‘Com’on Coyne!’ complaints by picking out Volunteers who really did an amazing job overseas. Yes, we all did amazing jobs! However, there are many, many PCVs who away from their APCDs, or any host country attention, did wondrous working as teachers, nurses, community development workers in the barrios of Latin America, or digging fish ponds in Africa. Whatever! We all knew one or two Super Vols in our programs. Some of us, perhaps, were Super Vols. Still, on the national level, over the 50 plus years of the agency, there are several moments when the world as a whole paused and for a moment at least nodded in agreement and thought: ‘yes, this is what the Peace Corps is all about.’ One such moment occurred early on in Nigeria at the University of Ibadan when Trainee Maragery Michelmore dropped a . . .

The ‘back story’ the Puerto Rico camp(s) comes mostly from Coates Redmon’s 1984 book, Come As You Are: The Peace Corps Story. Her author’s note at the opening of her history begins with a line that sums up Redmon’s personality and lifestyle as I knew it back in the early ’60s: “I decided to write this book over poached salmon and a glass of white win at the Jean-Pierre restaurant on K Street in Washington, D.C., April 1975.” Coates was feature editor of Glamour magazine in the late 1950s. (In full disclosure, my wife, a Non-Peace Corps Volunteer (NPCV), was the Executive Editor of Glamour for over a decade, in years after Coates tenure.) At the Peace Corps, Coates lists herself a ‘senior writer’ but my recollection was that she was attached to Charlie Peters Evaluation Division and in the early Sixties, as I recall, she spent a lot of time riding up and . . .

From its first days the Peace Corps knew that it needed help from international organizations to get the agency off the ground. And it received tremendous help from private groups in the way of contacts, experience and support in planning, recruiting, selection, training and overseas project administration. In June of 1961, there were only two projects administered for the Peace Corps by private agencies, CARE in Colombia, and Heifer Project, Inc., on the island of St. Lucia in the West Indies. Within another year there were 17 projects administered by private organizations under contracts with the Peace Corps. Also 30 % of Volunteers were working with other organizations–national and international.  PCVs were in addition getting administration help from 13 colleges and universities in 16 programs in 13 countries. Besides that, some PCVs got help from past association with a university in a particular county. For example, the University of Kansas and Costa . . .

Elias Wondimu is the Publisher & Editorial Director of Tsehai Publishers that is located independently within Loyola Marymount University in Southern California. This is a wonderful publishing company and he is launching an Ethiopia Coffee Table Book. It is a project you might want to support. Elias writes: The book is an attempt to change global perception of Ethiopia by focusing on the many accomplishments of successful younger Ethiopians living throughout North America and Ethiopia today. These individuals are the sons and daughters, and younger siblings of those who lived through the 1970s Ethiopian political turmoil. By focusing on these individuals, we want to tell their parents’ story of resilience and share with the world the proud heritage that they commonly inherit as Ethiopians. This book presents the life stories of dynamic achievers from all walks of life. Some are scholars, scientists, artists, chefs, singers, models, and executives. Few you’ll . . .

from  ctpost.com by Michael P. Mayko Jesse Osmun, a former Peace Corps volunteer from Milford, CT. charged with abusing several young girls in a South African HIV/AID encampment preschool, was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison on Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2012. HARTFORD — A former Peace Corps volunteer from Milford admitted Wednesday he “tarnished” his country and the organization by sexually molesting young girls between the ages of 3 and 6 years old while working in a preschool at an HIV/AIDS camp in South Africa. “The victims in South Africa did nothing, absolutely nothing to deserve the conduct that came upon them,” a contrite Jesse Osmun told Chief U.S. District Judge Alvin W. Thompson moments before he was sentenced to 15 years in prison, followed by 10 years of U.S. Probation Department supervision. “They were completely innocent but they will live with the scars for the rest of their lives.” Osmun, . . .

