The Peace Corps

The Baby Whisperer iUniverse by George Pope (Chile 1963-65) 112 pages September 2021 $5.99 (Kindle); $13.99 (Paperback)       For the past sixteen years, George Pope has been holding and comforting babies in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) a local Children’s Hospital. The book is full of heart-warming, heart-wrenching, and sometimes downright amusing stories of working with the most caring, the most compassionate, and the most competent professionals he has ever been associated with. His job? He calls himself:  The Baby Whisperer! Before becoming a “Baby Whisperer,” George had a forty-year international affairs career. Beginning as a PCV in Chile (1963-65), he served in six U.S. Embassies and managed the operational aspects of international food aid relief programs in over fifty countries.  

  WASHINGTON (Reuters) – First lady Michelle Obama will travel to Japan and Cambodia this month as part of a U.S. global effort to support education for girls, the White House said on Tuesday. She will visit Tokyo and Kyoto in Japan from March 18 to March 20, and the Cambodian capital Siem Reap from March 21 to 22, it said in a statement. The initiative aims to reduce the number of girls — 62 million worldwide — who do not attend school, according to the administration. The effort, launched last summer through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), will use the Peace Corps volunteer program to help expand access for schooling for girls, especially for teenagers. Cambodia is one of 11 countries targeted by the Peace Corp initiative during the program‘s first year, the White House said. The other countries are: Albania, Benin, Burkina Faso, Georgia, Ghana, . . .

The current issue of WorldView (online at the NPCA site) has an informative interview with Bill Moyers and Bill Josphenson on the creation of the Peace Corps. The interview introduces new information about those formative days of the agency. Here is an essay I wrote in the late ’90s about creating the Peace Corps based on interviews I had done with founders like Warren Wiggins and Harris Wofford and others who had been part of the Mayflower Gang that created the Peace Corps.    Establishing the Peace Corps Let me start with a quote from Gerard T. Rice’s book, The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps: In 1961 John F. Kennedy took two risky and conflicting initiatives in the Third World. One was to send five hundred additional military advisers into South Vietnam; by 1963 there would be seventeen thousand such advisers. The other was to send five hundred young Americans . . .

After helping to found the Peace Corps, the former West Virginia legislator started this magazine in 1969 and molded it for 32 years.  by Matthew Cooper December 22, 2021 A little over 20 years ago, I made a short film in honor of Charlie Peters, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly. The American Society of Magazine Editors was inducting my old boss and mentor to its Hall of Fame, a kind of Cooperstown of glossies. Held at a glitzy luncheon at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, the editors of venerable titles lavishly toasted themselves as the National Magazine Awards were handed out. (In retrospect, it had an end-of-an-era feeling, with 9/11 and the collapse of so many publications in the offing.) My short film was a precis to Charlie getting his Thalberg. It began with shots of the Time-Life Building, the Newsweek building, and the Condé Nast tower, followed by . . .

MY LIFE IN THE LAND OF THE ETERNAL SPRING: THE COFFEE PLANTATION BY Mark D. Walker (Guatemala 1971-73) Though I had lived and worked in Guatemala for seven years, it was a brief encounter with my young daughter, Michelle, on the San Francisco Miramar coffee plantation, perched on the side of the Volcano Atitlan that would determine my direction in life. It was a few days before Christmas, and I was strolling through the “Big House” when I came upon her in the living room. She stood, her feet planted on the orange tile floor, hugging her new Airedale puppy, Tiky, and gazing with wonder at the Christmas tree twinkling with colored lights and filled with handmade decorations. Below the tree, a number of brightly wrapped packages sat in contrast to the stark white walls. On the wall was a number of photographs of my wife’s family members It was . . .

  Dear Folks, As a matter of fact, Christmas was quite merry this year, even without snow. Friday, Phil, Mr. Rowat, Bernie, and I went out in search of a tree. What we were looking for was not a Eucalyptus tree or a false banana tree but for a more symmetric and Christmasy cedar, and sure enough down on the banks of the Gogeb River we found a prime candidate. We lost little time hacking it down with our stone-age ax but were startled when along came some village folks who wondered what we were up to. Phil being more quick-witted than the rest of us, and more fluent in the local dialect said we were taking it to help welcome the Provincial Governor who just happened to be coming for an annual visit the next day. Well, that made perfect sense all around, and we gleefully hauled off the . . .

An RPCV who went to Ethiopia with the first group in 1962 and is now living in a retirement community in DC. “I’m preparing to go to bed.  In comes Rahel, an Ethiopian nurse, to take my temperature and other vital measures.  While she’s here, she’s joined by Asnaku, Ethiopian, who has come to get out my PJS and reorder my clothes.  Then she is joined by Melat, the youngest of the Ethiopian caregivers, who not only helps Asnaku but also takes out my laundry for pick up overnight. Melat is a graduate of BarDahr University.  Great service.” A PCV story that has come full circle.

