Spring 2019: Harris Wofford Vol. 32 No. 1

WorldView NATIONAL PEACE CORPS ASSOCIATION CELEBRATES

40

YEARS

SPRING 2019 VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1

worldviewmagazine.org

Who Started Colombia’s Drug Trade? p20

He Gave Them Legs to Stand On p24

The Volunteer Who Didn’t Come Home p27

Harris Wofford 1926–2019

CONTENTS

WorldView

S P R I N G 2 0 1 9 | VO LU M E 3 2 , N U M B E R 1

F E AT U R E S

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16 Lifting Bumpeh To Another Level How a Sierra Leone paramount chief leads transformation

BY A R L E NE GOL E M B IE WSKI

20 PCVs and Wayuu Blamed for Drug Trade Friends of Colombia challenge fiction of new movie and popular novel

BY A B BY WASSE RM A N

24 Helping Children Stand Tall An RPCV serves Congo’s young polio victims

BY KI T T Y THUE R M E R

27 The Volunteer Who Stayed Twenty years creating forest and family in Benin

BY C. RYA N SM ITH

30 Empowering a Village

A destitute village starts with a school, then micro-loans, then the Rio Olympics

BY HE L E NE DUDL E Y

D E PA R T M E N T S PRESIDENT’S LETTER

ADVOCACY

2 Healing Grace for Our Times

14 Universal Service

BY G LEN N BLU MH ORST

EDITOR’S NOTE

BY MAR K G EARAN

4 Our New Magazine

BY DAVID AR N OLD

24

A new U.S. commission is asking you what America should do to advance national service.

T R AV E L

33 The Places I’ve Been LETTERS

6 6 Country Shut Downs, Marketing Moritz, Moritz Draws, Broke in Chile

The art of traveling far, going alone

BY T IMOT H Y CAR ROLL

GALLERY IN MEMORIAM

36 Taibatou Women

7 A Life of Public Service: Harris Llewellyn Wofford

P H OTOS AN D T EXT

BY BET H AEN ELLI

PEACE CORPS

BOOKLOCKER

CONNECT

39 A Path We Still Follow

10 Come to Austin

R EVIEW BY BOB AR IAS

Come to Texas Longhorn country for your 2019 Peace Corps Connect gathering

39 Tragedy for the Stewarts

BY SALLY WALEY

FORTY MORE YEARS

12 Welcome to Your New Home

A community leader recognizes our past 40 years and foresees growth in technology, new NPCA offices and Digital WorldView.

R EVIEW BY P ET ER V. D E E K L E

40 Lorenzo, Margarita and Licha R EVIEW BY BOB AR IAS

41 Joy of Language R EVIEW BY KAT H LEEN COSK RAN

ACHIEVEMENTS

42 ED IT ED

BY P ET ER D E E K L E

BY MARCAR MEN SMIT H - MART IN EZ

ON THE COVER: Harris Wofford at the swearing-in of Carrie HesslerRadelet as Peace Corps director in 2016. Photo courtesy of Peace Corps

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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PRESIDENT’S LETTER

Healing Grace for Our Times

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.

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

BY GLENN BLUMHORST

The question over the phone unsettled me.

“Will Senator Wofford be joining you?” I was calling to make a reservation for a regular group of Peace Corps friends at Ristorante La Perla, our preferred lunch spot on Pennsylvania Avenue.

It was logical that Vincent, the restaurant’s host, would ask. This was Harris Wofford’s preferred meeting place for lunch or dinner, just a short walk from his Foggy Bottom apartment. Peace Corps people usually didn’t gather there without him. But this time was different.

I hesitated and collected myself before telling Vincent that Senator Harris had passed away. With reverence Vincent thanked me for the news.

“I’m so sorry” he said. “He was a dear friend to all of us and we will miss him.”

Vincent and the restaurant staff were among thousands who regularly spent time with Harris and considered him a dear friend. Harris would have expected it. He was just that way. He always took time to visit with La Perla’s chef and all the service staff. He made them feel important. People mattered to Harris.

I won’t forget the crisp sunny March day in 2013, my very first day on the job as NPCA president and CEO, when I first met the Honorable Senator Harris Wofford. He had come to help us advocate for the Peace Corps in the halls of Congress on NPCA’s 9th annual National Day of Action. Everywhere we went, Harris was met with admiration and respect.

Capitol Hill police called him by name.

“Senator Wofford, it’s good to see you 2

S P R I N G 2 0 1 9 WO R L D V I E W

ADVISORY COUNCIL

Ron Boring, Former Vice President, Vodafone Japan

again.” Congressional staffers stopped us to thank him for his statesmanlike leadership. Senators gave generously of their time for our small group of citizen advocates. Senator Wofford was with us.

Whether one has known him six years or 60 years, everyone who knew Harris legitimately called him a friend.

From the Washington, D.C. taxi driver from Ethiopia who shared a five-minute Amharic chat with him to President Obama, who shared a podium with him, thousands of people looked up to him and called him friend.

Losing a friend is difficult. Losing a giant like Harris leaves a tremendous void in the Peace Corps community and the voice for national service.

Michael Gerson gave this tribute to Harris Wofford. “We are a nation that talks a great deal about who should be a citizen. There is less emphasis on how to be a citizen. And that is often learned in the company of others who share a public goal.

Bonds of common purpose become ties of civic friendship, reaching across political divides. In a time of bitterness, choosing to serve others offers a kind of healing grace.”

My wish is that we all will become more like Harris Wofford in these challenging times. Take time for the people like Vincent along life’s path. And may we find healing grace in serving others just as Harris did, for a lifetime.

With great respect.  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.

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

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

CONSULTANTS David Arnold, WorldView Editor

David Herbick, WorldView Art Director

Lollie Commodore, Finance

Scott Oser, Advertising

INTERNS David Dimolfetta, Roni Kapitulnik, Raya Kazdan, Jing Zhao

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VOLUNTEER Peter Deekle

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WorldView

EDITOR’S LETTER

Publisher Glenn Blumhorst

Our New Magazine

BY DAVID ARNOLD

WorldView magazine is marking several turning points at NPCA in this Spring issue. The photograph on the cover pays honor to Harris Wofford, a man of legendary imagination and intelligence who helped shape the Peace Corps and our larger Peace Corps community.

As John Kennedy would say, the torch is being passed. Harris died in January. At his passing, some of his family and friends recall Harris on our pages. On another page Mark Gearan, a former Peace Corps director, invites you to give public testimony on strengthening America’s commitment to the national service Harris championed.

Here’s another turning point: NPCA is now celebrating its first 40 years. The biggest birthday party will be in Austin, Texas this summer when our Heart of Texas affiliate hosts Peace Corps Connect. Read Sally Waley’s invitation from Longhorn country.

NPCA also decided to refresh this 31-year-old quarterly. Yes, thanks to our new art director, David Herbick, WorldView has a legible type face and a display of texts and photographs that makes the magazine an easy read.

NPCA will also add a digital product with the same name. A month from now what you read in these very pages will be on the NPCA website.

Later this summer NPCA launches a digital WorldView under the guidance of our new digital content manager, Ana Victoria Cruz. We’ll provide the print issue with expanded features and services with easy internet access for our members, to the 7,000 cur4

S P R I N G 2 0 1 9 WO R L D V I E W

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

rently serving Peace Corps Volunteers, and to the English-speaking world.

As is often the case the thrust of our stories is the continued impact we have because of our Peace Corps experience. Abby Wasserman reports on the determined efforts of Friends of Colombia to clear the Peace Corps reputation as novels and movies link PCVs with the birth of Colombia’s illegal drug industry. Several other narratives come from Africa. 2018 Shriver award winner Arlene Golembiewski profiles the visionary behind her own achievements, Chief Charles Caulker of Rotifunk, Sierra Leone. Kitty Thuermer discovers an RPCV who has rescued an estimated 3,000 polio victims from the streets of Kinshasa and Lubumbashi. Helene Dudley expands the TCP Global micro-loan model to a small Niger village. Ryan Smith explores why he decided to stay in Pèrèrè-Gourou for 20 years.

Beth Aenelli is back on our pages with more portraits from The Gambia, and Tim Carroll, our first association director, reveals his compulsion to visit more countries than you or I. Our 40 association years are not a mid-life crisis. More of a turning point. Read what Maricarmen Smith-Martinez has to say. She returned from service in Costa Rica 10 years ago and is now chairwoman of the NPCA board. She says our community can have even greater impact in the next 40 years.  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.

Bob Arias Glenn Blumhorst Timothy Carroll Peter Deekle John Dickson Helene Dudley Beth Eanelli Mark Gearan Arlene Golembiewski Joan Mansfield Byron Rollins

Joaquin Sarmiento Susan Selbin Ryan Smith Maricarmen Smith-Martinez Doug Teschner Todd Tibbals Sheila Tiarks Kitty Thuermer Sally Waley 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 the Ebola epidemic, memories of Moritz Thomsen and good things that happen when you don’t get paid Shut Downs I was enjoying my Winter issue of WorldView and came upon the letter to the editor (“New Ebola Threat”) on page 5. It occurred to me you might be interested in the little-known story of how Peace Corps staff had a key role in ending West Africa’s big Ebola outbreak that began in 2013 but greatly expanded in 2014.

Just before my July 2014 arrival in Guinea as Peace Corps country director, I oversaw the evacuation of Volunteers from Ukraine due to ae revolution and the Russian invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. I agreed to the transfer to Guinea but only 17 days after I arrived, Peace Corps decided to evacuate the Volunteers in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia because of the spreading Ebola outbreak.

With back-to-back country evacuations, I was the agency’s ‘bad luck’ country director, but the role of Peace Corps staff in the unfolding tragedy of Ebola became a great success for Peace Corps, although the role of the staff and RPCVs with CDC didn’t get much publicity. We rolled out a successful community-based training of trainers’ initiative that reached 3 million people with accurate information about the disease.

Happily, Volunteers are back in both Ukraine and Guinea.

Doug Teschner Morocco, 71-73

Marketing Moritz I appreciate the article on Living Poor by Mark Walker in the Winter issue. I thought it was well done.

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I served with Moritz in training and in-country in Ecuador. We corresponded through the 1960s and I still have those letters. He mentions his writing in some of them and his unique personality comes through in many of them.

Here’s a piece of a letter he sent me that was dated 8/28/66: “A letter from PC Washington saying that two men are coming to Rio Verde to make television movies and tape recordings of interviews ‘to put me in the kitchens of farm families all over the country,’ the idea being that as an old fart who hasn’t cracked up yet I can be an example for recruiting more old farmers.

“I tried to get out of all this, since the idea is extremely repellant but Roehrig was a little shocked at my not wanting to help the PC, and I finally wrote to Washington today explaining that as soon as they turned the cameras on me I would probably wet my pants and start to giggle hysterically and if this is what they want, all right, come on down.”

