Summer 2019: A Troubled Northern Triangle Vol. 32 No. 2

WorldView NATIONAL PEACE CORPS ASSOCIATION CELEBRATES

YEARS

SUMMER 2019 VOLUME 32 NUMBER 2

worldviewmagazine.org

Welcoming Refugees in El Paso p30

Martin Puryear at the Venice Biennale p36

A Troubled Northern Triangle Why migrants are leaving El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras

Peace Corps Guinea Battled Ebola p42

CONTENTS

WorldView

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F E AT U R E S

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15 Flight from the Northern Triangle 16 Trouble in the Highlands

Poverty, population, drought and persistent repression

BY M A RK D. WA L KE R

20 A Divided Heart

A Guatemalan father faces life after deportation

BY LU I S A RGUE TA

24 Ganging Up

El Salvador is central to Washington’s border dilemma

BY M A RK L . SCHNE IDE R

26 Unequal Justice

A human rights activist examines why Hondurans flee

BY M A RIA ROB INSON

D E PA R T M E N T S

30 Dispatches from El Paso

PRESIDENT’S LETTER

N P C A AT 4 0

2 Our Service Continues

12 Making it Happen

BY G L E NN B LUM HORST, PAM N AESSIG, DIAN N E AN D MARK T R IBO, T ER ESA B E THKE CA RSON , AN D LAU RA N OLAN

BY G LEN N BLU MH ORST

NPCA affiliates change how we make a difference

RPCVs help at migrant welcome centers

34 OPINION: The Caravan Poster child for a broken system

EDITOR’S NOTE

4 Digital Migration

BY DAVID AR N OLD

BY J O H N DICKSON

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BY AN N E BAK ER

13 Gathering at the Red Lion

LETTERS

How NPCA began in Omaha

5 Colombia Investigation, In the Spirit, The Last Act, Working Partners

BY MARGAR ET R ILEY

F O R WA R D

6 Our New Home

GALLERY

36 Less Can Be More

The Venice Biennale celebrates the sculpture of Martin Puryear

BY GLENN BLUMHORST

6 Our Milestone

BY ROGER K. LEWIS

6 NorCal Coffee Grant

BY MARIA ROBINSON

FICTION

39 Those Class Six Girls

A short story about teaching in Kenya

BY K R IST EN ROU P EN I A N

7 Dumpster Diving

BY KITTY THUERMER

WHY I GIVE

8 Amazing Impact

BY H ASK ELL WAR D

PEACE CORPS NEWS

42 Beating Ebola

Peace Corps’ untold story of fighting the virus in Guinea

BY D OUG LASS T ESCHN E R

ADVOCACY

10 From Anzou to Capitol Hill

BY W ILLIAM BU R R ISS ON THE COVER: Families from El Salvador wade across Mexico’s Rio Bravo river to be apprehended at the U.S. border.

Photo by Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

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PRESIDENT’S LETTER WorldView magazine is published by National Peace Corps Association, a national network of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, former staff and friends. NPCA is a notfor-profit 501(c)(3) educational and service organization which is independent of the federal agency, Peace Corps.

Our Service Continues

BY GLENN BLUMHORST

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ADVISORY COUNCIL Carol Bellamy, Chair, Education for All—Fast Track Initiative

If you’re like me, your Peace Corps service was a life-transforming experience. Those three and a half years in Guatemala from 1988 to 1991 changed my perspectives, my perceptions and – in many ways – my plans. Thirty years later, that period in my life seems like just a moment in the past, but to this day Peace Corps ideals have guided every step of my life and career.

So, when I saw the need for volunteers at Annunciation House to assist with refugees in transition at the southern U.S. border, I couldn’t resist the call to serve again. I took a leave of absence from NPCA, packed my bags, and headed to the west Texas town of El Paso. The 10-day experience profoundly impacted me, and – like my Peace Corps service – I felt I gained so much more than I gave.

On the ground, I experienced first-hand the reality of what I was seeing and hearing in the media.

Detained men, women, and children of all ages huddled in an outdoor holding pen under the El Paso del Norte International bridge, sleeping on the gravelly surface. I later met them as they disembarked the prison busses from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers – weary, hungry, and sick.

Showing kindness and compassion is what any RPCV would do.

And many RPCVs headed to El Paso to do just that. “Every American should come here to see this,” said Pamela, a fellow RPCV. It sounded not unlike what my parents remarked while visiting me for two weeks in Guatemala back in 1990. The 2

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experience changes you.

It enlightens you. And it compels you to not only say something, but to do something about it. It was incumbent on me to put ideals into action, whether volunteering, advocating, or donating on behalf of those less fortunate than I. That’s what the Peace Corps community is all about – a lifetime commitment to Peace Corps ideals. As word spread about the need for Spanish-speaking volunteers at the border, dozens of RPCVs started signing up.

So many that Mary, the Annunciation House volunteer coordinator, soon wrote to tell me that there was an unusual abundance of volunteers for May, June, and July. RPCVs from all over the country were responding to the call to serve again.

We don’t have to go to the border to serve. One RPCV wrote to tell me he couldn’t travel to El Paso, but he had decided to work with his local church to support arriving immigrants. Other RPCVs that I’ve met on my travels around the country are assisting with refugee and immigrant resettlement, working in free health clinics, or teaching in programs for people in transition. Our Peace Corps community is demonstrating our common values and making a difference in people’s lives long after our close of Peace Corps service.

Thank you for your Peace Corps service, and for your commitment to a lifetime of service.

With great respect. 1 Glenn Blumhorst is NPCA president and chief

executive officer. He served in Guatemala from 1988 to 1991 and welcomes your comments at president@peacecorpsconnect.org.

Ron Boring, Former Vice President, Vodafone Japan Nicholas Craw, President, Automobile Competition Committee for the United States Sam Farr, Former Member, U.S. House of Representatives, California John Garamendi, Congressman, U.S. House of Representatives, California Mark Gearan, Director, Institute of Politics, Harvard Kennedy School Tony Hall, Former Member, U.S. House of Representatives, Ohio; Former U.S. Ambassador to UN Food and Agriculture Organization Sandra Jaffee, Former Executive Vice President, Citigroup William E. “Wilber” James, Managing General Partner, RockPort Capital Partners John Y. Keffer, Chairman, Atlantic Fund Administration Virginia Kirkwood, Owner/ Director, Shawnee Holdings, Inc. Richard M. Krieg, President and CEO, The Horizon Foundation Kenneth Lehman, Chairman

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Emeritus, Winning Workplaces Dennis Lucey, Vice President, TKC Global Bruce McNamer, President & CEO, The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region Gordon Radley, Former President, Lucasfilms John E. Riggan, Chairman Emeritus, TCC Group Mark Schneider, Senior Advisor, Human Rights Initiative and Americas Program, CSIS Donna Shalala, Congresswoman, U.S. House of Representatives, Florida Paul Slawson, Former CEO, InterPacific Co. F. Chapman Taylor, Senior Vice President and Research Director, Capital International Research Inc. Joan Timoney, Director for Advocacy and External Relations, Women’s Refugee Commission Ronald Tschetter, President, D.A. Davidson & Co. Gaddi Vasquez, Senior Vice President, Government Affairs, Edison International Aaron Williams, Executive Vice President Emeritus, RTI International Development Group

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Maricarmen Smith-Martinez, Chair Jed Meline, Vice Chair Patrick Fine, Treasurer Rhett Power, Secretary Mariko Schmitz, Affiliate Group Network Coordinator Glenn Blumhorst, ex officio

Nikole Allen J. Henry (Hank) Ambrose Daniel Baker Elizabeth Barrett Keith Beck Sandra Bunch Bridget Davis Corey Griffin Chip Levengood Katie Long Robert Nolan Mary Owen Thomas Potter

n STAFF Glenn Blumhorst, President

David Fields, Special Projects Coordinator

Anne Baker, Vice President

Kevin Blossfeld, Finance & Administrative Assistant

Jonathan Pearson, Advocacy Director William Burriss, Government Relations Officer Ana Victoria Cruz, Digital Content Manager

Elizabeth (Ella) Dowell, Community Technology Systems Coordinator Cooper Roberts, International Programs Coordinator

n CONSULTANTS David Arnold, WorldView Editor

Mervin Leroy, Fundraising

Dawn Cacciotti, Human Resources

Scott Oser, Advertising

Lollie Commodore, Finance

Jenna Smith, Events

David Herbick, WorldView Art Director

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INTERNS Lauren Jett, Samantha Motyl

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VOLUNTEERS Peter Deekle, Harriet Lipowitz, Betty & K. Richard Pyle

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WorldView

EDITOR’S NOTE

Publisher Glenn Blumhorst

Digital Migration

BY DAVID ARNOLD

We’ve tapped into the rich vein of RPCVs with personal, activist and professional experiences in Central America for the latest reporting on the Central Americans at our southern borders. Our 48-page quarterly couldn’t contain it all, so we’re going to give you even more of that evolving North American dilemma with the launch of WorldView digital services. Here’s a sample of what’s going online for you.

Do you remember the sevenyear-old Guatemalan who died in detention? University of Washington associate professor of geography Megan Ybarra — author of “Green Wars: Conservation and Decolonization in the Maya Forest” — will tell you what happened. Ybarra served in Guatemala from 2003 to 2005.

Congress and the White House are quarreling about how to treat the current migrations from the Northern Triangle. In addition to his El Salvador analyisis on these pages, Mark Schneider, senior advisor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former Peace Corps director, will discuss the uncertain protections for 273,000 American-born children whose parents came in recent decades.

Schneider served in El Salvador from 1966 to 1968.

In El Paso, Sean Sullivan made peanut and jelly sandwiches for migrants and rented an eight-passenger van to drive them to the bus station and the airport. He says, “There is a crisis at the border and it’s not manufactured” and adds that he voted for Donald Trump. Sullivan served on staff in two countries and as country 4

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director in Mauritius.

If you have another story to add, write to WorldView’s digital content manager, Ana Victoria Cruz at ana@peacecorpsconnect.org.

In addition to our Northern Triangle articles, we’ve introduced a regular feature called Forward to look at the issues and events of our greater Peace Corps community: the federal government’s first vote on the architectural commemoration to our Peace Corps service, National Book Award nominee Peter Hessler’s bookstore promotion of his new Egypt book, and Glenn Blumhorst’s announcement that we’re creating a big new office and enterprise zone for RPCVs in Washington.

Our national organization began 40 years ago so a founder, Margaret Riley, writes about those early potlucks and a birth at the Red Lion Motor Hotel in Omaha. Anne Baker, NPCA’s vice president, reveals some pleasant surprises about the growth of our national network since then.

We’re all about the career achievements of RPCVs so we’re proud that America sent the recent sculpture of Martin Puryear to this year’s Venice Biennale. Another success is Kristen Roupenian, whose first published short story, Cat People, broke some viral traffic records on The New Yorker’s web site. Read “Those Class Six Girls,” an excerpt from a Kenya piece that’s in her first published short story collection, “You Know You Want This.” 1 David Arnold is the editor of WorldView maga-

zine. He taught math, social studies, and English as a second language when he served in Asbe Teferi, Ethiopia from 1964 to 1966.

Editor David Arnold Art Director David Herbick Contributing Editor John Coyne Contributors

Barry Adamson Luis Argueta Anne Baker Glenn Blumhorst Jorge Cabrera Teresa Carson Ana Victoria Cruz John Dickson Luis Galdamez Ted Goldman Meagan Harris Roger Lewis Jorge Dan Lopez Alexandre Menenghini Pamela Naessig Laura Nolan

Kathleen Parker Margaret Riley Maria Robinson Kristen Roupenian Mark Schneider Rene Soza Douglass Teschner Eric Thayer Paul Theroux Kitty Thuermer Dianne Tribo Alan Yount Mark Walker Joshua White Abby Wasserman

n WORLDVIEW ADVERTISING Address all questions regarding interest in advertising in WorldView or NPCA social media and other online opportunities to Scott Oser at advertising@ peacecorpsconnect.org.

WorldView (ISSN 1047-5338) is published four times per year (Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter) by National Peace Corps Association (located at 1900 L Street, NW, Suite 610, Washington, DC 20036-5002) to provide news and comment about communities and issues of the world of serving and returned Peace Corps Volunteers. WorldView © 1978 National Peace Corps Association.

Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. & additional mailing offices.

n POSTMASTER Please send address changes to: WorldView magazine, National Peace Corps Association,1900 L Street NW, Suite 610, Washington, DC 20036-5002

n EDITORIAL POLICY Articles published in the magazine are not intended to reflect the views of Peace Corps, or those of National Peace Corps Association, a nonprofit mission-driven social impact organization mobilizing those whose lives are influenced by Peace Corps. NPCA is independent of the federal agency, Peace Corps.

n EDITORIAL SUBMISSIONS Send all communications regarding WorldView magazine to worldview@peacecorpsconnect.org. We will consider article proposals and speculative submissions.

We also encourage letters to the editor commenting on specific articles that have appeared in the magazine.

All texts must be submitted as attached Word documents. For more details on writer guidelines go online to https://www.peacecorpsconnect.org/cpages/ submission-guidelines or email the editor at darnold@ peacecorpsconnect.org.

n SUBSCRIPTIONS In order to subscribe to WorldView magazine for $35 go online to www.peacecorpsconnect.org and click on Join Now. If you need to contact NPCA regarding a magazine subscription or other matters, call (202) 293 7728 ext. 18

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LETTERS

Readers have more to say about Colombia’s drug trade, the magnum opus of Moritz Thomsen, how Senator Harris Wofford redefined marriage, and the report about Chief Chaulker.

Colombia Investigation I offer an update on my article on what Friends of Colombia has been doing since I wrote in the Spring issue, “PCV and Wayuu Blamed for Drug Trade.” We continue to counter rumors about Peace Corps involvement in the origins of the Colombian drug trade in that country. In February 2019, a strong op-ed piece by Maureen Orth, Arleen Cheston, and me was published in The Hollywood Reporter with the headline, “How Narco Movie ‘Birds of Passage’ Tramples the Truth”.

In Colombia, Maureen met Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the author of The Sound of Things Falling, and pressed him for a basis in fact for his portrayal of a drug-smuggling Peace Corps staffer in his novel. Vásquez admitted there was none. His rationale was that it could have been true.

Maureen also interviewed other Colombians and Colombia RPCVs, trying to track down any truth to the assertion by a politician that PCVs introduced marijuana to the Sierra Nevada. Not a single Volunteer’s name came to light. We’ve been in touch with other Guajira volunteers and no one was involved with marijuana. Peace Corps left La Guajira in late 1967, before la marimbera, the marijuana boom, began.

Abby Wasserman, Colombia, 63-65

In the Spirit The article Mark Walker wrote in the Winter issue (‘Living Poor’) about Moritz Thomsen’s Peace Corps memoir is worthy of the man. A British publisher, Eland Press in W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

London, is reissuing Moritz’s books; they just asked me if they could use my intro for nothing, and in the spirit of Moritz, I said yes. Actually I think Moritz would have had a big argument with them about money; his letters to publishers were fierce! Someday, someone has to sit down and gather all his letters and publish them in a big volume. His letters may prove to be his true masterpiece.

While the subject is riveting, and the details of peasant life vivid and unusual, Moritz himself did not really find a way to bring the people to life in “Living Poor.”

His models were Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe and god-only-knows who else - big personalities. Moritz himself did not have the ego, or the style, to match them. I think his writing improved with “The Saddest Pleasure” and “The Farm...” but in essence his writing has an epistolary feel - as though he is writing a letter to a reader; and is the reason his collected letters are probably his magnum opus. Just a thought...

Paul Theroux Malawi, 63-65

The Last Act With great sadness, I read the memorial to Senator Harris Wofford in the spring 2019 issue of WorldView. My sadness was compounded as I read “A Life of Public Service” and NPCA President Blumhorst’s letter, “Healing Grace for Our Times.” Neither one mentions Wofford’s last act of public service and grace, his 2016 essay in the New York Times, “Finding Love Again, This Time With a Man,” in which he announced his impending marriage to Matthew Charlton.

