Miscellany

On January 13th at the New York Public Library (5:45 pm) there will be an evening to celebrate Harris Wofford.  Harris helped Sargent Shriver start the Peace Corps and organized the Ethiopia program, serving as Peace Corps Director for Sub-Saharan Africa.  He later become a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania and was president of two colleges, an advisor to President Kennedy and to Martin Luther King.  On the evening of January 13th, he’ll be interviewed live by George Stephanopoulos and we will see an exclusive preview from the upcoming documentary on Harris’s life, including his return to Ann Arbor 50 years after John Kennedy’s 2 am speech where he first proposed the Peace Corps. This event is being organized to raise the funding needed to complete the documentary by Harris’s 90th birthday next April.  It normally costs $150 to attend; however, a limited number of $50 tickets are available here: wofforddocny.eventbrite.com RSVP today. Act fast. . . .

Support the upcoming documentary film on Harris Wofford and join George Stephanopoulos as he interviews Senator Wofford live at the New York Public Library. The evening will feature an exclusive preview of the upcoming documentary on Harris Wofford, including interviews with Senator Ted Kennedy, Rep. John Lewis, James Carville, Bill Moyers, and others. George Stephanopoulos will interview Harris about the stories of eight decades, including advancing Civil Rights with Martin Luther King and President Kennedy, helping to start the Peace Corps, fighting for national health care in the U.S. Senate, and growing national service. Wednesday, January 13, 2016 NYPL: THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street Sponsored by Corporation for Civic Documentaries As a special web offer, a very limited number of tickets at $50 (normally $150) to enjoy the event and the reception afterwards, hosted by New York Public Library CEO Anthony Marx. Go to:  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/george-stephanopoulos-and-harris-wofford-a-conversation-tickets-19997099864

The Office of the Third Goal at the agency has requested of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to create a “Portal” that will allow RPCVs to update their contact information, share stories, request official documentation, view their service history, and enroll in outreach and marketing campaigns. The official title will be: Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Portal (RPCV Portal). They say the general description of collection would be “To build a robust alumni network it is essential that Peace Corps maintains accurate and up-to-date contact information for RPCVs. By logging into the RPCV Portal, RPVCs access their record in the database directly, and are able to make changes and submit requests at their convenience. The updated contact information collected in the RPCV Portal will be used for outreach and support purposes, along with managing subscriptions for Peace Corps newsletters.”  (Do we even have a newsletter from the agency?) RPCVs . . .

(Thanks to Nancy Tongue(Chile 1980-82) founder of Health Justice for Peace Corps Volunteers (HJPCV) for Leading this fight for better health for RPCV.) CBS NEWS December 14, 2015, 7:43 AM Ex-volunteers accuse Peace Corps of health care neglect The Peace Corps says 91 percent of volunteers are satisfied with their medical care, but government reports as far as 1991 found problems with that care. Some returned volunteers tell CBS News they’ve fallen through the cracks both during and after their service — in some cases, for decades, reports CBS News correspondent Kris Van Cleave. In 1965, Nancy Minadeo Flanigan was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malaysia. She was raped by local men and impregnated with a daughter, who died at birth. “I started having depression and nightmares and flashbacks,” Flanigan said. In 2012 she got word she would be reimbursed for 50 years of medical bills, but she needed receipts. “Well, . . .

“Talking with Dr. Molly Geidel about her Provocative Cultural History of the 1960s’ Peace Corps” Comment: Thank you John for facilitating this discussion and giving it quite a rocket engine of a start. First of all, I neither have time nor energy to expose all of the logical fallacies upholding this many-headed argument accusing 50 years of goodwill by Peace Corps volunteers of committing more harm than good. However, I will attack the most egregious of them here. For starters her entire argument assumes the Peace Corps must be guilty by association with the US federal government and never once attempts to quantify how exactly this argument should be upheld. As a scientist I was taught, “if it cannot be measured, it does not exist.” How exactly does Geidel intend to measure Peace Corps’ negative effects on indigenous cultures around the Third World? And even if it were proven fact, . . .

How Peace Corps Handled My Sexual Assault My name is Cait Hakala and I’m a proud native of Tinley Park, Illinois. I graduated with a B.A. in Comparative Literary Studies and a minor in Spanish from Northwestern University in June of 2013. I joined the Peace Corps and began serving as a Secondary Education English teacher in a public high school in East Java in March 2014. A misleading and downright irresponsible article posted on November 30th by CBS News concerning Peace Corps’ response to sexual assaults requires my response. You can read that article here. The author lumps together three very different issues: the question of in-country staff misconduct against host country nationals and a narrative of the termination of a victims’ advocate are sprinkled with tales of horror from PCVs who were assaulted in an attempt to reduce Peace Corps to just as hapless as it is villainous when it comes to dealing with sexual assault. I have absolutely no comment on or . . .

