Short Works about the Peace Corps Experience – Page 9

Lynn Ralph Juhl (Malaysia 1966-69)

Feb 25 2010

Monday, November 21 9:24 pm MALAYSIA, 1967 Tom, the Peace Corps Regional Representative, had delivered several of us to our sites that day. I was last, the end of the line, the ulu, “in the sticks,” “up river.” Well, Iowa, my home, was ulu in the U.S. too, I thought. It was dusk, “Tom, why not stay here for the night?” “Nope, gotta get back to town,” as he climbed back in the Land Rover. Evening. Might as well take a stroll. “Duduk demana?” Oh, Jeez, I know the words (Where do you sit?), but not the meaning! And that was the first day. Total immersion in a new culture. Ever an outsider, but not quite alien. The only white man some had seen up close – are you healthy? Why is your skin so pale? Why do the little hairs grow on your skin, as little children sometimes tried . . .

Journals of Peace — Dennis L. Kaltreider

Feb 25 2010

Journals of Peace Dennis L. Kaltreider (Colombia 1964–66) Monday, November 21 4:24 pm • DURING MY SECOND YEAR in Colombia, South America, I worked with the Peace Corps and Laubach Literacy Foundation’s campaign for adult literacy. Perhaps more than any other, one item stands out from the thousands of recollections stored in my bank of memories. That is a letter I received just prior to my returning home. I treasure the letter which reads in part, Estimado Senor Kaltreider, This is the first letter that I write in my life. I send it to you to thank you for your help in teaching me to read and to write. I am 65 years old and never think that I would be able to do what I am doing now. God bless you with good health and in your work for peace. Signed, Guillermo Calderon Dear Mom and Dad, I’m enclosing . . .

Karen Joan Keefer (Nigeria 1966-68)

Feb 25 2010

Monday, November 21 6:45 pm MY SINGULAR, most meaning-ful experience in life occurred in my Peace Corps service. Before the Peace Corps …I was not. During my service……I emerged and became. Ever since…………I have been and am. Today, I thank all who let me be. Thank you John F. Kennedy, for being you and opening doors for others to be. Thank you America, my native land, for having freedoms that let us be. Thank you Peace Corps, for supporting us in a framework in which we can come to be. Thank you Nigeria, my homeland, for teaching me what being is and helping me become. Thank you my family in Offa, for bearing me and for bearing up with me and loving me in my becoming. Thank you my Peace Corps family, in knowing the importance of being through you own experience making explanations unnecessary. Thank you all citizens of . . .

Robert Scott Heavner (Sierra Leone 1969-71)

Feb 25 2010

Monday, November 21 5:06 pm I WALKED INTO THE VILLAGE beneath an intense West African sun. As I walked along the bush path, the sun trickled through a canopy of oil palm and banana leaves. Soft squawking of distant birds and spider monkeys balanced the mystical silence. Soon an opening revealed a vastness of rice fields stretching beyond a great river to the Guinean mountains forty miles away. My heart was heavy as I walked and read a letter from my friend,,Ira, telling me that he was too ill to continue and was about to return home. It was just the fifth month of my assignment and already three of my six closest friends from training had terminated. I felt alone and abandoned. I continued on to the road and into the village. I sat down on the banks of the Great Scarcies River and felt like Siddhartha as I . . .

Journals of Peace — Patrick H. Hare (Honduras)

Feb 23 2010

Journals of Peace Patrick H. Hare (Honduras 1966–69) Monday, November 21 6:15 pm • ED CALLED WHEN I was gearing up for a business trip and a presentation, cleaning up my desk and my mind for the trip and leaning into it the way the plane would lean into the take-off the next day. Papers for the trip, getting cash, and polishing shoes hurried through my mind like a drive-thru meal. When I knew Ed in the Peace Corps, we made time to talk. Most Volunteers did. Savings and loan co-ops, check dams for erosion-control, and raising money for sewers in my barrio had the same urgency as the trip I was going on now. But the landscape was different in Honduras, and lonely. There were hills with stunted corn and young rocks seeded together up the sides. The hills had trees on top. They were small, unfamiliar, cone-like hills, . . .

