Miscellany

Congressman Reuss was not the only U.S. legislator intrigued by the idea of youth service for America. Another Midwesterner, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, had observed the volunteer work being done by the American Friends Service Committee. He, too, like Congressman Reuss, had given talks on college campuses in the late 1950s and received the same sort of strong, enthusiastic responses that Reuss experienced at Cornell University. Humphrey would say later that no one in ‘official government Washington’ would take him seriously, but he went ahead anyway and assigned a young member of his staff–a Stanford University foreign relations graduate named Peter Grothe–to research the idea for him, and what Grothe uncovered convinced Humphrey that the idea had merit. Grothe spent six weeks interviewing private agency workers and digging through available material. In his final report, Grothe conservatively estimated that 10,000 volunteers could be sent into the field within four . . .

Congressman Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin, representing the Milwaukee area, went to the Far East in the fall of 1957 on a foreign aid inspection tour. The U.S. government had recently paid thirty million dollar to build a highway through the Cambodian jungle that Reuss realized when he arrived in Cambodia was a road to nowhere. One day he drove for miles along the new highway without spotting a single motorist. He spotted a solitary farmer trudging down the edge of the deserted road, his water buffalo in tow. The road, and the $30 million spent on it, was all a waste of money. But then, and by happenstance, in the same jungles of Cambodia, he came upon a village, and a new elementary school being built in the clearing by four young American school teachers. They told Reuss they had built the school with primitive tools and manual labor. . . .

Some Peace Corps historians, including early Peace Corps staff, trace the idea for such an organization as ‘the Peace Corps’ back to the nineteenth-century American philosopher and psychologist William James, and his “moral equivalent of war” statement. Bill Moyers, who was around the agency at the very beginning, was still saying in 2011 in an interview in Vanity Fair that he considered the Peace Corps his greatest professional achievement, adding, “We were making a statement to the world about America that is still valid half a century later. Remember, there is a moral alternative to war.” William James wanted a “conscription of our youthful population” to form “an army against Nature.” Once conscripted, the young people would be assigned “to coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing , etc.” James’ idea wasn’t entirely altruistic. He felt that assigning young people into disciplined service would . . .

The Peace Corps wasn’t Kennedy’s idea. It wasn’t a Democrat’s idea. It wasn’t even Shriver’s idea. Writing In Foreign Affairs magazine about the creation of the Peace Corps, Shriver would quote Oscar Wilde comment that America really was discovered by a dozen people before Columbus, “but it was always successfully hushed up.” Shriver added, “I am tempted to feel that way about the Peace Corps; the idea of a national effort of this type had been proposed many times in past years.” Beginning in 1809, churches in the United States started to send missionaries abroad. Besides preaching the gospel, missionaries also built hospitals and educated doctors and nurses. They helped farmers and they developed health and social welfare programs. They did much of what Peace Corps Volunteers would also do later in the history of America. The missionaries weren’t the only ones going overseas to help others. In 1850, British . . .

As Thurston Clarke (Tunisia 1968)  points out in his book Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and The Speech That Changed America, and Chris Matthews (Swaziland 1968-70) alludes to in his recent book on Kennedy, Elusive Hero, most of JFK’s great speeches evolved over time with ideas and paragraphs of prose being sharpened and changed and improved from one speech to the next during the campaign of 1960.  The idea for the Cow Palace speech on the Peace Corps has such a gestation period. To begin with, Kennedy was well aware of a ‘youth crop’ talk in the halls of Congress. In 1958 the novel The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick was published. As a Senator Kennedy had sent a copy to every member of Congress. The bitter message of this novel was that Americans diplomats were, by and large, neither competent nor effective. The implication . . .

In these first few days of the New Year, I thought I might try and chart the impulses in America that brought about the creation of the Peace Corps. These ‘impulses’ we might say are close to being lost in the fog of history. There were, however, several generally accepted desires that coalesced in the last days of the Fifties, framed by a number of people in speeches and in prose, and with the election of John F. Kennedy, became a reality as a federal agency. Most of the early history of the Peace Corps, as we know, lives only as oral history. Still there are a few key books that spell out in some detail the foundations of the agency. Two important books are The Story of the Peace Corps by George Sullivan, and that has an introduction by Sargent Shriver. It was published by Fleet Publishing in 1964. . . .

Marian Beil and I, and on behalf of all the bloggers on our site, would like to thank you for your support and for your contributions to www.peacecorpsworldwide.org as we close out our anniversary year. When we started this site for the Peace Corps Community our hope was that it would be a gathering place for all RPCVs. Marian and I wanted to draw into our gang of RPCVs writers others who would blog on all sorts of topics, that this new site would have something of interest for everyone. Marian and I began to publish a newsletter for and about Peace Corps writers after the 25th Anniversary of the agency, and we moved to a website in 2000. Next, we moved to this site where RPCVs interested in other issues might blog and share opinions, find news of what was happening with the agency, and like all good PCVs, complain about something or the other! We hope we have been successful. . . .

 [In our series of blogs from RPCVs around the world, we have this update from Colombia, sent to us from Bob Arias who is in country now as a Peace Corps Crisis Corps Volunteer (now called the Response Volunteers) and was a PCV in Colombia from 1964-66). He recently attended the swearing-in of the new PCVs to that country. We asked Bob about Christmas for him this season and he sent us Papá Noél in Colombia, 2011] Hey…Feliz Navidad they yelled to me as the bus came along side; they reached out to greet me, a stranger on the street in the coastal city of Barranquilla, Colombia. They were happy and wanted everyone they met to enjoy this holiday…so, Hey…Feliz Navidad y Prospero Año Nuevo 2012 I shouted back to their smiling faces…giving me the thumbs up as the bus traveled down the street. I have spent the Holiday’s in . . .

