Peace Corps Worldwide

One afternoon back in 1963 novelist Mark Harris received a telephone call from Sargent Shriver inquiring whether he’d be interested in writing a special report about the Peace Corps. Mark gladly accepted, then waited five months while his loyalty and sanity were investigated (been there, done that), and then went overseas  to West Africa where he wandered around for ten days in a country he called ‘Kongohno’  and then wrote his one-and-only Evaluation Report for Charlie Peters. Mark Harris retells all this in a book entitled, Twentyone Twice published in 1966. The book has two sections. One is about getting through security, the second is about Africa. The fictional name that he used of the West African country he visited is Kongohno…I’m not sure of the actual country, but I believe it is Sierre Leone. Old timers in the Peace Corps might know the real name of the country Mark Harris  visited as a Peace Corps Evaluator in 1964. But who was Mark Harris and why did . . .

Colombia I (1961-63) group was the first to go to Peace Corps Training and these PCVs had the first of the many famous CDs who served in the agency. In some ways their director was the most famous of all. His name was Christopher Sheldon and he is the sort of person legends are made of, and books written about. In fact, a book and a movie were written about Christopher Sheldon. If it had been his book, it would have been a love story about himself and his wife, and how they met on Capt. Irving Johnson’s last voyage around the globe, and how his new bride perished at sea. It was typical of Shriver to select someone like Chris Sheldon to be a CD, but it was Mary Bunting who suggested Chris Sheldon to Shriver. Bunting was on the Peace Corps Advisor Board. She was also the President of Radcliffe College, and the woman responsible for fully . . .

This is the very first photograph of Sarge Shriver meeting the very first Peace Corps Trainees. It happened on Sunday, June 25, 1961, at Rutgers University.  The photograph, and details surrounding it, were sent to me recently by Dennis Grubb who was one of those legendary first Colombia I Volunteers, 1961-63. The word from Dennis: I received a telegram and was told to call the White House switchboard. They passed me onto the Peace Corps HQ in the Maiatico Building and I was invited to Training in New Jersey. I drove down to Rutgers from Connecticut, and since my home was only a couple hours away, I think I might be the very first person to arrive for training for the Peace Corps.” Shriver came up from D.C. to New Jersey on Sunday, Jun2 25, 1961, to meet the potential PCV. “I think,” says Dennis, “Sarge just wanted to see us, to see what the Peace Corps was catching as potential Volunteers. There were 80 Trainees at . . .

Our site supports PCVs and RPCVs and anyone who works for the agency. We don’t go looking for causes, but Katie Flanagan is the sister-in-law to a woman who I worked with, an RPCV, and when my friend asked me to help her new sister, I couldn’t refuse. It’s a good project and this is a Peace Corps country, and PCVs in the field are involved. So if you are looking for a good cause for Christmas, think of Tanzania.] The Kupona Foundation was created in March 2009 to support Comprehensive Community Based Rehabilitation in Tanzania (CCBRT). CCBRT, itself founded in 1994, is composed of a surgical disability hospital, community rehabilitation, and training programs.  Its headquarters in Dar es Salaam, clinic in Kilimanjaro, and mobile services throughout the country, directly benefit more than 120,000 patients and caregivers. The next five years promise to be a period of tremendous growth for . . .

The other day I went down to D.C. to interview Aaron Williams, the new Peace Corps Director, a former Volunteer in the DR in 1967-70. Aaron told me that when he flew off to Training it was the first time this southside Chicago kid had ever been on a plane. He had never been out of Chicago before joining the Peace Corps, earning his college degree locally, in Education and Geography from Chicago State University, not Harvard or Yale. After his tour, he worked for the Peace Corps in Chicago as a Recruiter, and all these years later, that gang of RPCV Recruiters who worked together in the early Seventies are still close friends. For another year, and this was 1970-71, he worked in Peace Corps Washington as the Coordinator of Minority Recruitment, and then he returned to school and earned an MBA in Marketing and International Business. He worked in Minneapolis with General Mills for awhile before beginning a long USAID . . .