Sandra M. Greenberg (Kenya 1966-68)

Feb 23 2010

Monday, November 21 6:27 pm WHEN LES AND I WENT into the conference we were as discouraged as anybody – the preceding week was not at all a good one in terms of work – we had been told outright that money used for visual aids was money that should be spent on shows – which, of course, meant: no visual aids at all; no educational effort on our part; no fulfilling on one of the – or our – Peace Corps aims to help in education – that all we would have to show for our two years would be having done a bunch of shows, which we didn’t feel were all that important or necessary. We could only hope that we could get them to agree at the start of the next fiscal period that money should be set aside for VAs separate and apart from that used . . .

Meredith Schroeder Green (Ecuador 1967-69)

Feb 23 2010

Monday, November 21 5:33 pm EXCERPTS FROM LETTERS HOME — NOVEMBER, 1967 The bus trip down from Quito to Guayaquil was like a quick tour of Ecuador. The climate and vegetation changed every few miles during the decent as did the type of housing construction and the physical make up of the people. In the High Sierra, buildings were largely of cement, the population predominantly Indian; half way down the side of the Andes mountains the houses were built of brick, the people looked more Spanish, except for the distinct ethnic group of Colorado Indians and the landscape became green and lush. By the time the bus reached sea level, the tropical heat was oppressive, the bamboo houses with tin roofs gave the landscape a sense of temporariness and the small, dark skinned people spoke a rapid fire Spanish that was undecipherable le to my untuned ears. My emotions went . . .

Betty Hite Graff (Ethiopia 1963-65)

Feb 23 2010

Monday, November 21 5:27 pm PRESIDENT KENNEDY SPURRED ME to try new adventures. In 1963, Kennedy said Americans need more physical exercise – take a 50-mile hike in 20 hours – I walked twenty. Then Kennedy said, “Join the Peace Corps, serve in a foreign country.” I joined the Peace Corps. I stepped off the plane in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in September 1963 with much awe and trepidation as to what I was about to begin. A new life for me. A new beginning in the most beautiful country with the most beautiful people in the world. I wrote in my journal that day: “What a magnificent view and what a beautiful airport we landed at! Today is the Ethiopian New Year. The women are dressed in white (off white from washing them in the dirty streams) hand woven dresses with colorful trim around the edges. I guess I’ll have . . .

Arnold and Annette Finn (Philippines 1964–66)

Feb 23 2010

Monday, November 21 3:51 pm DEAR PRESIDENT KENNEDY, My wife, Annette, and I began our senior year at the University of Florida in the spring of 1963. We weren’t old enough to vote for you in 1960, but we thanked those who did. We were marching and ducking stones in Gainesville in the summer of 1963 trying to break the color barrier in the local food establishments, eliminate the white-only restrooms and homogenize the bus seating. You were making a tough decision to press on with the Civil Rights Bill. We all knew that what we were doing was right. We loved you. You were young and dynamic. You spoke of things we could understand, relate to, and support. We trusted you. You spoke the truth and seemed to do so with courage. You drew the best from us, the young idealists who thought that we also had a contribution . . .

Patricia I. Eimerl (Ethiopia 1967-69)

Feb 23 2010

Monday, November 21 7:15 pm THIS IS OUR SECOND YEAR as Peace Corps Volunteers in Ethiopia. This year we are working in the city of Axum in Northern Ethiopia. Axum is a 2000-year-old city and the center of Ethiopia’s Coptic Christian Church. Ethiopia’s brand of Christianity began in Axum in the fourth century and spread to the rest of Ethiopia from this city. We enjoy exploring the ruins nearby; all the hills surrounding the city have various kinds of ruins, many of them unexcavated. We also enjoy finding different kinds of agates, quartz geodes, and other kinds of rocks in the fields and valleys of Axum. Our work this year is similar to last year, i.e., teaching. We are more experienced this year and so enjoy our teaching and our students even more than last year. We know how to handle the discipline problem better. Pat teaches English to the . . .