Corps Values The UO and the state of Oregon have been long and lasting contributors to the international vision of the Peace Corps. By Alice Tallmadge It was October 1972. The East African country of Uganda was in the grip of the brutal dictator Idi Amin and twenty-two-year-old Peace Corps volunteer Ernie Niemi ’70 was in a tight spot. The Peace Corps had decided to pull its volunteers out of the country, but to avoid retaliation it scheduled a conference in Kampala, the country’s capital and site of its major airport, and said all volunteers were required to attend. On Niemi’s way to Kampala, 300 miles from the boarding school where he had been teaching chemistry and physics for eighteen months, he had to pass through several roadblocks. At one, he was confronted by a security guard whose son was a student of Niemi’s. “He said, ‘You cannot leave. My . . .

[Thanks to Amber Davis Collins  ( Honduras 2002-04)  who forwarded me an email note that is circulating in the Honduras RPCV community. This is from Maggie McQuaid (Honduras 1976-78) who was trying to organize a reunion of Honduras  RPCVs.]  Several months I asked you all if you’d be interested in a reunion in Honduras in 2012, and I was overwhelmed with your responses.  It’s no surprise that we still love the place and dream of returning.  This makes it hard to do what I’m going to do next, which is announce that going further with any plans seems to be a very bad idea right now. As many of you are aware, Honduras now bears the terrible distinction of having the highest per-capita murder rate in the world.  In recent weeks,  a former Honduran government drug czar and a journalist for La Prensa were murdered in Tegucigalpa.  Since the beginning of December, a volunteer with . . .

You might have heard the news yesterday how the agency is pulling out of Honduras, and stopping Volunteers going to Guatemala and El Salvador all because of increasing drug and organized-crime violence. At the same time we are back in Colombia! The PCV in Honduras –158–with be leaving the country in January. Aaron Williams says, “We are going to conduct a full review of the program.” In Guatemala and El Salvador, the Peace Corps is keeping the 335 PCV in country but not sending in 78 more Volunteers. The new spokeswoman for the Peace Corps, Kristina Edmunson,  says that the decision came about because of “comprehensive safety and security concerns.” Now, Peace Corps blogs has been reporting that a PCV had been shot in an armed robbery. That I had not heard about, but it is being reported in the New York Times today, Thursday, December 22, 2011. They got . . .

PCVs have returned to Colombia, the first full-time Volunteers since 1981 when the program was suspended due to security. Colombia was one of the first programs launched by the  agency, beginning in the summer/fall of 1961. The current PCVs were sworn in on December 14, 2011. The push to return to Colombia was started by the large, active and forceful lobbying of the Friends of Colombia RPCVs who, with the support of the Colombian government, last year since Peace Corps Crisis Corps Volunteers, now known as Response Volunteers, back for short term assignments. These 22 new and full time PCVs will  go to teaching English assignments in schools in Santa Marta, Cartagenia, and Barranquilla. Today there are  also  two Response Volunteers working in-country with the  Community Development office as Disaster Relief Specialists, assigned to rural areas that have been affected by the recent floods. Attending the swearing-in ceremony were two RPCVs from the early years, both . . .

[In our series of blogs from RPCVs around the world, we have this update from the United Arab Emirates and Darcy Munson Meijer (Gabon 1982-84) who lives now with her family in Abu Dhabi and teaches English at Zayed University. She recently published  Adventures in Gabon: Peace Corps Stories from the African Rainforest,  a collection of the best stories submitted by Gabon RPCVs to the quarterly “Gabon Letter.” We asked Darcy how the world looked from her side of the world this Holiday Season.] • IT’S WINTER NOW, so the weather is ideal: clear, sunny and in the mid-60s to 70s Fahrenheit. We are on winter break at Zayed University where I teach and at my children’s schools, and my family and I will spend 2 of the 3 weeks in Greece! We’ll divide our time between Athens and Crete. The abiity to travel in the region is one of the nicest parts of living in . . .

The Death Notice Reads: Heffron, Margery M.  73, of Exeter, N.H. on Friday, Dec. 9 of cancer. Until her death, she was at work on a biography of Louisa Catherine Adams, wife of the sixth U.S. president. She was a graduate of Smith College and earned a master of arts degree from Columbia University. She was press secretary to Rep. Edward J. Markey, 1979-80; associate director for media relations at the Harvard University News Office, 1981-89; and associate vice president for university relations at Binghamton University (SUNY), 1989-95. A native of Foxboro and a longtime resident of Westwood, she is survived by her husband of 49 years, Frank H. Heffron; daughter Anne Heffron (Chris) Sigler of Palo Alto, Calif.; sons John Heffron of Providence, R.I., and Samuel (Ashley) Heffron of Kittery Point, Me.; three grandchildren: Keats Iwanaga of Los Gatos and Palo Alto, Calif.; and William and Phineas Heffron of Kittery . . .

Fifty Years Ago Today, Sunday, December 11, 2011 Today I find myself reminiscing about this day fifty years ago, when I was serving as the first full-time cultural anthropologist in Peace Corps/ Washington.  I had begun my consulting role the previous June, at the request of various officials of the then-fledgling organization.  Since I was a Thailand specialist, my original assignment was to help plan the training program for Thailand One.  Pretty soon, however, “mission creep” set in, and I was working on other assignments as well — notably for the Talent Search, to find linguistically, culturally, and otherwise qualified people to serve overseas as ” Peace Corps Representatives,” or “Reps.” By December, 1961, after six months of the most frenetic work imaginable, it had become clear to me that I ought to plan to leave soon, and return to academic life.  (I had a nice grant waiting to be . . .