HUFFPOST PERSONAL I Joined A Far-Right Group Of Moms. What I Witnessed Was Frightening. Phoebe Cohen has walked many paths in life, including living in the Gobi Desert as a Peace Corps volunteer and working as a paramedic in several states. Cohen’s work has been featured in Graphic Medicine, Mutha Magazine and BorderX. She regularly posts on her website Merry Misandrist. Cohen is a part-time cartoonist, writer and nursing student. She has been known to go up to five hours without coffee. By  Phoebe Cohen (Mongolia 2005-07), Guest Writer   “There are about 20 of us. We are all maskless, all (apparently) white, mostly women and all on the younger side.” “Look out for the trigger words,” the woman says. She’s perched on a chair in front of the room. She’s well-dressed yet funky with elegant boots, a demure sweater and some colorful jewelry. “‘Equality,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘inclusion,’ ‘marginalization,’… These words . . .

First published on this site on Dec 22, 2020 My First Christmas in Africa by Mark Wentling by Mark Wentling (Honduras 1967-69 & Togo 1970-73) This holiday season has me reminiscing again about my first Christmas in Africa. As I stare blankly out the window I am transported back to 1970 and my humble room in the Adjakpo family compound in the village of Agu-Gadzapé, Togo. After three months of living there as a Peace Corps Volunteer and learning how to fit in where I would never really fit, the Christmas season was upon us and I began raising questions about what to do for Christmas. Everybody in our congested compound, which was always vibrantly alive with people doing their daily chores and what they had to do to survive the poverty that engulfed them so profoundly, liked the idea of doing something to celebrate Christmas. But, they all said . . .

  Here’s another look at Tanzania in the novel An African Season, written by Leonard Levitt (Tanzania 1963-65) that tells the better side of the Peace Corps in Africa. SARGENT SHRIVER WROTE about An African Season, The first book which truly conveys the flavor of Peace Corps work, the realities of it, the challenges, the frustrations . . .. An extraordinarily fine book. Levitt’s book is about his one year in rural Tanganyika, as the nation was called at the time. Levitt was a secondary school teacher in Ndumulu School in Mbeya, and his book is a wonderful look at Tanganyika in its last days of British colonial rule. The nation would become Tanzania in 1964 when Tanganyika joined with the island of Zanzibar. It is also worth reading for Levitt’s clear eye for details and telling incidents. Here are his first impressions on arriving in up-country Tanganyika. Levitt arrived late at night in . . .

by Tricia L. Nadolny, Donovan Slack, Nick Penzenstadler and Kizito Makoye Published in USA TODAY – 12/21/21 DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — An American Peace Corps employee in Tanzania in 2019 killed a mother of three and injured two others in a series of car crashes that began after he left a bar where he had been drinking and brought a sex worker back to his government-leased home. Witnesses pelted the man’s car with rocks and pursued on motorcycles as he fled the scenes of his crimes. The chaotic and deadly episode ended when he slammed into a pole and was detained by police. But within hours, Peace Corps and U.S. Embassy staff rushed the man onto a plane and out of the country. Tanzanian authorities were unable to charge him first, and the U.S. Department of Justice later declined to file criminal charges because of a lack of jurisdiction. The man . . .

John Garamendi (Ethiopia 1966-68) joins senators in calling for the inclusion of Peace Corps volunteers in student loan forgiveness By NICK SESTANOVICH December 20, 2021  With the U.S. Department of Education announcing further steps toward student loan forgiveness, Rep. John Garamendi, D-Solano, was one of the lead signatories in a letter calling upon the education secretary to include Peace Corps volunteers in these changes. Garamendi, co-chair of the Congressional Peace Corps Caucus and the only returned Peace Corps volunteer in the House of Representatives, joined Sens. Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, both Democrats from Maryland, in writing a bicameral letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in response to a new temporary waiver period for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program that was announced back in October. During this period, some borrowers will be allowed to receive credit toward student loan forgiveness for periods of public service that would . . .

First published on our site Dec 21, 2020 by Jeanne D’Haem (Somalia 1968-70)   On Christmas Eve my family gathered at my grandmother’s house on Jane Street in Detroit, Michigan. Her Christmas tree glittered with multicolored bubble lights. The uncles sat in the small living room, my aunts and grandmother tasted and talked in the kitchen. Cousins played with the wooden blocks and the Indian doll in the wooden toy box in the den. Sometimes there were new babies to hold. I was 22 the first time I could not attend, as I was a Peace Corps volunteer serving in Somalia, and  I wanted to at least send a Christmas gift to Grandma Carter. Newspaper cones of tea, alcohol for the tilly lamps, or the blue and green patterned cloth for sale in my village did not seem worth sending across two oceans. However, when my neighbor showed me what she . . .