Moritz had no filter before the phrase ‘having a filter’ existed.

Sheila Tiarks Ecuador, 64-66

Moritz Draws I very much enjoyed the article in the Winter issue by Mark Walker on Moritz Thomsen, whom I knew in Ecuador.

After my service in Peru, I became a regional director in Ecuador in 1964, then the Ecuador desk officer in Washington in 1968. I only ran into Moritz a few times in Ecuador, and it was always eventful. But my Letter to the Editor would be a stateside memory:

Oh, Moritz Thomsen. Brillant, irresistable, quirky. It was the Summer of 1969; a rural Montana training ranch for Ecuador-bound Volunteers. Moritz and I were trainers.

On a day off, Moritz and I drive to the little crossroads western-looking burg of Harlowton. Moritz is overcome by an urge to “shoot up the town.” We enter the funky Five and Dime Store, and he buys a cap pistol and caps. Then he proceeds to open fire up and down the Tombstone-looking Main Street. People scatter, and Señor Thomsen and I quickly get out of Dodge.

I am in possession of bound copies of dozens of letters Moritz wrote to Joe Haratani, who later became Ecuador country director and then a Volunteer in the Galapagos.

Thanks for all of you do to help keep the Peace Corps community engaged.

Todd Tibbals Peru 62-64

Broke in Chile When I was a PCV in Chile, the person who delivered the mail knew everything I received. The local Peace Corps office had failed to pay me. Because I used the town’s only telephone to call the office, the word of my situation got out in my small community. I started getting extra food drops at my house and more dinner invites. When Peace Corps finally got back to me that I needed to be at a meeting in the capitol, neighbors in the local community lent me the money for the train.

Not being paid was the best thing that happened to me early in my assignment.

So if volunteers haven’t been paid and are truly involved in their local communities, leak your situations.

Susan Selbin Chile 65-67 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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IN MEMORIAM

A LIFE OF PUBLIC SERVICE Harris Llewellyn Wofford

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As Peace Corps special representative to Africa, a young Harris Wofford was proud of occasions such as this when national media reported on President Kennedy’s 1962 send-off on the White House south lawn for more than 600 fresh new Volunteers.

e honor the life and work of Harris Wofford, president of two colleges, a U.S. senator, advisor to more than one president, a major force in the conduct of Peace Corps ideals around the world, and a public servant who embodied

Photo courtesy of Peace Corps

LEADERSHIP

Harris Wofford helped to inspire generations of young people and those who are not so young to join the Peace Corps. Their admiration for his leadership and the inspirational mission of the corps led hundreds and thousands of Americans to believe that they had something meaningful to share with rest of the world, while they received a deeper understanding of humanity in return.

Furthermore, Harris Wofford was one W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

the spirit of the equal rights of Americans and our responsibility to serve our country. We present some of the personal memories of family and friends and reporting on events by others about the life and influences of a citizen for whom we continue to hold deep respect.

of the individuals who was instrumental in introducing President John Kennedy to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and that collaboration would spark a transformation that would change America forever. He truly believed in the way of love, the way of peace, and the philosophy and discipline of non-violence.

He dedicated his career to helping our world community to fulfill the vision of a Beloved Community, and he helped hasten the day when we will live in a world finally at peace

with itself. He was a man of vision and a man of peace. Harris Wofford will be deeply missed.

John Lewis, Congressman.

U.S. House of Representatives, Georgia’s 5th Congressional District ADVENTURE

My father was a daring man and a lover of adventure. When I was 11, he drove our family to visit Ethiopian villages and towns where Peace Corps Volunteers lived. Dad told us that WO R L D V I E W S P R I N G 2 0 1 9

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IN MEMORIAM

we might be stopped by Eritrean Liberation Front rebels or thieves who had stopped other travelers and taken everything, even their clothes. That thought had a big impact on my young imagination. A few days later he and I drove back to Addis alone, stopping in Axum, the Queen of Sheba’s capital, in the 17th-century city of Gondar, and at Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile.

We were told there were snails in the lake that gave swimmers the quite awful disease of schistosomiasis, but never mind, we were told, you can go far out into the middle of the lake where there weren’t any snails. So off we went in a boat to swim in the middle of the lake. I still remember the beautiful glow of the sunset on the lake after we swam, and my father’s deep pleasure at the water, the sunset, the volunteers, the lake and the entire experience of immersion in the beauty of Ethiopia.

Susanne Wofford, Daughter

NATIONAL SERVICE

Thanks to Harris’s tireless work, AmeriCorps thrived in the face of opponents’ efforts to defund the program, Shirley Sagawa, the chief executive officer of Service Year Alliance recently wrote. Each year that agency sends 75,000 Americans to serve in programs run by national nonprofits, service and conservation corps, and thousands of grassroots organizations.

SPIRITUALITY

Harris did not create lasting social change by managing with business-like efficiency but by utilizing his deep visionary spiritu-

he called it The Trinity Tree. “I’ve written quite a bit of my book here on this bench while looking at that Trinity Tree,” he said.

This was not surprising. Harris possessed a deep spiritual gravitas that served as a centrifugal force attracting key issues of the day to land at his feet.

Geri Critchley, Senegal, 71-72 CALLING MRS. KING

In his obituary, the Washington Post recounts his role as a lawyer for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights before joining the Kennedy presidential campaign. Dr. King was in jail and Harris wanted to help but he understood the

MISSING SIGNATURE

DETERMINATION

Harris is described by many as an early supporter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and marched alongside him in the civil and voting rights flash point of Selma, Ala. According to the Washington Post, Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother and U.S. attorney general, once referred to Harris as a “slight madman” in his zeal for advancing civil rights.

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As the newly elected U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania in 1991, Harris Wofford defeated Richard Thornburgh, a former U.S. attorney general. Governor Bob Casey joined him in the celebration of his election.

ality inspired by the Jesuit philosopher and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, his transcendent yet grounded idealism, his poetic imagination and childlike enjoyment of wonder. One of his favorite books was The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: a moral allegory and spiritual autobiography of a little boy who leaves the safety of his own tiny planet to travel the universe.

One day when Harris was in the middle of writing his eighth book, I joined him for a walk to the Georgetown waterfront where he liked to sit on a bench looking out over the Potomac River, not far from a tree with three trunks. It was a favorite tree of his and

political risks. Knowing that any overt sympathizing with the jailed leader might alienate Southern white voters, neither Kennedy or his opponent, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, wanted to risk the election by getting involved. Harris later told oral historians about the plan he hatched that some believe was what turned the election to Kennedy’s favor.

“The idea came to me,” Harris said, “Why shouldn’t he just call Mrs. King?”

COMMITMENT

Harris played a special role with Peace Corps in Ethiopia by supporting his volunteers 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 Robin Rombach/Pittsburgh Gazette/AP

Just a few weeks before his passing, Harris and Matthew Charlton came by the NPCA office. At one point, I found Harris back in my corner office, one by one picking up and admiring photos on my bookshelf: me with the Obamas at the White House, with former Peru President Alejandro Toledo, with Liberia President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, with folk singer Peter Yarrow and others. But missing was a photo of me with Harris. On my laptop, I quickly pulled up one of many photos of the two of us, and told him I’d have it framed and ready for autographing at his next visit to the office. I now have the photo prominently displayed on my desk, but sadly, sans autograph.

Glenn Blumhorst, NPCA president

Send NPCA your and standing up for them when intellectual and political birthremembrance of it mattered. A Volunteer in our place and, as was often the case Harris Wofford to on our trip, we were joined by a first group wrote an overly frank http://bit.ly/ Harris-Wofford former Peace Corps Volunteer letter home about Ethiopian who served as our guide. food. The AP picked it up from a U.S. radio broadcast and it was front page I like to think of Harris Wofford looking news in Ethiopia’s major daily newspaper. backward and forward simultaneously, as he The Ministry of Education wanted the would often do. I imagine the times in his teacher expelled. Harris let the Emperor life when he and my grandmother, Clare, know that if the Volunteer was forced to met with Gandhi’s disciples to debate world leave the country, Harris would leave, too. interdependence through nonviolence. I Harris and the Volunteer stayed. imagine my grandparents talking late into On a trip upcountry, Harris visited the night about how to build a fire under a slightly older Volunteer, an experience those who are satisfied with the way to the teacher in a remote town who after only a world works. My grandfather’s spirit was few months was ready to call it quits. Harris forged in part in the crucible of Gandhi’s spent the better part of the night talking to India to light fires under the powerful, to him. By next morning the Volunteer agreed cure the sick and feed the starving.

Gabe Lezra, Grandson to stay and after his first year he moved to Asmara where he continued to be a very successful teacher.

PERSUASION John Coyne, Ethiopia 1962-1964 When Harris was arrested for protesting police brutality during the 1968 Democratic CIVIL DISOBEDIANCE National Convention in Chicago, he spent I feel so privileged to carry with me the honor the night in jail. He later told the Pittsburgh of being the recipient of the 2018 Harris Post-Gazette that he became disillusioned Wofford Global Citizen Award conferred with the radical youths leading the protests. by the National Peace Corps Association.

“One of the common threads all my life,” And how lucky I was to personally meet him Harris told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “has over dinner at his old Senate office, formerly been a disagreement with those who see occupied by Senator John F. Kennedy before politics as primarily focused on their own he became President. Harris played a key psychic or ideological satisfaction, those role in inculcating Gandhi’s principle of people that want to vote or to protest or non-violent civil disobedience that motivated be witnesses [without being interested] in Rosa Parks to defy the rules of segregated the art of persuasion or what the results will bus seats and inspired Martin Luther King, be. The protest movement of the late 1960s Jr to follow the Gandhian path. ended by appalling me.”

Kul Chandra Gautam PEACE CORPS INDIA

There was a crushing, vibrating, life-giving heat radiating off the streets of Delhi. We bounced along on a noisy, smelly ride, honking vigorously along the main thoroughfares in a little cab, discussing the poetry of William Blake and T.S. Eliot. But our discussion always came back to the world we wanted to build and how we wanted to build it.

I was 13 years old and the first grandson he took traveling in the world. He had chosen India which was my grandfather’s the W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

I joined Peace Corps staff in Washington and had ample opportunities to see Harris Wofford in action. On a weekly basis, there would be an Open Forum for staff on subjects having to do with Peace Corps and its future.

When Harris led one of these sessions, you could always depend on a full house—and they listened.

He firmly believed that Peace Corps “must see beyond itself to the next steps America should take in world development and education.” Harris was among the few

enablers that gave early meaning and purpose to the concept of a Peace Corps, most particularly at a time in its first five years when many people didn’t take it seriously.

Jerry Norris, Colombia 62-64 HEALTH CARE

The New York Times obituary recalled how Pennsylvania Bob Governor Casey asked Harris to accept a six-month appointment to the U.S. Senate after a senator’s death.

