The Peace Corps

  For those who don’t know, Charlie Peters (PCW/staff 1961–65) put together the first self-evaluation unit in the federal government for the Peace Corps. It would develop by the government into the Inspector General’s Office that we have today. It grew out of an idea of another very early staff member Bill Haddad who told Shriver, as Coates Redmon relates in her book on the early days of the agency, Come As You Are, “Let’s get our own guys to go out there and find out what’s goin’ on, and if there’s something wrong, we’ll be the first to know and can correct it before the press gets onto it and starts screamin’.” Charlie Peters was named head of the Evaluation Division, and known in the agency as “The burr under the saddle.” He hired first-rate journalists and writers, including Fletcher Knebel, Mark Harris, Richard Rovere, Calvin Trillin, James Michener, Stan . . .

  From a single tooth, an Anthropologist can reconstruct a whole culture, a whole epoch. Watching a single dedicated nun, one can deduct the rules of a whole Order, was the observation in the novel, “A Nun’s Story”. So it is with Peace Corps. The Snugli and the generations of baby carriers it inspired exemplify the Peace Corps mission. If every time, someone saw a baby being carried close to a parent, he or she thought, “Ah, that started with a Peace Corps Volunteer”. If every time, a Mom plunked a crying infant into a baby carrier, close to her heart, and the baby calmed immediately, the Mom said, as I did, “Thank you Peace Corps”, “Thank you Anne Moore” and “Thank you Mothers of Togo”,then, maybe we would not have to hear: “Why preserve the Peace Corps when no one cares or has even heard about it?” I think . . .

   Thanks to the ‘heads up’ from Jackie Dinneen recently the White House Liaison and also Director of Gifts and Grants Management at the Peace Corps. — JC Note What Our Children Show Us — and the World COMMENTARY From RealClearPolitics By Mark Salter, RCP Contributor February 22, 2017 • Our daughter accepted an assignment as a Peace Corps volunteer yesterday. I’ll leave out the particulars of the job except to note she will be living on the other side of the world in a remote location without electricity or plumbing, and she won’t be home for two years and two months. Her mother and father are experiencing equal measures of pride and dread, and suffering what you might call anticipatory separation anxiety. She won’t leave for several months yet, but I already find myself looking at her picture several times a day. We are going to miss and worry about her constantly. In . . .

My first trip to Massawa, Eritrea, was by bike. In January of 1963, our first group of PCVs to Ethiopia, some 280 + of us, assembled for a conference in Asmara. On Friday, January 11th, between our workshops, four of us: Tim Bodman, Charles Michener, Ernie Fox, and myself, decide to rent bikes for the six hours ride down the mountains, into the Danakil desert, and to the Red Sea. Starting before sunrise we peddled five miles to the edge of the mountains. At that level, we were above the clouds that enclose the valleys and encased the rugged mountains pikes and lay perfectly still, billows of white and gray, with the red sun coming up out of them like a sore thumb. It was cold when we pushed off down the mountain and for a while we were bothered with the wind that froze our fingers to the hand . . .

A good friend recently asked me: “Why preserve the Peace Corps when no one cares or has even heard about it?” In this new administration where there is talk of cutting government departments and programs, many RPCVs are concerned about what will happen to the agency. Once before, under the Nixon Administration, the agency was cut and smothered into ACTION before being rescued by President Carter and returned to its lawful place as a separate agency. I want to write an article about why the Peace Corps is valuable to Americans and the world. I was hoping you might have specific examples to send me and give me permission to quote your name and years and country of service. Send your reply to: jcoyneone@gmail.com Here are some topics I’ve thought about, and you may have other issues and ideas to contribute. Thank you for your help.  Tell me your story. Most . . .

Do you remember this painting by Peter Max Peter Max drew this Peace Corps poster, to the best of my memory, in the late ‘60s and it was using in Peace Corps recruiting on college campuses. For those new to the Peace Corps (or the world of art) Max was a master of Pop Art and the culture of the ‘60s. His work was first associated with the counter culture, neo-expressionism, and psychedelic movements in graphic design during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Max is famous for using American icons and symbols in his artwork. He has created paintings of several presidents, i.e. Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and the Clintons. He often features images of celebrities, politicians, athletes and sporting events and other pop culture subjects in his artwork, and, of course, the Peace Corps!  

  This is a short essay that appeared on LinkedIn from a woman who calls herself Kewatki2. She says she is a ‘student and childcare’ person from Salisbury, NC and she wrote this on February 3, 2017 as she prepared to leave ‘staging’ and head overseas for Africa and her Peace Corps assignment. I thought you might enjoy reading it and it will also bring back your memories of your time at Staging. JC note. • STAGE ME Friday, February 3, 2017 Whoa. This past year has been long. Each year that goes by makes me less familiar with the Me I was the year before. In March of 2016 I started the journey through my application to serve in the US Peace Corps. Honestly, I didn’t think I would make the cut. I had been filling my mind with reasons why I should wait “a little bit longer” so . . .

