Archive - September 29, 2021

  By William Seraile (Ethiopia 1963-65)   I was among about 140 Peace Corps volunteers, mainly in our early twenties and graduates of Ivy League colleges, small never heard of private schools, a few large public universities, and a small number of historic black colleges and universities, went to Ethiopia as the second group of PCV teachers in the fall of 1963. Most of us had to examine our atlases to find Ethiopia on the map. Only one of us had ever been to Africa  — Haskell Ward (Ethiopia 1963-65) a graduate of Clark Atlanta University, who had spent a summer in Kenya with Operation Crossroads Africa, a model for the Peace Corps. We had two months of Peace Corps training at UCLA studying Ethiopian culture, history and Amharic, the Ethiopian language. Our Amharic instructors, all young graduate students studying in American universities initially assumed that I was one of . . .