During the special election that followed, polls showed his opponent, a former U.S. attorney general, with a whopping 47 percent lead. “Mr. Wofford gained steadily in a winning campaign that stressed health care and the economy, themes that resonated with voters and that would underlie Mr. Clinton’s campaign for the presidency a year later,” says the Times.

RIGHTS

Harris recalled passing a note to Dr. King before the start of a protest march in Selma.

Alabama. “First Amendment,” the note said.

Harris told Politico magazine about the note and what Dr. King did with it. “He was eloquently invoking the Bible to support the march, and then, glancing down at the note, he added: ‘And we march in the name of the Constitution, knowing the Constitution is on our side. The right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances shall not be abridged.

That’s the First Amendment.’ ” SERVICE

Harris helped to write the legislation that created the Corporation for National and Community Service. He later served as the agency’s chief executive. Senator Bob Casey, Jr. of Pennsylvania, who is the son of the governor who originally appointed Harris to the U.S. Senate, noted the irony that Harris died on Martin Luther King Day, a federal holiday dedicated to national service through the efforts of the Corporation for National and Community Service.

“It’s only fitting that Harris passed away on the national day of service he helped to bring into existence,” said Senator Casey.  WO R L D V I E W S P R I N G 2 0 1 9

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PEACE CORPS CONNECT and each RPCV can move the innovation needle forward at home and abroad.

LET’S NETWORK

Come to Austin Let’s innovate for good on June 20 to 22

BY SALLY WALEY

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nnovation is a skill that all Peace Corps Volunteers know a little something about. That initial plunge into culture shock when you step off the plane sets off a service-long process of adapting and evolving your worldview to meet local needs.

In reality, this process never really stops.

Along with a widened perspective on the world and a drive to serve, RPCVs come home with an ability to think and create in ways that challenge the norm.

This combination of motivated altruism and creativity gave us the focus for the theme of the June 20-22 Peace Corps Connect Conference: Innovation for Good.

The over 400 members of Heart of Texas Peace Corps Association (HoTPCA) are so excited to welcome you to our great city of Austin, the capital of Texas and the home of the University of Texas, for the NPCA’s 2019 Peace Corps Connect national gathering.

We’ll explore the ways that Peace Corps

Peace Corps Connect is how we unite all those who served—Volunteer and Peace Corps staff, family and friends. This is our opportunity to connect with different generations of RPCVs and to welcome back those who have recently returned by helping us explore a future of innovation and service.

Austin will also serve as this year’s venue for many of NPCA’s more than 180 affiliates and especially those groups based on their country of service to host their annual meetings. Ask your group leaders if there’s a reunion plan.

We come together as a whole to share and learn from each other. It’s our community’s chance to honor the champions of our Third Goal spirit and forge our path to building a powerful and innovative force for good among more than 220,000 of us who have served in Peace Corps.

THE DESTINATION

National reports and rankings have recently been backing up what Austinites have known for years: that we really are the best city in America. Live music, great food, constant sunshine and art on every corner - we love showing off our city almost as much as we love bragging about it.

Austin is a perfect backdrop for the hundreds in the Peace Corps community who are coming to discover new links between innovation and service. We consistently top the charts: In world rankings we’re No. 1 in technology and No. 7 for enabling innovation through tech. In the United States, we’re ranked No. 1 in start-up density and No. 8 in creativity.

 Sally Waley welcomes us as the Heart of Texas PCA’s conference chair. She’s a native of Austin and a proud University of Texas graduate. She says there’s no Longhorn petting zoo in town but there are plenty beyond Austin’s city limits.

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In addition to robust learning opportunities at PCC 2019, you have a chance to help launch your own new idea, one that embodies innovation for good, at Saturday’s live Pitch Competition. Individuals and organizations will present their project or program in front the conference audience to compete for 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

Photo courtesy Sally Waley

PITCH YOUR INNOVATION

prize of $2,500. Interested in competing?

Submit your application for the opportunity to pitch in June.

START AT THE LAKEFRONT

The conference opens with a Thursday evening reception at our lakefront Austin Public Library, a stunning new part of the Austin skyline named one of the World’s Greatest Places last year by Time magazine.

On Friday night, you can enjoy some of Austin’s finest restaurants and connect with other Volunteers at regional dinners curated by local RPCVs. It will be an amazing opportunity to connect with the broader Peace Corps community and across countries and generations during our time in Austin.

EXPLORE RPCV IMPACT

The library’s ultra-modern venue sets the stage for two days on the University of Texas Campus where we’ll celebrate successful RPCV impact businesses and recognize RPCV

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To get more information community leaders who have 67 degrees of Barton Springs and register, go to: driven their post-service careers Pool, or learn how to two-step Austin.peacecorps connect.org/hotpca and community engagement to at the Broken Spoke. make positive change.

We’re in the heart of Texas We’ll take a look at the Hill Country where a short history of how Peace Corps service has road trip takes you to the 125 buildings of evolved over the years to incorporate new Bastrop listed on the National Register of philosophies and technology. You’ll also Historic Places, to any of the five Wine Trails have opportunities to join workshops in the second-most-visited wine region in with thought leaders on impactful and the nation, or Reimers Ranch park and innovative topics to engage community adjoining Hamilton Pool, only one of half conversation on hot-button issues, practical a dozen state parks in the immediate area. understanding of diving into a start-up, and Take a little more time for longer drives effective storytelling. to see Space Center Houston, The Alamo Mission in San Antonio, or the Dallas Museum EXPLORE AUSTIN of Art’s collections of contemporary, Islamic, The PCC 2019 provides a perfect oppor- African art. tunity for friends and family to explore the There is so much to enjoy here in the city and surrounding areas before and after Heart of Texas, and we can’t wait to see you the conference. Watch from lake, trail, or in June at Peace Corps Connect.  bridge as 1.5 million bats spiral out from Sally Waley chairs the local host committee for 2019 Congress Avenue Bridge at dusk. Enjoy Peace Corps Connect. She conducted health extension and community development is Samrong, Cambodia the bluebonnets at the Lady Bird Johnson from 2012 to 2014 and is a U.S. Commerce Department Wildflower Center, plunge into the refreshing senior economic specialist.

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40 YEARS

Welcome to Your New Home

BY MARICARMEN SMITH-MARTINEZ

The growing Peace Corps community invites you…

vision is a united and vibrant Peace Corps community that enables NPCA to focus on community-driven decisions. Consistent with our grassroots approach to Peace Corps service, our model of collaborative engagement gives us a bold new direction and provides a refreshing opportunity for us to drive positive change that propels NPCA to even more innovation.

Our Board of Directors has taken a daring move to transform NPCA from a member-based model to an approach driven by purposeful impact. By eliminating membership dues for individuals and affiliate groups, they shifted us away from a sense

… to unite in our vibrant Peace Corps community

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 As chair of NPCA’s board of directors Maricarmen looks ahead at the changing strategies of our Peace Corps community to guarantee the values and impact of our experiences as Peace Corps Volunteers.

run for election as coordinator of the Affiliate Group Network Coordinator. After two terms as the national coordinator, I was elected chair of the NPCA Board of Directors—a Hispanic, the youngest RPCV and only the sixth woman in 40 years to hold that distinction. To me, that demonstrates the flavor of NPCA’s greater diversity.

Our Peace Corps community is shaping an era by building on our rich history to forge a dynamic future deeply rooted in our core values while boldly looking forward to inspire transformation. Our

of obligation and inspired a rededication to our mission and goals. As a result of that bold decision NPCA’s active membership increased by nearly 40 percent, individual giving by mission partners has increased by 21 percent, and participation in advocacy to Congress has increased by a factor of five. Among the 37 new groups to join our network, many such as RPCVs for Environmental Action, Peace Corps Community for Refugees, and workplace-based groups such as RPCVs at USAID have taken on new definition and focus.

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Photo courtesy of Bixal

United and vibrant communities drive transformative change. Over four decades we’ve grown from the nascent National Council of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers to the rebranded National Peace Corps Association.

As we adapt to our ever-changing world, we have demonstrated steadfast commitment to the Peace Corps mission. While I pause to reflect on the merits of this 40-year milestone and marvel at the winding road our Peace Corps community has taken, I also look back on my own Peace Corps journey.

Coming home to northern Florida from my rural community development work in Costa Rica, I joined NPCA prepared for the promise of our community but unsure how to leverage its many resources. I landed in Atlanta with a new job and found new friends at events hosted by Atlanta Area RPCVs. With their board’s encouragement, I quickly moved from non-dues paying status to formal AARPCV membership, joining the group’s leadership and the Peace Corps 50th Anniversary Committee. I later stepped into the role of vice-president and was elected to two terms as the Atlanta group’s president.

A career switch brought me to Washington, D.C. and plugged me into a new community—RPCVs of Washington, D.C. That relationship strengthened my understanding of NPCA, driving my decision to

With a community of more than 230,000 serving and returned Peace Corps Volunteers, a network of more than 180 affiliate groups, and increasing connections with social impact partners, our new mission-minded model driven by a Peace Corps community is bigger and bolder than ever.

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YEARS

… to visit Peace Corps House As we look to the horizon, we recognize the need to give our community a place to call home. If you’re familiar with our cramped offices in downtown Washington, D.C. you know that we yearn for a more innovative and collaborative space to grow our infrastructure, operations, and programming and a chance to create a gathering place in which our community can thrive. In such a collaboratively designed social and entrepreneurial setting, we believe affiliate groups, RPCVs, and PCVs on leave will develop new connections and leverage our vast network for social impact.

To achieve this goal NPCA staff, affiliate group leaders, and our community stakeholders have built local relationships and established a presence in our new neighborhood. Our space is strategically located at the edge of the District’s economically

cannot wait to share our new space with our community: the Affiliate Group Network, RPCV entrepreneurs and innovators, PCVs on leave in the metropolitan area, and—in true Peace Corps fashion—the local North Capitol community.

… to join in our technology transformation.

While we seek a physical location to call our own, the nature of our increasingly digital world expands our opportunity to encompass the virtual realm. As our technology evolves, digital tools enhance our community focus and increase our vibrant potential. In response to extensive feedback from the Affiliate Group Network, NPCA introduced SilkStart’s association management software and has on-boarded 44 affiliate groups to this cloud-based community-builder platform.

With an iterative approach that allows NPCA to build scale we’re enabling affiliate group leaders to improve technological capacity, simplify data management, and enhance NPCA active membership has increased by nearly 40 digital connectivity within our community. percent, individual giving To explore the intersecby mission partners has tion of technology and posiincreased by 21 percent, tive social change, the Heart and participation in advo- of Texas PCA will host our cacy to Congress has inannual conference in June. creased by a factor of five. Aptly themed Innovation for Good, Peace Corps Connect in Austin promises to uncover diverse northwest and close to the Capitol to new links between innovation and service, strengthen our congressional relationships provide opportunities to network with for Capitol Hill advocacy. Peace Corps will like-minded innovators, and leverage our continue to be our neighbors as they move collective community power for social good. their own headquarters nearby later this Innovative technology offers the potential year. With our anticipated relocation, we to unite our community in ways we never W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

thought possible just a few years ago.

