Miscellany

[On December 9, 2010, four of the First Response Action Coalition members met with several Peace Corps officials in Washington, D.C., including the Deputy Director and Chief of Staff.  Peace Corps shared several ways that they are moving forward with items on the 7-Point Plan, including a form of the Survivor Bill of Rights.  Peace Corps committed to follow-up with materials and updates.  Here is a report from that meeting, written by Casey Frazee.] It was a cold, snowy day in Washington, D.C. when four members of the First Response Action Coalition, the volunteer board which manges First Response Action, met with Peace Corps officials at Peace Corps’ headquarters. Representatives from the Office of Medical Services, Safety & Security and the Office of Special Services were in attendance as well as the Chief of Staff, Deputy Director and an official whose position is focused on examining Volunteer and staff sexual assault . . .

This comes to me from Casey Frazee of First Response Action advocates for a stronger Peace Corps response for Volunteers who are survivors or victims of physical and sexual violence. They envision a Peace Corps with policies that reflect best practices in all areas of training, prevention and response. For more information email firstresponseaction@gmail.com • ABC News has been working on several news pieces related to Peace Corps incidents of sexual assault, rape and Kate Puzey, the Volunteer who was murdered in 2009.  The show is scheduled to air next Friday 1/14 on 20/20 at 10 p.m. Eastern Time.  They will also have companion pieces posted on their website, which you can check out here: http://abcnews.go.com/2020.  Coalition members and First Response Action supporters participated in interviews with ABC, which will be part of the show next week.  None of the Coalition members have seen the finished piece, so we welcome . . .

The Peace Corps actually ‘started’ the day after Kennedy inauguration. Kennedy telephoned Shriver and asked him to form a presidential Task Force “to report how the Peace Corps could be organized and then to organize it.” Shriver telephoned Harris Wofford and they rented two rooms for offices in the Mayflower Hotel, downtown in Washington, D.C. They were the “Task Force.” They began to call people they thought might know something about international development and living in the developing world. One name led to another. Shriver says that he had no long-term, premeditated vision of what the Peace Corps might be. “My style was to get bright, informative, creative people and then pick their brains.” The first official meeting  of the Task Force was scheduled for February 6. Kennedy had requested a report from Shriver by the end of February. Shriver would later say, “I needed help badly.” On Sunday night, . . .

Scratch any RPCV or PCV and they’ll tell you the three goals of the Peace Corps. While the wording varies from one publication to the next, these are the goals: (1) Contribute to the development of critical countries and regions; (2) Promote international cooperation and goodwill toward the country; (3) Contribute to the education of America and to more intelligent American participation in the world.  Now, those are the stated goals, and I know that they have been tweaked with by staff and PCVs over the last 50 years. For example, “living at the level of the HCNs” is often stated as Goal # 2. But the question is, who came up with these goals and why three? Well, at the famous Mayflower Hotel in the winter months of 1961 when the task force of Shriver/Wofford/Wiggins/Josephson and a handful of others began to draft the proposal to give JFK that would define . . .

Here’s one you won’t know: What’s the earliest mention of the Peace Corps in the movies? No, it is not Volunteer! It isn’t Airplane in ’78. From http://www.vocaro.com/trevor/blog/ I learned it was from Pink Panther and way back in 1963. Playing a supporting role in the film was Robert Wagner, better known to today’s audiences as Number Two from the Austin Powers series. In one scene Wagner casually mentions the Peace Corps. Moments later, David Niven enters and also drops the Peace Corps name as if it were common knowledge. This might even have been the very first reference to the Peace Corps-ever-in mainstream popular culture. Perhaps even more surprising is how nonchalantly the Peace Corps is mentioned, as if everyone knows what it is. Check it out!  

Thanks to Bob Chudy (Korea 1972-77) who told me this fact the act of signing the Peace Corps Bill took place at Hammersmith Farm, a Victorian mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. It was the childhood home of Jackie Kennedy, and where the wedding reception was held for JFK and Jaqueline Bouvier. During his presidency, Kennedy spent so much time at Hammersmith Farm that it was referred to as the “Summer White House.” In late  September 1961, during one of these stays, Kennedy signed Public Law 87-293, the Peace Corps Act of 1961.    

Those of us who follow the history of the Peace Corps agency know the term “peace corps” came to public attention during the 1960 presidential election. In one of JFK’s last major speeches before the November election he called for the creation of a “Peace Corps” to send volunteers to work at the grass roots level in the developing world. However, the question remains: who said (or wrote) “peace corps” for the very first time? Was it Kennedy? Was it his famous speech writer Ted Sorensen? Or Sarge himself? But – as in most situations – the famous term came about because of some young kid, usually a writer, working quietly away in some back office that dreams up the language. In this case the kid was a graduate student between degrees who was working for the late Senator Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Today, fifty years after the establishment of the . . .

Ken Levine is an Emmy winning writer/director/producer/major league baseball announcer. I picked this story up from his blog. • This is a true “Hollywood” story of how my writing partner and I got Tom Hanks to star in our 1985 movie, Volunteers. We wrote the first draft five years earlier (so far this is a typical Hollywood story). The movie centers around a preppy Yalie who ducks a gambling debt and winds up in the Peace Corps. Hilarity ensues (at least on the page). Sargent Shriver, then the head of the Peace Corps, read it and said it was like spitting on the flag. I knew we were onto something. The producer asked whom we thought might be good to star and we suggested this guy who at the time was in Bosom Buddies on ABC – Tom Hanks. The producer scoffed. Tom Hanks couldn’t get a movie made. We were . . .

