Ghana I — The First Peace Corps Volunteers

 

by John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962–64), editor

In mid-August 1961, Ghana I was ready for Ghana. Nobody was more pleasantly surprised than the Africanists, who at the outset had believed that it would take nearly two years to prepare the Volunteers adequately, given the fact of their youth, inexperience, Kennedy connection, and accompanying media hype. Too much, it was felt, hung on their performance.

Pat Kennedy

The Ghana I group, numbering fifty, had become “one”; there was an unspoken sense of being special due to their having been so closely associated with America’s top four people in African studies and the ever-attentive point man from Washington headquarters, Pat Kennedy, first Director of the Office of Peace Corps Volunteers.

They hadn’t paused to absorb the daunting fact that they would be absolutely the first Volunteers (Tanganyika I had started and finished its training program earlier but would trail Ghana I to Africa by a few days.) But there were celebrations nonetheless.

John Demos, a 1959 graduate of Harvard who had done graduate work at Berkeley before entering the Ghana training group there (and who was then a professor of history at Yale), recalls that at the graduation party, “many libations were poured and the program faculty accepted cigarette lighters inscribed with the heaviest pun of the year ‘Here today, Ghana tomorrow.’” As Demos puts it, “We were set down in Accra [the capital of Ghana] on the afternoon of September 1, 1961.”

by Robert Klein (Ghana 1961-63)

Pat Kennedy remembers the group’s (and his own) thrill at being wished well personally by President Kennedy at the White House, at which point it fully sank in that they were the first, and he remembers the subsequent happy send-off at the Ghanaian Embassy in Washington on August 31, 1961.

He remembers thinking that it was all quite miraculous.  And he remembers the heat. Late August in Washington, D.C. A steam bath. “Perspiration was just pouring off all of us. An official of the Ghanaian Embassy said to us as we left. ‘I can promise you, it will be much cooler in Africa.’”

The flight to Accra, Ghana, took twenty-one hours by a propeller-driven DC-7. The voyage was deemed of sufficient historical importance by Pan American World Airways that Peace Corps Clipper was painted on the fuselage. David Apter (advisor to the Peace Corps, African expert) told the group that the first impression would be extremely important. Thus, the trip to Africa turned into what Pat Kennedy called “a twenty-one-hour rehearsal.”  The Volunteers had been taught the Ghanaian national anthem in Twi, the primary dialect of Ghana. They practiced it obsessively on the plane.

“While one group would practice the song, another group would be practicing the highlife, the bouncy national dance of Ghana, in the back of the plane. And another group would be practicing what to say in case they were interviewed. The rehearsal paid off.”

There was a formal greeting party at the airport that included the Minister of Education, the local council, the American Ambassador, and an assemblage of local chiefs. The Volunteers sang the anthem in Twi to the pop-eyed amazement of the Ghanaians on the tarmac.

Then Kenneth Baer, a well-groomed, scholarly-looking young man, stepped to the microphone. Baer, from Beverly Hills, had his B.A. from Yale and his M.A. in history from Berkeley. The core of his message—in Twi—immediately found its way into Peace Corps lore: “We have to come to learn as well as to teach.”

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  • I was 10 years old and at the airport in Accra to welcome you with my family (my father was with the Embassy). I was so inspired by the idea of the Peace Corps that it became my goal to join. In 1973, right out of college, I set off for 2 years in Zaire. Although I had grown up overseas, the Peace Corps experience, working at the grass roots, was essentially different and changed my life. I will remain ever grateful for the experience.

    Tina

    • Hi Tina,
      I just saw your comment. I was 12 years old when the first peace corps group came to Ghana. I remember we had a party for them at our house with a local band and all the neighbors on our dirt road came to watch. Where did you go to school? I went to Ghana international school for the two years we were in Accra. I have no idea if you will ever see this, but in case you do, it would be fun to connect.

  • Nowadays on the first Thursday of the month usually up to about a dozen of our Ghana I remaining fifty meet online zooming mostly all over the USA (except now Sue Bryson joins us from Scotland) including Florida, Pennsylvania (where Donald Groff helms us), New York, California, Kansas and elsewhere for an hour and change mostly. A few of us are in our 90’s but most in our 80’s. We are getting creaky, our hearing is it seems equally to our seeing is challenged. Ed Mycue from San Francisco CA born 1937

  • Mycue, Edward short HISTORY 2025 January 8 San Francisco born Niagara Falls NY March 21, 1937. Jack & Ruth and seven children moved 1948 to the north central Texas Grasslands Dallas dad selling auto aftermarket brake lining/ clutch facings TX, ARK, NM, LA, OK for the World Bestos/ Firestone subsidiary. I attended Our Lady of Perpetual Help, N.R.Crozier Tech HS (sports editor), Arlington State A.S. honor May 1957. At North Texas State B.A. magna com laude January 1959 then Teaching Fellow continuing graduate study in constitutional government. Following in 1960 Graduate Public Relations and Communications Boston University a Lowell Fellow in Cooperative Broadcasting intern at WGBH-TV Cambridge on M.I.T. campus on Massachusetts Avenue just over the Charles River Bridge from Boston. June 1961 w/Peace Corps’ first group abroad at 1961 August’s to Ghana teaching secondary school Acherensua in the Brong-Ahafo area west within the old Kumasi kingdom. When father died came home, worked for regional office of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s State Merit Systems traveling TX, OK, ARK, NM, LA, 3 years followed next 3 Washington, D. C. department’s Secretary’s offices. Next 3 years to Europe working at various jobs including the harvests in Southern France (the grape wine harvest), Rotterdam on changing ships to containers during the time the Red Sea was blocked, teaching USA literature Elsinore Denmark. Berlin. Brussels. London. Tubingen. Returned to USA to San Francisco HaightAshbury wonderful sister Margo Mycue of Univ Santa Clara/ACT/ SF Mime Troupe w/ excellent cousin Mike O’Connor had a room for me & June 1, 1970 worked booking for the New Shakespeare Company-San Francisco, then Panjandrum Press (published my first book of poems Damage Within The Community in 1963) clerking Fine Arts Museums San Francisco bookstores & others: Graduate Theological Center UC-Berkeley and Stacey’s in San Francisco (which closed in 2009 after 85 years in business) continuing free-lance writer of Poetry mostly and still at it today at age 87 in San Francisco where I’ve shared my life since 1971 with Richard Steger painter with whom have had many volumes of his art and my poetry published including selected poems publication I am a Fact Not a Fiction published by Wordrunner Press, October 1923 recipient the 2024 Peace Corps Writers’ Poetry Award Winner. (c)Copyright Edward Mycue updated January 9, 2025

  • My name is David Chin. My mother and I were the only dependents who were attached to the first group of volunteers. To be candid, the PCV did not allow dependents to accompany volunteers. My mother and I were military dependents because my father was on TDY (tour of duty) from the U.S. Public Health Service. As a specialilst in tropical medicine, my father, Dr. William Chin, was sent with the volunteers to monitor their health.

    I was a little over 8 months old when we landed in Accra with the volunteers. We were based in Accra.

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