The Peace Corps

Agency history, current news and stories of the people who are/were both on staff and Volunteers.

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From HuffPost Impact: Interview with A TOWERING TASK film director, Alana DeJoseph (Mali)
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Restructuring The Peace Corps
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THE TOWERING TASK — A Film by Alana DeJoseph (Mali)
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The Peace Corps in the Time of ISIS
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Donate to Peace Corps Projects
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Cold Hand of History, The Peace Corps 10 Final Blog
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Cold Hand of History, The Peace Corps Part 9
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Cold Hand of History, The Peace Corps Part 8
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Cold Hand of History, The Peace Corps Part 7
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Cold Hand of History, The Peace Corps Part 6
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The Cold Hand of History, Part 5
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Cold Hand of History, The Peace Corps 4
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Cold Hand of History, The Peace Corps, Part 3
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RPCVs Speaking Up For Their Host Country Families and Friends
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Peace Corps and IBM Corporate Service Corps Team Up

From HuffPost Impact: Interview with A TOWERING TASK film director, Alana DeJoseph (Mali)

Alana DeJoseph (Mali 1992–94), director of the film “A Towering Task” was recently interviewed by Ann Paisley Chandler for HuffPost Impact. The interview, entitled “A Towering Task: A Peace Corps Documentary.” The Peace Corps is more relevant today than it ever was, but it’s not the same Peace Corps of the 60s. There is a fascinating story that has never been told. Please consider supporting this campaign today. • Ann Paisley Chandler: What inspired you to start A Towering Task? Alana DeJoseph: One in every 1,450 Americans is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. As Americans we care about how we show up in the world, and I think lately people are frustrated rather than proud about our interactions with the rest of the world. The foreign aid budget is less than 1% of the entire US budget, and of that 1%, the Peace Corps’ budget is about 1%. The Peace Corps has had incredible ripple . . .

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Restructuring The Peace Corps

  Emphasize the Peace Corps’s Third Goal Most people are aware of the Peace Corps’s first two goals—contribute to the developing of critical countries and regions, and promote international cooperation and goodwill—but few have ever heard of the Third Goal, which many RPCVs view as the most important. The Third Goal states that RPCVs should help to educate Americans about the world beyond its borders, enabling citizens to participate in foreign affairs with greater sophistication and sensitivity. The agency could continue the service of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers by establishing opportunities for RPCVs to tell their stories through public schools and a variety of national organizations, including the Library Association, Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions, League of Women Voters, National Council of La Raza, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Organization for Women. While today there is a Third Goal Office in the agency it should be . . .

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THE TOWERING TASK — A Film by Alana DeJoseph (Mali)

It isn’t until you lose something that you realize how important it was. For several years now, I have appreciated John Coyne and Marian Beil’s amazing website on so many levels. I have used it for research, to keep up-to-date on everything Peace Corps, for historical information, to fritter away many an hour, and to learn of the next great Peace Corps book. It made me feel good to know this incredible body of work was at my fingertips anytime I needed a dose of Peace Corps in my life. And then the website went down. To be revamped, John assured me. It would be back up soon, he said. Days went by without John’s familiar emails in my inbox, enticing me to spend another few educational minutes on one of the great articles at peacecorpsworldwide.org. When just weeks before I had filed away several of John’s updates, knowing that I would . . .

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The Peace Corps in the Time of ISIS

                                                                                                            In 21st century campaigns we’ve become accustomed to candidates stating their priorities by saying what they’ll do on Day One. On that day, he or she will end Obamacare or defund Planned Parenthood. What John F. Kennedy did, on the first day of the second month of his administration—March 1, 1961—was sign an executive order creating The Peace Corps.  This grass-roots, volunteer approach to the social and economic development of Third World countries, Peace Corps “symbolized what America wanted to be, and what much of the world wanted America to be: superhero, protector of the disenfranchised, defender of the democratic faith,” wrote Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman in her 1998 book, All You Need Is Love. In the U.S., in 1961, a new generation of citizens took it as a challenge and a gift when Kennedy called on Americans to “ask what you can do for your country.” Mostly young volunteers . . .

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Donate to Peace Corps Projects

The Peace Corps has added a new link to its official Home page. At the bottom of the page, the last section is “Donate”. Each link describes Peace Corps  programs for which Peace Corps can accept tax deductible donations. The projects include Volunteer Projects, Special Funds, and Country Projects. Here is the link for more information: https://donate.peacecorps.gov/donate/projects-funds/#issue Peace Corps has also created Memorial Funds for Fallen Volunteers, at the request of the families. These funds support project that honor these Volunteers.  For more information, go to: https://donate.peacecorps.gov/donate/projects-funds/memorial/ All of the contributions go to fund the projects. The administrative costs are included in the Peace Corps budget and do not come from the donations. The web pages are comprehensive and also ask for feedback on the new site.

