Archive - October 30, 2018

On its second birthday, March 1, 1963, the Peace Corps counted 624 Volunteers at work in the Philippines. Except for 22 men assigned to a rural community action program in the large southern island of Mindanao, the so-called “Texas of the Philippines,” all the Volunteers, men and women, were employed as teachers—some at the university and secondary levels but most of them in elementary schools. This meant that the Philippines was the setting for the largest single overseas educational program that the United States had ever mounted. It was also by a considerable margin the largest program in the Peace Corps—and would continue to be so for 10 more months. As the Peace Corps planned the program in conformance with requests from the Philippines government—the republic served as host to 650 Volunteers by the autumn of 1963, some of whom were assigned for the first time to the lushly tropical . . .