Peace Corps Worldwide

    Established by President John F. Kennedy on March 1, 1961, via Executive Order, the concept for the public service agency was first introduced months prior in an impromptu presidential campaign speech delivered to college students. “How many of you who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world?” then-Senator Kennedy asked the students. “I think Americans are willing to contribute. But the effort must be far greater than we have ever made in the past.” The response was swift and enthusiastic. Since the Peace Corps’ founding, more than 240,000 Americans have served in 142 host countries. Here’s a look back at some of the agency’s major accomplishments and milestones: 1961: President Kennedy hosts a ceremony in the White House Rose . . .

Thanks for the ‘heads up’ from Bill Preston (Thailand 1977-80)   By Kevin F. F. Quigley (Thailand 1976-79) Inside Higher Ed March 16, 2021 As the Biden-Harris administration gets underway in the midst of the global health, environmental and political crises that have given new urgency to needed social change, can a deeper partnership between higher education institutions and the Peace Corps play a role in building a more just and caring world? When they launched it at an earlier inflection point in American history, the Peace Corps’ founders tapped the energy and idealism of the young to achieve three enduring goals: 1) to help other countries help themselves, 2) to promote cross-cultural understanding and 3) to broaden our understanding of the world beyond our borders by having volunteers share their experiences with other Americans. Although the Peace Corps began as a bold innovation with great vision and ambition, much . . .

  In accepting the presidential nomination, John Kennedy promised “invention, innovation, imagination, decision.” Thirty-nine days after taking office, he established the Peace Corps by executive order and began to keep that promise. Harris Wofford remembers in this long-ago short essay. • The Peace Corps began for me when a call came from Millie Jeffrey, a Democratic National Committee member and active colleague in the Kennedy campaign’s Civil Rights Section (where I was deputy to Sargent Shriver). With great excitement, she told me about Kennedy’s extemporaneous talk she had heard at 2 a.m., October 14, 1960 to thousands of students, faculty, and town people waiting for him in front of the University of Michigan’s Student Union. Challenging the students, he had asked them if they were ready to spend years serving in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. Stirred by his question, Michigan students, including Millie’s daughter, had taken around a petition . . .

  It’s a fact of Peace Corps life that a volunteer must learn to get by in a world not his own, not her own. It’s never a perfect adjustment, not a completely comfortable fit. Often you make mistakes, some of which can be serious. Others are hilarious. (Once, at the dinner table with our training family in Asunción, as we were learning Spanish, my wife, Anne, commented that she had been taking notes in her diarrhea, which completely cracked people up and may still rank near the top in their hall of conversational fame.) In our case, our Peace Corps experience of feeling our way, doing our best to understand what was going on, turned out to be good practice for the foreign service, which we joined a few years after returning from Paraguay. Our Peace Corps country was nothing like Bolivia, or Honduras, or Spain, despite the common . . .

  Peace Corps was created in the golden glow of Post-World War II America. That war was won with our fossil fuel based industrial might. With the Marshall Plan, our ideals, our resources, our technology, we rebuilt our enemies, Germany and Japan,  into strong capitalist economics and laid the foundation for their democratic governments. Both countries became our strong, independent allies. At home, the GI Bill gave veterans a college education and support to own a home, building blocks for our growing middle class. Our economy was a golden cornucopia spewing forth millions of products, from a polio vaccine to pastel, scented toilet paper. In his Inaugural Address, President Kennedy acknowledged our wealth and our success with this call: Now the trumpet summons us again — not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need — not as a call to battle, though embattled we are — but . . .

  Not many people can claim association with an agency spanning nearly 50 years, but our guest can. In the case of the Peace Corps, she’s been working for, with and in it for almost all of the 60 years the Peace Corps is celebrating this year. She’s got a great title to go with that experience — Expert in the Office of the Director. Kate Raftery (Paraguay 1973–75), joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin on March 16, 2021 to discuss her Peace Corps career. • In a half century in and out of the Peace Corps, she’s done it all   Tom Temin: Ms. Raftery, good to have you on. Kate Raftery: Thank you very much for having me. TT: And we should point out, you didn’t work for the Peace Corps continuously, because no one can do that. But tell us how you have been orbiting that agency for all this . . .

    “I joined Peace Corps in 1988 to immerse in meaningful work providing basic needs at the village level, as well as an opportunity for an out-of-the-box experience and time to reevaluate my life.” By Rick Dandes/The Sunbury PA Daily March 6, 2021 | 1:29 PM • At a time when the Peace Corps has suspended all operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic and recalled 7,300 volunteers from 60 countries — a first for the six-decade-old program — six former volunteers with Central Pennsylvania connections recall the value of their “life-changing” experiences and praised the virtues of the far-off locations where they served. Whether assigned to primitive villages in Africa in the 1980s, emerging democracies in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, or more recently to South America, they all joined the Peace Corps out of a desire to serve their country and to help people in need, using skills . . .

  The awards are: The Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award The Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award The Maria Thomas Fiction Award The Award for Best Peace Corps Memoir The Award for Best Book of Poetry The Award for Best Short Story Collection The Award for Best Travel Book The Rowland Scherman Award for Best Photography Book The Marian Haley Beil Award for the Best Book Review The Award for Best Children’s Book about a Peace Corps Country Submit your favorite book(s) published in 2020. Send your selection(s) to John Coyne: jcoyneone@gmail.com List what award your selection should be given. The awards will be announced in August 2021. Thank you.

  This was originally posted on Peace Corps Worldwide on February 2, 2014.  Dr. Textor believed that RPCVs should ultimately be the ones staffing Peace Corps administration.  Perhaps in this time of proposing improvement to Peace Corps, it would be good to revisit his ideas. • This is a good time to remember how very much Robert Textor contributed to the Peace Corps. He was one of the original Peace Corps staffers. He believed passionately in the Volunteer and just as importantly, the RPCV. Textor was the  author of the “In, Up, and Out” policy or as it is more commonly known, “the five year rule.” But, he insisted that tenure should be eight years, not five. He envisioned a Peace Corps agency staffed 90% by RPCVs, arguing that the cross-cultural experience of the Volunteer was transformative and should be incorporated into every function of the Peace Corps agency. In the months before his passing, . . .