As a gay RPCV who served in the 1980s, I am saddened—and hurt—by this oversight.

In his essay, referenced in both the New York Times’s and Washington Post’s obituaries, Wofford writes, “Seeking to change something as deeply ingrained in law and public opinion as the definition of marriage seemed impossible.

“I was wrong, and should not have been so pessimistic. I had seen firsthand — working and walking with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — that when the time was right, major change for civil rights came to pass in a single creative decade. It is right to expand our conception of marriage to include all Americans who love each other.”

Wofford clearly saw his marriage as yet another act of “a public servant who embodied the spirit of equal rights of Americans,” as WorldView’s “In Memoriam” states.

NPCA’s omission of his essay and marriage does a disservice to Senator Wofford and to LGBTQ volunteers and RPCVs. Alan N. Yount Guatemala, 85-86

Working Partners Arlene Golembiewski wrote a compelling narrative about Charles Caulker, Paramount Chief of Bumpeh Chiefdom in Sierra Leone in the Spring issue. She illustrates what can be accomplished when a strong local leader, a community, and a dedicated RPCV work together. They continue to achieve results with unlimited future potential.

Arlene’s Sherbro Foundation Sierra Leone, now in its sixth year, has been able to provide startup capital, “seed money,” to support Chief Caulker’s projects to improve the lives of his chiefdom’s inhabitants. This approach is far different from what NGOs often try to accomplish through total outside funding and management.

Cincinnati Area Returned Volunteers continues to support and applaud Arlene’s efforts in her former Volunteer site.

Barry Adamson 73-75 Editor’s Note: What are you thinking? Do you agree or disagree with something we’ve printed in WorldView. Is there something more to a story? What’s your view? Send your thoughts in 200 words or less to the editor at worldview@peacecorpsconnect.org.

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F O RWA R D

3 A rendering of NPCA’s new home in Washington, D.C. which is expected to open in November.

Our New Home Nestled in the heart of the Truxton Circle neighborhood on the North Capitol “Main Street” corridor of Washington, D.C., Peace Corps Place — also referred to as Peace Corps House — will be the Peace Corps community’s national hub of innovation, entrepreneurism, and advocacy.

As home to National Peace Corps Association and over 180 affiliate groups, Peace Corps Place will be a visible and dynamic presence in the neighborhood, raising high the banner of the Peace Corps and embodying our values in a vibrant urban setting.

Located at 1500 North Capitol Street, NW, Peace Corps Place is a short walk to the new Peace Corps Headquarters, Capitol Hill, the Peace Corps Commemorative site, and the eventual Peace Corps Community Center and Museum.

Stepping through the doors of WorldView Café, you’ll immediately feel at home among familiar art, artifacts, and aromas from Peace Corps communities around the world. Find friends old and new who speak your Peace Corps language. Join a storytelling session, film fest, or cultural 6

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fair hosted by the Peace Corps community.

Meet up in the Leadership Center for career counseling, mentoring or transition support.

Browse hundreds of books by Peace Corps writers. Welcome to your home — Peace Corps Place.

Glenn Blumhorst, Guatemala 88-91

Our Milestone The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts for the first time reviewed and approved at its March 21 public meeting the design concept for the national Peace Corps Commemorative to be built on a National Park Service site in the heart of Washington, D.C. It took 10 years to get to this exceptional approval vote, one milestone in the federal design review process. In 2009, the Peace Corps Commemorative Foundation, assisted by the National Peace Corps Association, began five years of advocacy for a bipartisan, non-controversial Congressional bill authorizing the Commemorative that was enacted in 2014. Our foundation spent five more years identifying a compelling

design concept for a small but well-located site near the National Mall and U.S. Capitol Building.

As president and director of the foundation, I can say we’re pleased with this progress. For more about the Commemorative see www.

PeaceCorpsDesign.net.

This unique Commemorative will honor the historic significance of the Peace Corps’ founding in 1961 and the timeless American ideals inherent in the Peace Corps mission. An inspiring homage to the better angels of our nature, it will symbolically represent enduring American values: commitment to engaging with and learning from diverse peoples and communities across the planet; living and working with others in the spirit of mutual respect and trust; and transcending differences in culture, faith and ethnicity to create a better and more peaceful world.

Roger K. Lewis, Tunisia 64-66

NorCal Coffee Grant As part of a delegation investigating the after-effects of Honduras’ 2013 presidential elections I met Rigo Matute Ponce, a La Union coffee producer whose life had been threatened by political thugs. Matute had supported the political opponent in President Juan Orlando Hernandez’s re-election.

I introduced Matute and three neighboring coffee growers to a U.S. Agency for International Development program that gave the growers an organic solution to a plant disease called la roya and to Fair Trade representatives who connected him with more reliable commercial markets.

The growers formed Cooperative Mixta de Lempira Norte and elected Matute as president. They found new buyers for their coffee, began collecting dues and created a micro-loan program for co-op members. In four years, the co-op has grown to almost 200 members. They recently completed a N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

harvest and sold 10 shipping containers of bagged beans.

This year the Northern California Peace Corps Association approved a $2,000 grant so the co-op could start a fungicide spraying program. More than anything, the enthusiasm of those La Union coffee growers keeps me going back. (Editor’s Note: See page 26 for Robinson’s report on why migrants are fleeing Honduras) Maria Robinson, Honduras 63-65

Photograph by Kitty Thuermer

Dumpster Diving When I last saw Peter Hessler, he was a cherubic-faced 32 year old. He was speaking to an august crowd at Politics and Prose bookstore and sparkling yarns captured his audience.

They were spun from River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze and they echoed tales that could have been told from a barstool in any Peace Corps town around the world.

He is a lithe 50 now and more than ever enthralls the crowd at Washington’s respected

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Peter Hessler signing his new book at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

bookstore. With the publication of The Buried: An Archeology of the Egyptian Revolution, Hessler closes the Middle Eastern chapter of his extraordinary writing career. His first books and articles focused on China where he taught school and reported for The New Yorker, so it was not surprising that after his talk I heard him chatting in Mandarin with fans lined up to have his book signed.

Less than a year after the Arab Spring revolution of 2010, Hessler landed in

Cairo with a bit more “baggage” than he carried as a young school teacher in Fuling, China: twin baby girls, writer-spouse Leslie Chang, a jump start at Arabic, and empty notebooks to fill.

Over seven years, he filled them doggedly by living on the ground. On the ground talking with people. On the ground with people like Sayyid, whose title of neighborhood garbage collector belied his renaissance talents. Sayyid taught Hessler the labyrinthine cultural and political archeology of Cairo from scrap metal on up. Ever the Peace Corps Volunteer offering a helping hand, Hessler noticed Sayyid’s hands resembled leather gloves, so he bought him real gloves. Sayyid replied that he didn’t need the gloves. He needed to feel the garbage with his hands.

Hessler and family are now preparing to return to China. With each successive book, this RPCV has successively abandoned wearing gloves, and, like his friend Sayyid, prefers to feel the garbage with his hands.

Kitty Thuermer, Mali 77-79

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WHY I GIVE believed that I was not Ethiopian. I found this to be the case in other African countries as well in the early 60s. This was never an issue for white volunteers.

NPCA asks Haskell Ward why he supports his greater Peace Corps Community

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askell Ward’s international career began with Crossroads Africa in Kenya which led to his Peace Corps service in Nazareth, Ethiopia. He built his international career developing African and Middle Eastern economic development strategies for the Ford Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria. He served as New York City’s deputy mayor during the Ed Koch administration and as deputy assistant secretary for Africa under Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in the Carter administration. Ward later worked on Africa energy and mining issues for Global Alumina and spent four years negotiating submarine broadband high-speed internet services for Seacom Corporation in Mumbai, India and among governments on Africa’s east coast from Cape Town to Cairo. His last professional position was as senior vice president at Black Rhino Group, a company that specializes in investment in African infrastructure.

How was your Peace Corps experience in Ethiopia?

It was not very different from what it was like for me as a poor African American boy growing up in Griffin, Georgia. The level of poverty I experienced in Ethiopia and the living conditions people were facing in Ethiopia were like my growing up in my small southern town.

I was intrigued by the cultural patterns but even back then the basic norms of behavior in Ethiopia didn’t shock me as much 8

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as it might have shocked other volunteers.

What were the challenges you faced?

My two-year Peace Corps teaching experience in Ethiopia was one of the most important experiences of my life. Having grown up as a poor African American in the American South made me more comfortable with the poverty and underdeveloped conditions I encountered in Ethiopia. On the other hand, it was difficult for Ethiopians to understand that I was an African American because they had met very few African Americans in their villages in 1963.

They were curious but welcoming at the same time. The fact that I spoke more than rudimentary Amharic often led to confusing experiences such as when going through security checkpoints. The police never

What about your life in Nazareth?

It was a dusty no-paved-street little railroad town outside of Addis on the rail line to Djibouti in an Oromo area where the new prime minister is from. They now call it Adama. There was sunshine there 365 days of the year and it was a very dry, hot town. I made phone calls the same way I did in Griffin. You rang the little knob on the side of the phone and you got central EthiTelecom downtown.

They asked what number you were calling, 23 or 24, and they would connect you.

3 NPCA board chair Maricarmen Smith-Martinez and Haskell Ward

Do you keep in touch with Ethiopians?

Oh, yes. Ethiopians remain some of my closest friends.

After the Peace Corps I went to graduate school at UCLA and Ethiopians were my roommates. By and large some of N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

Photo courtesy Sally Waley

Amazing Impact

What were your fondest memories during those years?

The richness and diversity of the Ethiopian people and culture remain my most prized memories of my Peace Corps years. The food, the music, the beauty of the country and people made for lasting attractions and endowments in my life. As a volunteer, I made a conscious decision to spend as much time as possible with Ethiopians, especially in their homes, and because of this I developed lasting relationships with them which I cherish to this day. I ate in Ethiopian homes as much as I ate in my own home. I found this cultural affinity and acceptance to be a very valuable learning experience both in Nazareth and in other places around the country. I attribute some of the openness toward me with the fact that I didn’t think I was superior to Ethiopians because I was an American.

my strongest relationships have been with Ethiopians. Since then I have been to Ethiopia 25 or 30 times in different capacities. Over three or four years I was the lead negotiator for a company called SeaCom to install broadband high-speed internet capacity with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Telecommunications.

The internet cable started in Mumbai, India then went undersea to South Africa and up the East Coast to Egypt.

How about friends from your Peace Corps service?

To this day they are some of my closest friends. Our Ethiopia and Eritrea RPCVs have had reunions every two years for about 40 years. I organized a flight back to Ethiopia for over 100 of us in 1995. We are people who stay in touch on almost a daily basis on the internet, through our country of service affiliate or through our Facebook group.

Do you think we’re living up to our Third Goal promise?

In my career working at the State Department, the Ford Foundation and in private enterprise on African development, I find that the greatest contribution America has made in international relations is through the impact Peace Corps volunteers have had in our universities and in foreign policy circles.

Even though the agency couldn’t ratchet up to a million volunteers as we once hoped, we have had an amazing impact both in this country and around the world.

Why do you give to the NPCA? Given its size and limited resources, NPCA is doing an incredible job. They are doing things that reflect a lot of the brilliance of the outcome of the Peace Corps experience. From my perspective the real under-appreciated asset the NPCA has is Glenn Blumhorst as chief executive officer. He has made an enormous difference. My confidence and respect for Glenn and the staff he has assembled is one of the main reasons I give money to NPCA. If more of us provided this organization with greater financial resources, NPCA could do much more in my lifetime to create a more equitable world. 1 W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

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ADVOCACY

From Anzou, Morocco to Capitol Hill Stories that have the power to persuade lawmakers

BY WILLIAM BURRISS

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he click of shiny shoes and high heels echo off the marble halls of Congress as our group of RPCVs march past the brightly colored flags to our next meeting. For a brief moment, the sound of clicking shoes hypnotizes my mind and reminds me of the familiar clink from a donkey’s metal-lined hoof as it stumbles across sun-cracked concrete. This sound had recently been an everyday occurrence for me in the foothills of North Africa where the olive groves outside of Marrakech meet the Atlas Mountains.

In the weeks following the end of my service in Morocco, I was astonished by how quickly the most mundane things could remind me of a small village called Anzou.

On a good day, I manage to go a few hours without mentioning Morocco or the Peace Corps. Fortunately one organization actually encouraged me to talk about it. The National Peace Corps Association.

It was NPCA’s Congressional advocacy day. Over 100 RPCVs had travelled to Washington, D.C. to speak with 160 lawmakers and their staff about the consummate professionalism of Volunteers and the importance of the Peace Corps. It was our job to convince members of Congress that the Peace Corps needs more funding, not the $14-million budget cut our current Commander-in-Chief consistently recommends.

THERE AND BACK AGAIN

If it was surreal being back in America, it was even stranger to pace through the House of Representatives once again. Before packing 10

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that this is still a country of practical idealism where a group of citizens can subtly shift the mechanisms that mold our lives through the democratic process. I’ve heard politicians privately say that one of the most endearing traits of the American people is that we’ve never trusted our government to get everything done, so we created a robust civil society to ensure the greater good. The Sierra Club. The YMCA. NAACP. NPCA. Perhaps this is where our true democracy lies within a larger republic?

THE DIFFICULTIES OF AN EASY SELL

my bags and lacing up REI boots for two These congressional staffers and the congressyears in Morocco, I spent three years packing persons they represent all want to believe in policy briefs and lacing up legislative loose the goodness of our country. Whatever their ends as a congressional staffer. Coming political party or perspective, they possess back to Congress, it was as if nothing had an ardent patriotism that makes them open changed. The offices still smelled like stale to learning more about the Peace Corps. coffee, and overly caffeinated staff assistants And it doesn’t hurt that our community of still stood guard at the office doors ready to greet Congressional staffers and filter guests.

It was even stranger and the congresspersons still trying to summarize they represent all want to my two years abroad into believe in the goodness stories that could convey of our country. They posPeace Corps’ importance sess an ardent patriotism to Members of Congress that makes them open to during our Day of Action. learning more about the Having recently returned home, I sometimes forPeace Corps. got basic social norms in America, and could barely remember the protocols of Capitol 235,000 RPCVs live in every congressional Hill politicos. district across the county. Organizing over However, I could vividly recall the vast 100 passionate advocates from around the amounts of money that special interest country suggests a certain seriousness of groups donate to political campaigns, and purpose as do RPCV phone calls that ring the highly influential voice that well-healed office telephones off the hook and letters lobbyists can have in comparison to the that fill their mailboxes. pleas of The People. Walking down the cold This kind of outreach is necessary, even marble hallway, I found myself growing amongst offices historically supportive of pessimistic about our chances. How could the Peace Corps. Salaries for congressional RPCVs possibly compete with the corporate staffers have remained uncompetitive for campaign contributions and dark money that years in one of the most expensive cities has become synonymous with Free Speech? in America, and the size and scope of an But then I began to recall where I was. office’s staff can reflect this. With countless Home. The U.S. of A. And as cynical as the legislative requests pouring in every day, we newspaper headlines can be, I remembered must fight to make sure they remember the N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

Peace Corps at key moments in the legislative process. Otherwise they might forget. It’s easy to do when you receive hundreds of requests on a weekly basis.

One of the best parts of NPCA’s Congressional Advocacy Day was meeting with dozens of staffers and a few Members who also served in the Peace Corps. One RPCV currently serving as a chief of staff for a Republican had an interesting perspective on the pleasantness of these encounters. “It’s like we share a secret. An inside understanding that no one else gets.”

Fortunately for us, the positive contributions and minimal costs of the Peace Corps are not much of a secret in the halls of Congress. Yes, plenty of people working in Congress profess to be responsible for Foreign Affairs policies but know precious little about the Peace Corps. With the support of our NPCA community across the country, however, we are making sure that even isolationist-oriented skeptics are engaging in dialogue about our program.

