54 minute read
One School at a Time
Ifirst visited Myanmar as a tourist in 1996, a few years after the country’s name changed from Burma. Years later, I was curious to return to Myanmar because I have grown to love Asia’s art, its culture, and Buddhism.
I’ve traveled in more than 100 countries and many of them were very poor, but I never had the impulse to jump in and help solve a problem until the day in 2010 I walked through the hills of Myanmar’s Southern Shan State.
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In the market town of Kalaw, I met people working with a local non-government organization called the Rural Development Society. Despite the political and economic challenges of the country now known as Myanmar, this rural development organization has since 1990 been building schools in several surrounding villages. Two more communities were “school ready,” meaning they had a donated school site, a commitment for government teachers, a school committee, a strong desire from parents to see their children educated, and a commitment from villagers to do the unskilled labor to build a school. They needed only funding, organization and a plan to execute the vision.
We went to see one of these villages, the ethnic Danu farming community of Nan Auw which was about one and a half hours over rutted tracks from Kalaw. The villagers had carefully carved out space for a school by redrawing their own house lot boundaries. Two days later the chief of Nan Auw came to Kalaw with a petition signed by all the villagers asking for help. Most of the signatures were ‘X’s. That night I thought long and hard about what it meant to be illiterate in the 21st century: no ability to use the internet, no access to further education, vulnerability to human trafficking and no prospects in life except to be a subsistence farmers like their parents. What could be done to keep the children of Nan Auw from a similar fate? The answer, I realized was to help the village build a school to educate them. Returning to San Francisco, I talked to my friend Andrew Lederer, another RPCV who served in farm mechanics in Pune, India from 1969 to 1971. Andrew agreed to help raise money to build the Nan Auw school and we created Build a School in Burma to do it. Andrew and I wrote the first checks and started a campaign for donations. To our surprise we quickly raised enough money to How to build 40 schools in Myanmar for less than a million dollars BY ROBERT CORNWELL
3Residents of Pyin Ka Doe Gone in the Ayeyarwady River Delta gathered last year to celebrate their new school. Teachers are the women in dressed in white blouses and blue skirts and the two men standing on the far left and far right. Build a School in Burma country director Naing Lin Swe is in center foreground. Author Robert Cornwell and board member Frank DeRosa stand at the back.
build Nan Auw Primary School.
We have gone on to build 45 more schools with villages and partners in Myanmar. Most of our schools are quite similar in design, because of government requirements and the type of materials available in most rural areas of the country. We also seek to build cost-effective, durable buildings that can be maintained with locally available materials and labor skills. This means that buildings are simple. We strive for a brightly lit learning environment, and make sure the school has furniture, a water supply and sanitary toilets. fundraising, accounting and disbursement, press, managing projects and programs from 9,000 miles away. Most of the seven volunteers providing services are in the United States but we’re now getting increased support from Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Norway. Over time we have found generous donors who had a personal connection to Burma: Burmese emigrants who left and became successful elsewhere, travelers who had been touched by the graciousness of Myanmar people and wanted to help, Buddhist and Christian individuals and organizations with connections to the country.
FISCAL SPONSORS Neither of us had any real experience raising money. That first year we put up our own donations and wrote to friends, relatives and professional associates asking for contributions. The goal was to raise $18,000 to cover the building costs for Nan Auw Primary School. But generosity foiled our simple-minded plan. Total donations topped $24,000. We decided to find another village needing a school. And so a “one-off ” school became an organization.
Andrew and I had long been involved with non-profit organizations; we knew how time-consuming creating a 501(c)3 would be. A professional fundraiser friend suggested we work with a fiscal sponsor to get started, rather than spend our energy becoming a non-profit. A fiscal sponsor provides its tax-exempt status to non-profit organizations. The fiscal sponsor usually charges a fee and sometimes provides other services, such as an on-line donation platform. Donors can take their tax deduction because of the fiscal sponsors IRS status. Build a School in Burma is a non-profit organization with a specific focus on education in Myanmar. Our first 40 schools were built for less than $1 million. We were deeply fortunate to hire Naing Lin Swe as our country director. He is a longtime NGO worker who had just left the Karen Women Action Group, our longest active school building partner. Naing Naing’s patient community development skills, as well as his knowledge of construction and his facility in dealing with people at all levels in Myanmar society have been powerful reasons for our success.
We keep our costs down to ensure compliance with all of our board’s policies and IRS rules for each project. Naing Naing is our only employee and a board member contributes the cost of Naing Naing’s salary. When advisory board members like Andrew and I travel to Burma we pay our own expenses. Operating expenses were about 7 percent of last year’s budget. This allowed us to focus on raising money and building schools to build a track record.
Early results strengthened our fundraising and our experience working with communities to build their schools. Donations gradually increased, and we were faced with the problems of growth. Both Andrew and I have experienced the disappointment of donating to high salaries and perks to executives and seeing the ineffectiveness of many NGO foreign assistance efforts.
We decided to organize Build a School in Burma as an all-volunteer effort and invited people who showed interest and had skills to join us on a volunteer advisory board and to manage web and social media,
UNDER THE COUNTRY’S RADAR Myanmar is a challenging environment. It remains one of the poorest countries in Asia. When Build a School in Burma began in 2010 the country was still a xenophobic military dictatorship. At that time, the average 25-year-old had only four years of formal education, the lowest in Asia. Foreigners were viewed with suspicion, and were prohibited from visiting many parts of the country. Transparency International had ranked only Somalia as more corrupt than Myanmar. Roads and communications were poor—many parts of the country lacked cell phone signals. The residue of many of these problems persist, but conditions are slowly improving and the government is devoting more money and effort to education. Being old Peace Corps Volunteers, we decided on a ‘bottom up’ approach in-country: Build a School in Burma would work with local Myanmar non-government organizations and 18 community-based groups to build the 46 schools completed to date. We collaborate with the local NGO or religious organization and the school committee, use local materials, designs, contractors and workers. Our goal was to remain “under the radar”, and to empower the local people to resolve problems and deal with the government. To this day we have not had a formal meeting with the Myanmar’s ministry of education. We’re already active in communities to find villages which needed schools that were willing to contribute to building them.
