The Peace Corps

C Payne Lucas, leader of relief efforts across Africa, dies at 85 Payne Lucas, who died Sept. 15 at 85, led Africare for more than three decades. (Dudley M. Brooks/The Washington Post) By Emily Langer Payne Lucas, who was credited with improving lives across Africa as a founder and longtime president of Africare, a Washington-based relief organization that has constructed roads and wells, established schools and literacy programs, and improved health care in some of the neediest countries in the world, died Sept. 15 at a hospital in Silver Spring, Md. He was 85. The cause was advanced dementia, said his wife, Freddie Hill Lucas. Mr. Lucas, one of 14 children born to a lumber mill worker and his wife, was once described by The Washington Post as an “accidental idealist.” He grew up in poverty, achieved an education through scholarships and rose through the ranks of the fledgling Peace Corps before . . .

From the website at the National Archives: “Act of September 22, 1961 (Peace Corps Act), Public Law 87-293, 75 STAT 612, Which Established a Peace Corps to Help the People of Interested Countries and Areas in Meeting Their Needs for Skilled Manpower, 9/22/1961” Read the Act  here: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/299874 Coincidentally, RPCV Chris Matthews (Swaziland 1968-70) host of MSNBC’s Hard Ball, ended his show last night with a tribute to his Peace Corps group, from whose reunion he had just returned. He spoke of  pride in his fellow RPCVs and his affection and appreciation for them and all the people of Swaziland, who had welcomed and helped them.  What a fitting way to commemorate the 57th!

  C. Payne Lucas, early Peace Corps Director in Togo (1963)  and co-founder of Africare, passed away peacefully on Saturday, September 15th. His stewardship of Africare for many years build the organization to unparalleled status in the African development community. It all began for C. Payne in the Peace Corps as CD for Togo. In November 1963 Payne arrived in Togo on temporary orders from PC/HQ. He had been there for a few days, living in the Benin Hotel, when the Acting Director, Robert Haves, decided to return to L.A. and rescue his law practice. This left Lucas in command of a complicated program. He quickly showed that he could handle it. Payne had come to the Peace Corps after being a research intern with the Democratic National Committee. He saw the Peace Corps, he said at the time, “as an instrument of foreign aid in areas where AID had . . .

Ed Corboy, from Hyde Park, Mass, packed a rifle in the infantry from 1943 to 1946. With the war’s end, he returned to Massachusetts and completed a business course at Bryant and Straton school in Boston. The Foreign Service School at Georgetown attracted him to Washington, and he studied there at night for the next five years while working days as a secretary to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1956, shortly before he received the degree of Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service, he was invited to work as a law clerk for the Washington law firm of Covington and Burling. This firm, involved in the Dupont-General Motors anti-trust action, came to Georgetown to hire 30 people, of whom two were asked to stay on when the anti-trust suit was concluded. One of the two was Corboy, “and a lucky thing, too,” he now says. For it was at . . .

This is a extraordinary effort by the RPCV Friends of Korea and Gary Fedrick (K-6) to collect and preserve the important history of Peace Corps in Korea.  Now, the University of Southern California has accepted the collection for their library.  Please read this announcement: http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15799coll86 “Between 1966 and 1981, more than two thousand Americans served in Korea as Peace Corps Volunteers, working as teachers, health workers, engineers, agricultural advisers, etc. Living in rural and urban communities across the country, they learned the Korean language and participated in Korean life on a broader and deeper level than any other group of Americans before or since have been able to do. Once returned to their homes after their service, they formed an alumni group called Friends of Korea to continue their friendships with Korea and one another. Many went on to build careers as Korea experts as diplomats, educators, scholars, policy makers, consultants, etc. To . . .

After establishing the Peace Corps Headquarters on a eucalyptus-covered hillside above Addis Ababa, Wofford concluded that in a nation twice the size of Texas, the program should be administered on a regional basis. With Canby assigned to the former Italian colony of Eritrea, two other Associate Representatives (APCDs) were posted to the rest of Ethiopia although both were assigned houses in Addis Ababa. William White was given primary responsibility for Volunteers in the north and west country which included the capitals of Gondar and Axum and the vast canyon of the Blue Nile. William Kruse was assigned to the south and east, the land of the Rift Valley, the Ogaden desert and the cities of Harar and Diredawa. Although he was born and raised in Cleveland, Bill White enrolled in Atlanta’s Morehouse College for one semester, this at the insistence of an aunt in Alabama “who wanted me to experience . . .

Peace Corps has published a Legacy Book for Peace Corps Burkina Faso honoring the 22 year accomplishments of Peace Corps Volunteers and the communities and people with whom they worked.  The program was suspended in late 2017 for security reasons. In preparation for the suspension of the program, the country staff began to collect examples of the work done by Volunteers and their communities over decades.  The stories ranged from the building of a computer lab for a school to programs seeking to eradicate guinea worm disease.  It became a collaborate effort when: “U.S. Ambassador to Burkina Faso, H. E. Andrew Young described the need to collect and immortalize the history of Peace Corps/Burkina Faso after the suspension became official in December 2017. Additional ideas for content and format were provided by the Peace Corps Acting Regional Director for Africa, Mr. Tim Hartman and the Country Desk Officer for Burkina . . .

