Peace Corps Worldwide

  Thanks for the ‘heads-up’ from Mary-Ann Tirone Smith (Cameroon 1965-67) — This is from Wednesday, May 20th PBS News Hour, which featured Judy Woodruff and William Brangham, of the PBS NewsHour talk with George Packer (Togo 1982-83). As Mary-Ann wrote to me about Packer’s presentation, “Brilliant indictment of the Trump administration.” — J Coyne, ed. • Judy Woodruff: Throughout this entire crisis, questions continue to be raised about why the U.S. government was not better prepared for such a challenge. As William Brangham tells us, those questions include how the Trump administration views the role of government and civil service broadly. William Brangham: That’s right, Judy. Most people would agree that the scale and speed of this pandemic would have taxed the resources and abilities of any administration and of any president. But the Trump administration’s response has certainly come under some intense scrutiny. Let’s turn now to two writers who . . .

  In 2017, the PC OIG followed up on the investigation and trial of the accused of the murder of Kate Puzey. The murder remains unresolved as of today. The OIG had monitored the implementation of the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Volunteer Protection Act of 2011 and that was included.  Jody Olsen, the current Director of the Peace Corps was Acting Director in March of 2009 when Kate Puzey was murdered. Click for an update: https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.peacecorps.gov/documents/inspector-general/Interim_Update.pdf From the update: “Ultimately, all four defendants were acquitted. Three of the defendants had been incarcerated for eight years pending trial, and one had been incarcerated for three years. Despite the extensive investigative fieldwork conducted in Benin and other resources devoted to this investigation by the Beninese Gendarmerie, the Peace Corps OIG, the FBI, and the Regional Security Office of the U.S. Embassy in Benin, the case remains unresolved. OIG and our partners continue . . .

  Starting this Friday (May 22), you will be able to buy movie tickets from your local theaters and stream “A Towering Task” while at the same time supporting a local movie house. Go to “First Run Features” to learn if this his happening in your neighborhood. http://www.firstrunfeatures.com/toweringtask_playdates.html   If you don’t see your neighborhood theater in this list, send this link to your theater so that they can sign up to participate in this opportunity: https://bit.ly/AToweringTaskVirtualCinemaSignUp  

  By BRAD BIGGS CHICAGO TRIBUNE | MAY 16, 2020 | 6:51 PM Former Bears President Michael McCaskey, shown in this January 1999 photo, has died at 76.(JOSE MORE / CHICAGO TRIBUNE) Michael McCaskey, who took over the reins of the Chicago Bears from his grandfather George Halas in 1983 before the team achieved its greatest moment two years later, died Saturday. He was 76. McCaskey became the president and CEO of the Bears in 1983 and remained at the helm of the organization in a long run, serving as the chairman of the board from 1999 until 2011, when he stepped down and was replaced by his brother George. McCaskey battled cancer for a considerable time. The oldest of Ed and Virginia McCaskey’s 11 children, McCaskey is survived by two children, John and Kathryn, and one grandson, Jackson. “Mike was already successful in every sense of the word when he took over for . . .

Thanks for the ‘head-up’ from Matt Losak (Lesothe 1985-88) Carolyn and Richard Paul Thornell were married for nearly 50 years. (Family photo) By Tara Bahrampour In the 1970s and ’80s, when Richard Paul Thornell would go with his sons to the grocery store and return late, his wife would teasingly ask, “Did you run into someone from the Peace Corps?” Usually, the answer was yes. In the early days of President John F. Kennedy’s administration, Thornell had worked under Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver and future senator Harris Wofford, negotiating and setting up the first Peace Corps program in the world. In May 1961, the 24-year-old Thornell traveled to Ghana as director of the Peace Corps Africa Regional Office to help design educational, agricultural and job-training programs there. Although he had to return to the United States that summer after contracting tuberculosis, the experience marked him. “For him, it was . . .

Scott Galloway predicts a handful of elite cyborg universities will soon monopolize higher education by James D. Walsh New York Post, May 11,2020 In 2017, Scott Galloway anticipated Amazon’s $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods a month before it was announced. Last year, he called WeWork on its “seriously loco” $47 billion valuation a month before the company’s IPO imploded. Now, Galloway, a Silicon Valley runaway who teaches marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, believes the pandemic has greased the wheels for big tech’s entrée into higher education. The post-pandemic future, he says,  will entail partnerships between the largest tech companies in the world and elite universities. MIT@Google. iStanford. HarvardxFacebook. According to Galloway, these partnerships will allow universities to expand enrollment dramatically by offering hybrid online-offline degrees, the affordability and value of which will seismically alter the landscape of higher education. Galloway, who also founded his own virtual classroom start-up, predicts hundreds, . . .

