Miscellany

Life is unfair as we know and sometimes we have to go to Home Depot on a weekend morning,  even a weekend morning during the Christmas season when every one is buying trees and tools (i.e. toys) for Dad, and what-have-you.  I actually don’t mind the store, but the parking lot is a minefield of loose, lost, and dangerous nails, screws, and other tire-piercing pieces of metal, so I was proceding cautiously through the maze of  car lanes trying to select an area which most likely would have the least heavy metal and came upon an elderly gray-haired guy (well, lets say someone my age!) who was jaywalking down the middle of the car lane. I hit the brakes. He looked around angrily alarmed by my sudden arrival. I did the only sensible suburban thing I could think of: I smiled at him and passed by. Well, when I parked safely (I hoped) and got out of the . . .

The 50th Anniversary of the Peace Corps Infographic: Peace Be With You Typography by Julie Teninbaum By: Jeninne Lee St. John, FastCompany.com November 1, 2010 Fifty years ago this month, President John F. Kennedy gave a name to his idea to send Americans abroad “to encourage mutual understanding between Americans and other cultures of the world.” A look at the numbers behind the venerable Peace Corps. The FIRST group of volunteers, 51 strong, arrived in Ghana on August 30, 1961. Since 1961, more than 200,000 Americans have served in the Peace Corps. 7,671 volunteers now serve in the Corps. In 1966, there were more than 15,000 in the field. The Peace Corps’ operating budget this fiscal year is $400 MILLION, about 1% of the federal government’s foreign-operations budget. Peace Corps volunteers here been trained in more than 250 local languages. 60% of ACTIVE Corps members are women. Today, the Corps . . .

The mentioning of Cultural Frontiers of the Peace Corps, edited by Robert B. Textor, with a foreword by Margaret Mead, on this blog brought comments from a few readers, and brought me to pulling Textor’s book off my shelf of Peace Corps books (God, there are so many Peace Corps books!) to look again at this important book on the agency published in 1966 by The M.I.T. Press. Robert Textor, for those who weren’t around at the beginning of the Peace Corps, was a early consultant to the Peace Corps, starting in the summer of 1961 while a Ph.D. student at Harvard. He was asked to Washington to help plan the training program for the first PCVs to Thailand. He would make other important contributions to the agency during those early first years, including writing the memo that outlined the In-Up-Out policy for the Peace Corps staff, a memo  Textor sent on December 11, 1961, . . .

In Bob Herbert’s Op-Ed column today (Tuesday, November 23, 2010) he writes: “It was a half-century ago this month that John F. Kennedy won the presidency in a thrilling and heart-stoppingly close election against Richard Nixon. You’d probably be surprised at the number of Americans who are clueless about when Kennedy ran: ‘It was 1970, right?’ ‘Wasn’t it in the ’40s, soon after the war?’ Or whom he ran against: ‘Eisenhower?’ Herbert goes on: “Kennedy’s great gift was his capacity to inspire. His message as he traveled the country was that Americans could do better, that great things were undeniably possible, that obstacles were challenges to be overcome with hard work and sacrifice.” And then Herbert recalls the Peace Corps: “Kennedy the cold warrior was also the president who created the Peace Corps, which Ted Sorensen, who died just last month (and whose daughter Juliet was a Peace Corps volunteer), described . . .

Nick Herbert (Mauritania 2007-09) wrote me. Nick works for Social Solutions, a company, he says where, “we challenge and equip human service providers and their funders to turn good intent into measurable change by relating efforts to outcomes.” He  joined Peace Corps for many reasons but ultimately, he wanted to be a part of the solution and make a positive impact on the lives of others. “I know what it means to be a Peace Corps volunteer,” he writes, “working on the frontlines of international development, doing your best to give back to the community in which you live but constantly asking the question: How do I know if my efforts are making an actual difference in the people I am serving?”  Now he wants to hear your stories. How did you make it happen? “Where did you serve and what did you do?” he writes. “How did you know that your work was . . .

Who’s protecting the PCVs overseas? Can PCVs be protected while overseas? These are questions that have plagued the Peace Corps from Day One. Way back in 1960 the Daughters of the American Revolution were warning us about what would happen to young PCVs living in “backward, underdeveloped countries.” Then in the 1965 civil war in the Dominican Republic, when Johnson sent five hundred Marines into the DR, supposedly to evacuate Americans and other foreigners, then added another 23,000 U.S. troops to keep, so thought Johnson, the DR from becoming another Cuba, there were PCVs in the middle of it all and living in Santo Domingo. Of the 108 Volunteers ini the country, 34 of them were in the barrios of the capital, 25 working as urban community development workers, 9 nurses running clinics.  What happened to these “real heroines of the civil war’ as the New York Times correspondent Tad Szulc called the female nurses in his book . . .

David Sears on our site has been faithfully listing jobs for RPCVs and Staff. Today he has 6 new postings by Sustainable Bolivia and United Planet on our site.  They can be viewed:  http://www.cambridgedata.com/search_jobs.htm   David started Cambridge Data Systems to provide on-line tools for recruitment for development projects in 1997 and continues to manage that enterprise. And we are lucky he blogs for our site. Thanks, David.

