Miscellany

Yesterday in the New York Times I read that Jacqueline G. Wexler has passed away at the age of 85. The TIMES called her, “Ex-Nun Who Took On Church.” Indeed she did, and successfully. Sister J. as she was fondly called by her students back in St. Louis, had a slight connection with the Peace Corps during its early days. She was a famous liberal nun in the late Fifties and early Sixties and in 1965 she spoke to a packed room in the State Department at the first Conference of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. I recall her saying, off-the-cuff, that she was the only person in the room dressed in the traditional dress of a foreign country, i.e. the habit of the order of the Sisters of Loretto. A charming and charismatic woman, she was at one time the bane of my existence. So,  I cornered her that day in the hallway of the State Department . . .

Donna Shalala (Iran 1962-64) is back on the front page of the paper. Remember last August 2011 when there was a brief flare up about one of the fancy donors to her college– University of Miami where she is president–who was in jail. He said he had ‘paid off’ football players with gifts? Well, now  the story on the front page of the January 20, 2012, The Chronicle of Higher Education says that she made almost a half a million dollars in 2010 from serving on three companies’ boards. Two of those companies are run by university trustees. “That’s just a no-no,” according to a Jay W.  Lorsch, professor of human relations at Harvard Business School, and someone who has expertise in corporate governance. Donna isn’t the only college president with her hand in the cookie jar. The article entitled, “Board Conflicts Abound for College Chiefs” focuses on several other ‘chiefs’, including the . . .

Last week marked the first anniversary of the passing of Sarge Shriver.  His son, Mark Shriver, was invited by Director Williams to be one of the speakers in the Loret Miller Ruppe Series of talks given at the agency. Here are Mark’s comments if you were not at the Peace Corps, or have not read them. • WHEN MY FATHER DIED, my siblings asked me to give the eulogy at his funeral. At the time, I didn’t really want to be drafted into that role, but I was, and it has turned out to be a blessing for me. Because before I wrote that eulogy, I thought I knew my father. Of course I did know him — as any son knows his father. But as I was preparing the eulogy, I began to get to know him as a man in his own terms — not just as a . . .

[My friend Kevin Quigley, President and CEO of the NPCA, emailed me late today to tell me I was all wrong about the blog I posted over the weekend that drew attention to his organization.. You might remember how I wrote that their offices were moving to a higher space because they were running out of money and couldn’t afford stay on the lower floor. Not true says Kevin. I also said that they wouldn’t take a stand against the Peace Corps because the NPCA depended on the agency to support them. Not true says Kevin. I asked Kevin to please place his comments on the site, but he couldn’t because, as I said, he was moving to a higher floor and his computer was packed, but he email me anyway to say I could post his comments. And here is what Kevin had to say to correct my mistakes. He calls me Sean Padraic, by . . .

Writing in the Los Angeles Times on Friday, January 20, 2012, PCV Jared Metzker, who is stationed now in Guatemala, said that the Peace Corps should not have pulled out of Central America, saying that the one Volunteer who had been murdered in Guatemala was the first in 40 years. Metzker goes onto write in his op-ed piece,  “The Peace Corps director Aaron Williams decided last month to take a step back from the programs in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. He has evacuated all Peace Corps workers from Honduras and is suspending the induction of new volunteers in Guatemala and El Salvador. From my perspective, based on being here, speaking to other volunteers and reading the Guatemalan press every day, these decisions seem unnecessary, even cowardly.” I don’t think  Director Aaron Williams is a coward or afraid to assign PCVs to the “real world.”  Aaron and I were born and raised on the southside of Chicago; we . . .

The following paragraph is from the Peace Corps Agency Assessment Report published in June 2010. It is Recommendation #4 in the Vision Summary on page 12, and reads: Breaking from the current mission of Peace Corps Response, assignments would be open to those who could meet qualification criteria, whether or not they had been Peace Corps Volunteers in the past.  The program would place experienced and qualified individuals into assignments that draw on their specific skills and experience, with flexible time commitments. Questions RPCVs might raise are: Does this negate the language and cross cultural training that Volunteers receive? Does this negate the experience that serving Volunteers gain by service that would be helpful in a crisis response? Does this allows those who do not have the Peace Corps experience to use the “brand name” to their advantage? How do you keep the CIA from ‘volunteering’ and using the Peace Corps as . . .

All 158 Peace Corps volunteers in Honduras left the country on Monday, weeks after the United States announced that it would pull them out for safety reasons. The U.S. group said in late December that it was bringing home volunteers from Honduras and suspending training for new volunteers in El Salvador and Guatemala, though existing volunteers would remain in the latter two countries. The region is plagued by gang violence and Honduras is considered to have the highest murder rate in the world. Honduras President Porfirio Lobo said Monday that the Peace Corps volunteers had been affected by rising crime, but neither he nor U.S. officials have cited specific attacks as reasons for the withdrawal. U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Ledy Pacheco said instructions for the withdrawal came from Washington, where the group’s head office is located. The Peace Corps had operated in Honduras since 1963. The three countries make up the . . .