Even now, the violent ethnic conflicts in this country are intense, particularly between the dominant Bamar (Burmese) and the more than 130 minority groups that make up 40 percent of the population. Ethnic conflict is still a risk in many parts of the nation and clashes between ethnic militias and the Burmese Army are a daily occurence.
We‘ve been surprised at how quickly a project can come together. Working directly with communities rather than government ministries has been a key. I don’t think we would ever have considered trying this without the cross-cultural training and experience Andrew and I had from Peace Corps.
Even under these circumstances, problems building schools in Myanmar have been fewer than we first expected. In one or two cases we decided not to build a particular school because we perceived someone had their hand out in getting approvals.
Most of our schools serve non-majority ethnic groups. None of our schools has been damaged in fighting but the bridge to one village school was blown up by the army a few years ago. Rapid urbanization
New Schools Over Nine Years The cost of a three-room school on donated land is between US $ 25,000 - $ 30,000 today.
Completed Under construction or approved
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and work abroad means populations are not growing in many rural areas, so a few schools have fewer students than we would like after expanding them. In a few cases the communities have not fully held up their end of the cooperative bargain or cooperation among villagers has broken down during or after construction. So far every school has been completed, is in use and is serving its intended purpose. We began installing solar electricity in some schools in 2015. Until recently, only about one quarter of Burmese households had electricity from the national grid. As many of our 46 schools are in remote rural communities, most do not have access to power. Electric lights help students study at night, particularly to prepare for national exams given at the end of the 4th, 8th and 10th grades. Perhaps the most important part of creating a school has been working with the community to discuss how to plan and organize. Cooperating with local partners, we select villages based on their knowledge of places they are already working. We have clear criteria for a school project: need, community participation, sustainability, readiness, interethnic and interreligious cooperation and keeping children together with their families.
A HIGH SCHOOL Three years ago Peace Corps came slowly and haltingly to Myanmar. I made a point to seek out the new country director, even before the first volunteers arrived. We offered to collaborate with Peace Corps Burma on education-related projects, but nothing came of that meeting. So when the chance came last year to work with current volunteer Abby Hester, we were excited.
Abby contacted Bob through our Build a School in Burma website. She wrote about the need for a large new building at Thanatpin Basic Education High School near Bego in Southern Myanmar, where she was teaching. Several old buildings needed replacement; some were no longer safe to use. With a proposal drafted by Abby and the school staff and her counterpart, Naing Naing traveled to Thanatpin to assess the school.
The proposal was to build a new two-story, steel structure classroom building in early 2019. Abby’s family donated funds toward the new school building. We hired an experienced contractor to erect a two-story steel frame building and add eight new sanitary toilets and a water supply.
Partnership with local communities and organizations is at the heart of all of our school projects. The Thanatpin community helped plan the building and donated labor and money for new toilets. They also cut a trackway to get materials to the building site. Thanatpin was a bit non-standard in that the school committee became our partner rather than a third-party NGO. Abby and her counterpart, You You Wah, eased the process as did the work of a couple of particularly strong school committee members.
The project had many twists and turns. Several challenges had to be overcome, including a lack of space and school yard flooding during the rainy season. The site was at the back of the school compound, with no road access and the region was prone to flood in the rainy season. We had to cut a track beside a canal to bring in building materials. The building pad had to be lifted with soil brought from elsewhere in this very flat region. The toilet water supply piping was improperly installed and had to be reversed.
A date had been set for an official celebratory opening just before Abby’s close of service date. We were operating under time pressure. Naing Naing, Abby and the Thanatpin school committee worked diligently to gain approvals, prepare the site and start construction. On June 1, Build a School in Burma and Thanatpin marked the building’s completion, just in time for the beginning of a new school year. The Deputy Chief of Mission from the U.S. embassy, the Peace Corps country director, several members of the state and national parliaments, local township and education officers, teachers and school staff, Abby’s family, our advisory board members, members of the local community…and most importantly, the students of Thanatpin Basic Education High School, celebrated the new building together.
One of our special guests was David Zweig, an RPCV I served with in Jamaica 38 years ago. When another Jamaica RPCV told him about our Thanatpin school construction project, David offered to contribute the cost of the classroom furniture. We already had a donor for that but I persuaded him to support another nearby school. He contributed enough to build the entire Taw Bot Su primary school and we opened it the day after we opened Thanatpin. David came to attend both school openings and now serves on our Build a School in Burma board. 1 Robert Cornwell is the founder and executive director of Build a School in Burma. He served in the Peace Corps as an agricultural trainer in St. Mary’s Parish, Jamaica from 1981 to 1983. During his professional career he has advised cities, states and federal agencies on public-private partnerships and capital finance, including the Washington Nationals baseball park in the District of Columbia.
When we climbed the stairs to the attic, almost all of the floor space was filled with objects. It was the most amazing thing. There were masks, carved figures of all sizes, weapons, vessels, utensils … Oh, my goodness! Most fascinating and exciting to me were five or six large tables in the middle of the room on which were hundreds of masks.”
Sarah Schroth, director of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, is recalling the moment when she and two colleagues first glimpsed one of the world’s great private collections of West African art. Like Indiana Jones entering a treasure trove, they beheld the extraordinary artifacts in the Durham, North Carolina attic of two returned Peace Corps Volunteers, Reggie and Celeste Hodges, who met nearly a half-century earlier while serving in Sierra Leone.
Celeste hadn’t expected to go there. She’d signed up for Ethiopia, but a Peace Corps recruiter said there was a problem. “I could hear him shuffling papers,” she recalls. “What about Sierra Leone?” he asked me. I said OK, although I wasn’t sure where it was.” She had no idea she was about to meet her life partner and stay with him in West Africa for nearly two decades. Africa in the Attic The Hodges give their collection to American museums BY DAVID JARMUL “
serve instead as a primary teacher in a village. Reggie was the only foreigner in Sembehun, a village of about 900 Mende-speakers where during the next three years he helped build a school, a library and a village water system.
Celeste arrived in the coastal town of Shenge during the start of Reggie’s second year and met him at a Peace Corps training conference. They returned together to Shenge and shared an improvised Thanksgiving din
SOMETHING INTERESTING TO DO Reggie Hodges became interested in the Peace Corps during his junior year at North Carolina Central, a historically black university in Durham where he was studying to become a high school art teacher. He said he wanted to do something interesting and challenging before he drifted into the school classroom and to avoid being sent to Vietnam, where his brother had served.
