Peace Corps Worldwide

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 . . .