And it’s paying off. In the weeks following our 160 congressional meetings, a record 181 members in the House of Representatives called for giving the Peace Corps a $40 million raise after five years of fiscal stagnation. We still have work to do before the Peace Corps receives this much needed raise but it’s a solid bipartisan start.

This level of support is largely a result of passionate citizens making reasonable arguments. What does democracy look like?

Sometimes it’s a grey-haired RPCV telling a 20-something political “expert” who works on the Hill that the Peace Corps actually costs less money than the bands that play music for our military. My favorite sight used to be watching a Saharan rainstorm sweep across the horizon. Now I watch skepticism about the Peace Corps wash away from the faces of those who work in those marble halls of Congress. 1 William Burriss is NPCA’s government relations officer

and was until recently a youth development volunteer in the Kingdom of Morocco. He served in Peace Corps from 2016 to 2018. Prior to the Peace Corps, Will spent three years working as a congressional staffer in the office of Congressman David Scott where he primarily focused on foreign affairs, defense, and transportation issues.

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Making it Happen NPCA affiliates change how we make a difference

BY ANNE BAKER

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ORGANIZING YOUR OFFICE

ow. The world of the greater Peace here? Where are these groups coming from What I didn’t see a decade ago were community members coming together where Corps community is certainly and how are they supported? evolving. I’ve been at NPCA they work, or around what they passionately long enough to see lots of change. All good BUILDING TOOLS believe in or how they identify themselves.

RPCVs who work in the State Departstuff. One that excites me the most is what’s For one, we’ve expanded our resources and happening with our affiliate groups. tools for group capacity-building. The online ment created our first WAG, or workplace When I joined the NPCA staff more than Affiliate Group Resource Library includes affiliation group. RPCVs@State came on 20 years ago we had 118 affiliate groups and toolkits, affiliation tips and forms, and links board in 2010, connecting RPCVs workall but three of them were founded to focus on to recordings for webinars covering a broad ing in our foreign service in Washington, countries where we had served as PCVs, like range of topics from building a database D.C. and around the world. We now have Afghanistan, Colombia or Fiji, or in U.S. cities and legal considerations 101 to working a dozen WAGs spanning the alphabet soup like Buffalo or Sacramento of federal acronyms. Most where many of us now live. are also official employee How Your RPCV Network Changes in 20 Years Some affiliate groups acturesource groups within their agencies, educating ally pre-dated the formation YEAR TYPE OF AFFILIATE GROUP TOTAL their co-workers about of our NPCA. As we head Geographic COS Affinity WAG Cause into 2019, we have 65 more Peace Corps and why they 1998 78 59 1 0 1 139 groups on the books; 28 should hire RPCVs. They of these new groups have also make sure RPCVs 2003 81 62 3 0 2 148 redefined how to bring the who apply take advantage 2008 71 61 2 0 0 134 world of our Peace Corps of their non-competitive 2013 75 57 2 1 1 136 experience back home. eligibility.

2018 88 67 6 12 10 183 So, what’s happening WAGS are not exclusive 12

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Photograph courtesy of RPCVs & Friends at USDA

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Some of the 300 RPCVs & Friends who work at the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture marshaled forces to reduce food waste and feed Washington, D.C.'s homeless at the D.C. Central Kitchen last year.

with refugees and hosting a Peace Corps story slam.

The Affiliate Group Network holds its annual meeting each year in conjunction with Peace Corps Connect, providing a lively face-to-face forum to share best practices, opportunities and challenges. And between those yearly gatherings, these group leaders connect on Facebook and through periodic virtual Town Halls.

Three years ago NPCA began offering the leaders of all affiliates a Community Builder platform that provides a full menu of services for managing membership, enabling project fundraising and building each affiliates’ own web site and communication tools. NPCA community technology systems coordinator Ella Dowell has provided these services to 50 of our affiliates so far.

As I look back at the list of groups 20 years ago, I see a lot of familiar names of groups still going strong after all these years. They are heroes and I congratulate them for their committed service to these communities.

Others have faded over the years and some have been reborn with new Third Goal enthusiasm.

to federal government agencies. WAGS can work in corporate America, labor unions and non-government organizations where hundreds of PCVs have taken jobs in international development and community service organizations all over the country. If you want to start a group, let us know. I wonder who will be our first non-federal WAG. FINDING NEW HORIZONS

What we know is that RPCVs are passionate about and ready to build from their Peace Corps experience to make the world a better place. Groups are now coming together more than ever before to tackle challenges and engage community members in issues ranging from the environment and refugees to intercultural understanding. Are you a Peace Corps kid? Want to record and share the legacy of Peace Corps through oral histories or establish a museum of the Peace Corps experience? We’ve got groups for you. What’s your affinity or your cause?

Will you help connect RPCVs and others to make a difference?

I am so inspired by all that these groups are doing. Check them out at www.peacecorpsconnect.org/company/directory.

Join. Some charge dues; many do not. But all welcome you to bring your passion to life through your membership, to support their mission, and to roll up your sleeves and help them out.

Don’t see a group for you? Contact us to get one started. After all, we’re still short a few states here in the U.S. and about half of the countries ever served by Peace Corps.

And as for your workplace, your affinity or your cause, the sky’s the limit!

Anne Baker is NPCA vice president. She served as a

physics and mathematics teacher in Fiji from 1984 to 1987 and continued teaching math in the United States before joining NPCA staff in 1996.

Editor’s Note: If you are a member of one of the early affiliates, we’d like you to share how you got together, what motivated you to organize, your greatest successes and what challenges you faced. Send your story to groups@peacecorpsconnect.org and we’ll share it through our print or digital WorldView and with the leaders of our current roster of group leaders.

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Gathering at the Red Lion How NPCA began in Omaha

BY MARGARET RILEY

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he notion that it takes a village to raise a child comes from African tradition.

It aptly describes the early days of what later became the National Peace Corps Association. As we celebrate our 40th year, I rely on ever-fading memories and my unique perspective as one of a handful of RPCVs who created what we originally called the National Council of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. Apologies in advance for errors of omission and/or fact.

When I moved to Omaha in 1977, I was using the Spanish I had learned as a Volunteer in Colombia to investigate working conditions for migrant laborers in the milo and sugar beet fields of Kansas and Nebraska for the U.S. Department of Labor. When I heard there was a group of RPCVs in town, I found a ready group of friends who shared a similar experience regardless of where they served.

A popular activity was gathering at the home of Ron Psota (India 68-71) for what we called “International Indigestion” potlucks with a great mix of RPCVs and international students from local universities. We enjoyed helping these international students adjust to their lives in the United States with a unique understanding because we had faced similar challenges in their countries.

THE BIRTH OF AN IDEA

One evening in early 1978, we gathered at the home of Greg Flakus (Philippines 73-75), a school teacher who was getting a graduate communications degree at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. There were about 20 of us enjoying adult beverages, plenty of good food, great music, and lively conversation.

Discussion turned to the impact our Peace Corps service had on our lives and our shared Third Goal responsibility to bring the world back home. Greg suggested we could create a national organization of RPCVs — a

Peace Corps alumni association of sorts.

Greg suggested we collaborate with university’s annual Third World Conference and invite RPCVs we knew from around the country to come to the conference and discuss creating a national organization of RPCVs. We thought a national group could focus on issues that would be universally accepted and supported by RPCVs such as development education. We agreed we would bring together the expanding population of folks with an interest in and affection for developing nations and the Third Goal. We wanted to combine our experiences abroad to have a broader impact in the United States. We also agreed we should steer clear of political issues that might divide the group before we even got started.

We placed a small notice in a Peace Corps newsletter called “Reconnection” inviting RPCVs to come to the fall conference. To our great surprise, about 150 people came from across the United States including California, the Pacific Northwest, and the Southeast.

A large group of RPCVs in Washington were curious about the gathering. The president of RPCV/Washington, Karen Keefer, and two others drove to Omaha and stayed at my home during the conference. They came with suspicions about our motivations and intent. They discovered we were just a group of well-intentioned volunteers with an idea worth pursuing. They became part of the effort and Karen and I became life-long friends.

Some U.S. government officials came, too.

Sam Brown was the director of ACTION, the agency that then oversaw Peace Corps operations, and Carolyn Payton was the Peace Corps director. Brown and Payton disagreed on efforts to make Peace Corps an independent agency once again, but both of them agreed that it was not likely that our motley crew of RPCVs could create a viable WORLD VIEW SUMMER 2019

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national movement. The prevailing thought was that if you got 10 RPCVs in a room you’d have at least 15 opinions on any topic.

In spite of the naysayers, we made a decision in 1978 to move forward.

During the next year, committed volunteers wrote by-laws and articles of incorporation. By the next Third World Conference, another group of about 150 RPCVs approved the by-laws and the charter and NCRPCV was born. We adopted the slogan “Bringing the World Back Home” and elected Greg Flakus as our first president. We elected Phil Peters (Guatemala 62-64), a comfrey farmer from Oregon as vice president, Jody Rohe from Omaha as secretary and Roy Thomasson (Malaysia 68-70) as treasurer.

Roy filed the articles of incorporation from his hometown of Elkin, North Carolina.

At the signing of the charter, Jody and I predicted that in 50 years we would return as frail elderly folks to a celebration and say “Do you remember back in Omaha, when we started this group?”

REACH ACROSS THE NATION

We held our 1981 annual meeting at Howard University in Washington, D.C. in collaboration with the celebration of Peace Corps’ 20th anniversary. Karen coordinated the events and U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas (Ethiopia 61-63) was our keynote speaker.

Senator Tsongas had us in tears of laughter as he told stories about his cultural faux pas in his village and tears of emotion as he recalled the day some years after he returned to the Unites States that he opened his front door to find one of his former Ethiopian students greeting him. He was one of us, having been deeply touched by his experience.

We proceeded to hold annual conferences in Los Angeles, Denver, Boston, Atlanta, San Antonio, and then Washington once more to celebrate the 25th Peace Corps Anniversary.

Local groups coalesced as they hosted our gatherings. While never at the rate we had hoped, the organization grew. Our grassroots efforts were yielding results.

During those years we remained an all-volunteer alumni organization. In this pre-computer age, a 21-member board spread 14

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first real success at fundraising was a grant from the Carnegie Corporation in New York for a development education program.

We hired Diane Bosnick to run the program out of American Field Service in New York.

As the NCRPCV grew beyond our capacity to run it as volunteers, debate grew over where to establish an office. Some thought it was important for our grassroots organization to keep its base in the Three pioneering presidents, left to right: Margaret Riley, 3 Fred Thompson, and Greg Flakus.

Midwest where overhead would be low. Others believed advocacy across the United States accomplished our would be more effective if we were closer to tasks using newly developed fax machines, Peace Corps headquarters and Capitol Hill. snail mail, and brief telephone calls. Long When we met to hire a full-time director distance phone conversations cost a pretty we chose Timothy Carroll (Nigeria 63-65), penny so we kept them short. one of our first Shriver Award recipients.

The leaders of the NCRPCV were young Timothy was based in Washington and had professionals with limited means and unlim- strong D.C. connections from his previous ited commitment. Katy Hansen (Nigeria work with Eye Care, Inc. That tipped the 67-68) was editor and publisher of our scale and we created a base of operations RPCVoice newsletter. During my presidency in Washington, D.C. We shared space with (83-86), our secretary was Steve Rothe a couple of other non-profits, Campus (Kenya 76-78), an environmental planner Compact and Youth Service America, a for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I growing NGO run by Roger Landrum, the think one-time treasurer Frank Yates (Ghana Washington RPCVs president, who also 73-76) has probably attended every national became president of the NCRPCV. Forty years have passed. An idea that meeting that has been held over the years.

Most board members were RPCVs but was generated by some idealistic RPCVs in not all. Our initial sergeant-at-arms was Karl the heart of the United States captured the Morthole, a Union Pacific lawyer who was a imaginations of RPCVS and like-minded conscientious objector during the Vietnam souls around the world. The RPCVoice evolved War and did his alternative service in Kenya. into WorldView magazine. A volunteer board still pays their own way to meetings and FACING THE CAPITAL CITY donates their time and energy. They remain Finances have always been a challenge fully committed to the same 40-year old for our non-profit organization. An early dream. It doesn’t matter when or where we important stream of revenue came from served. We share similar values and beliefs an agreement with Peace Corps to publish about what we could and should be doing.

Hotline, a bi-weekly list of job vacancies We shared a life-changing experience that RPCVs received for free for two years after is kind of hard to understand if you haven’t their close of service. When those free sub- been there and done it. The village has scriptions expired, the agency gave us the worked together, persisted, and prevailed. original copy to reproduce, sell, and mail Here is to the next 40 years.1 for $20 a year subscriptions.

Margaret Riley served in Colombia as an extension home This was one of our earliest collabora- economist for coffee growers and supervised philosophy and nursing students from 1973 to 1975. At Duke University tions with the Peace Corps. We had very she was dean and assistant provost of Trinity College and close relations with them, even then. Our directed the university’s international study programs.

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Photo by Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

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Flight from the Northern Triangle

ince 2016 approximately 851,845 residents of El Salvador, year. More than 13,000 have served in the three countries since Guatemala and Honduras – countries collectively identi- then. Three years ago Peace Corps pulled out of El Salvador and fied as The Northern Triangle – have been apprehended Honduras. Guatemala has maintained a continuous presence

by U.S. authorities at our southern borders attempting to for 56 years, but its 136 Volunteers have strict guidelines on enter the United States. They may be officially distinguished one travel in Guatemala City and for reasons of security – among from another at various points along their more than 2,000-mile others – the Peace Corps office has been moved 35 kilometers journey as migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers, but all have chosen from the capital.

Tourists have been warned. If you’re considering a visit to leave their homelands for many reasons. The numbers have recently confounded our government in the same way an estimated to the ancient Mayan city of Tikal, surfing at a beach at El Zonte or exploring the 2 million asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan rain forests of Río Plátano and many African counBiosphere Reserve on the tries flooded the European Mosquito Coast, the State Union in 2016 and 2017, Department offers dire risking their lives on the warnings. They call GuaMediterranean. temala a Level 2 country, From within the bormeaning you should exerders of these three Cencise increased caution in tral American countries Guatemala City and five we present the views of other departments due to violent crime, such as authors whose ties began armed robbery and murwith Peace Corps service der, which is common, or and continue to this day. widespread gang activity, They’re not talking about Women and children from El Salvador wading across the Rio Bravo river.

3 extortion, violent street our President’s desire for crime, and narcotics trafa wall that has become a partisan argument in Washington, D.C. but about why they ficking. It gets worse in El Salvador and Honduras which they call believe men and women young and old have decided to flee Level 3 countries for which you should “reconsider travel” due their farms, homes and villages. to all previously mentioned crimes and adding rape, widespread We’re publishing an opinion about how the White House extortion, violent gang activity, narcotics and arms trafficking. and Congress have made a mess of out of the increasing traffic For all three, they warn the local police may lack the resources on the southern border and how we can remedy it. We’ve also to respond effectively to serious criminal incidents. added an interview conducted by film documentarian Luis The three country narratives that follow describe some of the Argueta – our newest Harris Wofford Global Citizen – with conditions that threaten the security of those born and raised Jacobo, who spent 24 years raising a family in Minnesota before in the Northern Triangle. We also invite you to read what a few RPCVs learned when they volunteered at welcome centers in being deported to Guatemela.

There were many other warnings about the troubles in the El Paso, Texas, offering aid and comfort to migrants who were Northern Triangle. Peace Corps Volunteers were first introduced released by U.S. Customs and Immigration officials.

—The Editors to El Salvador and Honduras in 1962 and to Guatemala the next

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FLIGHT FROM THE NORTHERN TRIANGLE

Trouble in the Highlands Poverty, population, drought and persistent repression

BY MARK D. WALKER

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he influx of undocumented immigrants into the United States last year reached a 10-year high of more than 115,000 and has already passed that figure this year, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. Since the recession, Guatemalans represent the second-largest group of undocumented Latino immigrants after El Salvador, according to the Pew Research Center. No longer is the majority of these immigrants young males seeking work, but families and children, many of whom are seeking asylum.