For some PCVs, instant messages on WhatsApp or even smartphone video chats have replaced the treasured phone call or the long-awaited postal letter.

Recent RPCVs are able to maintain connections with host families and communities through a myriad of social media platforms. Decades after service, they can reestablish contact and develop new links with the next generation of families with whom they lived and worked. As we dig into this digital age, the far-reaching corners of the world come a bit closer.

It’s also time to take our own communications to the next level. NPCA is thrilled to announce the design and development of a new digital platform for WorldView magazine. The fresh redesign and new content of the printed magazine you now hold in your hands is the foundation for a larger and more robust NPCA digital communications hub. By posting the quarterly printed content on an expanded digital platform we can redefine our ability to engage you with greater frequency and an increasing variety of news and ideas.

This digital magazine will increase NPCA’s audience by providing all RPCVs, the 7,500 PCVs and a larger global audience with immediate electronic access to our Peace Corps community. Digital WorldView will enhance your online access to the stories of friendship that we cherish and the impact of the good works that inspire us. As we embrace technology with a digital platform for our writers and storytellers, we enter the age of interconnected global development.

Whether you visit our new location at Peace Corps House, discover innovative technology at Peace Corps Connect in Austin, or engage virtually with the launch of our digital hub of news and ideas, we invite the entire Peace Corps Community to unite in our transformation.

Welcome to your new Peace Corps home.  Maricarmen Smith-Martinez developed financial and organizational leadership projects in Costa Rica from 2006 to 2008, and currently manages the online training and certification program of a large federal agency for Bixal, a digital communications, design, and technology company.

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ADVOCACY STARTING A NATIONAL CONVERSATION

Universal Service A national commission asks for your opinions

BY MARK GEARAN

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This commission wants to spark a movement and foster a greater ethos of military, national, and public service in the United States. Is it time for universal service in America? What do you think?

Our commission is considering universal service, which is outlined in our Interim Report released on January 23, 2019. Many Americans value service and are willing to consider a variety of options to encourage or require service of all citizens. For the commission, universal service is a transformative effort to involve many more Americans in military, national, or public service. Some of the approaches we heard on service include:

ne of the many privileges of she manages programs which connect high serving as director of the Peace school students and recent high school Corps was the chance to see first- graduates to meaningful employment and hand the value and impact service postsecondary opportunities.

Another RPCV, Leila Chavez Soliman, has in our communities, our country and across the globe. A commitment to service served as a panelist at a public meeting in maximizes Americans’ spirit of engagement Los Angeles. Leila shared how living and  Universal access to service. Everyone and in so doing embeds civic engagement working abroad in Cambodia gave her purwith a desire to serve can do so. This into our national identity while uniting us pose, showed her possibilities, and helped would require America to commit all in pursuit of the common good. her become a caring and responsible adult. enough resources to provide access I take that experience and knowledge I know each of you can identify with these for individuals and for entities to with me as vice chair for national and pub- qualities. As an English teacher and teacher provide opportunities. lic service at the National Commission trainer, she ran leadership workshops inclusive  Universal expectation of service. Seron Military, National, and Public Service. of girls and women as part of the Let Girls vice stays voluntary but becomes the This bipartisan, 11-member commission Learn Initiative. norm in our country. In this approach created by Congress is working to find Stories like Leah’s and Leila’s continue every American is expected to serve ways to increase participation in military, to inspire me and my fellow Commissionfor a full year to either military, national, and public service and to review ers. These are the stories that stick with us national, and public service. the military selective service process. Our as we develop recommendations that will  Universal obligation of service. All goal is to ignite a national conversation about encourage every American to be inspired Americans are required to serve but the importance of service as we develop and eager to serve. have a choice in how they meet this In a country of more the 329 million recommendations for the Congress and requirement. people, the potential for service is largely the President by March 2020.

The commission’s considerations and Throughout 2018, we listened and learned untapped. As currently serving Volunteers from the American people, including RPCVs and RPCVs, you deeply understand and ideas don’t end at universal service. Throughfrom across the nation. In Chicago, Leah appreciate the value of service. For some out 2019, the Commission will host public Eggers, who served as a Peace Corps Vol- of you, Peace Corps was your first service hearings to explore considerations further. In unteer in the Philippines, joined us at our experience. For others, it was the next ser- February, the commission hosted a hearing public meeting as a panelist. She provided vice opportunity. And for many, it was the on universal service in Washington, D.C. insight on how service can be a pathway to beginning of a career dedicated to serve. You where we discussed the potential for manemployment. As a Volunteer, she worked have helped create a culture of service, but datory service and other ways to inspire and with the Euphrasia Development Center, a what about the rest of our nation? increase participation in service. nonprofit focused on helpMore hearings are scheding youth involved in gang uled around the nation: You Can Join the Conversation activity. Her work in the national service on March n National Service, March 28, College Station, TX Philippines led her to serve 28 in College Station, Texas; n Selective Service, April 24-25, Washington, D.C. as the program manager of selective service on April n Public and Military Service, May 15-16, Washington, D.C. 24-25 in Washington, D.C.; Youth Workforce Development at Youth Guidance in public and military service on n Creating an Expectation of Service, June 20, Hyde Park, NY Chicago. In this position, May 15-16 in Washington, 14

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D.C.; and creating an expectation of service on June 20 in Hyde Park, New York.

YOU CAN JOIN THE DISCUSSION

I invite you to join us in this important conversation. Our hope is to spark a movement: every American – especially young Americans – inspired and eager to serve. I urge you to talk to your friends, family members, neighbors, colleagues and fellow returned Volunteers about the Commission, your service experience, and the idea of universal service. We want to hear from all of you!

Share your ideas with the commission through our website on any aspect of the commission’s mission, including any of the following questions: 











What unmet needs of the nation could be addressed through a formal service program?

What approaches could the nation take to foster a new norm in which giving at least one year of service to the nation becomes an expected rite of passage?

Should high schools transform the final semester of senior year into a hands-on service learning experience?

Should schools offer service-oriented summer projects or a year of service learning?

What benefits could such programs bring to the participants, our communities, and our nation?

How would such programs be structured to ensure they are inclusive and available to all?

To stay up to date on the commission’s activities and to download the Interim Report, please visit our website at www.inspire2serve. gov. We also invite you to follow the commission on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Medium via @ Inspire2ServeUS and join the digital conversation on service by using the hashtag #Inspire2Serve.  Mark Gearan currently serves as the vice chair for National and Public Service for the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service. He also serves as director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. Mark Gearan served as the 14th director of the Peace Corps from 1995 to 1999.

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A MSIH DOCTOR IS MORE THAN JUST A WHITE COAT

msih.bgu.ac.il • mishadmissions@post.bgu.ac.il • (212) 995-1231 Beer-Sheva, Israel

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SIERRA LEONE

Lifting Bumpeh To Another Level How a Sierra Leone paramount chief leads transformation

BY ARLENE GOLEMBIEWSKI

LIFE AFTER AN 11-YEAR REBEL WAR

I had served as a Peace Corps teacher in Rotifunk nearly 40 years before. Things felt familiar and unchanged on my first return trip to Bumpeh Chiefdom. Forty-thousand people in 215 small villages still live a subsistence existence on a dollar a day. All farming remains manual. Houses are still made of mud wattle or mud bricks with thatched roofs. As in 90 percent of the nation, there is no electricity.

At nightfall, Rotifunk goes dark.

But then I saw that life was worse than 40 years ago. During an 11-year civil war and seven years of rebel occupation, Rotifunk was burned to the ground. Now 60 percent rebuilt, the town’s piped water system is long gone. The roads are a nightmare. It takes four hours to drive 55 miles to Freetown. There are no wage-paying jobs. The weekly market draws only petty traders. The railroad that made Rotifunk a flourishing agricultural trade center was dismantled. Forests that protected streams were leveled, so children now 16

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walk greater distances to carry water home. Schools are primitive, classrooms overcrowded, and few have qualified teachers.

I returned for the first time in 2011 with the Friends of Sierra Leone, thinking it would be a one-off trip to connect with my past.

But I reconnected with my friend Charles Caulker, a fellow teacher in 1974. I had gone on to a career at Procter & Gamble and he had entered government administration and was now Paramount Chief Charles Caulker.

Chief Caulker is one of the longest-serving paramount chiefs in Sierra Leone with 34 years in office. Beyond the national government in Freetown, paramount chiefs are the only civil authorities in rural chiefdoms. I soon learned what a remarkable life he’s led as a traditional chief, war hero and national leader.

FRUIT TREES AS SALVATION

On that stifling afternoon on my third visit to Rotifunk, I forged a partnership with Chief Caulker to help him develop his chiefdom.

I formed Sherbro Foundation, named for the historic local tribe, when Sierra Leone was still lifting its head from the trauma of civil war and another 10 years in the aftermath. In 2018, I received the NPCA’s Sargent Shriver Award for Distinguished Humanitarian Service for my Sherbro Foundation work in supporting Chief Caulker’s vision of rebuilding his war-torn homeland.

Chief Caulker wants every child born in the chiefdom to receive a secondary school education, an ambitious goal for a nation in which 70 percent of the people cannot read or write. And he wants to move his people from abject poverty to self-reliance.

Chief Caulker waited many years for aid from his government or NGOs but eventually realized, “We must do this on our own.’’ He spoke to me in his soft but resolute manner. “We have an abundance of fertile land, water and our agriculture traditions. That must be our salvation.”

“When I grew up,” he said, “we had a tradition of growing fruit trees. Everyone had oranges, mangoes, bananas and coconuts to eat in their backyard garden. When a baby was born, the umbilical 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 Arlene Golembiewski

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n a steamy West African afternoon in 2013, the best offer I had was to find some shade and sit still while a trickle of sweat ran down my back. My friend Charles said, “Let’s go sit in my father’s grapefruit orchard where it’s cooler and have kids pick grapefruit.”

Children carried our chairs a short way to a grove of old grapefruit trees. We watched boys shinny up the tall trees to where they were nearly out of view. “That’s far enough,” Charles called out, concerned for their safety. The trees we sat under were at least 50 years old. The citrus was as sweet as any I’d ever eaten.

We were in the small town of Rotifunk, the seat of Bumpeh Chiefdom, Sierra Leone, in lowland tropical rainforest just north of the equator. The Bumpeh River snakes through Rotifunk as a stream before opening into wide estuaries 30 miles downstream and emptying into the Atlantic. The river’s natural tidal flooding creates verdant wetlands for traditional rice growing, a farming practice unchanged in hundreds of years. And it makes it hard to escape constant sweating.

cord was planted with a tree that became that child’s tree. The small child could see the tree growing as he grew.

