Archive - 2015

Last night in D.C. Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet, and Charlotte Kea from her office, and other RPCVs, including former Senator Christopher Dodd, were hosted by Boston University’s Scott Nichols, another RPCV so that the group could discuss raising funds to increase the number of PCVs overseas. The money raised, I presume, will be to lobby Congress to increase the Peace Corps budget. Nichols, I understand, is planning to hold a series of such dinners around the country before Carrie leaves her post at the end of the Obama administration. His aim is to make Peace Corps alumni, as he calls them, a more effective force for increasing the size of and funding for Peace Corps. As Carrie told her dinner partners, “many qualified applicants are turned away and several countries asking for volunteers cannot be accommodated because of lack of funds.” Some guests wrote checks on the spot. There were also . . .

Early on Sunday, those of us up for another long drive, left Villa Clara to visit the Che Monument. It was really our first opportunity to see the countryside of Cuba, and this region of the island is quite beautiful with soft green hillsides and rolling land. What struck this Midwest farm boy was the nearly total lack of cultivated land. We learned later in the week that less than 30% of the country’s land is used for farming. Cuba imports about 80% of its food which makes it vulnerable to price increases, changes in food supply and the impacts of natural disasters, i.e., hurricanes. Most of this situation (if not all) is due to the dependence on Russia and then the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union.  How Cubans live today in rural Cuba is obvious from just this photo. It is a photo that could have . . .

In our tour of four provinces, the first ‘city’ we visited was Trinidad in the province of Sancti Spiritus, in central Cuba. Together with the nearby Valle de los Ingenios, it has been one of UNESCOs World Heritage sites since 1988. It is a cobbledstone town, a fairly well preserved Spanish colonial settlement of around 75,000.  The center of town is the Plaza Mayor, an open-air museum of Spanish Colonial architecture. Dominating the square, and the town of brightly painted buildings, is the beautiful Santisima Trinidad Cathedral and Convento de San Francisco. We arrived in Trinidad from our nearby hotel Ma Dolores with the last of the summer rains. This ancient town does not have anything like a drainage system and we were forced to hug the sides of buildings as we navigate the few square blocks up side streets to the historic plaza area. Nevertheless, wherever you go in . . .

On Sunday morning we drove for two hours to the Che Guevara Mausoleum and Monument in Santa Clara. Here are the remains of “Che” and twenty-nine others, including one woman, who were killed in 1967 during Guevara’s attempt to spur an armed uprising in Bolivia. There is also a bronze 22-foot statue of Che in this monument complex. Guevara, who was born in Argentina, was buried with full military honors in 1997 after his remains were discovered in Bolivia, exhumed, and returned to Cuba. There is also an eternal flame lit by Fidel Castro in Che’s memory. Our guide told us that Santa Clara was selected as the site for the mausoleum and monument as a way to remember Guevara’s troops taking the city on December 31, 1958, during the Battle of Santa Clara. It was the final battle of the Cuban Revolution. After this defeat, Batista fled into exile. What is particularly . . .

Last week the first NPCA trip to Cuba took place, an arrangement with Global Exchange, an organization that promotes people-to-people contact. This San Francisco travel group is one of only 12 ways in which the United States permitted to sponsored tours to the island. Twenty-five of us went on this trip, including Glenn Blumhorst, the President & CEO of the NPCA. In all 18 were RPCVs, one was a former HQ staff, there was a former PCV & Staff (me!), a current staff person, and four family/friends. Also the group had one 2015 COS RPCV (Nepal) and 2 RPCVs from the first PCVs to Samoa and Ethiopia. A second June trip to Cuba is now tentatively planned by the NPCA and in some ways we were the ‘experiment’. Let me say first that traveling with other RPCVs (if you have to go in a group) is the only way to visit . . .

One story that is told in the new book about the International Voluntary Services (IVS), The Fortunate Few IVS Volunteers: From Asia to the Andes, is from William Seraile (Ethiopia 1963-65). Here is a slightly edited version of what Bill had to say. Seraile had been a social science teacher in Mekelle, Ethiopia and he says “that experience had whetted my appetite for overseas adventures which is the reason I went to Vietnam.” He was 26 when he arrived in Can Tho and taught English at Phan Than Gian high school with a schedule that resembled a college professor’s light teaching load. The school had 3,000 students and was formerly a French fort and a World War II Japanese barracks. As the only American on the faculty, he recalls, his classes were very large. Before the Tet Offense, however, he had become disillusioned teaching English and thought he could better . . .