So what is pushing these people away from their homes? What impact do our government’s policies and those of the Guatemalan government have on the process? And what lessons have we learned so that we, as citizens, and our government can deal with the situation?

The deplorable conditions of rural Guatemala have existed for hundreds of years. As a Peace Corps Volunteer in the western highlands in the 1970s, I received a jarring introduction to these conditions while hiking down the side of a mountain to one of my experimental agricultural plots. I passed by a small cemetery in the village of Calapte with a great many small graves.

One evening, the entire community was dancing and drinking, so I asked one of the teachers why.

“The villagers are celebrating the deaths of the angelitos,” he said, children who died before their first birthday. “They go directly to heaven because they haven’t committed any sins, so this is a happy time for us.”

I remember thinking, “but why so many?”

Over the years, I’ve returned to the highlands with many international non-governmental organizations, only to find many of the same conditions and a deepened despair, especially in the departments where the majority of immigrants come from: Quiche, San Marcos, Huehuetenango, Totonicapan and Jutiapa.

I volunteered recently at a shelter church in downtown Phoenix and chatted with two Guatemalan immigrants, Hector and Felix, who had brought their wives and several children from the Guatemalan 16

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highlands. Both were small-holder farmers forced to leave their land due to a protracted drought in the annual dry season or canicula.

This one lasted longer than usual, killing most of their crops, their basic source of food. Despite the risks, they believed the difficult move from Guatemala to the United States was worth it, compared to the seemingly hopeless situation they faced back home.

According to a recent New Yorker article on Guatemalan immigrants by Jonathan Blitzer, over 65 percent of the children suffer from malnutrition exacerbated by the drought, one of the highest malnutrition rates in the Western Hemisphere. The communities Hector and Felix come from are part of the expanding swath of Central America known as the dry corridor. It begins in Panama and snakes northwest through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and parts of southern Mexico. As one Guatemalan climate scientist at the Universidad del Valle said, “Extreme poverty may be the primary reason people leave… but climate change is intensifying all the existing factors.” This phenomenon is underscored in a series of articles in the Guatemalan daily, La Prensa Libre, which reports that farmers just don’t know when to even plant crops to avoid these dry periods. The possible result is total loss of their harvests.

Felix told me his family left their home because he had to mortgage the land on which the family grew its food. “I’ll pay it off with the money I earn here.”

LIFE IN QUICHE

The Guatemalan government does work, but only for the two percent of the population who own 84 percent of the land, according to “The Agrarian Question in Guatemala” published by the nonprofit Food First in Berkeley. Most Guatemalans, especially the Mayan population in the western highlands, are relegated to small, unproductive plots of land that force them to work for extended periods on large plantations on the South Coast or to look for jobs in the capital. This exploitation goes back to Spanish colonial rule when some Mayan communities were forced to supply a “reparto,” N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

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Ninety-nine bodies were exhumed in 2000 from a mass grave in Xolcuayl, Guatemala, 90 miles west of the capital city. A Mayan Quiche resident of this western highlands village carries the remains of a relative. Human rights groups claim a government military patrol was responsible for the 1982 massacre that occurred during a lengthy civil war in which 200,000 Guatemalans died.

sending a third of their male residents to labor in nine-month shifts on Spanish-owned plantations. This system of forced labor was supported by post-independence Guatemalan regimes throughout the 19th century.

I saw these conditions first-hand when visiting a coastal coffee plantation, where I recognized that the traditional garb of the worker families was the same worn by indigenous villagers working in the highlands. Conditions on the plantations are harsh and the pay low.

In many plantations, these families will live for several months in lean-tos with limited, if any, sanitation.

Eventually these egregious inequities, combined with a population explosion starting in the 1950s, resulted in a period of violence lasting from 1960 to 1996, costing the lives of over 200,000 people, mostly from the Mayan population in the highlands. I led a Food for the Hungry donor tour to the Department of Quiche in 1995 and W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

came across some pictures drawn by children in Chajul depicting planes dropping bombs and napalm on their homes.

I remember one visit with a small farmer whose child was being sponsored by a donor and when we entered their home, the first thing one of the donors asked was, “Where are the windows?”

Many of the homes we visited still had dirt floors, thatched roofs with no ventilation and few, if any, windows.

Quiche is the province suffering more assassinations and murders than almost any other in Latin America. In “The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?,” Guatemalan-American author Francisco Goldman presents testimony from a 1998 Recovery of Historical Memory Project compiled by the Catholic church on government/army abuses in places like Santa Maria Tzeja, Quiche: …The señora was pregnant. With a knife, they cut open her belly to pull out her little baby boy. And they killed them both.

And the muchachitas (little girls) playing in the trees near the house, they cut off their little heads with machetes…

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failure to prosecute former President Efrain Montt and other high officials for hundreds of massacres and other human rights crimes committed during the 1960-1996 civil conflict. Frank La Rue, a longtime human rights activist in Guatemala and former United Nations official, told The New York Times in 2014, “You can only explain that (50,000 unaccompanied children fleeing north to the U.S. in 2014) when you have a state that doesn’t work.”

WASHINGTON’S IMPACT

In the early 1950s, the U.S.-based United Fruit Company, or “La Frutera,” exacerbated the unfair land distribution in Guatemala. The company owned over half a million acres of the country’s richest land, but left 85 percent of it uncultivated. At the time the U.S. government appeared to consider the company’s interests the same as those of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen Dulles, who was the Central Intelligence Agency director.

Prior to the government service, the brothers had been partners in Sullivan & Cromwell, a law firm that represented United Fruit.

The “secret” history of these two powerful siblings was brilliantly divulged in Stephen Kinzer’s “The Brothers.”

In 1950, Jacobo Arbenz was elected president of Guatemala and began promoting social reform and land reform policies. United Fruit quickly rolled out a propaganda campaign that turned the U.S. government against the new regime and led to a U.S.-supported coup d’état in 1954. This abrupt change in government dealt a death blow to Guatemalan democracy and reinforced the inequitable land tenure system that kept the majority of Guatemalans on the margin of the larger economy.

The United States’ inability or lack of political will to control the proliferation of drugs within its borders has also impacted Guatemala by allowing drug cartels to gain ever-growing financial and political influence. In his 2011 New Yorker article, “A Murder Foretold,” David Grann wrote: Overwhelmed by drug gangs, grinding poverty, social injustice, and an abundance of guns, it’s no wonder that violent crime rates have been sky-high. In 2009, fewer civilians were reported killed in the war zone of Iraq than were shot, stabbed, or beaten to death in Guatemala, and a staggering majority of homicides—97 percent—go unsolved.

from even entering the city, due to security concerns. So, one can understand how centuries of political abuse, violence, and a depleted infrastructure that includes schoolhouses with no books and hospitals and clinics with no medications and often a lack of doctors, has created despair. This is why families continue to leave their homes looking for a safe haven and an opportunity to educate their children. It also explains why so many seek asylum, as opposed to simply looking for work. My years of visiting and working in Guatemala only confirm that the isolation and poverty facing many remote villages in the highlands are similar to what I experienced 40 years ago.

HOW TO REDUCE MIGRATION

The United States encouraged civilian rule and elections in Guatemala in 1985, but subsequent elections in that country were deficient in terms of substantive democratic reforms. Latin America scholar Susanne Jonas, author of the 1991 book, “The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads and U.S. Power,” wrote: For the most part, from 1986 through 1995, civilian presidents allowed the army to rule from behind the scenes. After an initial decline, death-squad violence and other abuses by the army actually increased significantly in the late 1980s.

Every regime since has been hampered by excessive influence from the military, human rights abuses and corruption.

To address the causes of migration, the three Central American governments agreed to launch the Alliance for Prosperity in the Northern Triangle with technical support from the Inter-American Development Bank and the U.S Agency for International Development. The program is designed to promote local economic, health and infrastructural support to the poorest provinces, which export

Number of Immigrants to the U.S. from Guatemala 2009 to March 2019

Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection

150,000 125,000

A recent proliferation of “maras,” or gangs, began with the mass 100,000 deportation of Latino criminals to Central America in the mid1990s. The MS-13, for example, became an international gang 75,000 that spread through the continental United States and Central America. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported in 2011 that Guatemala had the highest number of gang members in Central 50,000 America, with 32,000.

The U.S. State Department rates the threat of violent crime in 25,000 Guatemala as critical, and when I applied for a country director position for the Peace Corps several years ago, I learned that they’d 0 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 moved their office out of Guatemala City and prohibited volunteers 18

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of elected officials, witnesses, members of the judiciary, and others involved in investigations of government corruption and human rights crimes, including violent evictions, labor rights violations, and other human rights violations in the context of agrarian disputes involving thousands of rural families.

Photo by Jorge Dan Lopez/Reuters

LESSONS LEARNED

At this point in our country’s history, we can choose to continue being part of the problem or offer effective solutions to the immigration issues challenging us. As U.S. citizens, we must appreciate that we are connected culturally, economically and politically to the people of Guatemala.

Remittances from Guatemalans working in the U.S. reached $8.5 billion in 2019, according to a recent NPR report.

Our country’s foreign policy has always impacted Guatemala, and, unfortunately, Smoke rises from graves in the San Marcos region of Guatemala after a 6.9-magnitude earth3 quake struck the nation in July, 2014. Human remains were exhumed from damaged coffins which as explained above, has contributed to the were burned. The quake triggered landslides that blocked roads near the Mexican border. injustices there. More recently, our inability the majority of refugees. But in April, the Trump Administration to limit the use of illegal drugs has much to do with the violence and announced the U.S cut in aid the Northern Triangle countries, poverty pushing large numbers of people out of Guatemala to the which includes Guatemala.

United States, as have macroeconomic conditions, climate change, The plan was a step in the right direction, but its impact is likely corruption, and internal policies of the Guatemalan government. to be limited by corruption, a continuing issue for Guatemala, The recent decision by the Trump Administration to cut all aid to which Transparency International says has one of the highest Guatemala will exacerbate the situation. Luis Argueta, the Guaterates of perceived corruption in the world. Former President malan American film documentary director NPCA recently named Alfonso Portillo was extradited to the United States in 2010 its 2019 Harris Wofford Global Citizen Award, said a few months and charged with laundering $70 million in Guatemalan funds ago at Arizona State University that those who ignore the impact of through U.S. banks. More recently, another former president, existing U.S. government policies are “complicit” in perpetuating the Otto Perez Molina, and a former vice president, Roxana Baldetti, ongoing influx of undocumented family members. were imprisoned in Guatemala for corruption as a result of efforts People escaping violence and abject poverty in Guatemala will

by Guatemala public prosecutors and the UN’s anticorruption continue to seek asylum and work in the United States, especially commission, the International Commission Against Impunity those with family ties here. Well over one million Guatemalans in Guatemala (CICIG). now living in the United States represent a lot of family members The closest advisor to Guatemala’s current president, Jimmy trying to reconnect. No wall, no matter how big, tall or wide will Morales, the president’s brother, and the advisor’s son were arrested stop the ongoing influx of immigrants. on corruption and money laundering charges in January, 2017. Eight Instead of creating fear about an invasion of insurgents, we must months later, President Morales expelled Colombian Ivan Velas- educate ourselves and our neighbors about who these people are. quez, the commissioner of the CICIG, when investigators began We must treat them in a more humane manner when they arrive. examining claims that Morales’ party took illegal donations from And we should support the U.S. aid and international development drug-traffickers. The CICIG also asked the Guatemalan Congress efforts in the sending provinces so young Guatemalans can raise to strip Morales of his exemption from prosecution. The Congress their families in their home countries. 1 refused, assuring continued impunity of Guatemala’s ruling class. Mark Walker was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala, 1971-1973, working on fertilAccording to the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission, the izer experiments with small farmers in the highlands. Over the next 40 years, he managed Guatemalan Congress is considering a law that offers total amnesty or raised funds for many international groups, including Food for the Hungry and Make A Wish International and wrote about those experiences in Different Latitudes: My Life in to any officials involved in the abuses and massacres during the 36 the Peace Corps and Beyond. His wife and three children were born in Guatemala. Go to years of civil conflict. Other abuses include death threats and killings MillionMileWalker.com or write the author at Mark@MillionMileWalker.com W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

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A Divided Heart A Guatemalan father faces life after deportation

BY LUIS ARGUETA

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acobo is a compact, 43-year-old man with too many teeth and a big smile. He is about to address a Monday morning class of 23 pre-med students from Minnesota’s College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University who are on a three-month immersion Spanish language program in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second largest city. On the day before, Jacobo stood in the living room of the two-story house in the village of San Lorenzo that he built for his family. The house, like Jacobo, is a bit unsettled. Four of the five bedrooms remain vacant and his father sleeps in what is supposed to be the dining room. At dawn the next day, he got on a chicken bus, as local buses are called, for a two-hour ride and then a transfer to a crowded 20-minute urban van ride in Quetzaltenango.

He begins speaking in Spanish, nervously, “I grew up in Guatemala, one of eight brothers and sisters. We lived in a thatched roof one-room house. There we cooked, ate and slept.” Then he adds, “Ours was a life of poverty.” The students are all in Guatemala to perfect their medical vocabulary, learn the culture first-hand and conduct community service projects. Most are proficient in Spanish but a local teacher translates into English for those who do not understand. Everybody listens attentively.

Jacobo is not a stranger to them. They just saw him in “Abrazos,” the second film of my immigration documentary series. The film follows 14 U.S. citizen children who seven years ago traveled from

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Jacobo and his father, Anastasio, chat on the steps outside of the house Jacobo had built for his parents in San Lorenzo, San Marcos, Guatemala while he worked on a Minnesota hog farm.

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Minnesota to Guatemala to meet their grandparents for the first time. Jacobo’s two eldest children were on that trip and are part of the film.

In those days Jacobo lived in Worthington, Minnesota, and in the film he talks about the daily anxiety of his limited mobility and the pervasive fear of detainment and deportation. “When I leave my home, I don’t know if I will make it back. That is the fear with which we live.” His state of mind is like that of millions of immigrants without proper authorization.

The young pre-med students absorb each of Jacobo’s words as if they are watching Woody Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo” in which a character on the screen steps out into the real world to continue addressing them. “I am a man with a divided heart. Part of it is here with my aging father and part of it is in Worthington, Minnesota, with my wife and my four U.S. citizen children.”

A FIVE-YEAR PLAN

Jacobo was once an eager 15-year-old student whose parents lacked the money to pay for books, a bus ride, or clothes so that he could continue his studies. Guatemala was immersed in a 36-year civil war during which the life of any young man was precarious; the army could force him to enlist, the armed guerrillas could recruit him, or either side could accuse him of being the enemy and kill him. In 1993 Jacobo left San Lorenzo, San Marcos for the United States where he applied for asylum.

His case was denied in 2002.

His plan was to make money in the States, return when the war ended, and go back to school. “My goal was three to five years,” he tells the American students. “Being alone and away from my parents was very difficult. One wants money but there is something more important, the love of your parents.

“Learning the ropes in the United States was very hard. I did not know the language nor understood the currency.” He worked hard harvesting tomatoes in Florida for two years, and picking fruit for seven in Michigan where two of his sisters live. That is where he met Isabel, who had grown up in another mountain village near San Lorenzo.

Jacobo and Isabel married. When their first child was born, he bought some fake documents in order to get a new job. He later pleaded guilty to using the fake documents and that legal case haunted him for 10 years. “At that time returning to Guatemala or staying in the U.S. was the hardest decision I had faced in my life,” he says. They decided to move to Worthington, where he got a job working on a hog farm. He worked hard, planned carefully, saved money, lived frugally, raised their four children, and prospered. “I bought a house in the U.S.,” he says proudly.