President Barack Obama announced Friday that he will ask Congress for the power to merge agencies to streamline government and improve efficiency. Obama wants to merger the Commerce Department, the Small Business Administration, the Office of the U.S. Trade representative and other independent business agencies into a new, unnamed Cabinet agency to create a more efficient experience for businesses. “Right now, there are six departments and agencies focused primarily on business and trade in the federal government – from the Commerce Department to the Small Business Administration to the U.S. Trade Representative’s office,” Obama said in remarks from the White House. “In this case, six isn’t better than one.” The president needs Congress to enact his idea. What next? The Peace Corps and AID? USIA all one Happy Agency? STAY TUNED!

Lost Touch: Peace Corps In Search Of 100,000 Old Volunteers January 11, 2012 by Corey Flintoff   Paul Vathis/AP Five Peace Corps trainees look at a map of the Philippine Islands in University Park, Pa. on July 31, 1961. The trainees will go there upon completion of training as teaching assistants in rural elementary schools. The National Peace Corps Association says it’s looking for about 100,000 good volunteers. They’re people who served in the overseas development program at some time in its 50-year history but later lost touch with their former colleagues. NPCA President Kevin Quigley says there’s no complete list of the 200,000 Americans who volunteered for the program, in part because key records were lost during its early days. “When the agency was in its infancy [in the early 1960s], a lot of systems for tracking former volunteers just didn’t exist,” Quigley says. The Peace Corps’ first director, . . .

I have written before about the Peace Corps’ first photographer, Rowland Scherman.  I got to know Rowland  in Ethiopia in the winter of 1962-63 when journalist Jim Walls and Scherman toured many of the Peace Corps countries writing about and taking photos of new PCVs. After his Peace Corps years, Rowland went out on his own as a free-lance photographer and became famous in other arenas. Here is one story of a famous photo he took on a sunny day in 1963. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhuSyFHGes0

I thought I might continue with a few more tales of Mad Men & Women at the Peace Corps in the early days when Headquarters was located in the Maiatico Building across from the White House and the agency had more clout in D.C. than it would ever have again. As we know the agency attracted to Washington the ‘best and the brightest,’ all of them wanting to work in the Kennedy Administration, with the majority wanting to work at the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps also attracted Republicans and one of them was Richard (Dick) Graham from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who worked with Bill Moyers as the Deputy Associate Director for Public Affairs. Dick Graham was one of the nicest guys to work at the Peace Corps, a selfless self-made millionaire in the days when being a millionaire meant real money. Dick had his Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering degree from . . .

Bill Moyers, who started out at the Peace Corps at age 27 or so, as the Associate Director for Public Affairs, and later was the Deputy Director under Shriver, and then continued to star in a variety of arenas, is back on public television this month with a new interview show, Moyers & Company. He left PBS 20 months ago, retiring from Bill Moyers Journal, but as he told Elizabeth Jensen in the New York Times (Sunday, January 8, 2012) he just needed a break. He wasn’t retiring. After all, he’s only 77! The new program by Moyers will be a lot like his last one: thoughtful interviews with thinkers. Upcoming will be interviews with David Stockman, Reagan budget chief; John S. Reed, the former Citibank executive; poet Rita Dove, and a four-hour chat with the political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, on their work Winner-Take-All Politics. The catch to  his return . . .

The Boston Globe is reporting that Joe Kennedy III,  a 31-year-old prosecutor and son of former Rep. Joe Kennedy, might run for the Democratic nomination of the redrawn Barney Frank district seat. Kennedy, a Harvard Law School graduate, was in the DR as a PCV. If he were to win, he would be the fifth RPCV in Congress. He is also the first in the fourth generation of Kennedys to thrust himself into electoral politics. He is the second Kennedy to join the Peace Corps. A cousin Maeve Kennedy McKean was an English teacher in Mozambique. She currently works at the Department of Health and Human Services.    

Busted Halo is a blog that I check weekly because I find it interesting, and also it relates to my job as a communication director at a small Catholic college. The blog is a media and ministry outreach to Catholics in their twenties and thirties created by the Paulist Fathers. The discussions are based on the belief that all God’s children are “saints in the making,” and that everyone is called to aspire toward the holiness and selflessness of a Mother Teresa or Saint Francis. At the end of 2011, Busted Halo looked back and remembered important figures who had died during the year. Included was a piece about Sargent Shriver that I read — because it was about Sarge. It was written by Joe Williams, an RPCV from South Africa, who is the head art, graphics and video producer for Busted Halo. After graduating from Texas Christian University with a degree . . .

Early Peace Corps Bibliography March 1961-March 1965 Books & Pamphlets An International Peace Corps: The Promise and Problems, by Samuel P. Hayes (Public Affairs Institute, 1961) $1.00. Breaking the Bonds: A Novel About the Peace Corps, by Sharon Spencer (Tempo Books, Grosset & Dunlap, 1963) $.50. Also available in hardcover. Complete Peace Corps Guide, by Ray Hoopes, with an introduction by R. Sargent Shriver (Dial Press, 1961) $3.50. Hidden Force, by Francis W. Godwin, Richard N. Goodwin and William F. Haddad, with a foreword by R. Sargent Shriver (Harper & Row, 1963) $3.95. Letters From the Peace Corps, Editor Iris Luce (David McKay Co. 1964) $2.95. New Frontiers for American Youth: Perspective on the Peace Corps, by Maurice L. Albertson, Andrew E. Rice and Pauline E. Birky (Public Affairs Press, 1961) $4.50. Peace Corps, by Glenn D. Kittler, with an introduction by R. Sargent Shriver (Paperback Library, 1963) $.50. Peace . . .