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Cold Hand of History, The Peace Corps 10 Final Blog

Gary May’s chapter on the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, the final essay in this collection about JFK’s foreign policies, was also meant to “tell the story of the Peace Corps world wide” and it summed up with two final points. May writes:  “Despite their difficulties, the volunteers considered their Peace Corps service personally invaluable.” He quotes Carol Miller Reynolds, “I still think the Peace Corps is one of the most valuable forms of foreign aid, despite its inadequacies….I still think it’s a good basic way to approach problems-at the grass roots level-unlike the policy makers who never understand things at the grass roots.” And Ron Kazarian told him in 1987, “I learned a lot about people, life, myself. Where I live [in central California] I’m an authority on one part of Africa. Every day, someone asks me about Ethiopia.” May then quotes Arthur M. Schlesinger’s book Robert Kennedy and His . . .

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Cold Hand of History, The Peace Corps Part 9

Ethiopia I Volunteers were as hard on each other as they were on the Ethiopians. At the Completion of Service Conference the Final Report filed in the Peace Corps Office read: “Many (PCVs) spoke openly about volunteers who they thought should have been sent home: the males who lived with prostitutes; the woman who was “obviously mentally disturbed; the “opportunist” who was unable to teach so was given a sinecure in the Ministry of Education. The Peace Corps,” one volunteer stated, “is not a goddamn rehabilitation center. ” Carol Miller Reynolds, who was a PCV in Debre Berhan, where students in early 1963 went on strike, would tell May-and May would tell me-that her comment was the most insightful of all he heard from PCVs. May interviewed Carol in 1987 and she told him, “The basic issues were deep seated and antagonistic to easy resolution. It had to do with . . .

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Cold Hand of History, The Peace Corps Part 8

The end of the Ethiopia 1 tour began with the Completion of Service Conference in April, 1964. The conference was conducted by Dr. Joseph English, chief Peace Corps Psychiatrist, and Jane Campbell of the Division of Volunteer Support. (Jane the following year would return to Ethiopia as an APCD.) May reports in his article that at the time the PCVs were uncertain about their future careers. He quotes John Rex writing to his parents in early ’64, “Can’t I write a book or travel, or do something different?” Most planned to spend the first few months following termination traveling through Europe. Some looked back and felt discouragement about what they had achieved in Ethiopia. Rex observed. “I certainly have benefited from the experience, but I ask myself if anyone else really has.” One of the PCVs interviewed by Gary May was Mary Lou Linman, who was a PCV in Debre . . .

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Cold Hand of History, The Peace Corps Part 7

This essay on the Peace Corps is entitled, “Passing the Torch and Lighting Fires: The Peace Corps.” And as I said it was written by Gary May. The essay is based on interviews he had with Ethiopian PCVs in the 1980s, as well as one Evaluation Report and a Close of Service report done in 1964. It is the last chapter in a scholar text entitled, Kennedy’s Quest For Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961-63, published by Oxford Press. It would appear to suggest that this is the story of the Peace Corps during the first decade.  It is meant to ‘sum up’ the work of Peace Corps Volunteers, to explain what the Peace Corps was all about  under Kennedy, Shriver, and Wofford, the driving force in the creation of the agency. This is not true, of course, It is one partial description of the work of PCVs in one country. . . .

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Cold Hand of History, The Peace Corps Part 6

In Late October,1962, Sargent Shriver visited Ethiopia. He was determined to meet all 278 Volunteers recalled Donovan McClure, who accompanied Shriver from Washington. “He raced around in a jeep from sun-up to sunset shattering the poise of countless Volunteers by suddenly appearing in their classroom or at the doors of their houses, hand extended, “Hi! I’m Sarge Shriver. Greatameecha…President Kennedy is behind you all the way.” As Gary May reports. I was teaching English at the Commercial School when Shriver burst into my classroom, followed by Wofford and several Ethiopian officials from the Ministry of Education and our Headmaster. He came across the front of the classroom right at me, hand outstretched, just that, “Hi! I’m Sarge Shriver. Greatameecha.” I remember blurting out, “No kidding.” My tenth grade class was so stunned they didn’t jump to their feet as all Ethiopia students would do when an adult opened the classroom . . .