“Your grandparents helped you water the tree, and you grew up with a respect for the environment. I loved my coconut tree dearly.

You learned if you took care of your trees, they would take care of you and feed your family for many years.” But the tradition of planting trees for newborns was lost during the war and old trees neglected.

“We can use this tradition people love to show them, by raising fruit trees, not only can they eat the fruit, they can sell it and save the money. In 12 years, they’ll have the money for their child’s secondary school education.”

That was the origin of our Orchards for Education Program.

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Charles Caulker’s leadership of the Bumpeh Chiefdom inspired RPCV Arlene Golembiewski’s efforts to develop her former Peace Corps site through the Sherbro Foundation. Five years later Golembiewski won the Sargent Shriver Award for Distinguished Humanitarian Service.

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This year, Chief Caulker will have planted over 3,000 fruit trees on 45 acres outside Rotifunk, thanks to a Rotary Club grant. In three to four years, they’ll yield tens of thousands of dollars in annual fruit profits, ensuring children’s education for many years to come. The idea has spread across the chiefdom with farmers and households now planting their own trees.

BORN TO SERVE

At 24 years of age, Charles Caulker was ambitious and charismatic, a natural-born leader. He comes from one of the oldest ruling families that traces its dynasty to 1672 when a female ancestor married Thomas Corker, an Irishman sent by the British monarchy to start the first trading company on the Sierra Leone coast. The name morphed into Caulker and the dynasty has thrived 350 years as coastal Sherbro-land’s traditional leaders.

Driven by his family’s deep sense of public service and armed

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with a bachelor’s degree in political science and administration from Fourah Bay College, he became the Sierra Leone’s youngest District Officer at the age of 30, administering the national government’s law in one of 12 administrative districts.

He became Paramount Chief Caulker at just 35 with his father’s untimely death. But it was Sierra Leone’s rebel war that shaped him. To rise above the violence, chaos and corruption was a test of his principles and courage. He was one of the few paramount chiefs young and skilled enough to organize a rural civil defense unit to fight rebels where military and mercenary forces had failed them.

“We started fighting with nothing but sticks with nails on the end against rebels with guns and mortars,” Chief Caulker told me. “We found ways to succeed in face of the impossible because we had to.” Under his leadership, they prevailed. Some people Chiefdom seeks economic stability by returning to its roots in the orchards of the 3 Bumpeh called him Sierra Leone’s Che Guevara, region.

Chief Caulker looks over 5,000 orange tree seedlings that he believes will pay for tuition the educated guerilla leader and military fees to increase literacy. strategist—minus the Marxism.

Chief Caulker served 11 years in Parliament where he chaired Bumpeh Chiefdom Council of chiefdom leaders and village chiefs. seven major committees. For his role in ending the war and reinstatI followed the Peace Corps model of empowering a grassroots ing democratic institutions he was awarded Sierra Leone’s highest organization for community-led development. Sherbro Foundation civilian honor, Grand Commander of the Order of Rokel. In 2018, supports CCET’s lead with organizational consulting and seed the newly elected president, Julius Maada Bio, asked Chief Caulker money. In six years, CCET developed seven programs serving 8,000 to join his 11-member transition team. of their poorest people. People eagerly participate in projects and work moves quickly.

LEADING CHANGE

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THE FEMINIST PARAMOUNT CHIEF

When I asked in 2011 how I could help, Chief pointed to the first chiefdom all-girls school he had just started as his biggest need. “I want my granddaughters and all girls to get a good education at home.”

Most girls here lack the $25 to pay annual school fees. I paid fees for one school and then launched Sherbro Foundation’s Girls’ Scholarship Program, which has now awarded 1,700 scholarships to over 600 Bumpeh Chiefdom girls in four schools. After six years, enrollment of chiefdom girls in junior high is at parity with boys, and they’re moving towards the same for senior high.

For 20 years, no Bumpeh student had ever passed the West African standardized school completion exams. Chief’s center started a free tutoring program to prepare 100 girls for these exams to enter senior high or college. In 2016, three girls on Sherbro scholarships passed the exam and are attending college. The tutoring program and college scholarships we began in 2017 will ensure a steady stream of girls follows in their footsteps.

Reflecting now on six years of CCET education programs, Chief 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 Arlene Golembiewski

Despite Chief’s many accomplishments, here we still were, talking about how to move Bumpeh Chiefdom out of abject poverty. It’s hard to explain to Americans just how poor is “poor” in rural Sierra Leone. Farms and villages were abandoned for years during the war.

People scavenged for wild yams and fruits. There has been only a trivial amount of money to re-build. Anyone with an education fled the Chiefdom and usually the country, creating a relentless brain drain. Bumpeh Chiefdom’s underdevelopment also stems from its location in inaccessible coastal wetlands. And it’s been on the wrong side of the political fence, cut off from resources in a country still strongly influenced by tribal affiliation.

From our 2013 conversation under grapefruit trees came Bumpeh Chiefdom’s development plan. I clearly remember Chief’s words: “We will work on small, beautiful things we can start quickly and have an immediate impact on improving the lives of our poorest people.”

Chief Caulker formed his own community-led non-profit to direct the chiefdom’s development agenda. The Center for Community Empowerment & Transformation (CCET) is authorized by the

said, “The programs are changing the lives of girls—giving them direction and ambition. Before, they didn’t know what their futures could be. With every year in school, they’re avoiding pregnancy and looking for partners who share their academic vision for the future.”

In Sierra Leone there is a saying that when you educate a girl, you educate the country. Educated women become the foundation for development with a virtuous circle of increased earning power and fewer, healthier, better-educated children.

I saw more and more examples of traditional barriers Chief has removed that kept women backward. I started referring to him as the Feminist Paramount Chief.

After seeing many women in abusive relationships and listening to countless family disputes in which a husband could end a marriage with

of foreign dollars poured into Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, the epidemic only grew.

One-year-old Sherbro Foundation supplied $12,000 and Chief mobilized village chiefs to ban traditional burial practices of families washing bodies of the deceased. Local volunteers maintained iron-clad border control of Bumpeh Chiefdom keeping out even returning residents, stopping the virus cold. Within one month at the epidemic’s peak, guidance from Chief Caulker’s National Council of Paramount Chiefs cut the country’s new Ebola case rate by 80 percent. The epidemic was soon extinguished.

IT TAKES ONLY PEANUTS

At the Ebola tragedy’s end, I asked Chief again, “How can we help?”

Chief said it was the women householders and small farmers who suffered the most in the epidemic, so he established one of CCET’s most successful economic projects. With Sherbro Foundation’s support, the Women’s Vegetable Growing Project offered women a $30 bale of peanut seed they couldn’t afford, a tarp to dry the harvest and 100 pounds of rice to quickly feed their family. Within five months, their income was twice what they earned from 12 months of rice farming.

The result is women can better feed children, pay school fees without exorbitant loans, and pay for health care. Empowered to keep growing cash crops, 400 women participants have increased their incomes. Their lives and those of their family members totaling at least 2,000 have significantly improved.

Chief Caulker always has next-level goals. He plans to keep fostering fruit tree growing to develop the chiefdom’s local economy.

In a few years, it should support fruit-based cottage industries like pulping and juicing. Fruit income will keep more girls, as well as boys, in school until they become an educated workforce that can attract investment.

And he wants to turn out six to ten young women college graduates a year for the chiefdom. “Do you know what an impact that will have?” he exclaims. We’ll have to keep planting more and more fruit trees to keep up with all of Chief’s goals.

Immediately after learning of my Shriver award, I called Chief to tell him, “I share this award with you.” With any development work, there’s two parts to the story. His on-the-ground grassroots-led work is by far the greater of our two parts. My Peace Corps experience taught me to first ask, “How can I help?” He always responds with clear and practical ideas that have improved the lives of thousands of people becoming models for other rural chiefdoms to replicate.

Our partnership keeps getting stronger and more energized with each success. And with each new goal he sets. 1

In three to four years, they’ll yield tens of thousands of dollars in annual fruit profits, ensuring children’s education for many years to come. a declaration and a small fee, Chief encouraged the women’s society to push for the same rights as men. With overwhelming demands from women, the chiefdom council passed bylaws for women to initiate dissolving their marriages. Next, he moved the council to give widows the right to inherit the property of their husbands.

FIGHTING AGAINST EBOLA

Sierra Leone has only one level of government, a highly centralized national government based in Freetown. Bumpeh and two other chiefdoms totaling 100,000 people share only nine police officers.

Most rural paramount chiefs are the only authority to maintain law and order and ensure security. They’re custodians of chiefdom land, the environment and customs.

In working with Chief, I’ve had a front-row seat in watching governance and development unfold in one of the most developing of developing countries.

Nowhere was it more evident than in the Ebola epidemic, an episode I wish I could have skipped. Frightened and helpless don’t begin to describe how we felt when the virus hit Bumpeh Chiefdom and people died when no one knew what to do.

Chief went into battle mode and assessed the unseen enemy.

He saw what Western experts did not see, or could not change, that no one was systematically breaking the chain of deadly virus transmission that had spread to the most remote corners of the nation.

“Arlene,” he told me one day, “it’s a behavioral management problem and only chiefs have the moral authority to stop the major source of transmission: traditional burials.” While millions W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

Arlene Golembiewski taught school in Rotifunk, Sierra Leone, from 1974 to 1976 and

later served as associate director of Global Health, Safety and Environment at Procter & Gamble. She founded the Sherbro Foundation Sierra Leone in 2013 and received NPCA’s 2018 Sargent Shriver Award for Distinguished Humanitarian Service.

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â—?

COLOMBIA

PCVs and Wayuu Blamed for Drug Trade Friends of Colombia challenge fiction of new movie and popular novel

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n the 2004 movie El Ray, the mundane life of a Colombian bar owner Pedro Rey is changed when a Peace Corps Volunteer introduces him to the drug trafficking business. In the 2011 novel The Sound of Things Falling, a Peace Corps staffer induces a Colombian pilot to fly marijuana and then cocaine to the United States. The film Birds of Passage, released in 2018, depicts Peace Corps Volunteers in La Guajira, a remote region of Colombia, handing out anti-communist pamphlets, trolling for marijuana, and pioneering the export of weed. These 20

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are artistic manifestations from Colombia of a longstanding rumor that Peace Corps Volunteers played a key role in the first days of narco-trafficking in that country.

Rumor-mongering about the Peace Corps has a long history in Colombia. When the first PCVs arrived in BogotĂĄ in 1961, the rumor was that they were CIA. It was the Cold War, and here were Americans who had the capacity to penetrate to the most intimate social fabric of the country. That created fascination and fear, says Colombian historian Lina Britto of Northwestern University, 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

Photo by Joaquin Sarmiento/Reuters

BY ABBY WASSERMAN

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Colombia’s entertainment industry is turning fiction into popular rumor that the indigenous Wayuu and Peace Corps Volunteers of the 1960s were deeply involved in the nation’s illegal drug industry.

leading scholar of la marimbera, the marijuana boom on the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

The CIA rumor did not gain currency over time; Peace Corps Volunteers were not spies.