Peace Corps Journal U. S. Capital Readings Remembered   Monday, November 21, 1965 Participant                                                                              Time Slot Letitia Morse Lladoc                                                             5:00 p.m. Philippines 1964-66 Leyte Island Teacher: ESL Imagine President Kennedy has been dead for two years, but it’s amazing how, here on the island of Leyte in the Philippines so many miles away from the United States, you visit barrio homes and there on the wall is President Kennedy’s picture. People here always want to talk about President Kennedy and it’s nice because they talk about him as if he was a close friend. I feel so honored to be . . .

The Journals of Peace Making it happen by Tim Carroll (Nigeria 1963-66) In 1988, as the first Director of the National Council of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (NCRPCV), now the National Peace Corps Association, I felt a considerable part of my mandate was to bring our disparate numbers together, to gather us up to celebrate those feelings we had in common. A number of special events given under my tenure accomplished this in varying degrees of success, but none held the hearts of Peace Corps family as did the Journals of Peace. As the 25th anniversary of the death of President John Kennedy — the founder and much-loved hero of early Volunteers — approached, I made a call to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, the church that had been the site of JFK’s funeral service, and asked if we might have a memorial Mass that would include not only the traditional Showing . . .

A 24-hour vigil at the U. S. Capital never happened before, or since. It was a day and night for America and for Returned Peace Corps Volunteers that should never be forgotten. I will over the next months publish a number of those addresses read by former Volunteers in the Rotunda of the U.S Capitol. All of these original essays I have and will give to the new NPCA museum in Washington, D.C. so that the history of the first generations of Volunteers will be kept, remembered, and understood by generations to come. In these sad days of the Trump Administration, we can now look back and read back what Volunteers did for America and the Third World as we approach the 60th anniversary of the Peace Corps in 2021. It is especially important at a time when Peace Corps Volunteers have been pulled out of service, and we have . . .

Thanks for the ‘heads up’ from Gerry Allan Schwinn (Nigeria 1963-65) Lou Stovall, Peace Corps, 1970, silkscreen, 35″ x 23″ Washington Color School artist Paul Reed commissioned this poster in 1970 while he was Director of Graphics at the Peace Corps. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lou Stovall created limited edition silkscreen prints for Reed and other Color School artists, including Thomas Downing, Gene Davis and Sam Gilliam, as well as posters for Vista, Job Corps and other service-oriented organizations. Stovall chose the following quote from Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweizer to capture the mission of the Peace Corps: “I don’t know what your destiny will be but one thing I know, the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.” Images and text courtesy of Will Stovall.

    The NPCA is reporting this possible action and asking the RPCV Community to rally and contact their Congress Representative. From the NPCA Newsletter comes the alarming news: “Legislation would jeopardize funds that provided for health and safety of more than 7,300 evacuated Peace Corps Volunteers amid global pandemic. Let’s keep that from happening. While there has been significant legislation introduced to support Peace Corps and evacuated volunteers, a South Carolina Congressman has announced legislation that would — in part — rescind the $88 million in emergency appropriations approved earlier for Peace Corps. Congressman Jeff Duncan (R-SC) has introduced H.R. 6657, the Working Under Humanity’s Actual Needs (WUHAN) Rescissions Act, which calls for eliminating more than $27 billion from the CARES Act legislation that was overwhelmingly approved by Congress and signed by President Trump in late March. Included in the new legislation is the proposed return of the $88 million appropriated . . .

    A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps “Helping other nations build the strength to meet their own problems, to satisfy their own aspirations, to surmount their own dangers. The problems in achieving this goal are towering and unprecedented. The response must be towering and unprecedented.”  — President John F. Kennedy • The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, published in 1958, demonstrated how Americans working abroad failed to integrate with local communities allowing Russians, who did in fact integrate, to spread Communism. President John F. Kennedy read the book and was spurred to action. His goal was to have Americans volunteer to combat hunger, fight for civil rights and promote world peace by working within the communities they were helping. On September 22nd, 1961, Congress voted to make the Peace Corps a permanent agency. “To help young Americans understand the rest of the world is . . .