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The Cold Hand of History, Part 5

The Volunteers arrived in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa,” Gary May continues, “on September 7. (They had finished Training on August 20, 1962, when 278 were inducted into the Peace Corps. Training had started with 340 eight weeks earlier. While some had left Training on their own, most others were De-Selected in the final days.) As the PCVs arrived in Addis they were greeted by a gathering of American USAID and Embassy types. They disembarked, carrying musical instruments, cameras, and piles of luggage, and the sun appeared-“most unusual in this period of heavy Ethiopian rain,” one official remarked, as May quotes a cable from Addis to the Secretary of State, “conspired to make their arrival a festive occasion.” The volunteer passed quickly through customs. May quotes from John Coyne’s Ethiopia novel A Cool Breeze For Evening on how the new PCVS spoke to every Ethiopian that moved. “We were all trying . . .

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Cold Hand of History, The Peace Corps 4

The following week The New Yorker would quote Wofford’s line to the Trainees that they as PCVs in Ethiopia were the new frontier, and on July 9, 1962, the Washington Evening Star, in an article entitled, “Peace Corpsmen Trek West” APCD Bascom Story, as detailed by Gary May, explained the educational situation in Ethiopia to the Trainees where only 5 % of the children attended school, and “it was a tremendous responsibility when you consider that one half of all secondary school education will be carried on by Americans within four or five years.” The Peace Corps Staff expected that with the Volunteers the number of students enrolled in Ethiopia’s secondary schools would double. Getting ready to teach in Ethiopia, and double the number of students, the Trainees got up the next morning at 5:45 at Georgetown University and did forty minutes of physical training: push-ups, jogging, bending, turning, leaping…etc. . . .

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Cold Hand of History, The Peace Corps, Part 3

Contrary to what the Peace Corps Evaluators wrote in their 1967 Evaluation of the Ethiopia project, that Wofford and the agency had “chosen the incorrect “institutional” answer-the secondary schools-to the problems of Ethiopia,” the Empire in 1962 had a serious “educational emergency,” which threatened to retard permanently its economic development. According to Gary May, out of a secondary school-age population estimated at approximately one million, only six thousand were enrolled in 1960, and there were few college-trained Ethiopians qualified to teach them. This crisis had its origins during the Italian occupation (1935-1941), when the Italians killed nearly 20,000 Ethiopians, “reportedly concentrating on the professional, educational, and political leaders.” When Selassie returned to Ethiopia in 1941 he found “almost no educated people left in the country.” Over the next two-decades he attempted to fill this gap by importing teachers from abroad. The Emperor considered education so important to the modernization of . . .

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RPCVs Speaking Up For Their Host Country Families and Friends

We are the Board Members of Arkadaşlar, “Friends of Turkey,” representing over 800 returned PCVs. As Peace Corps Volunteers in Turkey in the 1960s and early 1970s, we learned, and lived, the value of understanding and respecting other cultures and religions, specifically Muslims and Islam.  Many of us formed life-long friendships with our colleagues and neighbors, who were more like us than not.  Accordingly, we endorse the Minnesota RPCV message as reflective of our views and experience. The Minnesota Message: We, 99 Returned Peace Corps Volunteers from Minnesota, have written this letter to counter the recent increase in anti-Muslim, anti-Islam, and anti-immigrant rhetoric that is sweeping across America and our state. We served for two years as Peace Corps Volunteers in various countries around the world. Although we all had very different experiences in different cultures, one thing that binds us together is an understanding that the more you know about . . .

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Peace Corps and IBM Corporate Service Corps Team Up

Melinda Tabler-Stone, Deputy Chief of Mission for the U.S. Embassy in Accra, Ghana (left), and Louise Hemond-Wilson, IBM Corporate Service Corps Member, are all smiles after Louise is sworn in as a Peace Corps Response Volunteer. On Janaury 15, Louise Hemond-Wilson became the first IBM Corporate Service Corps member to be sworn in for duty as a Peace Corps Response Volunteer through a recent partnership between Peace Corps and IBM. Louise will support girls’ empowerment and gender equity projects. Her work will focus on connecting girls to electronic resources that reinforce school curriculums so that they can stay connected to their studies if they miss school for economic or other reasons. Additionally, her work aims to engage males in girls’ empowerment and gender equity practices within communities. WASHINGTON, D.C., December 2, 2015 – The Peace Corps and IBM (NYSE: IBM) are launching an innovative public-private partnership to allow highly skilled corporate professionals to serve . . .

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