Kinky Friedman (Borneo 1967-69) will not run again for governor of Texas. Instead Kinky will seek, as a Democratic,  the position of agriculture commissioner. In his last governor’s race, he finished fourth, running as an independent. Kinky has met with both Democratic gubernatorial candidates and has been stating his positions as the agriculture commissioner. For example, he will be for promoting more food from local producers in school cafeterias and putting animals rescue facilities in countries across Texas.    .

I think we have to view it as a victory, folks.  It’s the highest single year dollar-increase in 49 years.  In an actual and a symbolic sense, it can transform the Peace Corps. To help put it in perspective, it’s more than Peace Corps ever got in a single year since its founding, more than we got in the last seven years combined.  Director Williams is doing a magnificent job already, and with this 18% increase, he can do a whole lot especially if they streamline operations. I feel very proud and pleased with what we did and what I learned personally from all of you.  I had no experience in advocacy or lobbying and was thrown into this competitive environment.  Yes, we all wish we got the House mark (or $10 or $20 million more), but we didn’t. Failure would be if we just stopped trying.  This is nothing short of . . .

Several of  you have emailed me to ask ‘what’s the skinny on this Rajeev Goyal guy?’ To give  you a quick summary, over the last two years, Rajeev has been our indefatigable advocate of Peace Corps growth.  Without any formal training in lobbying or advocacy, guided by a team of advisors, he met with over 200 Congressional staff members to contest the anemic funding posture of Peace Corps.  Following a simple prescription of “squeeky wheel gets the grease,” he has organized 10,000 former volunteers, to pressure their elected representatives in a respectful, informed manner to vote for new funding to rejuvenate Peace Corps, which is half the size it was in 1966 despite 20 countries that want volunteers. He changed what was a marginal issue into a national news story, galvanizing the media (with the help of RPCV writers and journalists) into a watchdog for the President’s promise of doubling. Yesterday, as you know, the Senate passed a $60 million . . .

Yesterday the U.S. Senate  gave final congressional approval of a $400  budget to fund the Peace Corps in Fiscal Year 2010. President Obama is expected to sign the appropriations package into law shortly. The $400 million appropriation for Peace Corps is larger than Obama’s budget request, and is the result of work that Rajeev and others did to get the government to support the Peace Corps agency. Thank you, Rajeev! You’re the Little RPCV That Could! Watch Rajeev on Nightly News with Brian Williams http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/vp/29898341#29898341

The other weekend when visiting a small used bookstore appropriately named the BookBarn in rural Columbia County in upstate New York, several miles from where we have a weekend home, I spotted on a shelf in this low ceiling cluttered store a copy of Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped At Eboli. It is a book that I haven’t seen in some forty plus years, in fact since I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia. This book was one of appropriately 75 paperbacks that Sarge Shriver and the first administration of the Peace Corps put together in a portable ‘booklocker’ for Volunteers. The books were to be read and left in country, to become seeds for new libraries in the developing world where we were serving. The used copy I found in the Bookbarn was a later edition, a TIME Reading Program Special Edition, first published in 1964 with a new Editors’ Preface. The body . . .

Jason Carter (South Africa 1998–2000) who wrote Power Lines: Two Years on South Africa’s Borders published by the National Geographic Society in 2002, and who is the grandson of former president Jimmy Carter, has announced he is entering the race for the Georgia Senate. A Democrat, Jason, said this week that he will run for a DeKalb County seat soon to be vacated by David Adelman, President Obama’s nominee to be ambassador to Singapore. A special election will be held in the Atlanta-area district in March. Jason, now 34, is an attorney who focuses on voting rights at an Atlanta firm. He graduated from Duke University, then was a PCV in South Africa, and came home to attend the University of Georgia School of Law. He is the founder of the community service group Democrats Work. Jason’s great-grandmother, Lilian Carter, was a PCV in India from 1967-69.  Her book, Away From Home: Letters To My . . .