Archive - March 2021

    Here’s a look at some of the agency’s major accomplishments and milestones: 1961: President Kennedy hosts a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden in honor of the first group of volunteers departing for service. Congress approves legislation for the Peace Corps. The first volunteers arrive in Ghana. 1977: Carolyn Robertson Payton is appointed Peace Corps Director by President Jimmy Carter. She’s the first female and first African American to serve in this role. 1985: The Paul D. Coverdell Fellows program, a graduate fellowship program offering financial assistance to returned volunteers, as well as opportunities to continue service in underserved communities, is established. 1995: The Peace Corps sends volunteers to the Caribbean island of Antigua to rebuild homes damaged by Hurricane Luis. This pilot program, Crisis Corps (now called Peace Corps Response), provides short-term humanitarian service to countries worldwide. 2005: For the first time, volunteers are deployed domestically . . .

A Ghanaian medical doctor has recounted how her Peace Corps teacher transformed her life The doctor is known as Ruhaimatu Osman and according to her, she was a bad student back in senior high school. Her story was shared in a post by US Embassy Ghana which reads; “Dr. Ruhaimatu Osman is a medical doctor at the Eastern Regional hospital- Ko foridua in Ghana. She shares this awe-inspiring story about her encounter with Peace Corps volunteers. “I write in reference to the Peace Corps celebrating its 60th anniversary of impacting lives. I am a medical doctor at the Eastern Regional hospital- Koforidua in Ghana. I attended St. Louis Senior High School in Kumasi from the year 2006 to 2009. As a young ambitious girl who wanted to be a medical doctor, I had my fears. I kept on asking myself, what if I fail in life. In my first year . . .

    Established by President John F. Kennedy on March 1, 1961, via Executive Order, the concept for the public service agency was first introduced months prior in an impromptu presidential campaign speech delivered to college students. “How many of you who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world?” then-Senator Kennedy asked the students. “I think Americans are willing to contribute. But the effort must be far greater than we have ever made in the past.” The response was swift and enthusiastic. Since the Peace Corps’ founding, more than 240,000 Americans have served in 142 host countries. Here’s a look back at some of the agency’s major accomplishments and milestones: 1961: President Kennedy hosts a ceremony in the White House Rose . . .

Thanks for the ‘heads up’ from Bill Preston (Thailand 1977-80)   By Kevin F. F. Quigley (Thailand 1976-79) Inside Higher Ed March 16, 2021 As the Biden-Harris administration gets underway in the midst of the global health, environmental and political crises that have given new urgency to needed social change, can a deeper partnership between higher education institutions and the Peace Corps play a role in building a more just and caring world? When they launched it at an earlier inflection point in American history, the Peace Corps’ founders tapped the energy and idealism of the young to achieve three enduring goals: 1) to help other countries help themselves, 2) to promote cross-cultural understanding and 3) to broaden our understanding of the world beyond our borders by having volunteers share their experiences with other Americans. Although the Peace Corps began as a bold innovation with great vision and ambition, much . . .

  In accepting the presidential nomination, John Kennedy promised “invention, innovation, imagination, decision.” Thirty-nine days after taking office, he established the Peace Corps by executive order and began to keep that promise. Harris Wofford remembers in this long-ago short essay. • The Peace Corps began for me when a call came from Millie Jeffrey, a Democratic National Committee member and active colleague in the Kennedy campaign’s Civil Rights Section (where I was deputy to Sargent Shriver). With great excitement, she told me about Kennedy’s extemporaneous talk she had heard at 2 a.m., October 14, 1960 to thousands of students, faculty, and town people waiting for him in front of the University of Michigan’s Student Union. Challenging the students, he had asked them if they were ready to spend years serving in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. Stirred by his question, Michigan students, including Millie’s daughter, had taken around a petition . . .

  It’s a fact of Peace Corps life that a volunteer must learn to get by in a world not his own, not her own. It’s never a perfect adjustment, not a completely comfortable fit. Often you make mistakes, some of which can be serious. Others are hilarious. (Once, at the dinner table with our training family in Asunción, as we were learning Spanish, my wife, Anne, commented that she had been taking notes in her diarrhea, which completely cracked people up and may still rank near the top in their hall of conversational fame.) In our case, our Peace Corps experience of feeling our way, doing our best to understand what was going on, turned out to be good practice for the foreign service, which we joined a few years after returning from Paraguay. Our Peace Corps country was nothing like Bolivia, or Honduras, or Spain, despite the common . . .

  Peace Corps was created in the golden glow of Post-World War II America. That war was won with our fossil fuel based industrial might. With the Marshall Plan, our ideals, our resources, our technology, we rebuilt our enemies, Germany and Japan,  into strong capitalist economics and laid the foundation for their democratic governments. Both countries became our strong, independent allies. At home, the GI Bill gave veterans a college education and support to own a home, building blocks for our growing middle class. Our economy was a golden cornucopia spewing forth millions of products, from a polio vaccine to pastel, scented toilet paper. In his Inaugural Address, President Kennedy acknowledged our wealth and our success with this call: Now the trumpet summons us again — not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need — not as a call to battle, though embattled we are — but . . .

  Not many people can claim association with an agency spanning nearly 50 years, but our guest can. In the case of the Peace Corps, she’s been working for, with and in it for almost all of the 60 years the Peace Corps is celebrating this year. She’s got a great title to go with that experience — Expert in the Office of the Director. Kate Raftery (Paraguay 1973–75), joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin on March 16, 2021 to discuss her Peace Corps career. • In a half century in and out of the Peace Corps, she’s done it all   Tom Temin: Ms. Raftery, good to have you on. Kate Raftery: Thank you very much for having me. TT: And we should point out, you didn’t work for the Peace Corps continuously, because no one can do that. But tell us how you have been orbiting that agency for all this . . .