While many, many PCVs involved in Community Development felt they were failure, and some were, still projects on the whole were working. “The Community Development Program in Peru is healthy,” wrote Herb Wegner in a 1963 Peace Corps Evaluation Report on Peru, “The question in Peru is not so much of going from bad to good—but from good to better.” The large program in Colombia was also basically sound. By January 1964, over six hundred PCVS were working various projects and despite the site, it was successful. Meridan Bennett in his Evaluation Report summed up, “the Peace Corps’ ability to work in Community Development has been proven in Colombia.” And both of these early Evaluators in Charlie Peters office were hard edged reporters. The reason for the ‘success’ was because most of the projects in-country were ‘undefined.’ PCVs were free to tackle everything, and they did!  Volunteers in Latin America . . .

As Gerald T. Rice points out in his comprehensive study of the origins of the agency, The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps, published in 1985 by Notre Dame Press. (This was Rice’s doctoral dissertation as the University of Glasgow) “While Shriver actively encouraged Peace Corps teachers to go beyond their classroom duties and mix with their host societies in many different ways, the philosophy of “participation” found its fullest expression in the other major activity of the Peace Corps: Community Development.” Key to the development of “Peace Corps Community Development” at the agency, especially and nearly exclusively, in Latin America was the first Peace Corps Country Director in Peru and later regional head for all Latin American programs, one of the original Mad Men of the agency, Frank Mankiewicz. I have written elsewhere on this blog about Mankiewicz who would later go onto work as Robert Kennedy’s press aide, and . . .

Melanie Kondrat (Morocco 2012-14) is working in Youth Development in Morocco. From Tacoma, Washington, she graduated from Gonzaga University in 2011. She blogs about her Peace Corps tour at www.postgradmel.com. Melanie gave me permission to reprint her touching account of her trip back to Ouaouizerth where Chris was a PCV. Remembering Chris Stevens: My Journey to Ouaouizerth by Malanie Kodrat (Morocco 2012-14) I like to think that if I had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco in the early 80’s Chris Stevens and I might have been friends. Maybe we would’ve bonded over our mutual love for the Tadla-Azilal province. For the mountains that surround us. For the red dirt that threatens to stain our clothes every day. For the generous culture of the Amazigh people who’ve inhabited this region for ages. Or maybe we would’ve bonded over a love for the West Coast (Best Coast). We might’ve compared . . .

[Ambassador Chris Stevens was a PCV in Morocco from 1983-85.  He served twice in Libya in three different Foreign Service capacities, first, as Deputy Chief of Mission from 2007-09;  then as Special Representative to Libya’s National Transitional Council from March 2011 to November 2011; and  finally as Ambassador from June 2012 until his death on September 11, 2012.] Learning of Chris Stevens’ Death While Reading The Aeneid by Tino Calabia (Peru 1963-65) What intel the White House should have known/acted upon before the 9/11 attack and killing of Ambassador Chris Stevens and his colleagues in Libya is triggering partisan arguments sullying the memory of Stevens’ sacrifice.  Or so the current gamesmanship seems to this former Peace Corps Volunteer. Lots of the 200,000 Americans who, like I, have served as Volunteers never knew, prior to the violence in Benghazi, that the Peace Corps first sent young Chris Stevens to Morocco.  Later the State . . .

The early identification of the Peace Corps was that it was an agency filled with B.A. Generalists Volunteers. That evaluation was pretty much true. The majority of  Trainees in ’61 and ’62 were June graduates who went immediately back to school that summer and into 2-3 month Training Programs on colleges and universities across the country. Of the first 1,150 Volunteers to join the agency, more than two-thirds had Bachelor’s degrees; one in 10 had an advanced degree–an M.A. or Ph.D.  The Peace Corps HQ building was also full of academic types. In 1961 there were 31 Ph.D’s, 42 M.A.’s, and 20 LL.B’s on the Washington executive and advisory staff. Overseas, in Latin America alone, there were eight doctorates, all graduates of  Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, and the University of Chicago.  So it is not surprising that the agency  turned to 36 institutions from the East Ivy League schools, through the Mid-West, and onto California to direct Training Programs. By . . .