He also sent money home to his parents and bought a plot of land to build a house in San Lorenzo. He paid U.S. federal and state taxes, became a leader in his local church, and was promoted to become the supervisor of the hog farm. In 2013, I filmed his children taking their first trip to Guatemala. In the church, Isabel WO R L D V I E W S U M M E R 2 0 1 9

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sang lead vocals for Granito de Mostaza – Mustard Seed – one of the most popular music groups in their Worthington parish. The oldest of their sons will graduate from high school this spring, but his father will miss the ceremony.

THREAT OF DEPORTATION

Four days after his children returned from their trip to Guatemala in 2013, Jacobo’s car was stopped by a Worthington police officer for “suspicious movement of the car passengers.” He was arrested and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued an immigration detainer to begin deportation proceedings. The group that sponsored the children’s trip, Abuelos y Nietos Juntos, organized a petition drive and, with the support of the Guatemalan embassy, Jacobo was allowed to stay in the United States under an Obama administration policy of “prosecutorial discretion” that required he report to authorities every three months.

All of that changed in 2017 when the Department of Home-

there. Taking them to Guatemala is to expose them to a place that is dangerous. Also, I asked myself, ‘How am I going to make a living in Guatemala?’”

“I realized that a family that lives without a father is sad. My children need their father. I need the love of my children.” Finally, Jacobo told his wife, “I better go alone and look around to see how things are, see what I can do. Figure out how the six of us can survive there. So, I’ll go by myself.”

With the authorization of ICE, Jacobo drove to Guatemala in September of 2017.

BUILDING A GUATEMALAN LIFE

Jacobo is one of thousands of Guatemalans who are deported on a daily basis. They go back to a country they don’t really know. At best, they face indifference and, at worst, stigmatization and hostility.

To reduce irregular migration, its root causes must be addressed.

Poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, and corruption need to be transformed with long term investment in education, health, governance, and environmental protection. To abate the recurrent migration of returnees after decades abroad, we must foster a true sense of belonging for them. A holistic reintegration program that focuses on mental health, access to necessary documentation and educational records, skills-certification, re-training, job placement and support groups, should be created for returnees. In addition, a public information campaign should be designed to present the true face of immigrants and fight social stigma and job discrimination.

“Today, after 24 years, I’m back in my country with my father but my family is back in the United States,” Jacobo tells the pre-med students. “I am in a country that I do not know. Of which I know nothing. I find my dad who is older and a country where I do not have access to a job.”

When he finally told his father that he was deported, his father said he must be a criminal or the United States would not have sent him back.

Since he left 19 months ago Jacobo has talked with his family in daily video phone calls. Back in Worthington, 2,555 miles away, Isabel and their four U.S. citizen children struggle. Isabel cleans private houses and the parish house. She tries to manage an 11-year-old daughter and three teenagers. The oldest son, 18, works after school at a local supermarket and is grappling with his studies. The youngest boy, 14, is failing almost every class. When he comes home he stays in his room, playing video games. In one of their calls, Jacobo asks the 14-year-old, “Are you behaving that way because I am not there?”

In Guatemala, Jacobo has been busy. He and a nephew started a live video business which, via Facebook, transmits local family events like quinceañeras, baptisms, and other events to family

Guatemala was immersed in a 36-year civil war… the army could force him to enlist, the armed guerrillas could recruit him, or either side could accuse him of being the enemy and simply kill him. land Security began to consider all unauthorized immigrants an enforcement priority. During a regular check-in, authorities said next time you come in, bring a one-way ticket to Guatemala or we’ll put you on a deportee flight.

Jacobo asked, can I go by land?

Yes, the ICE official replied. You are not a criminal, you can go by land.

“I felt split,” Jacobo tells his Quetzaltenango audience. “I had the option of hiding because they did not deport me, but I was tired of hiding and I had not seen my dad in over 24 years and wanted to spend time with him before he died.” He had missed his mother’s funeral, so deportation would at least give him time with his elderly father.

He also pondered the consequences of leaving Isabel and his four children. “I wondered,” he says, “what will happen to my children the day I leave? They can fall into drugs, disobey their mother. But if I make them go with me to Guatemala, I will be taking away the opportunity for them to study here in the U.S. “And I put myself in their place. They are living a better life 22

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Photo by Rene Soza

Jacobo’s wife, Isabel, and 11-year-old daughter, talk almost daily in video calls with Jacobo, who was deported to Guatemala in 2018.

members in the United States. One day someone dropped off a disposable phone to their office and told them they should expect a call. Within 24 hours a call came: pay 2,000 quetzales, $266, every week or face the consequences. Everyone here knows that the consequence is being killed. Jacobo and his partner paid for the first week, and closed the business the following day.

Jacobo then enrolled in an automotive repair course at the Quetzaltenango branch of INTECAP, the national vocational school, making the two-hour commute from San Lorenzo for 12 months and began an internship in a Quetzaltenango garage. The garage is a franchise with armed guards at the entrance. The Guatemala City owners come rarely and they are driven in armored SUVs and are surrounded by professional bodyguards.

There is no automotive repair shop in San Lorenzo, so the opportunity seems to be there, but that is the place where he and his nephew were victims of extortion. Should he consider opening a shop in the state capital, San Marcos?

Fearful of more extortionists, Jacobo keeps his story to himself.

He says, “Calladito me veo más bonito.” I look prettier with my mouth shut. “I don’t tell them I am a returned migrant. I never speak English.

I never mention I have family in the United States.”

Jacobo is confronting his dilemma. Should he continue living separated from his family or bring them to live in Guatemala with him? Before leaving Minnesota, Jacobo told his oldest son, “You are going to live what I lived. I lost my parents and you’re going to lose your dad. With the difference that you have your mom.”

WHAT JACOBO IS LEARNING

To the North American pre-med students, he says, “My children have the opportunity to live 50 percent of what I lived. They have W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

a comfortable home, an education and the love of their mother, even if I’m not with them.” But the survival of his marriage is also on his mind. “We know that a consequence may be a split of the family.

As the popular refrain goes, ‘here there are many women, and over there are many men, and we are free to choose.’”

However, Jacobo’s defining characteristics include his optimism and his belief that love will conquer all. “Yes, we are free to choose,” he says, “but that is where love comes in. Do we love? If we do, we will suffer. But if we love we will achieve something better in the future. If I love my family I must respect them. And if I love my dad I should also give him some time because you never know how much longer he will live.”

Another of Jacobo’s key characteristics are the clarity of his goals and his unshakeable faith. “My desire has always been to be somebody in life. And, someday, to be complete. To have my heart complete. For me not everything ends here. This is my desire in life, to be a positive person and recognize we are all brothers and sisters.

“I am sad but will not give into sadness. My children have a future in the United States. I am not sure how long I will be here but I look forward to one day finding a way to go back to the U.S. legally.

“I understand that here in Guatemala there are a lot less opportunities. But the possibility exists of making one’s opportunities. I look forward to creating a new life. We must keep going with hope.

And even if hope ends, faith will not. That is what I have lived.”

Today Jacobo lives in a big, sturdy, yet empty, house, built with his work and forethought, and is able to accompany his father in his waning years. He misses his wife and children, but he is determined to find a way to get ahead in the country of his birth.

Jacobo celebrated his birthday in April with his father, his sister, his niece, and a couple of close friends around him. The cake, the refreshments they served, and the decorations were made possible with money sent by his sister, who lives legally in California. Isabel and the kids participated via video call. He and his kin exemplify the resilience and solidarity of immigrant families even when separated by distance and time. 1 Luis Argueta is the award-winning film director and producer of Guatemala’s first Oscar submission, “The Silence of Neto,” and the immigration documentary series, “aBUSed,” “The Postville Raid,” “Abrazos,” and “The U Turn.” He has been selected the 2019 Harris Wofford Global Citizen Award winner and is the recipient of The Order of the Quetzal, Guatemala’s high honor.

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Ganging Up El Salvador is central to Washington’s border dilemma

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BY MARK L. SCHNEIDER

ive decades ago my wife and I and some 40 other very nervous Peace Corps Volunteers walked down the stairs of a PanAm twin-engine plane that carried us to El Salvador’s Ilopongo airport just outside the country’s capital city.

After two years there, we were deeply committed to our San Salvador barrio, San Juan Bosco, despite its dirt roads and irregular electricity and periodic calls to fill the pilas – our sinks – because a revolution or a coup was coming. The country always seemed on the brink of an explosion given inequities, dysfunctional governance and exploitation. Every step toward democracy had its own two steps backward with the reactions from a traditional elite partnering with security forces.

USUAL POLITICS

An apparent win in 1972 by opposition Christian Democratic candidate, Napoleon Duarte, who had been the mayor of San Salvador, was the country’s first competitive presidential election in a decade. It ended with a military take-over, Duarte beaten and exiled to Venezuela.

A decade later in 1979, the call for an end to repression came from different corners including Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero and a short-lived civil-military junta promising elections. That, too, was soon ousted by traditional conservative military factions, the killing of reform leaders and finally the assassination of the nowsainted Monsignor Romero as he was celebrating mass.

And so began the tragic civil war that tore the country apart for a dozen years, with 75,000 lives lost, another unknown number forcibly disappeared and vast internal displacement and refugee outflow reaching the United States. The U.S. role varied from unwise support of the military to standing against peace talks with the guerrillas for much of the 1980s, to advocacy for human rights, to leadership in support for and helping achieve a negotiated peace accord and to funding post conflict reconstruction and the truth commission.

I had a unique vantage on these historical events, as staff to one of the few Senators in the 1970s interested in Central America, Senator Ted Kennedy. Then I helped direct the new State Department Human Rights Bureau of Jimmy Carter, and during the war and the peace negotiations, traveled to El Salvador with the Pan 24

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American Health Organization and the World Health Organization,, attended most of the Esquipulas Central American peace talks and later served as the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Latin America bureau during the country’s post peace accord reconstruction and then as Peace Corps director.

ORIGINS OF THE MARA

More than 1.2 million Salvadorans remain in the United States as a legacy of the conflict; another 200,000 — who have 190,000 U.S. citizen children — still hold temporary protected status, or TPS, stemming from earthquakes and hurricanes in this century. The current administration’s attempt to remove that status has been blocked by the courts.

However, the United States has a significant part of the responsibility for the migration crisis facing the United States today, with its calls for walls, closing the border, and most recently cutting off all aid to Central America. In the 1990s, our government began to massively deport young Salvadorans, some from gang backgrounds in East Los Angeles and other U.S. communities where MS-13 and Barrio 18 — the two dominant gangs, or maras — originated.

Number of Immigrants to the U.S. from El Salvador 2009 to March 2019

Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection

125,000 100,000 75,000 50,000 25,000

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Police in San Salvador corral Mara 18 suspects during an anti-gang operation coordinated with law enforcement agencies in the United States, other Central America countries and the Dominican Republic in February, 2015. With renewed pressure on gang activity, El Salvador’s migration totals have dropped.

During the Obama administration more than 1 million Salvadorans were deported. Initially they were sent with virtually no assistance offered to the receiving governments. These governments were still fragile from the conflicts of a decade earlier. Most often they were deported with only minimal information on their criminal, scholastic or family background. Not surprisingly, the deportees re-established their gangs in their “homelands.”

These deportees are now the source of much of the violence that, a few years ago, placed the three countries of the Northern Triangle among the most murderous countries in the world that were not involved in a declared war.

Photo: Reuters

DECLINING MIGRATION

One recent study found that in El Salvador, homicides boost migration by 188 percent and economic informality by 27 percent.

A similar pattern was found between violence and the migration of minors in all three countries of the Northern Triangle.

What should be a source of great pride for the United States is that over the past three years, as part of a conscious attempt to support development, security and governance in these Northern Triangle countries, there has been measurable progress. Since fiscal year 2015, one key program has been supporting El Salvador, its government, civil society and private sector in trying to understand and respond to the violence by targeting the 50 most dangerous municipalities with a comprehensive response, they have had measurable success.

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Incorporating rule of law, community policing, youth engagement, job training, actual new jobs and transparent governance, with broad civil society participation, they point to a 61 percent reduction in homicides and similar downturns in extortion. That record was 50 percent better than a still impressive 42 percent drop in homicides nationally. That is argued why El Salvador during those years, alone of its Northern Triangle neighbors, saw continuing reductions in unaccompanied minors and families showing up as illegal migrants along the southwest border, according to U.S. Border Patrol.

Given the concerns regarding rule of law, corruption and transnational crime in the Northern Triangle, USAID, State and Justice have been targeting the justice sector to combat impunity. It has included helping to fund the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala and the Mission to Support the Struggle against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras, the former through the UN and the latter through the Organization of American States.

It would be remarkably counter-productive to halt those programs or those that assist civil society organizations pressing for more equality, opportunity and democracy.

So looking ahead, one has to ask: “Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to sustain the success in those violence prevention programs in El Salvador’s 50 most dangerous municipalities, expand them to more cities and to Honduras and Guatemala rather than cut off aid to the three countries?” 1 Mark Schneider served as a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1966 to 1968 in urban com-

munity development with the Municipal Government of San Salvador. He later served as legislative assistant to Senator Edward M. Kennedy and held senior positions in the State Department, USAID, the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization and was director of the Peace Corps from 1999 to 2001. He has since served as senior vice president at the International Crisis Group and is a senior advisor in the Americas Program and Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. WO R L D V I E W S U M M E R 2 0 1 9

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Unequal Justice A human rights activist examines why Hondurans flee

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BY MARIA ROBINSON

hen I first arrived in Honduras as a Peace Corps Volunteer over 50 years ago, the only paved road was the 47 miles of Pan American Highway that ran along the Pacific side of the country from the capital Tegucigalpa to neighboring El Salvador. If I wanted to travel the 205 miles across the country from San Pedro Sula to Tegucigalpa, it took me two days.

There were not many private cars in those days, so I rode in those converted yellow school buses alongside campesinos carrying their pigs and chickens to market.

Although Honduras was extremely poor, I felt safe traveling alone. I lived in Siguatepeque, which is half-way between Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. The truck drivers stopped here for the night and I thumbed rides with them to get to the small aldeas for community meetings and back. The drivers would stop and deliver me right to my front door. They refused payment and said politely, “You can always flag me down, but don’t trust any other Honduran truck driver!”

I am wistful about those times. For the last decade I have returned to Honduras many times to join delegations as an investigator of human rights issues, as a monitor of two national elections, and as an investment advisor for clients who want their money to do good in Honduras. But for those 10 years, I have not traveled alone in Honduras. Even with a driver, I do not feel safe riding after dark. When a Peace Corps Volunteer was shot in the leg during an armed robbery in San Pedro Sula in December of 2012, Peace Corps pulled 158 Volunteers out of Honduras, citing ongoing security risks.

DRIVERS OF FLIGHT

Honduras faces the highest level of economic inequality in Latin America according to the World Bank. The bank estimated 60 percent of the population is living in poverty. In rural areas, one in five Hondurans live on less than $1.90 a day. Declining prices of their major exports of bananas and coffee reduced agricultural earnings by a third and like the rest of Central America, hurricanes and drought have damaged the economy.

I’ve come to believe that the murder rate and a government 26

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that fails to protect its citizens from extreme violence remains a major reason why increasing numbers of Hondurans are fleeing their country.

Years ago, I heard the weekend stories of campesinos drinking too much homemade chicha de jora and swinging machetes at each other. Things have changed. These days the proximate causes of the flight are gangs, drugs, and extreme inequality. The bottom line is that life is cheap. If you can find work in the cities, the wage is about $5 a day, but I have been told that the going price for an assassination is $25.

In daily life, that translates to this; When I stay in a pensionne

in a mainly gringo neighborhood in Tegucigalpa not far from the U.S. embassy, friends warn me not to walk one block to the local pulperia. Two blocks down the hill, security guards armed with submachine guns protect our neighborhood gas station.

A high murder rate, corruption, weak law enforcement, resource exploitation, and political repression drive the recent surge of migration. For Hondurans, migration is not so much a choice as a decision to protect their families and avoid dying. Their flight demonstrates an absence of alternatives.