3Much of two large shipments of African indigenous art collected by Celeste and Reggie Hodges over 32 years was stored in the attic of their home in Durham, North Carolina. Many are now being donated to museums in the region. Visit the Hodges web site at reggieceleste.com
The Peace Corps had about 300 volunteers in Sierra Leone then. Reggie was supposed to teach art in a teacher training college but, like Celeste, he got a surprise. “The country director told us they didn’t have enough slots for everyone.” He agreed to ner of a duck wrapped with limes in banana leaves. They talked about their backgrounds — hers in a white Catholic neighborhood in Chicago, his in rural North Carolina — and about their religious families. Both wanted a broader life. They began imagining it together.
NATIONAL PEACE CORPS ASSOCIATION J. Caldwell, Nasher Museum of Art
“We were only 36 miles apart but it wasn’t easy to see each other,” Reggie says. “Trucks left her village every morning loaded with fish. They drove past my village and into Bo Town, the country’s second-largest city. On their way back, I’d hitch a ride, riding for three or four hours in the back of the truck, which smelled like fish.”
REGGIE’S EDUCATION As his romance with Celeste blossomed,
professor, Reggie became an expert in what the world was just beginning to recognize as a compelling artistic tradition with its own aesthetics.
Reggie took photographs and made notes on what he was seeing. Celeste took photographs, too, creating a stunning photographic archive of the region. Reggie began collecting objects as examples to bring home to the American students he expected to teach. “I wasn’t collecting them as art,” he
and bought a loom of his own.
“What is so special about the Hodges collection, in addition to the great variety of styles and forms, is the documentation they collected on their objects, drawn from their years of contact with Sierra Leone artists,” says Frederick J. Lamp, retired curator of African Art at the Yale University Art Gallery who served in Sierra Leone from 1967 to 1969.. When Reggie ended his service as a Peace Corps Volunteer, he was hired as a
3Left: A Sande Society ceremonial helmet carved by Johnny Mong in nearby Bo and acquired by Reggie Hodges in 1972. Right: Reggie acquired this Dan Poro Society initiation mask in Ganta, Liberia, in 1984.
Reggie also fell in love with the art and crafts that surrounded him. A talented artist himself whose paintings now adorn their Durham home, he admired the craftsmanship and cultural significance of what he saw in Sembehun. He asked his neighbors how they produced and used different objects, and about their meaning. He observed dances and ceremonies. Without books or a said. “I thought these objects would help me be a better teacher.”
He began with a small soapstone figure and moved on to household items, musical instruments and hand tools. His Sembehun neighbors liked his plastic comb, so he traded his comb their hand-carved wooden combs, some of which are now worth $500.
His collection grew, supplemented by textiles Celeste began gathering. His neighbors gave him objects. When a student made a traditional Bundu mask for a class project, Reggie bought it for two dollars and then paid the boy’s father, a carver, to teach him how they made it. He asked the blacksmith to show how he made tools. He learned how women made blankets
regional director for Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and visited more than 100 rural communities in the country. Everywhere he went Reggie found art. Local chiefs gave him gifts. In return he brought them school supplies he paid for out of his own pocket. Some people who had recently converted to Islam and Christianity gave him family objects they regarded as conflicting with their new beliefs.
“I didn’t put a lot of money into this,” Reggie says. He and Celeste had moved in together after he began working on Peace Corps staff, and new artifacts began accumulating in their home. When he returned from visiting Volunteers at their sites, he arrived with new artifacts. Celeste began
wondering what Reggie was going to do with all of his collection.” She asked him. “Why are you spending every Saturday afternoon looking for new stuff?”
“It was sort of like an addiction,” Reggie laughs.
Others in Sierra Leone learned about his fascination with local art. When art scholars made their way to Sierra Leone, officials at the American embassy sent them to Reggie’s house. Years later when he visited Washington, D.C., Reggie met with Warren Robbins, a former diplomat whose legendary collection evolved into the National Museum of African Art. “When people like this talked with us, we began to realize the importance of what we were doing,” Reggie says.
CONSCIENTIOUS COLLECTOR Reggie and Celeste married in 1972 and remained in West Africa far longer than they expected. They lived nine years in Sierra Leone, six in Liberia and two in Ghana. They had two children there, Kadiatu and Hassan. Celeste held several jobs and Reggie continued with the Peace Corps, including time as acting country director in Sierra Leone. He then took on other development work, including a four-year stint setting up technical training programs in Liberia. He remained there with Celeste and their children even as the country descended into chaos following a 1980 coup. One day they found a body in their driveway. Reggie began sleeping beneath a window to avoid stray bullets.
Even after he completed that job, Reggie returned to Liberia every year until 2000 to work on programs and promote peace. In 1992 he assisted UNICEF and the Carter Center in assessing how Liberia’s children were affected by the violence and in developing demobilization and rehabilitation programs. He helped negotiate demobilization with the warlord Charles Taylor, who was later convicted by an international court for war crimes that included blood diamonds and sexual slavery. When former President Carter attempted to negotiate peace with Taylor in 1992, Reggie was there, too.
He and others helped to demobilize more than 5,000 combatants in Liberia and Sierra
An Art Windfall The former African art curator at Yale, Fred Lamp, calls the African art donations a windfall for North Carolina museums. Lamp served in Sierra Leone from 1967 to 1969. ”North Carolina has had some good collections of African art, but they have not been well known nationally or internationally, and they have been sparse on the art of this region. This changes things dramatically.”
Reggie and Celeste Hodges donated 27 works of art to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke and hundreds of Celeste’s negatives and prints to a Duke library. They also have
donated pieces to the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and to the Gregg Museum of Art & Design at North Carolina State University.
“We also want to give back to Duke, where we were both treated for cancer and our daughter received a kidney transplant,” says Celeste, who worked at the university for 18 years.
3The couple lived in a Peace Corps house in Sembehu when Reggie served on Peace Corps staff in 1970. Opposite: The Hodges Sierra Leone home was next door to the mosque in Shenge.
Leone, many of whom were child soldiers. Reggie also interacted with the leaders of several other African countries, discussing both development issues and programs for promoting peace. He received several awards for this work.