Doug Kiker was from Griffin, Georgia and had early success as a short story writer while still an English major at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. There’s a story about how he wanted to get published and he picked up Martha Foley’s short stories collection, went to the rear of the book and found the list of short-story publishers, closed his eyes and punched in the dark. He hit the Yale Review, to which he promptly submitted a short story. And they accepted his story. While still in college he worked as a reporter, covering the Senate race between Strom Thurmond and Olin Johnston. After college he joined the navy and was commissioned an Ensign, serving in Korean War. Discharged, he returned to Atlanta and worked at the Atlanta Journal and covered the first sit-ins at lunch counters in North Carolina. Out of that experience came his 1957 novel, . . .

In the first year the Peace Corps was in Ethiopia, way back in 1962, PCVs were invited to sing Christmas carols at Jubilee Palace, the residence of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Kings, and Conquering Lion of Judah. (I might have forgotten a few of his other titles.) Jubilee Palace was the real thing, built in Addis Ababa in 1955 in commemoration of the first twenty-five years of the Emperor’s reign. We had been to the Palace once before, in September of ’62 shortly after arriving in country, when we had been welcomed to the Empire by His Majesty. We toured the palace’s park-like grounds of trees, gardens and pools, and viewed his private collection of animals. Besides the Imperial lions, antelopes and monkeys, his cheetahs were a special interest to all of us because we could step inside the cage and pet them. . . .

Fritz Fischer is a professor of history and history education at the University of Northern Colorado. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University, taught for five years in middle/secondary schools, and then earned his Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 1994. His research specialties are 20th century American cultural and diplomatic history. He wrote Making Them Like Us: Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s published by Smithsonian Institution Press. It is, as Dr. Fischer points out, his PhD. dissertation at Northwestern University. The title, as he writes in his Acknowledgments, “might appear to some as an indictment of the Peace Corps and its volunteers. Quite the contrary . . . the experiences of volunteers promoted a new spirit of dialogue and understanding between Americans and the rest of the world. This book does not argue that the volunteers tried at all times to make them like us. Rather, the volunteers . . .

This was sent to me by  John Dwyer (www.jdwyer@over50andoverseas.com) Who is off in Egypt doing good. It is a blog called: Budget Travel by HoboTraveler.com Budget Travel is Andy Graham a perpetual traveler of 12 years and 88 countries. All the secrets of budget travel explained by a travel insider. — Andy writes: I have met many Peace Corps Volunteers, and about three directors of country organizations, they are easy to find, and difficult people to talk with, normally full of political correctness. Except strangely all the volunteers in Ethiopia, an exceptional bunch. You can normally find Peace Crops Volunteers the most popular bars in any city; this is where they hang out. Francesca was going to meet two or three other Volunteers at the White House Bar here in Ho, Ghana. Peace Corps Volunteers are supposed to spend the first month or two at their city, and not go visit . . .

Peter Hessler’s (China 1996-98) article about Rajeev Goyal and his advocacy of the Peace Corps will be in the December 20, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. Peter writes:  In the part of eastern Nepal where Goyal served as a Peace Corps volunteer from 2001 to 2003, people sometimes weep when his name is mentioned. Locals refer to him as Shiva, the god who is the source of the Ganges River. In the halls of Congress, most people have no idea what to make of him. For the past two years, Rajeev has approached the place as if it were just another Nepali settlement with a caste system to untangle. He figured out the Washington equivalent of village-well routes-hallways, hearing rooms, and coffee shops where anybody can hang around and meet a member of Congress. During the past two years, funding for the Peace Corps has increased by record amounts, despite . . .

I read where Brooke White, an “American Idol” Season 7 finalist, will star in Change of Plans, a TV movie presented by Fox. The 27-year-old singer-turned-actress will play a woman who becomes the legal guardian of four children after her best friend dies while serving in the Peace Corps.  (Wait, a PCV with four kids?) This is just the latest in a series of movies (and books) that uses the Peace Corps as a plot gimmick. The most famous one, and one of the first, was the very lowbrow movie Volunteers starring  Tom Hanks years before Hanks was an Oscar-winning megacelebrity.  In this silly movie, Hanks meets and stars with Rita Wilson who Tom later married. Volunteers is set in 1962–back when the Peace Corps was all the rage–and Hanks, speaking with an unfortunate accent meant to represent aristocratic wealth, plays a compulsive gambler, recently graduated from Yale, whose father suddenly refuses to pay his debts. To escape . . .

The 2011 International Calendar produced by the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Wisconsin is now available. It honors the Peace Corps by featuring the first 13 countries to host Volunteers. This 2011 calendar is another beautiful (and useful) publication by this RPCV group. And it is one more step in fulfilling the third goal of the Peace Corps: To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. Proceeds from its sale support development projects at home and aboard. Over $900,000 has been donated since the 1988 edition was created by the Madison, Wisconsin group. How’s that for Third Goal work by RPCVS! Congratulations are due these RPCVs. You can order your new International Calendar by writing, calling or emailing the group. The cost is $12.95. Returned Peace Corps Volunteers P.O. Box 1012 Madison, WI 53701-1012 #608.829.2677 e-mail: calendarmail@rpcvcalendar.org www.rpcvcalendar.org