Jill Diskan (Turkey 1964-66)

Feb 23 2010

Monday, November 21 5:21 pm DECEMBER, 1964 Only part of my job as a PCV is to be an English teacher. It’s really not that important, in my eyes, whether some child learns English. What is important is that I am here and that the children and adults of Afyon realize that there is a world beyond Afyon and Turkey. And that they learn that that world is different from Turkey. To me that is my most important reason for being here. I may or may not see any result from my teaching and other projects, but just by being here for two years I shall have accomplished something which in the long run may be more important to Turkey than whether a 13 year old can say “Good Morning, how are you?” in English. MARCH, 1965 Turkey is overflowing with soldiers and the accoutrements of a military establishment. It’s . . .

Jackie [McKee] Day (Turkey 1965–67)

Feb 23 2010

Monday, November 21 6:12 pm LETTER HOME TO MOM August 1, 1967 Got your letter of July 24 yesterday. It’s so good to hear from you. I worry about you – but at the same time I don’t think that you should worry about me. As far as earthquakes go – Bilecik is one of the best places to be in Turkey. They’ve never had an earthquake here. We feel the shakes from Adapazari, but with no serious effects. It seems funny to us that we’re in the “Earth quake stricken north-western Turkey” as reported on the BBC & VOA. We don’t feel very “stricken.” As a matter of fact, I’m at the moment sitting in bed with some good western music – a cup of tea – feeling quite comfortable and happy. CARE is supplying our several small canning houses with Ball jars for teaching purposes – and every . . .

Sally Collier (Ethiopia 1962–64)

Feb 13 2010

Monday, November 21 8:00 pm I served with the Peace Corps as a music teacher in Ethiopia with the first group to go there, from 1962-64. I lived in Addis Ababa with four other young women. Our house was termed “Debutante Hill” by our would-be humorous friends. My roommates included Mo, the daughter of a Chicago Irish policeman, Sylvia, an Italian-American, who when asked one day how she was, said, “Oh, so and so,” Peggy who was in seven Land-Rover accidents during her two-year stint (no one wanted to fly home on the same plane with her), and Stephanie who laughed on a perfect C- scale, always us. My roommates were fresh out of college; I was 25 – an older woman. I probably should have been wiser for my extra four years of living, but my real education had only begun. It began the day I received the invitation . . .

Dan Close (Ethiopia 1966–68)

Feb 13 2010

Monday, November 21 5:57 pm In November of 1963 I came to Washington to say farewell to Jack Kennedy. I came here with hundreds of thousands of people, and we stood in lines that stretched for countless Washington blocks through the cold November night. We walked slowly for hours toward the Capital, and along the way we met friends and relatives, brothers and sisters whom we had never met before, whom we would never meet again. We had come from all directions, along roads filled with hitchhikers carrying signs that said simply “Washington,” and we stopped and picked them up, carried them forward in our slow and silent and subdued tide. Through the long night, we were the American people, assembled to pay honor to our fallen leader, Jack. The lines of mourners entered the Capitol from the east, and there were placed the flowers sent by many nations, and . . .

Marilyn L. Charles (Morocco 1962–64)

Feb 13 2010

Monday, November 21 7:27 pm This summer I had a unique opportunity to become acquainted with Moroccans in a “big family-like” situation where I was accepted as the sister of all in the community. I spent 6 weeks at a camp on the Mediterranean, near the Algerian border, just outside the resort village of Saidia. Another PCV, Dave, and I were members of the general staff, which overlooked the activities of the 400 campers, mostly little boys ages 7-14. Actually, our position was rather honorary. Our time was occupied with assisting informally in the art workshop, with sports, in the health dispensary (I was the camp nurse for 8 days when the regular nurse was absent by virtue of the fact that I was the only female in the camp), and learning Arabic. The latter activity was a necessity since Arabic was the major means of communication in that particular . . .