Part 2–In That Time of Their Lives — Jeremiah Norris (Colombia)

RPCVs in the news —

by Jeremiah Norris (Colombia 1963-65)

Peter Hessler

Peter Hessler (China 1996-98)

And, now let us present the man who brought China Home to America, Peter Hessler. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in China, 1996-98, teaching English at a Teacher’s College. Afterwards, Peter continued his work in China as a freelance writer for publications such as: The Wall Street Journal; The Boston Globe; The South China Morning Post; and National Geographic. He joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2000 and served as a foreign correspondent until 2007.

Based on his experience as a Volunteer in teaching English, Peter has written four books on China: 1) River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze; 2) Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China; 3) Country Driving: A Journey from Farm to Factory, which is a record of Peter’s stories when driving a renter car from rural northern China to the significant economic and industrial growth taking place there; 4) and a collection of essay titled Strange Stories: Dispatches from East to West, which covers China’s ordinary people and life.

In 2019, Peter returned to China and taught non-fiction writing. There, he wrote several pieces for The New Yorker about how China handled the Covid-19 pandemic. In his time in China, Peter through his publications, went on to live Peace Corps 3^rd Goal. In 2020, Peace Corps broke ties with China and withdrew all of its Volunteers.

His professional career as an author has often been rooted in his experiences in a country that is foreign to so many Americans. In their totality, they are representative of why Peace Corps needed to remain in China, as they provided Americans with a new window into an emerging society’s passage onto the world stage. Of Oracle Bones, a reviewer wrote: “A century ago, outsiders saw China as a place where nothing never changes. Today, the country has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth”.

Peter captured China in this light and informed a larger audience of a country that is “undergoing a momentous change before our eyes”.

George Packer

George Packer (Togo 1982-83)

And, here we have George Packer, a most thought provoking analyst.  Since serving as a Volunteer in Togo, 1982-83, he went on to write for the Atlantic Monthly where he wrote the article “We are Living in a Failed State” and “Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century”. George has a thoroughly beguiling style of writing in which the reader is being told a story rather than reading one, as with the opening line in in Moby Dick “Call me Ishmael”.  With George, in Our Man, “you have heard that its author is a monstrous egotist. It’s true. It’s even worse than you’ve heard—I’ll explain as we go on”. And, so we will with a brief review of the books by both authors.

George describes Holbrooke’s vigorous self-promotion for a Nobel Peace Prize, the shameless and constant positioning with incoming Administrations to be appointed Secretary of State, his Gatsby-like carelessness, and sometimes tendency to show late for a meeting with the Secretary of State at the NSC (National Security Council) meeting with the President–disheveled in person and his hauteur matching that of General MacArthur. Upon entering a meeting room, Holbrooke’s waiting staff would whisper “the ego has landed”

In George’s “We are Living in a Failed State”, he writes that coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken. The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The U. S. instead reacted like a Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with a shoddy infrastructure and whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.

He has clearly exposed—and necessarily so, the warts in our body politic. The global burden we carry may lead us to stumble at times along that road to a more perfect union. Still, let’s be sustained by what we have done for the benefit of our global family where millions of children will never experience the miseries of Small Pox or blindness, where women can be immunized against Cervical Cancer, where over ten years we turned India from a net importer of grain products to an exporter via the Green Revolution, where polio can be declared by WHO to be eradicated, and for the first time since the Pharaonic era, Bilharzia in Egypt is now officially controlled, and Small Pox has been eradicated for the first time in human history.

We need to extend an appreciation to George for his exemplary adherence to Peace Corps 3^rd Goal by provoking us to undertake a renewal for what remains to be done.

Paul Tsongas (Ethiopia 1962-64)

Now, we present Paul Tsongas, the Volunteer who was Once the Future President of the U. S.  He served in Ethiopia at a time when the ink was barely dry on JFKs Executive Order, creating the Peace Corps   Following his service in the early 1960s, Paul earned a L. L. B. from Yale, then graduated from the Kennedy School of Government. He then entered the political arena, beginning with his role as a City Councilor, elected to the Lowell City Council in 1969. In 1974, he ran for the U. S. House of Representatives. In the massive voter turn-out, Paul defeated the Republican candidate by a 21-point margin. He was reelected in 1976. He passed away a year later at the age of 55.