They were there to build roads and bridges, dig wells, address health and sanitation conditions, train teachers in the use of the country’s new educational TV programs, assist small farmers to increase their yields, and work side-by-side with juntas of acción communal on self-help projects.

In time, they became advocates for the often-disenfranchised communities in which they lived and worked.

But rumor thrives in a vacuum. After 20 years of service to Colombia, Peace Corps pulled out as drugs-related violence escalated in-country. During a nearly 30-year absence, a generation grew to adulthood without direct experience with Peace Corps Volunteers. Some notable politicians pointed blame at the United States for the tragedies narco-trafficking wrought in Colombia and, since the United States was the main market for marijuana, many Colombians came to believe the rumors.

NOT JUST PEACE CORPS

Peace Corps Volunteers are not the only group misrepresented in Birds of Passage, Pájaros de Verano, a movie that claims to be based on true events. The main protagonists of the film are the indigenous Wayuu of La Guajira, a state in the northeast of Colombia that encompasses desert, mountain range, and tropics where I lived for a year and a half as a community development Volunteer in 1964 and 1965. The Wayuu, whose territory is the arid region north of the capital Riohacha, are portrayed as central W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

to the cultivation of marijuana and the main profiteers from its export. But marijuana was actually cultivated in the Sierra Nevada, far from Wayuu territory, and the Wayuu were not the ones who cultivated or profited.

“I lament that such a beautiful movie with incredible cinematography and beautiful symbolism is so sloppy in terms of historical fact,” historian Britto told me in a telephone interview. She says that making the Wayuu the protagonists “is a huge distortion that confuses audiences.” The filmmakers, she says, focused the marijuana business on the Wayuu “because they’re colorful. It’s like making a movie about World War II and making the Nazis French [because] their language sounds so much prettier than German.”

She continued, “And they caricature the Peace Corps—it’s laughable. That’s not the way the Peace Corps interacted with people on the ground. They are projecting this mythology we have in Colombia, a narrative we have constructed to excuse ourselves from culpability in this illegal business.”

The film’s co-producer, Cristina Gallego, was three years old when the Peace Corps left Colombia. Speaking in Spanish in a TV interview at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, she said the mission of the “Fuerzas de Paz” was to combat communism, and stated that Peace Corps Volunteers were “instrumental in laying the bases for the drug cartels, later taken advantage of by Carlos Lehder and Pablo Escobar. The Peace Corps saw opportunity in the United States, which wanted marijuana, and the networks were established and later taken over by the cocaine interests.” Her confidence in these erroneous assumptions is breathtaking.

FRIENDS PROTEST

Crippling this rumor within the popular culture of Colombia is a daunting task, but Friends of Colombia, an organization of RPCVs and an NPCA affiliate, has achieved some success with North American media. When Friends of Colombia President Arleen Cheston and board member Ned Chalker attended the 2008 premiere of the National Geographic documentary, Ancient Voices, Modern World: Colombia and the Amazon, they were shocked to hear Colombian sociologist Alfredo Molano claim that Peace Corps Volunteers introduced marijuana into the Sierra Nevada. Cheston had also served in La Guajira, the region in question, and knew the Volunteers. She complained to Wade Davis, an anthropologist who hosted the film and wrote the book of the same name.

“I told Wade Davis that it was impossible,” Cheston says. “I was afraid the allegation would result in negating the positive work Peace Corps had done in Colombia.” Cheston asked another member of the Friends of Colombia board, Jerry Norris, to research the long history of marijuana and coca/cocaine in Colombia. Cheston then contacted the CEO of National Geographic, who complied with her request to delete Molano’s accusation made in Spanish of Peace Corps involvement in the marijuana industry. The documentary’s producers substituted the word “foreigners” for the term “Peace Corps.” Cheston was satisfied.

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FLAWS OF FICTION

uncited sources, he reported that “a couple of gringo hippies” had gone into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and, finding that the Indians there were cultivating marijuana, took home a large quantity and contacted wholesale dealers in the States.

The “gringo hippies” did not necessarily mean Peace Corps Volunteers until the late Colombian lawyer-diplomat Victor Mosquera Chaux claimed that they were. In a 1984 op-ed piece for El Espectador newspaper, he alleged that Peace Corps Volunteers were the guilty ones not only for marijuana trafficking but for cocaine.

He cited no proof for these blanket accusations.

Like the old parlor game of Telephone, more politicians and ultimately writers and filmmakers repeated this allegation until it became widely believed. It might have made a difference if Peace Corps had been around to refute it by their presence, but they’d left Colombia two years before.

FINDING LA MARIMBERA’S TRUTH

Friends of Colombia is using research and strategic communication tools to reclaim the truth about la marimbera. The main thrust of research to date has yielded positive results. The historian Britto has rejected Mosquera Chaux’s casual linking of marijuana to cocaine.

“Cocaine is a different business,” she said during our interview.

“And I haven’t had any evidence of Peace Corps being part of the cocaine trade. It’s true that American buyers came to buy marijuana.

Americans did do transportation, but it’s very different to say they were the pioneers and responsible for this business.”

Norris’s White Paper identifies serious flaws in both the movie and the novel. A major character is Elaine Fritts, a Peace Corps Volunteer who marries a Colombian, bears a child and continues her service without a hitch. In reality, either the marriage or the birth would be enough to terminate a volunteer. To serve the plot, she remains a Peace Corps Volunteer for several more years. Another character in the novel, Mike Barbieri, is a Peace Corps staffer who deals in drugs with impunity until he ends up dead in a ditch, shot in the head by an unknown assailant. Yet no Peace Corps staffer was ever prosecuted for trafficking drugs, nor were any murdered in Colombia. Fiction is fiction, of course; but incidents that involve real organizations are most believable when based on fact.

The belief that Peace Corps Volunteers bear primary responsibility for instigating narco-trafficking in Colombia goes way back. As historian Britto writes in her forthcoming book, now under the working title of The Marijuana Bonanza: The Rise and Fall of Colombia’s First Drug Paradise, the late José Cervantes Angulo, a journalist for El Tiempo, in 1980 published La Noche de las Luciérnagas (The Night of the Fireflies), a collection of his rural marijuana industry turned the nation into a major hub of narco-trafficking. In one 3 Colombia’s articles about the early years of the day in 2000, a Black Hawk helicopter of the Colombian military destroyed 44 cocaine labs in Norte de drug trade in Colombia. Based on Santander province near the Venezuelan border.

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Photo by Reuters

In the last weeks of 2018, I interviewed Colombian scholars and wrote to Cristina Gallego and the author of The Sound of Things Falling, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, requesting information on their sources. Gallego replied and sent attachments for video clips and studies that she thought proved her point, but only show the power of rumor to persist. Juan Gabriel Vásquez did not respond.

When Gabriel Vásquez spoke about his book at the Miami International Book Fair shortly after its publication, Stanley Boynton was in the audience. Boynton had served in Colombia in the 1960s and returned in 2015 as a Peace Corps Response volunteer in Dibulla, La Guajira.

“Even he admitted that there was no concrete evidence of volunteers engaging in the behavior he described in the novel,” Boynton recalls, “but he said that he cast the role of a PCV in that fashion because it was believed that it had conceivably taken place.

In doing so, he tarnished without reason or concrete examples the image of the Peace Corps and the volunteers. He seemed to think that authors are allowed to engage in defamation without penalty.”

Photo by Joan Mansfield

projects on the Caribbean coast and in the Medellín area. Friends of Colombia provided school materials, uniforms, shoes and tutoring to 35 grade school children through Paso A Paso; funded scholarships for higher education, including university, through The Magdalena Foundation and Fundehumac; brought computer technology and computers to schools in the Medellín area through the Marina Orth Foundation; and implemented micro-loan programs through The Colombia Project to enable women and men to start cottage businesses. These efforts continue today.

In 2008, Friends of Colombia organized a conference in Cartagena. Two hundred Returned Peace Corps Volunteers attended, many returning to Colombia for the first time. President Uribe addressed the conference and awarded a Cruz de Plata to Friends of Colombia for their continuing contributions. Colombia had recently mandated the teaching of English to every school child, and soon after that we joined with coffee growers of the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros for a series of workshops in Colombia for Author Abby Wasserman in Wayuu traditional dress stood, left to 3 English language training. American teachers financed their own right, with Julio, Alvaro Cepeda, and PCV Bill Stowe in Baranquilla. travel expenses to provide workshops giving Colombian teachers That responsibility rests with Americans such as Allen Long, basic tools for teaching English as a second language. It was another who moved 972,000 pounds of Santa Marta Gold between Colom- step that led to President Uribe’s formal invitation in 2010 for Peace bia and the United States in his decade-long career. The Virginia Corps to return to Colombia. native was the most successful marijuana smuggler in America, After our language training workshops, a group of Peace Corps according to Robert Sabbag, who tells Long’s story in Smokescreen: Response Volunteers were sent to Colombia. Their previous Peace A True Adventure. Long gave up the smuggling business in 1981, Corps experience and their mastery of Spanish meant they would was prosecuted, copped a plea, and spent five years in jail. He died hit the ground running in a variety of self-help projects. They in 2012 in California at the age of 63. were followed by a new crop of Peace Corps Volunteers. At this Robert Sabbag has been writing about the illegal drug trade in writing, some 250 have had assignments in a new era for Peace general and Colombian drug traffic in particular since 1974. He Corps in Colombia. The individual experiences of Volunteers and interviewed hundreds of people on both sides of the law and at the painstaking scholarship of historians may not be as sexy as a every level of government over the course of his research for the well-made film or a bestselling novel, so it’s even more urgent that 1976 book about the cocaine trade, Snowblind, and for Smokescreen. the truth does emerge.

Are these efforts by Friends of Colombia to counter rumor Sabbag told me in a recent telephone interview, “The assertion that Peace Corps Volunteers were instrumental in the history of and refute allegations in the media worth the trouble? There is no drug trafficking is not in harmony with anything I’ve learned in my doubt in Jerry Norris’s mind that they are. research and writing about the drug trade in Colombia.