His first job back in the States was to oversee vocational educational programs in Africa for OIC International. He later helped to build more than 100 African schools for the International Foundation for Education and Self Help.
Through it all, he kept spending time in Africa collecting African art, always with the knowledge and consent of the previous owners. “I never wanted to be one of those people who takes relics away from a people and deprives them of their own art and culture,” he says. “We got legal permission for what we sent home.” In contrast, “so many works in museum collections were obtained under less than ideal circumstances, sometimes blatantly stolen or looted,” says Amanda Maples, curator of African art at the North Carolina Museum of Art.
“Reggie and Celeste’s careful cataloging of the artists and stories behind their objects carries an enormous amount of educational and cultural value that far outshines its considerable market value,” Maples says. “The vast majority of material at many museums is unprovenanced,” says Raymond Silverman, a professor and authority in
African art at the University of Michigan. “Because most objects were collected without documentation, an object’s attribution may say something like ‘Yoruba artist’ and offer a general time period. There’s no artist’s name, no specific place of origin.”
Reggie believes his collecting also saved many of the artifacts from destruction during the years of political chaos and violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia. “Many of the items would no longer exist if we didn’t have them,” he says.
RETURN TO DURHAM Reggie and Celeste made a permanent move to North Carolina, where his aging parents lived, in 2000. They knew it was time. “I got really sick with dengue fever,” said Reggie, who’d had malaria a half-dozen times and now discovered he also had lymphoma. Fortunately, his cancer and Celeste’s own bout with cancer were resolved. With their children growing up, they eventually settled in Durham, where he led the local literacy group and Celeste worked as a web administrator at Duke University.
They sent home the art they had collected over 32 years in two large shipments. The first arrived in 1979 and the second came six years later. They placed many of the objects
in their home freezer before shipment to kill any bugs. Most of the art went to their attic and remained largely unknown to the world until now.
They are working with local museums to catalog and donate much of the collection. Their children want only a couple of the more than 600 objects — both are more interested in Reggie’s own paintings — and they support their parents’ decision to share it with the world instead of selling it privately. “I learned in Africa that money is not as important as helping others,” Reggie says. “I don’t think people in the West understand that people who live in what we call an underdeveloped country can be happy. I went to Africa with an open mind and my mind opened up even further.”
Celeste says, “We still want to make a positive contribution. Sharing our art is a way to do that.” 1
David Jarmul served in Nepal (77-79) and Moldova (16-18). He lives in Durham, N.C., and blogs at Not Exactly Retired.
It seems inevitable now that he would end in Afghanistan. There’s a final circular logic to it.
You might remember that he first went there in 1970 when he was working for the Peace Corps. He found the country romantic, beautiful, and at peace. He didn’t return for 36 years—horrific years.
In the spring of 2006, he went back with Kati. Her nephew Mathieu was working for the United Nations in Kabul and suggested the trip. You can see why it would have appealed to Holbrooke.
Iraq was disintegrating— a war he’d like to have forgotten. He had no desire to see Baghdad for himself. I never met an American, soldier or civilian, who wanted to buy a little villa with a garden on the Tigris River. Iraq was flat and hot and harsh, and every human touch, including ours, made it uglier. But Afghanistan was the good war, provoked by September 11—a war to rid the country of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. By 2006 the Taliban were returning to the Pashtun provinces in the south and east, but Kabul was still safe, a beguiling magnet for expats: the snowy foothills of the Hindu Kush, the mule-drawn carts and white Land Rovers in the muddy roads, the glittery wedding halls, the craft shops on Chicken Street, the British lodges and French restaurants and Lebanese tavernas, the pomegranate juice, the vast suffering, the idealism and opportunism, the gossip.
The scene drew a remarkable cast of foreign characters. There was Rory Stewart, a flamboyant Scotsman in his early 30s, who had tutored Princes William and Harry, served Her Majesty as a diplomat and perhaps a spy, walked across central Asia after September 11, wrote a fine book about it, and then, at the request of Prince Charles and the Afghan president Hamid Karzai, started a foundation to support local craftsmen in restoring the old city of Kabul. There was Michael Semple, an Irishman who wore a long beard and shalwar kameez and knew so much that he was suspected of being either MI6 or a Taliban collaborator, when he was just an extremely well-informed analyst. There was Sarah Chayes, the caustic daughter of a Kennedy administration official, who went to Afghanistan for National Public Radio and stayed on to start a soap cooperative for farmers in Kandahar, then to advise U.S. military commanders as a critic of the Karzai government. A certain type of imaginative foreigner fell hard for Afghanistan.
At the beginning of his trip, Holbrooke met the coalition commander, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, who was in the middle of his second tour in Afghanistan. Eikenberry found Holbrooke amazingly opinionated for someone who hadn’t set foot in the country since 1970. Holbrooke packed his schedule day and night and grilled everyone he met—farmers, shop owners, journalists, officials. He even met Karzai in the Arg, the presidential palace in central Kabul, and informed him that the ancient minarets Holbrooke had seen in Herat were crumbling because of uncontrolled traffic. Karzai lied about the condition of the minarets, then got on the phone and shouted some orders. A white pigeon flew through the window and the president became distracted trying to chase it out. Holbrooke came away unimpressed.
He stayed just a few days. On his way out, he met Eikenberry again and gave the Ambitious Diplomat The wisdom and hubris of Richard Holbrooke in Afghanistan BY GEORGE PACKER
general a 10-point memo on Afghanistan’s various ills—corruption, poppies, bad police training, Pakistani subversion. Eikenberry used the document in his final assessment at the end of his tour. He decided that Holbrooke was the quickest study he’d ever met. Holbrooke didn’t quite fall in love with Afghanistan. He was too American to go native anywhere. The only foreign language he ever learned was French, which he spoke fluently with a heavy New York accent, and when he bought local artifacts it was to give them away as gifts, not to furnish his own houses. He fell for problems, not countries, and it was the problem of Afghanistan that began to consume him. It had everything—geopolitics, beauty, tragedy, hope. He believed that the war would be harder than Americans thought and would go on for a very long time—much longer than Iraq, longer even than Vietnam. Afghanistan would be America’s longest war. Al Qaeda was rebuilding itself across the border in Pakistan, a failing state armed with nuclear weapons. The security of those weapons was as intense a concern as the possibility of another terrorist strike at home. Perhaps, in
WINTER 2020 WORLDVIEW NATIONAL PEACE CORPS ASSOCIATION REUTERS/Shah Marai/Pool
3U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke talks as Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus at Kabul International Airport in 2010.
fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, we were at war with the wrong enemy in the wrong country. But Holbrooke thought this was the region where the history of the present was being made, and where we should put our efforts. We had already abandoned it twice. The story has been told again and again, but it makes me sad and angry every time. It’s a story of our folly and waste.
