Author - John Coyne

The other day I went down to D.C. to interview Aaron Williams, the new Peace Corps Director, a former Volunteer in the DR in 1967-70. Aaron told me that when he flew off to Training it was the first time this southside Chicago kid had ever been on a plane. He had never been out of Chicago before joining the Peace Corps, earning his college degree locally, in Education and Geography from Chicago State University, not Harvard or Yale. After his tour, he worked for the Peace Corps in Chicago as a Recruiter, and all these years later, that gang of RPCV Recruiters who worked together in the early Seventies are still close friends. For another year, and this was 1970-71, he worked in Peace Corps Washington as the Coordinator of Minority Recruitment, and then he returned to school and earned an MBA in Marketing and International Business. He worked in Minneapolis with General Mills for awhile before beginning a long USAID . . .

Kinky Friedman (Borneo 1967-69) will not run again for governor of Texas. Instead Kinky will seek, as a Democratic,  the position of agriculture commissioner. In his last governor’s race, he finished fourth, running as an independent. Kinky has met with both Democratic gubernatorial candidates and has been stating his positions as the agriculture commissioner. For example, he will be for promoting more food from local producers in school cafeterias and putting animals rescue facilities in countries across Texas.    .

I think we have to view it as a victory, folks.  It’s the highest single year dollar-increase in 49 years.  In an actual and a symbolic sense, it can transform the Peace Corps. To help put it in perspective, it’s more than Peace Corps ever got in a single year since its founding, more than we got in the last seven years combined.  Director Williams is doing a magnificent job already, and with this 18% increase, he can do a whole lot especially if they streamline operations. I feel very proud and pleased with what we did and what I learned personally from all of you.  I had no experience in advocacy or lobbying and was thrown into this competitive environment.  Yes, we all wish we got the House mark (or $10 or $20 million more), but we didn’t. Failure would be if we just stopped trying.  This is nothing short of . . .

Several of  you have emailed me to ask ‘what’s the skinny on this Rajeev Goyal guy?’ To give  you a quick summary, over the last two years, Rajeev has been our indefatigable advocate of Peace Corps growth.  Without any formal training in lobbying or advocacy, guided by a team of advisors, he met with over 200 Congressional staff members to contest the anemic funding posture of Peace Corps.  Following a simple prescription of “squeeky wheel gets the grease,” he has organized 10,000 former volunteers, to pressure their elected representatives in a respectful, informed manner to vote for new funding to rejuvenate Peace Corps, which is half the size it was in 1966 despite 20 countries that want volunteers. He changed what was a marginal issue into a national news story, galvanizing the media (with the help of RPCV writers and journalists) into a watchdog for the President’s promise of doubling. Yesterday, as you know, the Senate passed a $60 million . . .

Yesterday the U.S. Senate  gave final congressional approval of a $400  budget to fund the Peace Corps in Fiscal Year 2010. President Obama is expected to sign the appropriations package into law shortly. The $400 million appropriation for Peace Corps is larger than Obama’s budget request, and is the result of work that Rajeev and others did to get the government to support the Peace Corps agency. Thank you, Rajeev! You’re the Little RPCV That Could! Watch Rajeev on Nightly News with Brian Williams http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/vp/29898341#29898341

The other weekend when visiting a small used bookstore appropriately named the BookBarn in rural Columbia County in upstate New York, several miles from where we have a weekend home, I spotted on a shelf in this low ceiling cluttered store a copy of Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped At Eboli. It is a book that I haven’t seen in some forty plus years, in fact since I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia. This book was one of appropriately 75 paperbacks that Sarge Shriver and the first administration of the Peace Corps put together in a portable ‘booklocker’ for Volunteers. The books were to be read and left in country, to become seeds for new libraries in the developing world where we were serving. The used copy I found in the Bookbarn was a later edition, a TIME Reading Program Special Edition, first published in 1964 with a new Editors’ Preface. The body . . .

Jason Carter (South Africa 1998–2000) who wrote Power Lines: Two Years on South Africa’s Borders published by the National Geographic Society in 2002, and who is the grandson of former president Jimmy Carter, has announced he is entering the race for the Georgia Senate. A Democrat, Jason, said this week that he will run for a DeKalb County seat soon to be vacated by David Adelman, President Obama’s nominee to be ambassador to Singapore. A special election will be held in the Atlanta-area district in March. Jason, now 34, is an attorney who focuses on voting rights at an Atlanta firm. He graduated from Duke University, then was a PCV in South Africa, and came home to attend the University of Georgia School of Law. He is the founder of the community service group Democrats Work. Jason’s great-grandmother, Lilian Carter, was a PCV in India from 1967-69.  Her book, Away From Home: Letters To My . . .

Roy Hoopes who wrote, among many other books, The Complete Peace Corps Guide, for Dial Press back in 1968, and was a long time Washington journalist died last week in Silver Springs Maryland. In his lifetime he wrote 30 plus books. Hoopes is best known for his 1982 biography of James M. Cain, who wrote the hard-boiled classics The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity. The story goes that  Hoopes read an article Cain wrote for the Washington Post in 1975 about columnist Walter Lippmann, and then found Cain, and all-but-forgotten novelist living alone in Hyattsville, Md.  Hoopes wrote a profile of Cain for Washingtonian magazine and talked extensively with Cain before the 85-year-old author died in 1977. The very definition of a professional writer who lived by his typewriter, Roy Hoopes contributed to hundreds of publications and held many jobs with magazines, newspapers and federal agencies. He wrote . . .

Every new Peace Corps administration tries to reinvent the agency with a new tag line. Remember,  the ’70s line that went “Not Your Father’s Peace Corps?” And most recently the Peace Corps is saying: “Life is Calling? How far will you go?” In the first years of the agency there were no need for a selling line for the Peace Corps, but there was certainly a need to tell people what the agency was. Warren Wiggins, in an interview I did with him in January 1997, credits Bill Moyers for getting the word out to the world. Moyers had come to the agency as the Associate Director for Public Affairs early in 1961. “His (Moyers) role in the creation of the public service advertising campaign for the Peace Corps created a nationwide citizen constituency,” Wiggins told me. “These achievements were of unparalleled importance. Moyers got Young and Rubican to create ads. Moyers . . .

Trying to find the ‘perfect’ Peace Corps Volunteer was a difficult task from day one of the agency. Shriver said early on, “there is no perfect Volunteer, unless you believe in the hazy concept of a perfect American.” “Peace Corps Volunteers,” he said, “look like any Americans you might pass in the supermarket or like a neighbor who lives down the street. The average 24 years of age for men, 25 for women. The things that make them different from the average don’t show–their good will, their sense of adventure, their willingness to sacrifice for others and to work hard under difficult conditions.” In the early days it was thought that Shriver’s ‘perfect’ PCV would be skilled technicians or people with two or three years of experience in an activity which would be of use in the developing world. But it quickly became apparent that experienced technicians would not be . . .

In 1960 not everyone thought the Peace Corps was a great idea. Many people (and some of them good people) thought it was a wacky and dangerous idea. Former President Eisenhower declared it a “juvenile experiment,” and Richard Nixon said it was another form of “draft evasion.” The Daughters of the American Revolution warned of a “yearly drain” of “brains and brawn…for the benefit of backward, underdeveloped countries.” In those first few years of the agency, we didn’t know if the Daughters of the American Revolution and the other critics of the Peace Corps might not be right. Our joining up with Kennedy’s new venture might mean a stain on our careers for the rest of our lives. And yes, it was a dangerous idea, but not in the way the Daughters thought. The Peace Corps changed us. It made us aware of the world in ways we never would have been if . . .