Take the example of a family in a small town in the department of Cortes. The family was involved in a 2014 land struggle on behalf of the poor. The town’s corrupt mayor had appropriated land and was trying to give it to some of his cronies instead of several hundred families who had been designated to receive it. When the father delivered food to the campesinos during the eviction process, he was shot point-blank in the face in front of his wife and two of his sons. He died on the spot. His widow and a son identified the killer as a member of MS-13 who was apparently a hired gun. But the investigation stopped with the gunman’s arrest. Authorities made no effort to find out who paid him for the killing.

The widow and her four children began to receive death threats. The prosecutor declared them “protected witnesses” but offered little protection. The family of five moved from one haven to another for four months, then mortgaged their house to borrow money and hire a smuggler — a coyote — to escort them on the long and dangerous trek to the U.S. border where they requested asylum.

This may be an extreme case, but many Honduran migrants tell stories of political repression and fear of going to the police when they are victimized by the gangs

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A woman holds a poster with a photo of slain indigenous environmental activist Berta Cáceres outside the public prosecutor’s office in Tegucigalpa, Honduras during a protest to mark this year’s International Women’s Day Match.

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or the local zicarios, the tough guys. Many campesinos tell you that the police and the gangs are part of a web of crime and impunity, giving them no alternative but to flee.

A DOWNWARD SPIRAL

The large numbers who have fled Honduras are responding to conditions that worsened after the 2009 coup led by Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez that removed the elected president, Manuel Zelaya. The coup ignited international controversy. Karen Spring, the coordinator in Honduras for the US- and Canadian-based Honduras Solidarity Network, is critical of Washington for failing to protest the coup.

“The coup led to a downward spiral of human rights violations, of criminalization, threats, attacks, and assassinations against journalists, lawyers, indigenous leaders, environmentalists,” says Spring, who has lived in Honduras for 10 years. “Unfortunately, that downward spiral has not stopped.”

Shortly after the coup I was in Tegucigalpa with a delegation led

by Global Exchange when I became aware of the growing number of land grabs which appear to have been a major source of the violence provoking mass migration. A group of us was sitting one day in the comedor, the small restaurant of our pensionne, studying a road map of the country. The son-in-law of the pensionne’s owner sat down and indignantly circled on our map all the areas of the country where mining and hydroelectric power concessions were just granted by the nation’s newly installed president, Porfirio Lobo. What struck me then was that these concessions, instead of being given directly to corporations, were usually given to political operatives and Lobo cronies who sold them for a healthy profit to foreign companies.

BERTA CÁCERES

The Goldman Environmental Foundation in San Francisco, a champion of global environmental issues, estimates that in Honduras “about 30 percent of the country’s land was earmarked for mining operations, creating a demand for cheap energy to power future mining operations.” The foundation was aware of and supported the environmental activist Berta Cáceres.

I first met Berta Cáceres in 2014 in La Esperanza with a delegation documenting the fight of the indigenous Lenca people.

Cáceres had organized her neighbors to block the construction the Agua Zarca dam on the Gualcalque River by Desarrollos Energéticos, a Honduran company holding the dam concession.

The river flows through land the Lenca consider sacred and the destination of their annual Easter pilgrimage. Cáceres charged that the construction would be a violation of international treaties that guaranteed the rights of indigenous peoples. The dam would also block the community’s access to the communities in Rio Blanco and to food, water, and even to the land where they would grow their own food.

Activists such as Berta Cáceres have been targets of violence 28

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for years. According to Global Witness, at least 123 people taking a stand against dams, mines, logging, and agribusiness in Honduras were killed between 2010 and 2016. Cáceres received many death threats for her role in the protests and her supporters were relieved when she was chosen for the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize. We thought the Goldman prize would protect her.

We invited her to a barbecue in a Berkeley backyard the night before she received her Goldman prize. By candlelight, she spoke with eloquence about her cause back home. The next night she was dressed in a formal gown to receive her prize before a theater filled with applauding supporters.

Back home in Honduras, in the early morning hours of March 3, 2016, gunmen broke into her house in Esperanza and shot and killed Cáceres. She was a day short of 43 years old. The world was outraged. The U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa said they had never received so many emails, cables, and calls from around the world from supporters of Cáceres and her cause.

Because of this outcry and continuing pressure from such activists as the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras and the Lenca activists, the government identified and arrested eight suspects in November 2018. Seven were convicted of her murder, including two former Honduran military officers and Desarrollos Energéticos’ former security chief and its community and environment manager.

Four of those charged were also convicted of the attempted murder of the Mexican activist Gustavo Castro, the only witness to Cáceres murder. Their trial was rife with irregularities that served as a persistent reminder of the consistent impunity under which these companies operate. The local activists have been joined by Amnesty International and other NGOs in claiming that Desarrollos Energéticos, its owners, and government officials were masterminds of the Cáceres death.

Number of Immigrants to the U.S. from Honduras 2009 to March 2019

Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection

125,000 100,000 75,000 50,000 25,000

0 2009 2010 2011

2012

2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

Not long after the Cáceres killing, President Lobo attended an international conference organized in San Pedro Sula and declared, “Honduras is open for business!” Lobo called the event a “fundamental milestone of the National Program for Investment Promotion which we consider is one of the most important instruments to meet the objectives of our Nation Plan.” Lobo anticipated that the plan could lead to much needed social and economic development in Honduras. One government press release claimed “the project could attract up to $14 billion in investment projects from both national and international sources.”

Photos by Jorge Cabrera/Reuters

RESORTS AND IRON ORE

The government’s public prosecutor recently subpoenaed Miriam Miranda, a popular Afro-indigenous activist and general coordinator of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras. Miranda is being targeted for defending community-owned land against large-scale, so-called development projects. Miranda and other community leaders are fighting to stop the sale of land on Honduras’ north coast that is inside Garifuna ancestral land. Foreign investors want to build tourist resorts and gated communities on the beaches of Trujillo Bay with a view of the Caribbean.

The timing could not have been worse. Miranda fears arrest if she appears before the public prosecutor. Twelve other opponents of land grabs appeared before a judge in handcuffs in late February.

They had tried to stop an internationally-financed iron ore mine in W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

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Migrants fleeing years of Honduran poverty and violence crowd onto a truck last October as they join the 2018 caravan at Ocotepeque, bound for the United States.

Guapinol in northern Honduras. The mine, which is inside Carols Escaleras National Park, has polluted the source of drinking water for 16 communities in the Bajo Aguán region. The activists were charged with six crimes including criminal association, a criminal charge designed to be made against individuals who are suspected of being involved in organized crime.

The fact that conflicts between local communities, the Honduran government at both national and local levels, and the financial interests of mining companies and land developers reveal a pattern of struggles that challenge the hopes of many Hondurans for a future in their own homeland.

“The justice system is used unequally,“ says Karen Spring, “and it goes after people like Berta and people from other communities that are trying to stop hydroelectric dams and mining projects that severely damage their communities.” She says there are reprisals for “any sort of human rights work of people who speak out about what is happening here. And so the situation remains very dire in Honduras.” 1 Maria Robinson served in rural community development in Honduras from 1963

to1965 and helped establish radio literacy schools, vaccinations campaigns and milk distribution in several dozen aldeas outside of Siguatepeque. She has been engaged in human rights and environmental causes in Honduras for the past decade and is an investment advisor who specializes in socially-responsible investing.

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FLIGHT FROM THE NORTHERN TRIANGLE

Dispatches from El Paso

T

he Most Reverend Bishop Mark Seitz of the El Paso dio-

brick building on the edge of El Paso’s biggest barrio and just about

cese told “Aunt Pat” in Florida about the need for volun-

10 blocks from the Mexican border. Annunciation House directs

teers to help at two dozen welcome centers in this Texas

services for most of the churches, welcome centers and hotels

border city. He was sure Patricia Edmisten would appreciate the

they rent to help thousands of migrants find their way to sponsors

migrants’ plight at the border because she had captivated him

throughout the United States.

during family gatherings back in Wisconsin years ago with her Peace Corps stories of the 1960s.

Edmisten started the recruiting effort with John Coyne at Peace-

“Hundreds if not thousands are being released each day,” the bishop said in early May. “They have no money, no cell phones, just the shirts on their backs. It’s not letting up at all even though

CorpsWorldwide. NPCA posted a blog appeal to a 60,000-mem-

the latest tactic of Homeland Security is to send asylum seekers

ber database asking for intake workers, translators, drivers, and

back to Mexico to wait. We don’t know what the future holds.

cooks. President Glenn Blumhorst was one of the first to go.

Within a matter of days the first 25 RPCVs reported to Annun-

“We’re very grateful for all the help we are getting from Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. They can step into the chaos

ciation House, a century-old somewhat dilapidated two-story red

and bring some sense of order and peace. They still have that gift.”

Wristbands

I volunteered in El Paso to see for myself what was going on at our Southwestern Border. Soluna was one of many hospitality centers run by Annunciation House, a project of the Archdiocese of El Paso that has welcomed more than 50,000 migrants. I joined dozens of other dedicated volunteers who wanted to do something meaningful to help ease the transition in the United States for thousands of Central Americans who were flooding across the border.

It was an enlightening and rewarding experience.

Most of the refugees were single parents traveling with one or two young children. They journeyed by bus, by train, and flatbed truck for 15 to 20 days to reach the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez. The Rio Grande runs shallow near El Paso, so most of them walk onto U.S. soil where they turn themselves in to, or are apprehended by, armed and uniformed officers of CBP. Most of the refugees spend two or three nights huddled under the U.S. side of the Paso del Norte International Bridge in a makeshift holding pen, sleeping on the gravely surface with a thin aluminum foil covering for protection from the elements. After that, ICE officers place them in what migrants call hieleras, or ice boxes, the detention centers where they spend five or six nights sleeping on concrete floors.

I met Hondurans, El Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Ecuadorians, Brazilians, and Cubans during my 10-day stint, but most of them were indigenous Maya from the western highlands of Guatemala.

They come to Soluna weary, hungry, dehydrated, and sick. All they have is the clothes they wear and the asylum petitions they hold firmly in their hands.

F

or all of the migrants who step off of the buses in front of the Soluna hospitality canter in El Paso, small things go a long way to restore human dignity. Before I began my intake interviews, it gave me great pleasure to take a pair of scissors and cut off the red, blue, and yellow wristbands that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had put on the wrists of the detainees. And I offered them a pair of shoelaces. Their own had been confiscated when they crossed the border so they could not easily run from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody.

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Dozens of RPCVs answered a plea for volunteers to staff the welcome centers in El Paso, Texas. NPCA’s Glen Blumhorst conducted intake interviews and guided asylum seekers searching for the homes of their U.S. sponsors.

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Central Americans navigate the labyrinth of chain-link fences as they at the El Paso entry point. See more El Paso coverage at TGoldmanPhotography.com

I extend my hand. “Bienvenidos a los Estados Unidos. Mi nombre es Glenn, y estoy para servirles.” Hardened faces soften when I declare in a language they can understand that I am here to serve them.

It was by sheer luck that I met Maria, a young woman from my old Peace Corps site, San Miguel Chicaj. I greeted her in her native Rabinal Achi dialect.

“Nu wanima’ ka kikotik,” I told her. My heart is content to see you.

Her face broke into a smile as her eight-year-old and four-year-old sons Michael and Edson stood stoically at her side. These beautiful people could have been the family in the mud hut next door who befriended me when I was a guest in their country.

—Glenn Blumhorst, Guatemala 88-91

Border Divide

Photo by Ted Goldman

I

volunteered at the Soluna and Budget Hotel shelters run by Annunciation House. I conducted daily intakes, called the families of migrants around the country, confirmed travel arrangements, recruited drivers, coordinated departures, and whatever else needed to be done. I spent a third week at Cristo Rey Lutheran, a small Hispanic ministry in downtown El Paso. They hosted refugees when Annunciation House needed help. The pastor asked me to stay overnight at the church in case of a medical emergency among any of the 30 or so migrants they were sheltering that week In the chaos of relocation, families crossing into El Paso can W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

get separated or assigned immigration court dates in the wrong U.S. cities. At the hotel, I met a Guatemalan father and his two teenaged boys who were traveling to southern Florida but assigned a court date in Boston. ICE refused to change their paperwork and the family spent almost 3 weeks in the same clothes waiting at the hotel for permission to leave. There was another father and daughter at the church who could not leave El Paso until their paperwork was changed by ICE. They were also traveling to southern Florida but were incorrectly assigned an immigration court date in Atlanta.

One day a mother and father arrived from Honduras to cross the border with their son and daughter but they were separated at the border because the boy was not biologically the man’s child.

The father attempted to cross the border with the daughter and the mother attempted to cross with the son. The mother was successful and eventually delivered by ICE with her son to Cristo Rey after being released from the detention facility, but she had no idea what had happened to her husband and their daughter.

A family member in Florida paid for their bus tickets but, when our driver took them to the bus station, the Greyhound agent said the ticket was an open ticket with no specified departure date and all the buses were full for the next two days so, the driver had to bring them back to Cristo Rey. When they called their family to tell them they should not drive to their final destination to meet them on the day planned, they learned that the father had just called from another location in El Paso but the family didn’t know the name of the place. The pastor began calling around to the other 11 shelters in town. She finally found them waiting at another church. It was against Annunciation House policy but she was WO R L D V I E W S U M M E R 2 0 1 9

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Shift Work & Dominoes

O

scar Romero House is a one-story brick building next to a row of U.S. Border Patrol training centers just in front of the airport runway. My husband, Mark, and I worked there for two weeks last December. There are 118 bunk beds and an assortment of mattresses and folding cots. It was very exhausting work taking care of so many families.

Mark is a registered nurse. He tested people for blood pressure and diabetes, gave first aid in small emergencies and dispensed overthe-counter medications. A doctor came by two or three times a week to treat sore throats, coughs and runny noses. We slept in the house so Mark could be on 24-hour alert and could call the doctor if a serious medical issue came up, I never had an assigned job; you just did the work. Every day was different. We had a list of things to do every day: fill baggies with toothbrush and toothpaste, soap, comb; fold stacks of laundered sheets and towels; pack up bottles of water, fruit snacks and sandwiches. Making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches took all day. We checked the bathrooms for toilet paper, and hauled out garbage.

In the afternoons I was able to hug and welcome the newcomers, 32

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3

In El Paso’s largest barrio, the nonprofit Annunciation House has for 40 years been the hub of the city’s effort to help migrants find their way to families, friends and sponsors in the United States.

explain the rules of the house, hold the babies, and teach the kids how to play dominoes.

I asked some of the migrants to help cook, clean floors, wash the sheets and towels every day and help me straighten out the donated clothes. They did their own personal laundry in the sink and hung them out to dry. They willingly did all the work, and helped each new group that arrived.

We were getting families out the door to the airport just a few blocks away on most mornings, and to the two bus stations in the afternoon or late at night. More migrants arrived in the afternoons.

I went on many trips to deliver migrants to the airport and the bus station and explain how to get to their destinations.

Mark and I had taught in Arequipa, Peru as Peace Corps Volunteer in the 70s, and in 2016 went back to work with the Incarnate Word Sisters in San Antonio, Peru, where I taught English to teachers who had never heard a native speaker of English. So we knew the Hispanic migrants’ lifestyle and culture. We truly enjoyed being with the people who came to Romero House. It was so heartwarming to be able to return the kindness to them, like the Peruvians had treated us many years ago.

The clerks and agents at the El Paso airport and the bus stations were kind and most spoke Spanish. The hardest part of bus departures was a six-page ticket of transfers; it was a nightmare of gate numbers N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

Photo by Ted Goldman

able to reunite the family the next morning and a few days later they all left together on the long bus journey onward to connect with their family in the USA. —Pam Naessig, Malawi, 06-08

and departure schedules. The route to Miami took three days; they usually left with a bag of food, but not a cent to their names.

We all worried about whether they would reach their destinations, but I think they all did. A young woman with a two-year-old son got on the bus to Washington state so I gave her my phone number. She called one night around midnight and said they were fine and had just arrived.