Zahir Shah was overthrown in 1973 by his cousin, Prince Daoud, who established the Republic of Afghanistan. In 1978, Daoud and his family were slaughtered in the Arg by Communist troops. For the next year and a half the coup’s leaders killed one another off, until the Soviets tried to impose order by invading on Christmas Eve of 1979.
That was the year political Islam first convulsed the world. In February, an Islamic revolution expelled the shah of Iran and seized power. In April, General Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan hanged the elected prime minister, whom he had overthrown in a coup, then abolished Parliament and began to institute sharia law. In November, hundreds of militant Islamists occupied the Grand Mosque of Mecca for two weeks of bloodletting before surrendering, and then the Saudi king decided to head off the radical tide by imposing even more severe religious strictures—banning cinemas and non-Islamic education, completely segregating the sexes in public life. The next month, in December, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan, provoking a jihad—backed by American and Saudi money, U.S. weapons, and Pakistani intelligence—that continues today. No event since 1945 changed geopolitics more than the war in Afghanistan. Up to two million Afghans died during the Soviet occupation of the 80s, millions more were maimed, another five or ten million fled to Pakistan and Iran. The Soviets killed so many civilians that it amounted to genocide. The Red Army was forced to limp back across the border in 1989, speeding up the end of the Cold War, and we lost interest in Afghanistan, just as Arab veterans of the jihad were organizing themselves into a global terrorist group called Al Qaeda. In 1992, the mujahedin entered Kabul and turned their guns on one another. The civil war destroyed the capital—you can still see the bullet holes and rubble today, along with the amputees—and Afghanistan fell into banditry. Out of this chaos rose a movement of religious young Afghans, ethnic Pashtuns schooled in the harsh ideology of Saudi-funded madrassas in Pakistan or the border refugee camps. They called themselves Taliban—“students.” In 1994 their army emerged in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, led by a one-eyed veteran of the jihad named Mullah Mohammed Omar, and backed—controlled, to some opaque degree—by Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI. The Taliban swept through the country, and by 1996 they had three-quarters of Afghanistan, including Kabul. They were initially welcomed—so were the Khmer Rouge— and replaced the criminality with a form of law and order that amounted to extreme cruelty and ignorance. The strongest of the vanquished warlords withdrew up to the Panjshir Valley and formed a resistance army called the Northern Alliance that did little more than survive.
The Taliban held power for five years of terror. They turned parts of the country over to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, who paid the bills in exchange for shelter while plotting to provoke America into a war with Islam. Then came September 11, 2001. The United States told the Taliban to hand over the perpetrators, but Mullah Omar refused—even at the cost of his own rule. After the Americans threw out the Taliban and Al Qaeda, it seemed as if the torment of Afghanistan was over. In Bonn that December, a U.N. conference established a loya jirga, a national assembly, which chose Hamid Karzai, from a family of Pashtun tribal noblemen, as Afghanistan’s interim leader. At the Bush administration’s insistence, all
Taliban were barred from the new government, with fateful consequences. In 2004 Karzai became the first elected president in the country’s history.
He carried himself with a natural, regal grace. He wore a purple-and-green-striped Uzbek silk cape and lambswool karakul hat to symbolize tradition and national unity. He was a brilliant retail politician with a sure touch for bargains that kept important players inside the tent. Like a tribal chief he spent his time receiving people in the Arg over tea and cakes, not governing. He saw power as something to hold, not to use in behalf of a vision for his country. He charmed everyone, Afghan and foreigner, with his openness, listening intently and responding with large, theatrical gestures. Even the occasional twitch that made his left eye squint and the flesh of his cheek jump—nerve damage from an accidental U.S. aerial bombing in late 2001, when Karzai was leading a courageous Pashtun uprising against the Taliban—even this made him sympathetic. He told visitors that Afghans responded above all to sincerity. “The moment an Afghan feels he’s being taken for a ride, or that he’s being cheated, then he’s the worst person to deal with.”
But soon, and for the second time, we Americans turned away from Afghanistan—Iraq sucked up all our attention and resources—leaving behind a small number of troops whose mission was to kill terrorists, not provide security. Bush and his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had no interest in the long, difficult work of building Afghan institutions and training an Afghan army. The writ of Karzai’s state was so weak that he became known as the mayor of Kabul. To gain control of the provinces he turned to the same warlords who had laid waste to the country and brought on the Taliban. Among them were his relatives, his brothers. He kept them close through patronage networks, and they fattened off cash from the exploding opium trade and the billions in American dollars for aid projects that seemed to benefit U.S. companies and Afghan bigs more than the dirt-poor ordinary citizens. The lavish mafia villas that arose in Kabul’s Sherpur neighborhood, which the locals called Chorpur, Thieves’ Town, became the symbol of Karzai’s rule.
It wasn’t all a waste. Schools and clinics were built, too, and millions of refugees returned, and life improved, especially for women and girls. But the torment hadn’t ended. The narco-warlords and corrupt officials, and the American bombings that left so many civilians dead and wounded, disillusioned Afghans who had expected a little safety and justice from the new regime. All this created an opening for the Taliban to return.
They hadn’t been defeated, only withdrawn to Pakistan’s crowded cities and border mountains, where they were supported by the same ISI that had run the jihad in the eighties and midwifed the Taliban in the nineties. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda was reconstituting itself in Pakistan’s tribal region of Waziristan. The Bush administration didn’t care to
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look too deeply. President Bush saw Karzai and General Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani dictator, as friends and allies in the war on terror, even as the region started to slip back into chaos.