In his White Paper conclusion, Norris argues that between 1961“I have met a lot of Peace Corps Volunteers, and they are some 1981 thousands of Peace Corps Volunteers served in Colombia. of the best people I know—dedicated to their work, not to how “The Sound of Things Falling and its acceptance by… media groups they can turn it to their commercial advantage.” as the foundational basis for the initiation of the modern drug trade between that country and the United States profoundly discredits DEVOTED TO COLOMBIA each of them for their service to a place many of them consider their The conflation of Peace Corps Volunteers and stoned hippies on a second home. If Friends of Colombia doesn’t stand up to refute beach in a film that blithely co-opts the culture of the Wayuu should the uncorroborated assertions made in films and a novel, then not be surprising but it is upsetting to those of us who know better. comments like this… from National Public Radio: ‘[The novel] After two to three years of Peace Corps service, most of us shows “Peace Corps hippies who peddle drugs”… will stand as a returned to the States to teach, practice law, work as court transla- marker on [our] time in Colombia.’ ” And that would be simply unacceptable. 1 tors, become journalists and filmmakers, nurses and social workers, agronomists, and environmentalists. Some stayed on in Colombia.

Friends of Colombia never abandoned the country where we’d Abby Wasserman is a journalist, magazine editor and former editor of the Friends of Colombia newsletter. She has written for the Washington Star, Washington Post, San formed friendships and experienced youthful rites of passage. We Francisco Chronicle, Sonoma Magazine, and has published five books. She is editor of initiated and supported educational and community development the Mill Valley Historical Review. Contact her at abby.wasserman@gmail.com.

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CONGO

Helping Children Stand Tall An RPCV serves Congo’s young polio victims

BY KITTY THUERMER

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hen Jay Nash was six years old and running around during school recess in Scituate, Massachusetts, his classmate Michael was trapped in heavy leg braces and crutches by a crippling case of polio. Jay learned then that life was not always fair. That lesson, forever embedded in his young brain and heart, found expression decades later, thousands of miles away in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

For the last 40 years Nash has been helping children with severe lower-limb disabilities. He created StandProud, an organization run mostly by former beneficiaries who grew up with disabilities. Since its beginnings, the non-profit has helped more than 3,000 youth.

The mission of StandProud is to help young people counter public mockery and institutional discrimination by offering greater mobility with leg braces, training, and an opportunity to become respected members of their communities.

How did Nash end up spending most of his adult life in Africa?

The story that answers that question begins when he joined the Amherst College Glee Club and sang his heart out on his university’s 1972 summer tour of that music-rich African continent.

“I loved Africa immediately,” says Nash, who aspired to be an English teacher. On the tour he asked himself, “Why teach in the United States when there was a need for teachers in Africa?”

He joined the Peace Corps the following year and began teaching in a Jesuit high school in Bukavu, a city on the shores of Lake Kivu in what was then known as eastern Zaire.

And why did he decide to help children with disabilities?

When he first visited a rehabilitation center in the city of Goma, Nash thought of his childhood friend Michael. He ended up returning to the center many times to learn how he could help these young polio victims. He discovered that the braces and canes for these disabled children were not very expensive, but also were not very accessible.

THE PRICE OF STANDING

“A child whose legs were paralyzed by polio and was thus left crawling on the ground could be helped,” Nash says. And he learned how 24

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3 Ramses Atunga and Rais Maboso 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

Photos courtesy of Jay Nash

little it cost to help them to stand and walk.

Nash found ways to provide leg braces and walking canes for the children who suffered from polio. This revelation inspired him to begin intervening in the lives of Congolese children.

After his Peace Corps service, Nash couldn’t wait to get back to his host country. He spent the next 20 years in and out of Congo, eventually writing a doctoral thesis on the Lunda language spoken in Congo and Angola. In 1998, Nash moved to Lubumbashi to work for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“The difference between Jay and the rest of us is this,” says Tony Gambino, another Zaire RPCV and a former USAID director in Congo. “When you’re walking along a hot, crowded street in Kinshasa and you almost trip over a child pulling himself along the street by his elbows, you may stop for a few minutes and give him some

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

money. But then you walk by. Jay doesn’t do that. He stops, and he does something. He’s being doing something for more than 40 years.”

Nash explains. “I began helping disabled children obtain orthopedic equipment that gave them greater mobility and dignity.” He paid a local institution to fit them for braces. “I was unsatisfied, however, with the quality of the equipment they made, and frustrated by how long it took to get work done.”

When he learned that a Congolese friend in Kinshasa, Shouna Lungungu Kapaya, was trained to make braces but didn’t have a job, Nash created a workshop for Shouna in his own garage in Lubumbashi.

“This was the beginning of StandProud,” Nash says, “though at the time I had no idea that it would grow into something a lot larger.”

Nash and Shouna faced two immediate challenges. First, it became obvious that many beneficiaries could not just receive a

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leg brace and walk away. They needed rehabilitation.

“We tried doing rehabilitation on an out-patient basis,” Nash says, but he discovered that transportation costs were too high for many families. And without proper rehab and training, the youth were unable to practice on their new equipment.

THE NASH GUEST ROOMS

“Fortunately, I had a very large house in Lubumbashi, with many guest bedrooms,” Nash says. “We began letting the kids stay over until their rehabilitation was complete.”

His USAID work often took Nash to Kinshasa, where there were many more disabled children on the streets. StandProud needed to expand, so Nash rented a house for them and recruited staff to help manage the new shop to make braces.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has experienced more than its share of political turmoil and war over the years. A year after setting up the brace shop in Lubumbashi, Jay Nash came under attack.

“In April of 1999, I was almost killed by a mob in Lubumbashi,” he recalls. Neighboring Rwanda had taken control of a large part of the Congo and their advancing troops were nearing the edge of Lubumbashi. Local residents were convinced that the United States was behind the invasion. “Paranoia about expatriate ‘spies’ was widespread,” Nash says.

Nash was driving out to check up on one of his young StandProud recipients who lived in a university dormitory.

“I had only been there 10 minutes when I was surrounded by a large, hostile mob who expressed their intention to kill me. Thanks to a few brave students who protected me from the others, I made it into the girls’ dormitory with its lockable front door. As the crowd grew outside and tried to break in, it seemed like the end might be near.”

Nash was terrified and while students hid him in a dark back room he had time to think final thoughts. “One of my regrets was that I had a list of a few kids with disabilities in my head that I had not gotten around to helping and now there would be no one to see that they got helped.”

In the early morning hours, some students led him safely out of the dorm after the crowd had broken up.

He made a decision that night. “If there was something you thought needed to be done,” he says, “don’t wait to do it, since there are no guarantees that tomorrow you’ll be able to.”

Nash did not flee the Congo after that violence. He poured more energy and money into the two brace shops.

When USAID moved Nash to the capital city of Kinshasa, his staff in Lubumbashi wanted to continue helping the local youth, so he agreed to send them a weekly budget and they continued servicing new beneficiaries. In 2001, his family helped him create a tax-exempt charity registered in Ohio called the International Polio Victims Response Committee. It was later renamed “StandProud.”

As an NGO that could accept donations, they expanded to Bunia, Butembo, Goma and Kalemie, cities in the Democratic Republic of Congo where he regularly traveled for his work with USAID. 26

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FIGHTING DISCRIMINATION

When he was honored by an association of NGOs in Washington, D.C. with InterAction’s Disability Inclusion Award last year, Nash spoke about how people ostracize polio’s young victims.

“I think in particular of one young man in Kinshasa, Djo Pono, who hopped everywhere on one leg, the other having become unusable as the result of an accident at age nine.” Djo Pono confided to Nash how his neighbors treated him. “He told me that people in the neighborhood called him ‘Frog’ because of the hopping, and even mimicked him when he went through the neighborhood.

“Other children and youth who wear leg braces and use crutches to facilitate their mobility are often nicknamed ‘robots’ by their peers.”

Most of these disabled children were not even in school, which is expensive. According to Nash, “Most parents prioritized their other children, having jumped to the conclusion that their children with disabilities would never play much of a role in society.”

Those disabled children whose parents could pay for their education shunted them off to trade schools to learn handicrafts.

“While there is nothing wrong with handicrafts as a profession,” Jay says his staff lets them make their own decisions..

MAINSTREAMING IN DRC CONGO

StandProud began financing the integration of children with disabilities into Congo’s public school system. Nash says they quickly see their intellectual potential. “When they start the program, many of the children’s expectations of themselves are to become tailors or cobblers, following societal stereotypes of suitable occupations for people with disabilities. Shortly after mainstreaming in regular schools, they begin talking about becoming doctors and lawyers, a goal which some of them have already achieved.”

StandProud cites an example. Young Mashila used to crawl to school on his hands and knees. He envied those students with braces and crutches his family couldn’t afford. Under the care of StandProud, Mashila entered a Congo secondary school where he studied electronics and now has a side job as a barber, goes dancing with friends, and plays soccer. Mashila calls it “happiness that surpasses anything else in my life.”

Twenty years after almost dying at the hands of an angry mob, Nash spends little time at diplomatic soirees or luxury beach resorts. Au contraire! He feels most at home hanging out at one of the StandProud Centers, spending time with those who he works with and has served.

With Congolese music blaring, Nash joins their parties. In fact, he loves joining them in whatever activity they do, dancing, running, playing soccer.

“I enjoy working with them a lot and have known them since they were a good deal younger, so it’s been fun watching them grow.

Watching someone walk for the first time since early childhood is always a special thrill.” 1 Kitty Thuermer grew up overseas, served in Peace Corps Mali from 1977 to 1979, and

has written for The Washington Post, among other publications.

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BENIN

The Volunteer Who Stayed Twenty years creating forest and family in Benin

BY C. RYAN SMITH

Photo by Ryan Smith

M

y life in Africa began on the evening of June 5, 1998 when I arrived in Cotonou, the economic capital and port city for the Republic of Benin. I recall seeing small lights flickering across the city as we circled for landing, as if tiny fires had been sprinkled around the town from above. Those were thousands of small, homemade kerosene lanterns where women sat selling food and wares by the roadsides.

I also remember the warm humid air that invaded the cold airplane when they opened the doors, and that the Americans meeting me were right there on the tarmac waiting as I descended the stairway.

Security concerns were still some years away.

I journeyed to Benin as a Peace Corps environmental action and community forestry volunteer, a two-year and three-month commitment I had made to the U.S. government, to my family in Lithia Springs, Georgia, and to Benin. To be completely honest 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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Abidatou and Yon Judith flopped down in the Sabi Goura clan’s corn crop harvested during the 2017 school break. Their mothers are among more than a dozen clan children raised by Smith.

about it, I think I was just looking for an adventure.

I also wanted to fulfill a promise I had made to my father in the early 1990s when I was still a student at Emory University, that I would do something “different” and “interesting” elsewhere. Dad died in 1995, my graduation year, and by 1998 I was asking myself, “What now?”

A major Georgia conservation alliance offered me a job as a fulltime lobbyist, a terrific opportunity that spelled out a high-profile career, nice enough income, mingling with the powerful, a go-go lifestyle in the big city... and yet, something was fundamentally misaligned. I was 24 and at a crossroads, and I was already afraid of getting stuck in a rut. So I listened to Dad’s voice calling to me from afar and got on that plane to Benin.