Several weeks ago I was reading The New York Review of Books and spotted a full page advertisement for new books published by the University of Minnesota Press. Glancing at the page one title jumped out at me. Contacting the press for a review copy of the book, I also sought out (and found) Molly Geidel in England where she is teaching American studies at the University of Manchester. Her official title is Lecturer in Twentieth Century American Cultural History in the Division of English, American Studies and Creative Writing. I am pleased to say, Molly agreed to be interviewed for our site and over the course of a few weeks, while I read her cultural history of the agency, I emailed  Molly a series of questions about her book and her study of the Peace Corps in the 1960s. I should start by saying that Dr. Geidel in her . . .

Whistleblower: Peace Corps Ignored and Then Blamed Sexual Assault Victims Peace Corps volunteers dedicate two years to serving others, but if they are sexually assaulted, one inside advocate says, they are blamed, shamed, and face removal from the program. And we have the emails to prove it. Internal Peace Corps documents and emails obtained by The Daily Beast from Congress indicate an appalling culture within the agency: where sexual assault victims stationed abroad on behalf of America are blamed; assailants are allegedly permitted to walk free without consequence; and the organization fails to fully support the Americans it posts abroad. Following the sexual assault of a Peace Corps volunteer in 2014, Peace Corps clinical psychologist Dr. Kris Morris issued behind-the-scenes “guidelines.” The message: Volunteers who continue to need help following a sexual assault are not Peace Corps material. “Demonstration of a need for ongoing therapy is an indication that she . . .

The agency was notified this last Wednesday afternoon about an upcoming broadcast tomorrow morning on CBS This Morning sometime between 7 am and 9 am EST.  The topic is sexual assaults on PCVs. The general feeling within in the agency–based on questions asked–is that the segment will focus on what has gone wrong overseas and CBS will not balance its reporting with the positive changed that have taken place for women since the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Volunteer Protection Act of 2011 took effect. The reporting will also focus on the failures of  some CDs in country to protect their Volunteers. Whether the CBS Morning segment will have the ‘staying power’ of the 20/20 report remains to be seen.   For a good  overview of how the agency is doing read the Peace Corps Performance and Accountability Report FY2015. It has just been published. The link:http://files.peacecorps.gov/multimedia/pdf/policies/annrept2015.pdf Meanwhile, applications to join the Peace Corps are at . . .

Stanley Meisler, an early evaluator for the agency, in his 2011 book, When The World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and its First Fifty Years gives a detailed account of the Peace Corps’ limited connection to the war in Vietnam. In his book, Meisler writes, “On January 6, 1966, two Peace Corps officials embarked on a secret, reckless trip to Vietnam. The goal of their mission was to find out whether Vietnam might be a suitable country for a Peace Corps program. That goal was foolish and fanciful……The two officials were Warren Wiggins, deputy director of the Peace Corps, and Ross J. Pritchard, director of Far East regional operations. Within the Peace Corps, Wiggins and Pritchard were known at the most fervent players of the numbers game-they relentlessly promoted massive new programs without worrying about meticulous planning. But it was not their idea to go to Vietnam.” . . .

Recently I have been reading two books that focus on volunteering in the time of the Vietnam War. The one that we are blogging about currently, Dr. Molly Geidel’s Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties. The second is The Fortunate Few: IVA Volunteers From Asia to the Andes written by Thierry J. Sagnier. The IVS was founded in 1953 and played a key role in the establishment of the Peace Corps in 1961. Over 30 PCVs were IVsers after their service, another four became PCVs after IVS and some 17-18 were on the staff of the Peace Corps. Dr. Geidel spends a lot of time in her book detailing how PCVs spent time in the Peace Corps hiding from the draft, (remember now the good doctor has already said early PCVs in the ’60s were “ruggedly masculine figure” and now she is claiming we didn’t want to . . .

Dr. Geidel in her cultural history of the U.S. in the 1960s turns her attention on the Peace Corps and Vietnam in chapter five of her book, Peace Corps Fantasies How Development Shaped The Global Sixties. (I should say right off that I served in the military and in the Peace Corps in the Sixties and I don’t have an axe to grind with either service.) Molly Geidel is another story. She begins, (again,) by turning her academic lens on Associate and then Deputy Director, Warren Wiggins, and what he had to say about Vietnam and Peace Corps Volunteers. (By the way, I should mention that Wiggins was a pilot in WWII, flying war supplies to China over the Hump in the China/Burma/India campaign. He was one of many early Peace Corps staff who were vets from the war.) Geidel begins her Fifth Chapter: Ambiguous Liberation: The Vietnam War and . . .

Dr. Geidel spends a chapter on the role of women in the early days of the agency, i.e., the ’60s. In particular she singles out associate director and also deputy director of the agency, Warren Wiggins, author (with Bill Josephson) “A Towering Task,” quoting from his speeches and from his staff meetings. She picks up lines given in talk, and comments made by men around the senior staff meetings to make her point that the Peace Corps was sexist back in the ’60s. Geidel has done her homework. She has gone to the files stored in boxes at the Kennedy Library in Boston and those old files at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. She cannot be faulted for her research. However, it the way she spins, edited, and presents her findings that I find fault with. Having been around in the ’60s, having served with women in Ethiopia, . . .