Holbrooke returned in March 2008, in the middle of the Obama-Clinton prizefight. By then the momentum was slipping away from the Afghan government and its West- ern backers. The Taliban controlled entire districts of Pashtun provinces. Karzai, in spite of his friendly weekly videoconferences with Bush, began to feel that the Americans didn’t regard him as an equal partner. He complained bitterly to Condoleezza Rice about the rising number of civilian casual- ties, including one horrible case of an entire wedding party wiped out by an air strike on a hillside near the Pakistan border. He objected to American crop dusters spraying pesticides on poppy fields in Helmand, without regard for the livelihood of the farmers or the future of the soil and water. But the practices continued.
Karzai began to sound like a national- ist—not an aggressive one like Milosevic, but more like Diem, proud and resentful, with the humiliated anger that a poor man feels toward a rich man whose help he sought. Karzai told visitors that the source of Afghanistan’s problem was Pakistan, and since the Americans refused to crush the Taliban there, they must want an endless war in his country for their own strategic reasons. If the United States regarded Afghanistan as a client state rather than a partner, a tool to serve its interests, it would meet the same fate here as the British and the Soviets. His statements became so volatile that Western intelligence agencies speculated that Karzai was mentally unstable, perhaps even on drugs. He hardly ever left the palace for fear of assassination, while the corruption in his regime and his family became rampant—the inner rot that nourished the Taliban.
As a possible next secretary of state, Holbrooke was received again at the Arg. This time he criticized Karzai to his face. “You are responsible for some of the failures of the past few years,” he said bluntly. “What have I done wrong?”
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Holbrooke mentioned corruption and Karzai’s tolerance of violent warlords. Karzai blamed international aid contracts for the corruption, Bush administration policy for the warlords, and Pakistan for the Taliban. He had a point on all counts. After Holbrooke left, Karzai remarked to his chief of staff that it might be better if Hillary Clinton lost the election.
Holbrooke flew eastward on an aging Russian-made U.N. helicopter to Khost, a provincial capital on a dry plateau at the border with Pakistan. In the 1990s, Osama bin Laden had set up a terrorist training camp near Khost, and in 1998 a few dozen U.S. cruise missiles had just missed killing him there. In the winter of 2001, Osama and his followers had fled over a mountain pass north to Pakistan. Fewer than seven years later, the Taliban again controlled much of the countryside. A few miles east of Khost, over mountains that were greening with early spring rains, was Waziristan, the sanctuary of America’s sworn enemies. Khost wasn’t a place many American VIPs visited. It was as close to the ground truth of the war as a potential secretary of state could get.
A Foreign Service officer named Kael Weston had invited Holbrooke to spend the night at the U.S. base on a former Soviet airstrip. Weston was in his mid-thirties, from Colorado. He had spent four years as a political advisor to the marines in the extreme violence of Fallujah, where he came to the conclusion that Iraq was the wrong war. He asked to be posted to Afghanistan, the right war, and in Khost he found more welcoming locals. Weston was a rare American diplomat in the war on terror who didn’t live day and night behind blast walls and air-locked doors, chronically on email, sealed off from the country he was supposed to be trying to understand. He wore jeans instead of pressed khakis and spent his time in markets and combat outposts, talking with tribal elders and students, patrolling with American grunts
and sharing their risks. He wrote cables back to the State Department criticizing a strategy that relied too heavily on military force and showy aid projects. He thought that the effort in Afghanistan needed to be both more modest and more tenacious than American politicians wanted.
“No one in Washington knows anything about Afghanistan,” Holbrooke said when he arrived at the base.
“Don’t tell me that,” Weston said. “And what they do know is mostly wrong.” They had met a few months before, in the Midtown Manhattan offices of Perseus, where Holbrooke had shown Weston a blackand-white photograph of himself walking down a street in South Vietnam with his boss, Ambassador Maxwell Taylor. Fifty-eight thousand Americans dead for a mistake. “Why should we care about Afghanistan?” Holbrooke had asked Weston.
There were obvious similarities between Afghanistan and Vietnam, structural ones— rural insurgency, corrupt government, unreliable client, cross-border enemy sanctuary, a muddled and endless war. Weston answered that the difference was strategic. The Vietnamese Communists hadn’t posed a threat to the United States—the domino theory turned out to be false. We could walk away from Vietnam. But America had been attacked from the valleys and plains around Khost, and could be attacked again. This was Holbrooke’s answer, too, and he added that the vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons to homegrown terrorists made the strategic stakes all the higher. Afghanistan and Pakistan—Holbrooke had begun to speak of the region as a single organism, “Af-Pak”—would be a major part of his portfolio as Clinton’s secretary of state.
Weston introduced Holbrooke to madrassa students, tribal elders, and a handful of former Taliban who had warily come over to the government side. Holbrooke slouched in his chair, hands folded over his belly, and listened as the elders complained about police shakedowns and night raids by U.S. Special Forces. “Not even my brother can enter my house at night,” an old man with a white beard said, “but you
Americans did not even knock.” Afghans were caught between their own predatory government, the heavy-handed foreigners, and the brutal insurgents. Holbrooke asked if the elders wanted the Americans to stay or leave. Without the Americans the Taliban would return to power, they answered, but if the Americans stayed they should build up the country.
Holbrooke’s billet that night was the VIP room on base—plywood walls, cheap Afghan rugs, a cot, and a TV with American cable networks. Shoes off, feet propped on a coffee table, he flipped between channels and criticized the pundits and politicians on-screen while peppering Weston with questions about Khost.
“Ambassador, when are you going to visit our other war, Iraq?” Weston asked. Holbrooke shot him a look. “I see no need to go to Iraq.”
Weston reminded him of himself, a lifetime ago in Soc Trang. “At your age I was already an assistant secretary,” Holbrooke told him. If Weston wanted to shape American foreign policy, he would need a Washington zip code and State Department badge. But Weston was more like Frank Scotton, who had spent a decade in Vietnam and kept his distance from Washington. It would hurt his career, but Weston was committed to seeing out the war here.
Holbrooke slept in cheap flesh-colored pajamas that looked like something given out by the airline in a plastic bag. He woke early in the morning for his helicopter back to Kabul. As in Sarajevo, 24 hours in Khost was enough for him.
He asked for some aspirin. Weston brought him Advil.
“Thanks, but I need aspirin, for here.” Holbrooke pointed to his heart. 1
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George Packer writes for Atlantic Monthly magazine. This chapter from the book, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, by George Packer. Copyright © 2019 by George Packer. Published by arrangement with The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. The first of Packer’s fiction and non-fiction books was his 1988 book, The Village of Waiting, about Togo, where he served from 1982-1983. WorldView previously reprinted a portion of one of Packer’s earlier books, The Assassin’s Gate.