And from the wreckage of world War II, we built a post-war architecture, system of alliances and institutions to underwrite freedom and oppose Soviet totalitarianism and to help poorer countries develop. American leadership across the globe wasn’t perfect. We made mistakes. At times we lost sight of our ideals. We had fierce arguments about Vietnam and we had fierce arguments about Iraq. But thanks to our leadership, a bipartisan leadership, and the efforts of diplomats and peace corps volunteers, and most of all thanks to the constant sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, we not only reduced the prospects of war between the world’s great powers, we not only won the Cold War, we helped spread a commitment to certain values and principles like the rule of law and human rights and democracy and the notion of the inherent dignity and worth of every individual.

Harris Wofford was born in Johnson City, Tenn., and raised in Scarsdale, N.Y. While still in high school, he founded and became the first president of the Student Federalist Movement, after he was inspired by Clarence Streit’s Union Now. Enrolled in the University of Chicago’s accelerated student’s plan, he took Chicago’s famed great books curriculum and received his degree in two yers, after which he became the first holder of an accelerated degree to be admitted to Yale University Law School. He also became the first White student to be admitted to Howard University Law School since suffragette days when some White women sought to dramatize their demands for the vote by enrolling there. In 1954, he received law degrees from both Yale and Howard. In 1948, the year in which he graduated from Chicago, Wofford attended a World Youth Festival in Prague which he also covered in three articles . . .

Bascom Story’s father was a Methodist minister who moved from small town to small town in Texas. Born in Rotan (Fisher County), Bascom went to 22 schools before he enrolled in North Texas State College in Denton, where he obtained a degree in political science in 1934. Barely in his twenties, he became principal of the high school in Lytie, a small town near San Antonio. He moved from there to Runge High School, also in south Texas, to superintendent of the Runge School District, finally to Deputy State Superintendent of Education, a job he held for three years while he worked on a master’s in educational administration. He got the degree in 1942 from Southwest Texas State at San Marcos. From 1942 to 1946, Story served in the Navy as a communications officer with amphibious forces in the Pacific, and he participated in the invasion of Okinawa. He returned . . .

Ethiopia’s First Peace Corps Staff On October 13, 1961, Emperor Haile Selassie informed the Peace Corps that Ethiopia would be interested in inviting Volunteers to one of the few Africans nations which remained independent throughout the era of colonialism. Harold Johnson, operations officer for East Africa, was dispatched to Addis Ababa on November 5, 1961. Johnson remained until November 29 while Ethiopian officials explained to him that the nation wanted Volunteer teachers and plenty of them. The request was impressive enough to send Harris Wofford to Addis Ababa twice in the following months, in January and April. Wofford, then adviser to the President on civil rights and Peace Corps matters, subsequently negotiated a program in Togo. In Ethiopia, Harris quickly determined that the nation wanted to expand its secondary school capacity without delay –at the start of the next school year in September 1962, if possible. Key to this expansion . . .

Photo credit to Cecil Stoughton, White House After their Peace Corps service, many volunteers go on to international careers. Although State does not track former PCVs in the department, an average of 5% of new Foreign Service Officers in the last four entering classes reported Peace Corps experience and more than 60 former volunteers have served as U.S. ambassadors. For USAID, a 2015 report to Congress pegs the percentage of former volunteers or staff in the agency at 28%. Focus on Peace Corps and Diplomatic Careers How the Peace Corps Transformed the Foreign Service by John Coyne Joining the Foreign Service: the Experiences of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers by John Coyne First Ambassador with Peace Corps Experience: Parker Borg by John Coyne Responding to the Call for Volunteers “From Every Race and Walk of Life” by John Coyne Go to: www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/      

Summertime Quiz                    Country                              Author The Measure of a Dream                                           Tunisia                         Lora Begin  (1989-91) Published by Peace Corps Writers, 2012 How to Cook a Crocodile                                            Gabon                        Bonnie Black  (1996-98) Published by Peace Corps Writers, 2010 Dusty Land: Stories of Two Teachers                     Botswana                   John Ashford  (1990-93) Published by Peace Corps Writers, . . .

Thanks for the ‘heads up’ from Mary-Ann Tirone Smith (Cameroon 1965-67) In South Florida, Donna Shalala (Iran 1962-64), the 77-year-old former federal health and human services secretary, won a close primary for an open House seat against a younger male state legislator who criticized her from the left.

  (Thanks to Alana deJoseph, Mali 1992-94 and Producer of The Towering Task, a Peace Corps documentary, for the information on this story) Peace Corps and Global Seed Health were in partnership for five years to train medical professionals in Africa. Peace Corps is terminating the partnership as of September 30, 2018. (See: https://peacecorpsworldwide.org/peace-corps-response-and-global-health-service-partnership-end-relationship-9-30-18/) Now comes an interview on PBS with reporter Fred de Sam Lazaro about the consequence in Africa of the end of this partnership.  Dr. Vanessa Kerry is the Director of Global Seed Health. She is attributed with the following explanation:  “Dr. Kerry blames the Peace Corps decision politics and says the resulting cutbacks will force a significant scaling back from five countries to two, including Uganda, and far fewer American medical volunteers.” Peace Corps declined to comment.  Here is the story from PBS. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/resisting-the-african-brain-drain-that-has-created-a-health-care-crisis A “brain drain” is sending many of Africa’s highly skilled workers abroad–and leaving . . .