Archive - 2018

  “The Congressional Research Service (CRS) works exclusively for the United States Congress, providing policy and legal analysis to committees and Members of both the House and Senate, regardless of party affiliation. … Its highest priority is to ensure that Congress has 24/7 access to the nation’s best thinking.”  Its current summary report on Peace Corps Issues, updated on October 12, 2018,  can be read at: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS21168.pdf Peace Corps funding is discussed in detail and that is important.  The information helps to answer the question:  What happens to Peace Corps funding after December 7, 2018? The federal government’s budget runs from fiscal year beginning on October 1, and ends on September 30, of the next year.  Congress failed to pass a new budget by October 1, 2018 for fiscal 2019.  Instead, Congress passed a Continuing Resolution, funding agencies at the old 2018 level. For Peace Corps, this means funding continues at . . .

WASHINGTON – Peace Corps Director Jody Olsen joined USAID Counselor Chris Milligan to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Small Project Assistance (SPA) Program. The joint collaboration has supported more than 25,000 projects and 2,800 training activities in 116 countries over the past three decades. On Monday, at a co-hosted event held at Peace Corps headquarters, Director Olsen shared success stories and the results of a new, jointly-funded external report that evaluated the program’s effectiveness. “Whether increasing local water access in The Gambia, developing waste management solutions in Tonga, or mobilizing civic sector organizations around food insecurity in Macedonia, the SPA Program helps to catalyze community-led development,” said Director Olsen. “Time and again, we have seen the ripple effect of the program go well beyond a single grant, and last long after the end of an individual Peace Corps volunteer’s service. Now we have the hard data to prove it, thanks to . . .

Featherweight boxer Johnny Hood had 165 bouts in an amateur career which took him all over the U.S. in pursuit of expenses and eating money. Sometimes, he fought five and six nights in a row. In amateur tournaments, such as the Golden Gloves tournament in which he won the featherweight championship of Michigan, he sometimes had to take on three opponents in one night. Born and raised in Columbus, Mont., where the Yellowstone river pours out of the Rocky Mountains, Johnny Hood felt an early attraction toward Mexico. “I was bumming around Mexico one summer when I ran out of money,” he remembers. “I decided I would take my boxing and turn pro, but I didn’t know enough Spanish at the time to tell whether the agent said I would get 60 pesos for four rounds or four pesos for 60 rounds. You can guess which figure was correct.” Before . . .

Let’s see–four years prep school…Princeton, Magna Cum Laude…three years Harvard Law School….two years Peace Corps….” The Saturday Post, 1963

Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, Volume III Edited by Clifford Garstang (South Korea 1976-77) Press 53 Publisher October 2018 196 pages $19.95 (paperback)   Reviewed by Peter Van Deekle (Iran, 1968-70) During my Peace Corps in-country training I always remember that one of my expatriate guides distinguished between visiting (short-term travel) and living (extended immersion including residency and employment) in a foreign culture.  Despite what some erroneously called a “junket,” Peace Corps service represented an intensive cultural immersion that travel could not provide. Much of the short fiction in Volume III of  Everywhere Stories, edited by Clifford Garstang, is informed by that intensive immersion that only living in a society can supply.  This collection’s short story authors individually reflect that unique awareness particular to each tradition and circumstance associated with a country. The short fiction in Volume III is organized by five major geographic regions and countries within . . .

The turning in the road for Bill Moyers came when he took a summer internship in the office of Lyndon Johnson, then Democratic leader of the Senate. The inside glimpse into national politics that this experience gave him—as well as the relationship Moyers formed with the man who became president—set in motion a chain of events which brought him finally to the Peace Corps. If he hadn’t come to Washington in that summer of 1954, Moyers would probably become a professor of ethics at Baylor University. “I was all signed up at Baylor when an offer came from Mr. Johnson to join his staff as a special assistant working for the Majority Leader in his relations with the Senate,” Moyers said. “To me, the offer was irresistible.” The young special assistant became Johnson’s executive assistant during the Senator’s 1960 campaign for the Vice Presidency. In this capacity, he lived in the . . .

  “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.” John F. Kennedy May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963

“Do you think it would be all right on a postcard to mention frozen foods, dirty streets, crowded tenements, TV commercials, and things like that?” This is the original cartoon that Ellen Kennedy, wife of Padraic Kennedy, Chief of the Division of Volunteer Field Support –1961-65–purchased from The New Yorker cartoonist. Ellen and Pat Kennedy kindly gave the cartoon to me and I am turning it over to the NPCA when they open their RPCV museum at their offices in Washington, D.C. next spring. The “post card” incident in Nigeria involving the lost postcard sent home by a PCV was a signature event of the first year and because the Volunteers and Staff in Nigeria “held it together” the Peace Corps was kept together. It could have caused the death knell for the agency. The New Yorker, as only they would, found humor in the situation and published this cartoon.

Thanks for the ‘heads up’ from Andy Trincia (Romania 2002-04) Peter Navarro—a business-school professor, a get-rich guru, a former Peace Corps member, and a former Democrat—is among the most important generals in Trump’s trade war. MATTHIEU BOUREL by ANNIE LOWREY DECEMBER 2018 ISSUE of The Atlantic “No one’s more careful about what they buy,” Peter Navarro (Thailand 1972-75) told me recently. The director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy was explaining that he reads labels closely and avoids products made in China. “People need to be mindful of the high cost of low prices,” he said. In Navarro’s telling, those cheap flip-flops are supporting an authoritarian state, and that cut-rate washing machine might be mortgaging America’s future. Such wariness of foreign goods is not just one man’s consumer preference—it’s United States policy. In the past year, the Trump administration has embarked on a trade war with sweeping geopolitical aims: . . .

When newly independent Cyprus showed an interest in inviting the Peace Corps, the Near East-South Asia regional office sent Patricia Sullivan to Nicosia, the island’s capital city. Miss Sullivan, who later became operations officer for Nepal and Afghanistan as well as Cyprus, arrived in Nicosia on January 9, 1962, and remained until early April. Toward the end of April, Associate General Counsel Roger Kuhn, then discussing a program in Turkey, flew over from Ankara for three days to assist with a few technical points in the program note. When Miss Sullivan flew back to Washington, the first Cyprus program, which called for geologists, teachers and agricultural extension workers, was ready to go. The 23 Volunteers who were sent to the island went into training nine weeks later at Howard University. Meridan Bennett, the Representative in Cyprus, shared part of the training with them. Born in Minneapolis, “Med” Bennett was raised . . .

          The photographs are by Rowland Scherman, Paul Conklin and Jim Walls, first photographers for the agency.

      The photographs are by Rowland Scherman, Paul Conklin and Jim Walls, first photographers for the agency.  

One of the nicest people, especially to RPCVs arriving at PC/HQ in the early days, was a woman who had the least connection to Volunteers life, Ruth Olson. She was raised in Albuquerque, N.M. and had two years at the University of New Mexico before she came to Washington to take a job as a typist in the Treasury Department. It was then the gloomy Thirties, the heart of hard times, and her college career became a casualty to economics. The approach of World War II generated a number of new war agencies which, because they were new, had tumultuous personnel problems. Beginning in 1940, Miss Olson moved through the personnel offices of a number of these new agencies—the War Production Board, the Federal Security Agency, the Foreign Economics Administration, the vastly expanded Navy. In the process, she was called on to deal with every conceivable variety of personnel problem. . . .