The Peace Corps

  Peace Corps service is not without real risks, as these two tragedies demonstrate. • CBS4News in Denver, Colorado reported on the death of PCV Cody Oser in Panama, recently. Cody Oser was an Engineering Graduate of Colorado State University. Oser’s father, Steven, tells CBS4 there is “absolutely no foul play.”His son’s body was found in the shallow water of a creek. “He was going down by a river and going across some boulders and he slipped,” said his father.” In a news release, acting Peace Corps director Sheila Crowley said, “His impressive engineering skills made him stand out as a volunteer because he dedicated himself to working with communities around the world to find solutions to their technological needs. His passing is a profound loss for the Peace Corps community as we mourn along with his family and friends.” The news report concluded: “The family is already starting an effort . . .

  Mark Gearan, who worked on the nomination of Bill Clinton and then as Senior Staff in the White House before becoming Director of the Peace Corps in 1995, has asked his friend and the former president to be the commencement speaker at Hobart and William Smith College this spring. Mark D. Gearan, the longest-serving president in the history of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, has already announced that he will conclude his duties as president at the end of the 2016-17 academic year. At the time of his appointment in 1999, Gearan was one of the youngest college presidents in the nation and a “non-traditional” choice given his background as Director of the Peace Corps and White House senior staff member. When he concludes his presidency in 2017, he will have served for 18 years, leading the Colleges through a period of unprecedented growth. Gearan, with help from his . . .

  Keep America Beautiful announced on April 11, 2017 that Helen Lowman (Thailand 1988-91), who served as an appointee of President Barack Obama at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and with the Peace Corps, has been named the organization’s new president and CEO. She will assume the role on May 1. From 2010 to 2017, Lowman served as an appointee of the President of the United States in the senior foreign service and the senior executive service. Most recently, she was Director-Individual and Community Preparedness at FEMA in Washington, D.C., overseeing programs to increase citizen and community preparedness while encouraging disaster and crisis resilience. Previously, she served in a variety of roles with the Peace Corps, directing Recruitment Office in DC as an Associate Director. She earlier served as Regional Director-Europe, Middle East and Asia, Peace Corps’ largest geographic region. Earlier in her career, Lowman managed environmental education events . . .

  Secretary of Transportation Elaine L. Chao, who was briefly a director of the Peace Corps (1991-92), and RPCV Netflix CEO Reed Hastings (Swaziland 1983-86), will reflect on their experiences as leaders in government and business and discuss the need for a spirit of service and idealism. The talk will be moderated by Ann Compton, former White House correspondent for ABC News. The discussion, “Inspiring a Sense of Service and Idealism,” will highlight the evolution of the Peace Corps and how its ideals remain relevant today—five decades after its founding.  The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 18, in the Coolidge Auditorium on the ground level of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C.  Tickets are not needed, but an RSVP is required to specialevents@loc.gov. In recognition of the centennial of the birth of President John F. Kennedy, . . .

Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) has another long and entertaining piece in the current New Yorker entitled “Talk Like an Egyptian: Learning Arabic during Tabrir and after.” Peter is now back in the States and working on a book about the five years he spent reporting from Egypt.  

  Dear friends, The National Peace Corps Association is proud to endorse “Rethinking the Battlefield,” Senator Murphy’s alternative budget proposal representing a powerful vision for American leadership in International Affairs. This proposal includes funding for 15,000 Peace Corps Volunteers by 2022. We are forwarding you NPCA’s press release in the hopes that you can push it out into the public media space (print and online), either yourself or through your media contacts. And if you can help NPCA build our media contact list, we’d appreciate it even more! Just reply to this email or contact us at news@peacecorpsconnect.org. Though the vision of 15,000 volunteers is an exciting one, we know it will be an uphill battle in the next few months just to maintain level funding of $410 million for Peace Corps and $60 billion for International Affairs. For this reason, we need all the media support we can get! With . . .