—Dianne and Mark Tribo, Peru 71-73

Their Stories

A

nnunciation House is the brief interface between release from Immigration and prompt travel to sponsoring families. Most migrants arrive without phone or dollars. Shelter and phone calls are an enormous boon compared to being “released to the street”. I saw my intake job as one that required efficient speed so the migrants could to move on to food, shower and rest before the next leg of the journey. I didn’t intend to ask questions that were not on the form.

Even so, the stories spilled out.

“We’re going to join my mother,” he said. “I have not seen her in 14 years. She will soon meet my baby and my lady.” I looked at the intake form. He had last seen her when he was six.

A slumped young mother’s six-year-old daughter hovered near her. Tears streamed silently on both faces. Immigration had separated them from her nephew because she was not his mother. On the phone, she sobbed to her sister – who is also her sponsor – that the boy was lost. “No, no, he’s okay,” his mother replied. He had called from a different Annunciation House shelter.

“My son and I are here thanks be to God but three companions from our neighborhood were shot,” one migrant said.

“By the coyotes?” I asked.

“No, by the bandits following our caravan.”

A man says he lost his wife, toddler and 30-day-old infant in the desert as the coyotes rushed them. “¡Tú, acá, hurry, now!” The doors of a van divided them. Later, in a joyous reunion he saw his wife, toddler and 40-day-old infant as they arrived in the Casa Romero dining room.

“I will tell the judge that our farm didn’t get rain in the last two years. Our government does nothing for us. I left my wife and two babies and need to send money for medicine and food.”

I could not bear to tell him that these are not qualifications for asylum.

I think admiringly of the RPCVs who volunteered with me at the Casa Oscar Annunciation House shelters in El Paso. There were Dianne and Mark Tribo and Laura Nolan. I met Laura at Casa Oscar Romero a couple of minutes after her 23-hour drive from Chicago and just before she began shuttling migrants to bus stops and the airport, explaining tickets and lay-overs, smoothing the way to gates or bus bays.

One day, Laura replaced some of the inner workings of a toilet and was trying to snake another toilet. Later, I saw her re-balancing W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

a washing machine and jotting down needed parts. At 10 pm there she was bracing the legs of bunk beds, and then she was running out for supplies. None of these jobs was glamourous, only gracefully completed.

Shelter capacity was 120 migrants each night: 120 sheets to wash and fold; 120 dinners to prepare; more than 120 dishes to wash and dry; clothing bank to staff; diapers, baby bottles and formula to distribute. The migrant guests managed the kitchen, dining and laundry areas, and handled tons of cleaning, but there was plenty left for volunteers.

We speak Spanish. We know the culture and like the people.

At one time, we were the strangers in faraway places who were welcomed and oriented by the local people. Unusual or chaotic situations seem less chaotic to us. We like to be there. We volunteer.

—Teresa Bethke (Carson), Burkina Faso, 81-83

Godmother in Isabal

T

he Immigration buses arrive in the morning, afternoon, and night. They are white and silver and look like old Greyhound buses but they have no signage and the insides of the windows are covered with metal mesh.

The buses usually hold about 45 people. The first one off the bus is a uniformed immigration officer wearing a flak jacket and a sidearm holstered at his waist. As the families pour out they are hunched and cautious. They have traveled 2,000 miles and remain standing in line in the hot sun until I say, “Bien Venidos. Pasen adelante por favor” and tell them not to bother to stand in line but come into the shade of Casas Oscar Romero.

One day while I watched an intake volunteer fill out a form for a father and son from Guatemala, I asked the father what part of the country he is from. The East, he tells me.

“I lived in the east of Guatemala, as well,” I say and name the town where I lived many years ago. El Estor, Isabal.

I am from that town, he says.

I lived along the lake, I say, just down the street from the first bus stop.

The father’s eyes widen and he exclaims, “I lived just five blocks in the other direction from the Parroquia.”

I picture the neighborhood just blocks up from that Catholic Church, and I ask, “Did you know my dear friend, Sheny?”

“That’s my godmother and my aunt,” he proudly declares.

I had no idea what to expect when I entered Casa Oscar Romero. I now find myself without the exact words to describe my two weeks there. The impact made is immediate. The lives touched are beyond count. As they leave to settle in some other state, they wrap their arms around me in a giant hug. Each child smiles and runs to hug my waist whispering, “Gracias Señora.”

The connection is short yet eternal. Our lives have been linked by these few moments in time.

—Laura Nolan, Guatemala 92-95 WO R L D V I E W S U M M E R 2 0 1 9

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OPINION

The Caravan Poster child for a broken system

BY JOHN DICKSON

T

he migrant caravans that have wound their way to the southwestern border of the United States from Honduras through Guatemala and Mexico have their roots in the failure of reform to our immigration policies. Despite two previous attempts during the George W. Bush administration and another during Barack Obama’s tenure in office, our politicians have preferred the path of bloated, fear-mongering rhetoric than one of serious, complicated policy reforms that would address the situation.

Our current President knows that demeaning immigrants helped launch him on the path to the presidency, and he clings to the old tried and true slogans about building a wall, calling in the military, blaming the Democrats, and cutting off aid to countries that allow the caravans to pass. While those sound bites seem to help sustain his core political constituency, they are unworkable, perhaps illegal, and, more to the point, they don’t get us any closer to addressing the challenges of large flows of immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees coming to the United States.

It would not be too far-fetched to say that his deterrent approach to the many facets of immigration has worsened the situation. First, by denigrating other countries and pounding on about “America First” and nationalism, he has undermined other countries’ willingness to cooperate on issues like migrations that cross borders and cannot be addressed alone. After all, the sending countries, transit countries, and receiving countries need to work together to address the causes that propel people to leave, the dangers of undocumented crossings, and orderly transitions to a new home.

Second, his draconian solutions of terminating protected status for thousands of Central Americans in this country and separating children from families is not only inhumane; they have done little to stem the flow to this country. According to the

New York Times, the “total number of families that entered the country in the 2018 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, exceeded 100,000 for the first time in recent history.” This record comes in the face of other numbers that show a pattern of overall declines in migration and specifically, in illegal crossings, since the early 2000s.

Third, the President continues to stand by his own catch-all immigration answer – the Wall. Besides overtaking the Statue of Liberty as the symbol of global perceptions towards the United States, the Wall does absolutely nothing to deter migrants in the caravans. Most of this group are asylum seekers who head right to a legal border entry port on arrival and directly petition immigration officers entry based on violence in their home communities. In addition, the Wall diverts resources that could actually make a difference. In 2014, when there was a previous spike in children arriving from Central America, the Obama Administration helped launch the Alliance for Prosperity, a collaborative program with the Central American countries and the InterAmerican Development Bank, to strengthen their criminal justice systems and promote economic opportunities for potential migrants. It’s important to add that those countries have put up most of the funding for this effort; our financial support, at a lower level, but still substantial, gave us a seat at the table to mold the effort. President Trump’s budgets have called for drastically reducing aid to that initiative. His response to cut off all aid to those sending countries doesn’t punish only them; it will increase the number of people fleeing to our border.

The President’s recent shutdown of the federal government and then his declaration of a national emergency continue to propel the Wall on to the national agenda, a distraction from the real issue of trying to reform our immigration policies.

The current situation does not rise to the level of a national

Our politicians have preferred the path of bloated, fear-mongering rhetoric than one of serious, complicated policy reforms that would address the situation.

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Photo by Eric Thayer/Reuters

Migrants file across a bridge from the violence of Mexico’s Ciudad Jaurez to El Paso in 2010.

emergency; the Administration’s own Worldwide Threat Assessment of February 2019 devoted limited attention to irregular migration from Latin America, with one eye-popping admission that “in recent years, Mexican U.S.-bound migration has been net negative.”

While not a national emergency, there nonetheless is a problem, a specific one related to asylum requests and a more general one related to treatment of all newcomers to the U.S., immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. The most pressing issue is the backlog of adjudicating asylum requests which has reached a crisis of almost 750,000 cases. However, immigration officials have reduced backlogs in the recent past without reducing refugee admissions so that government officials from that area could work on the asylum requests. A study by the Migration Policy Institute released in September 2018 noted the reduction of the backlog of asylum cases from 464,000 in 2003 to 55,000 just three years later and even further to just 6000 in 2010. The Institute offered a series of recommendations that helped reduce that backlog, mostly through streamlining processes in the Homeland Security division responsible for asylum. These are policy-wonk solutions, such as moving credible fear cases out of the immigration courts that take years and allow DHS asylum

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officers the discretion to adjudicate them. Such solutions don’t make for great campaign sound bites, but they have worked in the past when we faced similar backlogs.

On the broader issue of immigration, we need to change the either-or nature of the dialogue: either you are anti-immigrant and racist or you’re for open borders and chaos. We can start with appealing to three characteristics of sound immigration policy as outlined by the United Nations: safe, orderly and regular. A system that would incorporate those three basic values would move to: Reduce the dangers of illicit crossings and living in the shadows of our society; help integrate all newcomers – immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers – quickly and fully; and return to the cooperation needed with sending countries to address the causes that drives people to leave their homes.

The hope and altruism that drove Americans to join the Peace Corps and the subsequent interactions with foreigners at the grassroots level place the RPCV community in a unique position to advocate for the kind of sound, reasoned debate the nation needs on immigration. Our best hope is to use the focus on the caravans or the Wall as the poster child for a system that cries out for fixing. 1 John Dickson taught school in Lastourville, Gabon from 1976 to 1979 and conducted projects in health and education. He worked as a Foreign Service Officer in Nigeria, South Africa, Peru, Canada, and Mexico. He is member of the Peace Corps Community for Refugees. His opinion was first published in the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and on PCC4Refugees.org.

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GA L L E RY

Less Can Be More

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ight pieces of Martin Puryear’s monumental public work at the 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia demonstrate the unique vision of one of America’s most respected artists. The exhibit, ”Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertá” is open through November 24 at the U.S. Pavilion in Venice, Italy.

It’s the latest achievement of an artist whose career was inspired by his Peace Corps experience as an African American teaching art in a

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high school in Segbwema, Sierra Leone and discovering the techniques of artisan wood carvers who worked along the roads of the town.

Puryear recently told New York Times art critic Holland Carter that Sierra Leone introduced him to the idea that in the application of technology to art, less could be more; the hand was still the sovereign tool. Politically, he added, that two years gave him an eye-opening perspective on his own troubled and troubling homeland.

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“So to be able to live in West Africa and experience a tribal culture firsthand was priceless,” he told art historian Richard J. Powell. “For most black Americans the connection to the old Country is blank, erased by the middle passage of the slave trade.”

For several decades after Peace Corps he worked in the solitude of his Hudson River Valley studio to shape ground-breaking works now held by the major galleries and museums of America – including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in his hometown of Washington, D.C. — that increasingly reflect on the conflicted thoughts of an American artist of color.

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$ Swallowed Sun is a 20-foot wide by 22-foot tall work of Southern yellow pine that stretches across the forecourt of the U.S. Pavilion and is joined by steel polyester, canvas and rope and appears to be supported at the back by a large snakelike brace. ! A Column for Sally Hemings is a six-and-a-halffoot tall sculpture of cast iron painted tulip poplar with shackles on top as a monument to the black slave who was the mother of five of Thomas Jefferson’s children. The fluted Classical column stands at the center of the U.S. Pavilion, directly beneath its Jefferson dome.

Photographs by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

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n Big Phrygia is a monumental painted red cedar wood rendering of the so-called liberty cap that was the symbol of resistance during the American and French revolutions.

Tabernacle is a six-foot tall field cap worn

, by Union and Confederate infantry in the Civil War. Materials are steel, red cedar, American cypress, pine, makore veneer, canvas and printed cotton fabric. The crown of the cap offers a cross-hairs view of a siege mortar ready to fire at the viewer.

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FICTION

Those Class Six Girls A new Mwalimu in Kenya confronts rules of engagement

BY KRISTEN ROUPENIAN

N

ot long after he finally fell asleep, Aaron was awoken by a knocking at his door. His lantern had gone out, so he blindly untangled himself from his mosquito net and stumbled through the darkness to the front of the house. “I’m coming!” he called, but the knocking continued unabated. His visitor was so insistent that he wondered if there had been some kind of emergency, a terrorist attack or a rebel invasion, and people from the Peace Corps had arrived to helicopter him to safety. The possibility was both scary and a little bit thrilling, but when he finally unbolted the door, no one was there.

Confused, he ventured out into the compound. The night air smelled of charcoal and manure, and its chill sent gooseflesh prickling down his skin. The last knock had come only seconds before he’d opened the door; it seemed impossible that a person would have had time to run. But in the moon’s dim light, he could see that the yard was empty, the gate barred, and everything around him still.

“Hello?” he called out, but heard nothing in return save his own heaving breath.

He went back inside, rebolted the door, and rearranged his mosquito net, tucking it carefully under the corners of his mattress— but as soon as he was beneath the covers, the knocking began again. Three times, he flung open the door and saw nothing. Once, he snuck out the back and tried to creep around the house to catch his tormenter in the act, but as soon as he stepped outside, the knocking subsided into silence. He returned to his house and sat with his back wedged up against the wall as he tried to keep himself from succumbing to panic. That W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

was when the knocking began once more, the hammering on his metal door deafeningly loud. “Go away!” he screamed, his hands pressed to his ears. “Go away! Toka hapa! Go away!” But—madly, impossibly, mind-numbingly—the knocking kept up all night long.

At dawn, when his eyes were burning and his thoughts twitchy from lack of sleep, the door at last went quiet. Thinking his harasser might have left some clues that would be discernible in daylight, Aaron stumbled outside, only to confront a steaming pile of shit coiled snugly in the center of his porch.

The fresh intimate stink of it made him gag. He flung his arm across his nose, ran back inside, and slammed the door shut, but even so, he was sure he could smell it. Later, he drank two bottles of warm Tusker beer for courage and gathered the feces between the pages of a newspaper, its slithering warmth radiating through the thin pages. Then he ran through his yard with his arms outstretched and flung the crumpled ball over the wall and into the street.

Aaron knew that if he didn’t go to school that day, he would lose any chance he had of ever gaining control of Class Six, but he couldn’t make himself do it. He lay on his couch, sweating, his face covered with blankets, and tried to identify the most likely suspect for the night’s attack. Delicate, meowing Linnet? Vulgar Roda Kudondo?

Or someone less obvious, like pretty Mercy Akinyi, who’d once turned in an exam sheet that consisted of nothing but the words I love Moses Ojou over and over again? Maybe it was Milcent Nabwire, who, last week, had raised her hand during a lesson and asked, “Mwalimu, is it—is it—is it true that— that

wazungu—is it true that . . .” and then, in a great stuttering burst: “Mwalimu, ni kweli wazungu hutomba wanyama?” In an attempt to mask the slowness of his ability to translate, he’d pretended to consider the question carefully, frowning and furrowing his brow so that only when he finally unlocked her meaning (Teacher, is it true that white people screw animals?) did he realize how perfectly he’d set himself up to be the butt of her joke. Or perhaps it was Anastenzia Odenyo, one of his class’s many orphans, who served as the head of household for five younger siblings.

She came to school so rarely he had trouble remembering her face, although he would sometimes pass her in the village, looking tired and harassed, a basket of shopping balanced on her head, a child clinging to her hip. He’d once offered to pay for the handful of onions she was buying at the market, telling her he hoped she’d be able to return to school someday soon. She’d accepted the handful of shillings he’d given her, then pointed to his iPod and said something in Swahili he didn’t understand. “To hear music,” she’d said in English, each word enunciated carefully. “I like to listen to music.”

Requests for his belongings were common but always awkward for him.

“No, Anastenzia,” he told her. “I’m sorry.” “Okay,” she said. She shushed the child she was carrying, who’d begun to cry.

“Maybe later. Thank you for onions, Mwalimu.