The first Peace Corps Volunteers to Colombia (but not the first PCVs; they went to Ghana), are interviewed at their Peace Corps Reunion at their old Training Site. The guys, and they were all guys, gathered this weekend in New Jersey. A few of the RPCVs do look like Couch Potatoes, but don’t we all? Even the Peace Corps couldn’t keep us forever on the cutting edge. Take a look as NBC’s Ron Allen talks to them and a few of the other early PCVs who went to West Africa. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/vp/40035062#40035062

These last few days I have been having the pleasure of reading Stanley Meisler’s When The World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and its First Fifty Years. (The book will be published in February but you can go on-line now to Amazon.com and order your copy.) There are a lot of gems in Stan’s narrative, background stories on questions you might have had on ‘why in the hell is the Peace Corps doing this?,’ etc. that Meisler, a former foreign and diplomatic correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, now answers for you. What I liked especially is the way Stan summed up the story on the agency in a short and telling, and I believe, very true statement, writing in his Introduction: “The Peace Corps has one great inner resource. The strength of the Peace Corps has always depended on the energy and commitment of the Volunteers. No matter . . .

[On the 35th anniversary of the Peace Corps, in March of 1996, Mark Gearan, then Director of the agency, had the wisdom to stage three days of celebration for the agency in Washington, D.C. One event was at the Mayflower Hotel–where the agency was hatched in a suite of hotel rooms–was a dinner and speeches by key figures in the creation of the agency and in the administration. Coming to that event that evening where many of the ‘cast of characters’ who first brought the Peace Corps into being, including Warren Wiggins. Harris Wofford was there that night and spoke; Sarge Shriver spoke, as did PCV Congressman Sam Farr, former Director Loret Miller Ruppe, and a good friend of Mark Gearan, the Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine K. Albright. Also speaking was Theodore C. Sorensen, speechwriter and special council to President John F. Kennedy. Sorensen wrote most of JFK’s speeches, including the one JFK gave at the Cow Palace in San Francisco . . .

“I thought he was a bit of a nerd,” said RPCV Stacey McKeever. That was the line that caught my attention in the detailed profile (written by Rosalie R. Radomsky) in the wedding section of The New York Times this Sunday. (NO, I don’t usually read that section, but a friend of ours was also married this weekend.) So I started to read about Stacey McKeever and Charles Fogelman who were married yesterday in New York by a friend of theirs, a Universal Life minister, at a bar/event space in Brooklyn. (That’s the way we do things in NYC!) Stacey & Charlie met during Training for Lesotho and while Charles from the very first thought that Stacey was “very pretty, and something about her independence and faith in herself is what drew me in.” Stacey thought Charlie was a nerd. Of course, at the same time, during Training, Stacey was keeping her distance from all the . . .

American University’s School of Public Affairs annually grants the Roger W. Jones Award for Executive Leadership. The Award recognizes two public servants in the federal government whose careers are marked by extraordinary effectiveness in organizational development and a strong commitment to training and education managers and executives. This year’s awardees are: Kenneth E. Baker, Principal Assistant Deputy Administrator, Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, National Nuclear Security Administration Margaret A. Focarino, Deputy Commissioner for Patents, Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Department of Commerce Aaron S. Williams, Director of the Peace Corps, will deliver the keynote address. In 2011, the Peace Corps will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its founding.

Did you see the interview today with CNN’s Howard Kurtz and Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop per child? Negroponte says that the days of the physical book are numbered.  As e-book readers and tablet computers become more common, physical books could disappear sooner than expected. “It will be in five years,” said Negroponte. “The physical medium cannot be distributed to enough people. When you go to Africa, half a million people want books … you can’t send the physical thing.” Negroponte emphasized the efficiency of being able to put hundreds of books on the laptops his organization sends to villages. “We put 100 books on a laptop, but we also send 100 laptops. That village now has 10,000 books,” he said. It is for this reason that I have been campaign (without any success) to get the Peace Corps to send PCVs overseas with a Laptop to leave behind, just as we left . . .

[An online magazine for alumni and friends of U-M has a great piece about what is happening at the University of Michigan this week. Check out Joe Serwach story below. He writes for the U-M news service, and also watch the promotional: “The Passing of the Torch” on Youtube.com Thanks to Andy Trincia ( Romania 2002-04) for sending this along to me.] Joe Serwach writes: From John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, presidents have challenged University of Michigan students to change the world. In Kennedy’s case, the transformation was rapid and enduring: The Peace Corps was born. “It was 50 years ago that a young candidate for president came here to Michigan and delivered a speech that inspired one of the most successful service projects in American history,” Obama told U-M graduates May 1. “And as John F. Kennedy described the ideals behind what would become the Peace Corps, he issued a challenge . . .

50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PEACE CORPS CELEBRATION OCT. 14, 2010 Speech by Tom Hayden It happened here, and it can happen again. The difference between 1960 and 2008 (sic) is that students and young people in the earlier time couldn’t vote. But we could march, and we did in Ann Arbor in support of the southern student sit-in movement. And we could imagine, propose reforms, and believed the politicians might heed the call. Sargeant Shriver called the Peace Corps creation a case of spontaneous combustion. It would have been a stillborn idea were it not “for the affirmative response of those Michigan students and faculty,” and “without a strong popular response he would have concluded that the idea was impractical or premature.” If it was spontaneous combustion, there had to be igniters and inciters. I became the editor of the Daily in the summer of 1960. I hitchhiked and to . . .