  Former Peace Corps Director takes helm of International Development Organization   SAN DIEGO, CA–(Marketwired – February 07, 2017) – Carrie Hessler-Radelet was selected as the new President & CEO of Project Concern International (PCI) by its Board of Directors on February 3. Hessler-Radelet will lead PCI’s efforts working with families and communities in 16 countries to enhance health, end hunger, and overcome hardship. “Carrie is a recognized leader with decades of experience in global humanitarian affairs, and we are thrilled to have her expertise as PCI seeks to impact the lives of 20 million people annually by 2020,” said PCI Chair Dr. Robert S. Sullivan. “From leading the Peace Corps, to implementing maternal and child health programs in Asia with John Snow, Inc., to establishing Special Olympics programs in Africa, Carrie knows first-hand the difference that can be made when we partner with people and communities on the ground . . .

William Canby Jr. is one of three judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals who on Tuesday will hear oral arguments in the challenge to President Donald Trump’s travel ban. Canby’s colleagues are Michelle Friedland, who was appointed by Barack Obama, and Richard Clifton, who was appointed by George W. Bush. William Canby in 1962 joined the Peace Corps as an Associate Director after spending some time working in private practice. He would go on to becoming the deputy director for the Peace Corps for Ethiopia. After that, he became the director of the Peace Corps for Uganda for two years. He returned to the United States in the late ’60s to teach law at Arizona State University, but he returned to Ethiopia in 1999 to help achieve peace in the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea.    

  Jacqueline Lyons (Lesotho 1992-95) is the author of the poetry collection, The Way They Say Yes Here, poems about her time in Lesotho. Peace Corps Writers awarded this collection its poetry award in 2005. Her poems and essays have been published in over 20 literary journals and she has won several writing awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2003), a Utah Arts Council Literary Award for Poetry and Nonfiction (2002). Jacqueline’s collection will be the poetry textbook for the forthcoming (we hope) MFA in Creative Writing for PCVs and RPCVs at National University this coming April. With that in mind, I interviewed Jacqueline recently about her career and poetry since the Peace Corps. • Where did you grow up, Jacqueline, and what college did you attend? I grew up in eastern central Wisconsin, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire with two majors in English . . .

Thirty-eight US Peace Corps Trainees arrived in the country on Tuesday to begin their two years of service to the people of Guyana. A release from the US Embassy yesterday said that the 30th group of Peace Corps Volunteers to serve in Guyana have begun pre-service training on the Essequibo Coast, living with local host families and learning the Guyanese way of life. They are stationed in the villages of Suddie, Huist D’ieren, Queenstown, Windsor Castle, Capoey Lake, Lake Mainstay and Anna Regina. This US Embassy photo shows the Volunteers As health and education volunteers, they will engage in field practicums in local schools and health centres.  The group is expected to be officially sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers in early April, after which they will begin service throughout Guyana, the release said.

Brittany White (Peru 2015-17) is a Youth Development PCV in Northern Peru working with young people to help promote sexual health awareness as well helping to promote diversity and inclusion within the volunteer community. This item is from her own blog which she kindly agreed to let me republish. Thanks also to Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963-65) for giving me the “Heads Up” about Brittany’s piece. Thank You: From a Black Peace Corps Volunteer to a Black President On October 11,  2008, I woke up in the middle of the night to stand outside and wait for the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to speak. I had read all of his books, kept all the important newspaper clippings, obsessively watched CNN, and could tell you random facts like, “Did you know that Senator Obama is a two time Grammy winner?” I was 18, excited to be a first time participant in a . . .

Bob Stevenson (novel) by Richard Wiley (Korea 1967-69) Bellevue Literary Press, 2016 221 pages $16.99 (paperback) Reviewed by Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978-79) Up until reading Richard Wiley’s new novel Bob Stevenson, I had not given much thought to Robert Louis Stevenson since my sons, now in their early twenties, were in the first and third grades.  Alas, both, as I recall, proved equally determined to process through the Murray Elementary School auditorium brandishing Treasure Island in the “Books Alive” parade that serves in our system as a reasonable facsimile of a Halloween event.  (I live in a part of the country where enough evangelical Christians write off Halloween as devil worship that bona fide Halloween parties are not allowed in the schools).  I finally managed to talk one of them into dressing up as Robin Hood instead of Long John Silver, but it wasn’t easy. Suffice it to say that . . .

I just listened to a Tom Woods podcast of an interview with Gret Glyer who has created an app called DonorSee that allows anyone help in the developing world by using Glyer’s new app. The app program is only 4 months old and a month ago the Peace Corps issued an order that Peace Corps Volunteers were not permitted to be involved with the DonorSee organization. Glyer (and Tom Wood) see the use of the app as a way that Volunteers (as Americans) can be helpful by promoting donations between the US and the developing world. Woods and Glyer see the agency as standing in the way of giving immediate help to others. My guess it is the lawyers decision in the agency who have said ‘no” but the story that is getting back now to the US is that PCVs are not helping others, but are preventing any sort of help. Volunteers look like losers. Listen yourself to the podcast and hear what . . .

Many of us who knew Jack from our Peace Corps days have heard his stories of boxing in college and boxing briefly as a professional in Mexico before returning to Michigan and becoming a boxing coach as he finished his degrees. I asked his daughter Jane Constantineau to spend me Jack’s account from his book and she was kind enough to do so. JC note. Kill the Gringo In retrospect, I question the wisdom of my boxing coach’s plan to send me south of the border with no handler, no Spanish, and no backup. But at the time, I found Marty’s idea ingenious. We were dealing with long odds in trying to maneuver me, an undergraduate boxer, into the position of head boxing coach at the University of Michigan, and I was willing to go the distance to overcome them. On a hazy day in June I crossed the El Paso-Juarez . . .