Goodbye.” He’d been halfway home before the sickening possibility occurred to him that she might not have been asking for the iPod as a gift, but simply to listen to a song.

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FICTION

Yes, it could have been Linnet or Roda or Mercy or Milcent or Anastenzia . . . but it could also have been Stella Khasenye or Saraphene Wechuli or Veronica Barasa or Anjeline Atieno or Brigit Taabu or Purity Anyango or Violeta Adhiambo. The truth was, it could have been any of them, because they all loathed him, every single one.

The Headmaster came by the house in the midafternoon, and Aaron said he was sick. The Headmaster warned Aaron of the dangers of malaria and offered to send one of the children to bring him some Panadol, but Aaron declined politely and crawled back to bed. Later, Grace arrived at her usual time, and, lonely and shaky, he invited her in. “What is wrong with you?” she demanded as soon as she saw him. He told her an abbreviated version of the night’s ordeal, though he couldn’t bring himself to admit that someone had taken a shit on his porch.

Like Roda’s vulgar proposition, its insolence somehow shamed him, the victim of the act, more than it did the transgressor. He expected that Grace wouldn’t believe him when he told her the knocking had kept up until sunrise—he had trouble believing it himself—but when he finished his story, bracing himself for ridicule, she only nodded and said sagely, “Ah. It is a night runner.”

“A night runner?” he echoed. “They did not teach you about night runners at your Peace Corps school?”

Early on, Aaron had mentioned the eight weeks of Peace Corps training he’d completed before arriving in Butula, and ever since, he’d had the sense that Grace believed he’d spent months in a classroom, being taught every possible detail about Kenyan life, from the right way to greet a grandparent to how to properly slice up a mango. She acted astonished at even his smallest mistakes, and sometimes appeared truly offended by the extent to which these imaginary teachers had failed him.

“Night runners are a very common thing among us Luhya people,” she told him.

“They cause too much trouble by running around naked anyhowly.” Perhaps inspired 40

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by Aaron’s boggled expression, she lowered her voice into a masculine range, furrowed her eyebrows, and elevated her explanation into performance. “They come around, boom boom boom, making noises like this”—she demonstrated by pummeling her fists against the air—“and they will rub their ninis against your wall”—she poked out her ass and pointed—“and if you are very unlucky, they will leave you a little present.”

She giggled and concluded emphatically, “Yes! That is the night runner.”

For the rest of the evening, Aaron tried to get Grace to confess she was making this up. She’d told him wild stories of the super-

His skepticism slowly eroding in the face of her conviction, Aaron asked how one went about ridding oneself of a night runner’s harassment. Grace began telling a convoluted story about how the best night runners did their work in pairs, and the elaborate joint rituals they performed to keep themselves from being caught, but then she interrupted herself and shook her head in despair. “No! The real problem is, these night runners are too difficult to stop, because when you chase them, they can become something like a cat or a bird or even a leopard, so how can a person catch up?”

“Grace!” Aaron cried as she burst into snorting laughter. “You’re not funny!”

Grace slapped her hand She’d told him wild stoon the table and shouted, ries of the supernatural “Wrong! I am funny. Your before—one about a man problem is you are too seriwho’d been cursed so that ous. ‘Oh no, a child is meowing at me!’ ‘Oh no, someone every time he urinated is knocking on my door in he crowed like a rooster; the night!’ There are worse one about a witch who’d things in this world than being cast a spell on an adultermeowed at. So you have your ous couple so that they troubles—that means a pergot stuck together son can’t laugh?”

“I just think you could be a little more sympathetic,” natural before—one about a man who’d Aaron said morosely, as he drank down the been cursed so that every time he urinated rest of his Coke. he crowed like a rooster; one about a witch who’d cast a spell on an adulterous couple so that they got stuck together while having sex The next morning, fortified by a good eight and had to be brought to the hospital to be hours’ sleep, Aaron decided to venture surgically taken apart— but always in a way onto campus. Instead of going to his classthat seemed like a tease, as though she knew room, though, he presented himself at the he wouldn’t believe her and was daring him Headmaster’s office. The Headmaster’s feet to defy her. Of the reality of the night runners, were propped up on his desk, the bottom however, she seemed utterly convinced. No, of one of his shoes blackened with a smear they were not spirits, they were actual people, of chewing gum. “Mwalimu, Aaron!” the driven to run by a kind of demonic mental Headmaster exclaimed. “How is your malaria disease. Their identities were secret, because doing today?” if the community found out you were a night “It wasn’t malaria,” Aaron said. “And I’m runner—whoa, you were in for it then! Once, a lot better. But I need to talk to you about three towns over, a night runner had been the Class Six girls. Their behavior is out of caught and almost lynched before it was control.” As the Headmaster listened, rockdiscovered that during the daytime she was ing back in his chair, Aaron launched into the well-respected wife of a pastor. a litany of Class Six offenses. They threw N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

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things at him. They imitated him. They asked vulgar questions. They refused to do their assignments. They failed to treat him with the proper respect. When Aaron recounted the story of Linnet’s meowing, the Headmaster began to frown, but when he described the assault on his house, the Headmaster dropped the front legs of his chair to the floor with a clatter.

“No!” the Headmaster declared. “This is too serious. With harassment like this, how can you sleep? Someone coming to your door, banging, banging, banging, all the night long!”

Aaron was about to agree, but before he could say anything, the Headmaster continued, “This is not just a nuisance, no! It is a real problem in our community, this nasty habit of night running!” Aaron slumped back in his seat as the Headmaster burst into a wide smile, showing off a mouth full of damp, shiny teeth. He clasped Aaron on the shoulder. “My friend. If you want your class to have discipline, you must discipline them! The next time a small-small girl meows at you—pah!” He whipped his newspaper through the air. “Do so, and I think you will not be visited by this night runner again.” Defeated, Aaron returned to his classroom. On any other day, the girls would have gone wild in his absence, but today they sat primly at their desks, their ankles pressed together, their hands clasped in front of them. A hundred eyes tracked him as he crossed to the front of the room.

As he cleared his throat and prepared to speak, he allowed himself a moment of hope. Maybe it’s over. Maybe they finally realize they’ve gone too far.

“Good afternoon, girls,” Aaron prompted the class.

The sound of shuffling feet and squeaking desks filled the air as Class Six rose, as one, to greet him.

“MEOW!” 1

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Share your story with classrooms and community groups.

Kristen Roupenian served in Kenya from 2003 to 2005.

This is an excerpt from a short story, The Night Runner, from her collection, You May Want to Know This: ‘Cat Person’ and Other Stories, published in January by Scout Press, a Simon & Schuster imprint, printed with permission. The story was previously published in Colorado Review. Her short story, Cat Person, was published by The New Yorker last year.

W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

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3 A Red Cross worker shows how to dress in body suits to work among infected populations.

Beating Ebola Peace Corps’ untold story of fighting the virus in Guinea

I

BY DOUGLASS P. TESCHNER

n West Africa between December 2013 and June 2016 there were 28,616 known cases of the Ebola virus and 11,310 deaths. 3,804 of those cases and 2,536 deaths were in Guinea, where I was Peace Corps country director. But there would have been many more if it hadn’t been for the work of Peace Corps staff and RPCVs. When the epidemic was finally contained, the U.S. Ambassador to Guinea, Dennis Hankins, wrote, “Peace Corps local staff were able to make a key contribution in fighting Ebola. Through their collective efforts, I 42

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am convinced hundreds if not thousands of lives were saved.”

‘WHO WILL HELP GUINEA?’

The very contagious and deadly virus first appeared in Guinea in December 2013 and soon spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone.

When -it became clear that the disease would not be easily contained, Peace Corps evacuated more than 300 Volunteers from the three countries in August of 2014. As the Guinea country director, I asked each of the 97 evacuating PCVs to write on post-it

notes their parting thoughts about Guinea: “Family,” “My Home,” and “Love” were typical responses. One Volunteer asked painful questions in her award-winning blog: Who will help Guinea? Who will be their hero?

Within a month Peace Corps Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet and Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, signed an interagency agreement to use Peace Corps motor pool, offices, and staff to support the growing CDC mission in West Africa.

That agreement included drivers and staff acting as translators and guides for CDC health workers. In Guinea, we initially hosted 10 CDC infection control training events for health care workers. Together with RPCVs working at CDC, Peace Corps Guinea staff saw an opportunity for even greater impact given Peace Corps’ training expertise, national network, deep history and knowledge of the culture.

A key part of eradicating Ebola was N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

Photograph by Douglass Teschner

PEACE CORPS NEWS

contact tracing: identifying every person who had been in close contact with those infected, followed by daily checks for 21 days to ensure that they did not become ill or spread the disease to others. There were, however, many rumors and widespread resistance; many of those who had contact with Ebola went into hiding, and there were incidents of crowds attacking government convoys.

this initiative reached 3.2 million people all told, one quarter of Guinea’s population.

CALLED ON TO ACT

The commitment of our trained community educators went beyond simply teaching. In the town of Dubreka, a truck hit and killed two young motorbike taxi drivers and the Red Cross arrived to bury the bodies, a standard practice during the Ebola crisis. When a gathering crowd of young people saw their GRASSROOTS COMMUNITY EDUCATION dead friends being placed in plastic body bags, We designed a four-phase cascading train- they threatened to burn down the hospital. ing-of-trainers approach. CDC trained 25 Two of our community educators talked Peace Corps staff and trainers as master to the angry youths about why all burials trainers. Peace Corps staff recruited home- needed to be secure. “Let’s protect ourselves, makers, teachers, students, NGO workers, families and others,” they explained. By youth leaders, and community leaders in all stepping forward they defused the crisis and escorted the Red Cross to the cemetery to ensure that the bodies were respectfully “They accept us because buried, and that the crowd we are from the commuremained peaceful. nity,’ said one of our eduAmong their many acts cators. “They don’t trust of public service in the face people coming in a car.” of personal risk, our community educators discovered people who were hiding and parts of the country to become community persuaded them to seek treatment. They educators. Our 25 master trainers conducted discovered others who tested positive, were 26 workshops for these 995 people. treated and cured. A young trainer discovered Each training included discussion of a sick man in a taxi and took him to a health common rumors and how to overcome fear center where a nurse found that the man and resistance, including role plays using had died. He was safely removed. Another UNICEF picture books. Ebola survivors persuaded a family to test their dead daughter shared their experiences facing stigmatization. and, when tested positive, she was safely A CDC epidemiologist said, “We were so buried and the family agreed to follow up impressed with the training. Community contact for 21 days. When a local politician acceptance and cooperation are so critical told villagers that the virus was only a rumor to stopping transmission, and we believe spread by the ruling party to delay elections, that this grassroots approach may be the an educator convinced the crowd it was, in key to ultimately gaining the cooperation fact, a deadly and contagious virus. Another we so desperately need.” educator persuaded a frightened community Each community educator developed to let their school re-open and was invited a personal action plan starting with family to hold Ebola awareness classes. members and people they knew and reported that without any resistance they taught WASHING BODIES, TRACING THE VIRUS 295,612 people about the virus. “They accept Those who faced the greatest risk were those us because we are from the community,” who came in close contact with victims: said one of our educators. “They don’t trust family members, health care workers, and people coming in a car.” We estimate that the people who washed the bodies of the W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

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PEACE CORPS NEWS

3

Doug Teschner (right) and the Peace Corps Guinea staff celebrated their Ebola Community Education success after 17 months battling the often-fatal 2014 virus.

We collaborated with CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) on training 361 contact-tracing team health workers to use the most effective communication skills to negotiate positive citizen cooperation.

Our language trainers worked with the U.S.

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S U M M E R 2 0 1 9 WO R L D V I E W

embassy and Carnegie Mellon University to translate key Ebola messages into local languages for mass distribution via cell phone.

We assisted the government of Guinea, the Red Cross and WHO to pilot training of a rapid diagnostic test to be administered by Red Cross staff and other health workers.

Paul D. Coverdell Fellows Program

As we know, RPCVs make a vital difference long after their service as PCVs, and this was never more true than during the Ebola response.

CDC sent many people to each of the three countries, including RPCVs who had served in rural villages in Guinea and other francophone African countries. Seven who played a key role supporting our efforts were Molly Gaines-McGollom, Dana Schneider, Angela Thompson-Paul, Ben Dahl, Peter Kilmarx, James Ham, and Hermence Matsotsa. CDC also hired five of our own evacuated Volunteers for their language and cross-cultural skills. Other RPCVs contributed to the Ebola response through their work with State Department, USAID, and NGOs. .

Back in the United States, our evacuated Volunteers fundraised with NPCA and sold T-shirts to support Guinea NGOs. When family packages arrived in Guinea after the evacuation, PCVs we contacted asked that the toiletries, clothes, and food be donated to Ebola survivors.

By the fall of 2015, the epidemic was in N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

Photograph courtesy of Douglass Teschner

dead, a deep cultural tradition in Guinea that proved to be a source of many infections.

In collaboration with the Red Cross, our Peace Corps staff conducted 38 trainings for Muslim imams and body washers who trained 2,798 people in local languages. The lead imam in Dubreka told U.S. Ambassador Alex Laskaris that this training was the best he had ever received.

Our Ebola training initiative succeeded for many reasons. We identified respected community members to volunteer as community educators. These community educators gained credibility, earned respect and gained trust as unpaid educators. They asked openended questions and did not judge people who were skeptical or who had heard false rumors. They applied participative approaches to learning, used their local languages and adapted messages to the community level.

They were trained with role-playing techniques that helped them communicate effectively.

Peace Corps Guinea staff played a major role in other efforts to contain the epidemic.

retreat. A new vaccine was being used, local cooperation increased, and the number of cases fell dramatically.

“I'm so proud of our outstanding, amazing, extraordinary staff in Guinea,” Peace Corps Director Hessler-Radelet wrote to our staff. “What heroes you all are! It's such a privilege to call you our own… You are saving many lives and your work could not have a higher calling.” Peace Corps sent a cash award to the whole Guinea staff, and we bought a large quantity of pagna, traditional fabric. Each staff member was given a piece and, as is the tradition in Africa, asked local tailors to make us each a shirt or dress. Then we went out to lunch at a Conakry restaurant in our matching outfits! Mr. Fode Tass Sylla, communication coordinator for the Guinea National Ebola Coordination Committee came to express his gratitude for the way Peace Corps operated in Guinea.

ENDING EBOLA

On December 29, WHO declared Guinea

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free of Ebola free (although a few isolated cases later popped up in 2016). On January 5, the first 15 Peace Corps Volunteers returned to Guinea: seven Response Volunteers (five of whom had been evacuated 17 months previously) and eight Volunteers transferred from recently evacuated Mali.

We held an emotional welcome back ceremony with our new ambassador, Dennis Hankins. We had left on the walls the post-it notes written by the PCVs evacuated 17 months earlier. I asked the five returnees to take down their post-it notes and read aloud what they had written. Staff and new PCVs were then asked to pick one that had meaning to them. I chose one - labeled “Home.” I had been in country less than three weeks when the evacuation order came, but Guinea had become my home.

country national enthusiastically told the group, “This training is about more than Ebola, Peace Corps trains us to improve ourselves.” When a local radio station asked two of our community educators where they had received this great training to fight the Ebola virus, one of them answered, “Peace Corps.” And both of them smiled with pride and joy.

A key to our success during the epidemic was Ousmane Diallo, Peace Corps Guinea’s deputy director of programming and training.

He wrote, “One day soon Ebola will be a part of Guinea’s history, not its reality. And when that day comes, I hope people will remember the part that the Peace Corps played: that at a time of so much tragedy and so much need, our Peace Corps staff stayed, and stood true to our partnership with the people of Guinea.” 1

MORE THAN EBOLA

The work we did had far more impact than helping to end the epidemic. At one of the community education trainings, a host

Dr. Douglass Teschner served in Morocco from 1971 to

1973 and was Peace Corps country director in Burkina Faso, Ukraine, and Guinea. He trains and coaches effective leadership. See www.GrowingLeadershipLLC.com.

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