Paul D. Coverdell Fellows Program
Writing On Edge
The world of Peace Corps books
In my years of watching people join the Peace Corps, I have found that the most obvious PCV candidates are those who have an edge about them. They want more—whatever the more is—and are not satisfied with what America has to offer them here at home.
And the writers (and would-be writers) among these Volunteers go abroad because they want something to write about. The Peace Corps experience gives them that “something.”
We were all overwhelmed by the experience of the cultures that awaited us when we stepped off the plane. No one could have prepared a typical American for the ways of life in developing countries. But after the initial culture shock there was a richness of experience that the more talented writers could turn into vivid prose. It was raw material waiting to be shaped into books.
Paul Theroux recounts one of the more telling examples of how this happened to him. In this passage he describes the moment when he realized he had a mother lode of material.
“I remember a particular day in Mozambique, in a terrible little country town, getting a haircut from a Portuguese barber. He had come to the African bush from rural Portugal to be a barber… This barber did not speak English, I did not speak Portuguese, yet when I addressed his African servant in Chinyanja, his own language, the Portuguese man said in Portuguese, ‘Ask the bwana what his Africans are like.’ And that was how we held a conversation — the barber spoke Portuguese to the African, who translated it into Chinyanja for me; and I replied in Chinyanja, which the African kept translating into Portuguese for the barber. The barber kept saying — and the African kept translating — things like, ‘I can’t stand the blacks — they’re so stupid and bad-tempered. But there’s no work for me in Portugal.’ It was grotesque, it was outrageous, it was the shabbiest, darkest kind of imperialism. I could not believe my good luck. In many parts of Africa in the early 1960s it was the nineteenth century, and I was filled with the urgency to write about it.” WRITING FROM EXPERIENCE Anyone who has read Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, Malcolm Cowley, or John Dos Passos can see how they used the experience of living in France, England, and Spain as subject matter.
In much the same way, Paul Theroux, Moritz Thomsen, Maria Thomas, Eileen Drew, Richard Wiley, P.F. Kluge, Bob Shacochis, Norm Rush, Marnie Mueller, Peter Hessler, George Packer, Kathleen Coskran, Mark Brazaitis, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, Eileen Drew, Chris Conlon, Sandra Meek, Tom Hazuka, Jeanne D’Haem, Joseph Monninger, Leonard Levitt, Margaret Szumowski, Ann Neelon, Roland Merullo, Charles Larson, Susan Rich, Mike Tidwell, Susanna Herrera, Peter Chilson, Geraldine Kennedy, Rob Davidson, and hundreds of other Peace Corps writers have used Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe in their short stories, novels, poetry, and non-fiction.
While writing about the developing world and emerging democracies, they have broadened the landscape of American readers by introducing new countries and new ideas about other cultures and societies, much BY JOHN COYNE
the same way that the writers and artists in Paris in the 1920s broadened the view of the world for Americans back home.
OUR WRITER IN PARIS Closer to the Peace Corps, and closer to our decade, there is Black Girl in Paris by Shay Youngblood, who lived in Paris before becoming a Volunteer in Dominica. Of Paris, Shay writes, “it seemed to be the kind of place that, if you were a writer or artist, there was something in the air that could transform you.”
Shay Youngblood, however, was not following Ernest Hemingway. She was following another literary lion, James Baldwin, who left Greenwich Village in 1948 because of American racism. Baldwin would spend more than a decade in Paris where he wrote his first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain. In Black Girl in Paris, Youngblood informs us that upon arriving in the Paris of 1924 in his early twenties, Langston Hughes had only $7 in his pocket; that an equally youthful James Baldwin followed two decades later with $40. Youngblood’s protagonist came with $140 hidden between her sock and the sole of her shoe. “They dared to make a way when there was none and I want to be just like them,” she writes. “This is the place where it happened. Where it will happen again.”
With these writers as her touchstone, Shay doesn’t look back in anger, but expands on the expatriate theme to write about a young black woman who has fled the deep South in search of a childhood dream of a color-blind, liberal atmosphere in which a woman can become a writer. And in doing so, she pays her homage, not to Hemingway or Fitzgerald, but to her black expatriates: Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin.
POETRY IN THE PEACE CORPS The intense cross cultural experience of the Peace Corps has produced in many PCVs a deep well of sentiment that has found its way, perhaps too easily, into poetry. Fortunately, this intense experience has also been a rich source of material for many fine
published poets including Charlie Smith, Mark Brazaitis, Philip Dacey, Sandra Meek, Tom Hebert, Ann Neelon, Paul Violi, Keith Carthwright, Susan Rich, John Flynn, Margaret Szumowski, Virginia Gilbert, Tony Zurlo, and many others.
Poets, I believe, have been best able to explain the values of the Peace Corps experience as it relates to writing. Margaret Szumowski, who served in Uganda and Ethiopia, puts it this way: “I think the poet gains a great deal. She absorbs the sounds of other languages, takes in imagery never seen before, observes the way families operate compared to her own experience, sees the struggle other peoples have to survive at all.
“The visual shock and splendor of Africa is enough to keep the poet writing for the rest of her life—take as an example, the baobab. I’d never seen such a strange and magnificent tree, one that blooms at night, harbors night creatures such as lemurs, and provides food for humans from its fuzzy pods. I’d never seen donkeys in the streets of Addis Ababa, laden with their loads, or a woman dancing around our house, rags tied to her feet as she cleaned the floor. I’d never seen soldiers with their guns pointed at us, as I did in Uganda. All of these experiences gave me enough to think about and absorb for the rest of my life.”
The ability to “see” that poets have is combined with what all of us gained from the experience, as Chris Conlon puts it, “perspective, maturity, a larger and, one hopes, better ‘self.’”
But it is the “gift” of language that these poets find more useful and which benefits them the most. Poet Ann Neelon sums up her experience in Senegal, with one word, foreignness. “Foreignness is important to a poet because it teaches humility. Humility is important because without it there is no mystical experience.
“In Senegal, I gained many things useful to a poet. These included hours of direct exposure to the oral tradition via West African griots, caches of exquisite bush and desert images, and French and Wolof syllables, but none of these can compare with the opportunity to have Africa erase who I was. Only after losing myself could I find myself as a writer.”