  JFK100 MAY 27, 2017 @ 2:00 PM EST John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum Columbia Point, Boston, MA The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is proud to partner with National Peace Corps Association (NPCA) and Boston Area Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (BARPCV) to host the Peace Corps community at a centennial commemoration of the birth of President Kennedy. Since President Kennedy founded the Peace Corps in 1961, over 225,000 Americans have served as Peace Corps Volunteers in 141 countries around the world. Peace Corps Volunteers embody core American values of cooperation, understanding, and peace. And beyond service, Volunteers return home to carry out the “Third Goal” of Peace Corps – to promote a better understanding of the countries in which they served. Whether as educators, entrepreneurs, humanitarian aid workers, public officials, community leaders, and fellow citizens, RPCVs continue to live by these ideals and share the . . .

  It’s bad enough we have a president who is described as a narcissist but it’s even worse when he is combined with a China policy that is schizophrenic. I was reminded of that condition the other day. I heard Sen. Cory Gardner, a 42-year-old Republican from Colorado, open a think tank’s discussion about China’s “fault lines”…and “instability.” He is chairman of the Senate foreign relations subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and international cybersecurity policy. His remarks swerved from the threatening (“the United States will deploy every economic, diplomatic and, if necessary, every military tool at our disposal to deter Pyongyang and protect our allies”) to the conciliatory, recognizing that China’s rise has taken 500 million people out of poverty and hoping for a peaceful relationship. His talk echoed both the thundering and more reassuring cool breezes coming from on high in the Donald Trump administration. His secretary of . . .

Thanks to a ‘heads up’ from Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993-96) about the RPCV Gulf Coast, Florida group which has made great strides during the past few years fulfilling the Third goal of Peace Corps. The RPCVs have done a number of community projects: box gardens for children at a Sarasota library,  highway clean-up, sharing their Peace Corps experiences with library displays in Manatee and Sarasota Counties, making presentations to schools and colleges in the area, and a radio program of RPCV interviews. Their latest milestone was the presentation of an award of $800 to Project Light Manatee for exemplifying the spirit of the Third Goal, helping people in our community to become full-fledged and thus contributing members of the community.  Project Light teaches English to immigrants, mainly Hispanic and Haitian. It has been providing this important service to thousands of immigrants and others for twenty years or more.  Project Light was extremely . . .

Bill Moyers tells the story of how when he and Shriver went to talk to Vice President about getting the Peace Corps approved by Congress, LBJ took Moyers aside and told him, “don’t sell the Peace Corps, sell Shriver.” And that’s what Moyers did. Late in the afternoon—after a full day at the Peace Corps Headquarters in the Maiatico Building across from the White House and Lafayette Square –Shriver and Moyers would go downtown and “walk the halls of Congress” peering into open doorways to see who was still working and seek out Congressman and Senators as if they were two Girl Scout girls selling cookies. They’d introduce themselves and talk about the Peace Corps. Or Shriver would talk about what PCVs would do in the Third World and Moyers would “sell” Shriver and what this man could do with this new government diplomacy. Well, as we know, it worked. . . .

Last night on Hard Ball Chris Matthews (Swaziland 1968-70) was asking his panel for “something he didn’t know” and one commenter said the Secretary of State had gotten much of AID’s budget restored. Matthews asked immediately, “what about the Peace Corps?” The reply was “I think Peace Corps is okay, the politics behind it are so strong.” The reason that they are strong is that NPCV president Glen Blumhorst (Guatemala 1988-91) led the efforts to generate a record number of signatures from 175 members of Congress to sign a “Dear Colleague Letter” for funding for the Peace Corps at no less than $410m for FY 2018. Also significant was that the Peace Corps Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet spent the last two weeks of her directorship walking the halls of Congress talking to congressmen and senators about supporting for the agency in the upcoming budget. Rumors are that the Senate will also . . .

Carol Bellamy left the agency on May 1, 1995, and for several weeks it appeared that Harris Wofford (Ethiopia CD 1962-1964), a central figure in the creation of the agency, might become the new director. Clinton, however, had other plans and Wofford was asked by the president to take over and ‘save’ the new National Service Corporation. In August, Mark Gearan, then in the press office of the White House, and a political type, was named the next Peace Corps Director. Gearan was Director until August 1999, a total of four years and proved to be an outstanding director. I am indebted to Mark for taking an idea of mine—the Crisis Corps—and making it a reality. I had previously floated the idea of a “Crisis Corps” in a memo to Carol Bellamy who was intrigued by the idea but she didn’t last long at the agency. However, shortly after Gearan . . .