And in the Peace Corps the overwhelming opportunity to “lose oneself ” makes writers of us all. AS OTHERS SEE US On September 9, 2001, on the 40th anniversary of the agency, The Washington Post reported that the Peace Corps community is “churning out enough works—thousands of memoirs, novels, and books of poetry—to warrant a whole new genre: Peace Corps Literature.” Also in 2001, Book Magazine wrote in the March/April issue about the literary movement of Peace Corps writers, quoting Paul Theroux, Bob Shacochis and Kent Haruf.
Then there is the review that appeared in the November 2001 issue of Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy about the collection of Peace Corps stories that were published in Living On The Edge. The reviewer was Patrick Shannon of Penn State University and he wrote: None of the contributors are protagonists in their chapters, but each chapter is based on some event that the writer witnessed, experienced, or heard about. By telling the stories, the contributors seem to reconsider their experiences overseas and enable readers to consider (or perhaps reconsider) U.S. actions in the developing world. Those actions can serve as a metaphor for readers’ experiences with human and cultural differences. In this way, the book offers a triple treat. Readers learn a little about parts of the world they may never see for themselves, they are entertained by a good yarn, and they can learn about themselves as well. What more could a Peace Corps writer want? EXPATRIATES AND EXILES Peace Corps writers are, at least for a while, expatriates and exiles from their culture, and from that experience they gain a new perspective, even a new vocabulary, as Richard Wiley recalls from living in Korea. “As I started to learn Korean I began to see that language skewed actual reality around, and as I got better at it I began to understand that it was possible to see everything differently. Reality is a product of language and culture, that’s what I learned”
The experience is also intensely educational. The late novelist Maria Thomas said of her time in Ethiopia, “it was a great period of discovery. There was the discovery of an ancient world, an ancient culture, in 3 Distinguished RPCV authors include: Bob Shacochis, poet Ann Neelon, and Shay Youngblood.
which culture is so deep in people that it becomes a richness.”
For all these writers, their Peace Corps years were a time to learn the rules of another culture, as well as a time to learn about themselves in relation to the world, as well as in relation to the United States.
John Givens, a Volunteer in Korea and author of three novels published in the 1980s, says that the Peace Corps “suggested that experience was not limited to the mores and expectations of central California where I grew up. The ‘wideness’ of the world came home to me vividly in Korea, and I’ve been exploring the world ever since.” And novelist and short story writer Eileen Drew makes the point that writers with Peace Corps experience “bring the outsider’s perspective, which we’ve learned overseas, to bear on the U.S. We are not the only writers to have done this, but because of the nature of our material, it’s something we can’t not do.” Bob Shacochis characterizes the modern generation of writers as followers. “We are torchbearers of a vital tradition, that of shedding light in the mythical heart of darkness. We are descendants of Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and scores of other men and women, expatriates and travel writers and wanderers, who have enriched our domestic literature with the spices of Cathay, who have tried to communicate the ‘exotic’ as a relative, rather than an absolute, quality of humanity.”
Peace Corps Writers do the same by bringing the world back home through their own writing. They have an understanding of parts of the world few Americans will ever know. And as PCVs they have a “way of looking at this world” that is new and fresh and insightful. Fulfilling the Third Goal of the Peace Corps means telling your tales at home.
So, see how far you can go with a good line or two. Begin today. Write. 1 John Coyne is editor of PeaceCorpsWriters.org and publishes a blog at Peace Corps Worldwide. He served in Ethiopia from 1962 to 1965, teaches writing and has written more than 40 books of fiction and non-fiction. He is co-founder of the Peace Corps Fund, which encourages RPCVs to write and publish their work. This article is excerpted from an unpublished paper, “Writers from the Peace Corps,” with the author’s permission.
MacArthur Grant Winner On Fiji
The marine scientist Stacy Jupiter has been awarded a $625,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation to support her decade of work for the Wildlife Conservation Society on Fiji and in the larger Melanesia region. The award was made for her ground-breaking work as a scientist and her innovative ways of supporting the local coastal communities. Jupiter works to conserve the extraordinary biodiversity of Melanesia, a Pacific region that includes Fiji, Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea. She works with the Melanesian communities to manage coral reef natural resources by building on their traditional practices, such as periodic closing of the local reef fisheries.
Jupiter’s efforts were motivated when she returned from a 2009 vacation and realized the extent of the global warming crisis on the islands. She has accelerated community awareness of her wildlife conservation efforts among island youth by publishing comic books, staging live shows with barracuda as puppets and dressing in a sparkling blouse to perform at Fiji’s then-largest flash mob to the tune of “Stayin’ Alive” with 125 local supporters during a popular festival in Suva, the capital city. The 43-year-old environmentalist was a rural fisheries extension agent in Gabon between 1997 and 1999 before earning her doctorate at the University of California in Santa Cruz. 1
Moringa at Your Walmart
Kuli Kuli’s chief executive, Lisa Curtis, just made a huge leap in the U.S. health food marketplace by announcing that the Oakland, California firm is launching into Walmart. As of October, Kuli Kuli’s moringa-based Pure Organic Moringa Vegetable Powder and its Organic Chocolate Peanut Butter Moringa Green Smoothie are now on the shelves of 2,500 Walmart stories nationwide. That’s big news for the five-year-old company Curtis created after she encountered her first moringa tree during her Peace Corps work in Niger in 2010.
Moringa is a tropical tree with leaves that are more nutritious than kale and contain anti-inflammatory properties rivaling turmeric. Kuli Kuli’s moringa products are sold in over 10,000 U.S. stores. Inc. magazine ranks Kuli Kuli in the top 15 fastest-growing food and beverage companies in America. Kuli Kuli provides livelihoods for 2,438 small farmers—many are women, Curtis adds—who harvest the moringa’s leaves in countries in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. Their supply chain has reforested with 12 million new moringa plants to fight global warming. Kuli Kuli’s bars, smoothies, and wellness shots provide nutrition. 1 Kuli Kuli donates 25 percent of product sales to a PCV/RPCV group or project through a customized affiliate link. Email hello@kulikuli foods.com.
NATIONAL PEACE CORPS ASSOCIATION John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
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