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HOST FAMILY CRISIS

When I arrived in Pèrèrè-Gourou I was placed with a host family, the Sabi Goura clan. They were subsistence farmers who lived at Yin Doru, a typical Borgou family compound with adobe outbuildings and a courtyard in the middle. The patriarch of Yin Doru had died suddenly a few weeks before my arrival. Per the custom, his four young wives remarried in different villages leaving their progeny with the paternal relatives. Some of the kids had been sent away to live with extended family members in distant places.

Those children who remained welcomed me to Yin Doru that summer, together with their uncle, Baa Mamam Sabi Goura, an elderly gentleman who had moved in to look after the children, the

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‘Grand Papa’ Smith gathers his Sabi Goura clan each Easter in front of his house. In 2016 they included 14 adopted children whose biological father died in 1998 and 15 children of the next generation. A clan member holds up the letter “S” for Soumanou, who was studying at Georgia Southern University. Baa Mamam is seated with his wife in the center.

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compound and the farm. Baa Mamam’s wife had refused to come with him, so there we were. I had joined a family in crisis.

It took me four years to locate the other Sabi Goura siblings but by late 2002, I was able to reunite all 13 children. The eldest kids had already requested that I raise them and become their adoptive father. I agreed to do so. Thus our family began. Today I am directly responsible for 14 Sabi Goura children. The youngest is 20 years old. I am also indirectly responsible for three more cousins and 15 surviving grandchildren. Four grandchildren died in early childhood.

I raised my kids by myself, though the counsel and love of many Beninese friends and extended family members—and the prayers and occasional financial assistance from family and friends in North America—made that possible. Baa Mamam, age 85, remarried and his new wife and he still live with us at Yin Doru.

All of my kids attended school and the grandchildren are following suit, a rarity in the rural Borgou. I am proud to report that two Sabi Goura children graduated last year from the University of Parakou, northern Benin’s public college; a brother is a rising senior at this university and another is a freshman there. One my kids began the second year of nursing school last August in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. My son, Soumanou Sabi Goura, has been living with my American family since 2012 and graduated from Georgia Southern University last May. As far as I know he is the first Beninese citizen to attend that school. I was present at his graduation ceremony, my first encounter with springtime since I joined the Peace Corps.

Soumanou keeps the home fires burning for me in Georgia, and I keep them burning for him over here.

WHERE IS THE WILDLIFE?

When I first arrived in Pèrèrè-Gourou, I asked what work my new neighbors had in mind for me.

Bring the animals back, they said.

The Borgou is an administrative province in Benin and also an historical entity spanning northeastern Benin and west-central Nigeria that is mainly populated by the Baatonu people. The Baatombu have been hunters since antiquity. Only in contemporary times did they become farmers. Their traditional spirituality and ethnic identity are fashioned around the symbols of the hunt and the close proximity of indigenous flora and fauna.

Wildlife was disappearing in the bush, and the villagers were eager to reinforce their customs and livelihoods. They wanted nothing more—and nothing less—than the return of the mythic beasts of their region.

Keep in mind that only a few weeks before that I had been living it up in my loft near downtown Atlanta, meeting with friends to choose a restaurant or a dance club. Suddenly, I was being tasked by these Baatonu villagers to repopulate their countryside with wild African animals; lions, elephants, hippopotami, antelope, crocodiles, pythons, baboons, and hornbills.

I did not know where to begin so I founded the Antisua Environmental Club, a voluntary association of students who were 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 Ryan Smith

The Peace Corps posted me in the Borgou region in the north of the country, in the village of Pèrèrè-Gourou, two very long, hard days’ journey from Cotonou and a world away.

Only a few hundred people lived in Pèrèrè-Gourou, and no outsiders except me. The closest Peace Corps Volunteer was an hour away by motorcycle down a challenging dirt road. Pèrèrè-Gourou felt like it was significantly removed from the rest of Benin, much less the rest of the world, “off-grid,” as one would say these days.

Somehow, in this remote corner of the world, in this curious village where everybody knows everybody else’s business, I found a home. More than 20 years later, I still live in Benin and am still based in Pèrèrè-Gourou. In this great country I have been blessed with countless unexpected opportunities. I integrated into a new culture and gained new perspectives, becoming fluent in French and Baatonum, and delighting in a society and landscape I had not previously known existed.

I built a career based on conservation field work and community organizing and established a family of my own: I am now a father and the head of a large Beninese household.

Photo by Ryan Smith

had a sanctuary in which the wild animals could, hopefully, find safe haven and multiply.

I would be named coordinateur of the non-profit non-governmental entity set up to represent the interests of the Antisua villages.

Over the years, the Antisua Forest Regional Council would enter into partnerships with Beninese and foreign agencies including the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The participative and community-based management model employed on behalf of the Antisua reserve was a first for the region.

Funding from partners allowed for training and equipment for villagers and the local recruitment of personnel, even forest rangers.

These sorts of internationally funded technical and financial projects, vital as they can be, are always and unfortunately short-term, limiting the development of Beninese NGOs and the innovative endeavors they represent. Our council’s greatest challenge is functioning with very few capital resources.

All the same, for two decades my career has revolved around the Antisua Forest, sustainable development ventures in Antisua villages, and the promotion of Baatonu culture. I have gained renown in the Borgou as the American who gives interviews on the radio and television in Baatonum. These passions form the basis for my current research at the University of Parakou Graduate School where I have followed my children and a handful of Antisua students to that campus.

The greatest changes to Pèrèrè-Gourou in 20 years have to do 3 Ryan Smith chose to remain in Pèrèrè-Gourou as a forester for two with growth. The population of the commune where the village is decades to develop a nature reserve. He taught hundreds of students in his environmental clubs forest conversation practices such as techniques located has nearly quadrupled in a single generation. The setting is for germinating new baobabs from the village’s sacred older specimens. still very rural, but there are more people, more houses, more modern interested in hands-on learning about nature. Antisua comes from and permanent building materials used. A haze of urbanization is the Baatonum proverb, Àn tii sua ya kere bu nun sua, or, “It is better rising even in the Borgou bush. to lift yourself up than for someone else to lift you up.” Our club Partial electricity coverage came to Pèrèrè-Gourou seven years met at the Pèrèrè-Gourou elementary school, the pride and joy ago, though not to our compound. We have cell phones and the of the village. The school was built and opened three years earlier Internet, and the road out to the village was paved by Chinese by another Peace Corps Volunteer with funding from the U.S. engineers in 2016. Some youth are less interested in farm work and Agency for International Development. We used an environmental Baatonu customs nowadays than they are in making money and education guide written by other PCVs in Benin before I arrived. buying things. Natural resources, heritage foods and cooperative We started with 24 students and grew to more than 100 members. ethics are on the decline. These changes worry the elders who do Many were actually young adults who had enrolled in the elementary not mind telling you exactly what they think about it all. school as adolescents. The club became famous throughout the Here in the Borgou I have loved and been loved, have witnessed region for producing trees—some 40,000 saplings. Most of them history and participated in special occasions that few, if any, other are indigenous species that grew from seeds collected in the bush. foreigners will ever have the chance to observe let alone experience.

I have enjoyed the best of times and endured the worst of them, too. I suffer from recurring malaria, am frustrated by persistent INVENTING A FOREST RESERVE Baatonu chiefs suggested the creation of a nature reserve in which the injustice, and I constantly worry about money. Being separated saplings could be put to use. In July, 2000 the Antisua Community from my family in Georgia saddens me greatly, but for over 20 years Forest was demarcated and trees were planted on degraded areas of the Borgou has embraced me. Its people have become my people. that partially intact natural area by students, parents, and traditional They have cared for me as if I were a native son and they have given and government leaders. The reforestation day became an annual me an unforeseen but marvelous, extraordinary life.1 event and other villages joined Pèrèrè-Gourou in the initiative Ryan Smith served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Pèrèrè-Gourou from 1998 to 2002 as with 15 communities donating land to the reserve totaling more a community forester and stayed to raise a family and help to create the Antisua Forest than 8,000 hectares, about 20,000 acres. Henceforth, the region Regional Council.

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NIGER

Empowering a Village A destitute village starts with a school, then micro-loans, then the Rio Olympics

BY HELENE DUDLEY

This is a story of the love and long commitment of a Peace Corps Volunteer decades after that first experience in a small village.

THE BETTERMENT SCHOOL

Despite living just this side of survival, Kabey Fo’s residents told Virginia what they wanted most was education. So she worked with the village and the local government to establish a primary school.

The school in Kabey Fo started small. In the first year, 38 children entered what they called “the school of betterment.”

When a few of them were given a piece of chalk, they thought it was candy and tried to eat it. But they were quick learners and soon mastered classroom routine. Within five months they knew the basics of reading and writing and displayed the same eagerness to learn as children in America. Virginia remembers waking to the sounds of children running by her house counting in Tamacheque, French and even English “One-two-tree-fo-foive” After a year in the village, Virginia wrote, “I watched the lifelessness vanish from the children’s eyes, and a sense of accomplishment move into the eyes of the older men and women.”

Virginia gives most of the credit to the school’s teachers. Alhadji Amadou dismissed his primary school classes at 6 p.m. and spent the mild desert night by the light of his kerosene lantern, correcting notebooks and planning lessons for history, math, writing, reading, art and music.

She also credits Ibrahim and Alklinine, who traveled several hundred kilometers to Tahoua to learn how to teach the adults of Kabey Fo to read, write and perform simple mathematics in their native language. The two teachers returned to Kabey Fo “with a renewed Peace Corps Volunteers joined Virginia Emmons, seated third from the left, and the Kabey Fo com3 image of themselves and an astounding munity to build their first school. Later, she asked TCP Global to help them become entrepreneurs.

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Photo courtesy of Virginia Emmons

K

abey Fo is a Muslim village of about 200 people who live on a flat, dry plain of orange sand in Niger. Many who live in Kabey Fo emerged from slavery in the 1990s.

The average person in Niger makes less than $1 a day, but former slaves have less status and even less opportunity. Nearly 80 percent of Niger’s girls aged 13 to 24 do not know how to read or write and 36 percent are married before they reach the age of 15.

When Virginia Emmons arrived in Niger, there was no road to the village. There was no electricity, no clean water, no health clinic, and no school. She described it as a “tiny village, thousands of miles from any place you would imagine, just down the river from Timbuktu. Niger is a different world—and not just by distance traveled.”

The nation had just experienced a major drought. The name of the town means One Tree, but by the time she arrived there were no trees at all.

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Photo courtesy of Virginia Emmons

An estimated 200 people live in Kabey Fo, a town in Niger whose name means One Tree. PCV Virginia Emmons started a school there in 2008. In the last few years, she introduced a small loan service offered by an NPCA partner, TCP Global.

confidence that surpasses the value of any training fee.”

At 10 o’clock at night, as Virginia set up her bed and tied up her mosquito netting she would greet the men and women as they made their way to literacy classes, responding to the clang of a tire iron summoning them to the start of adult literacy classes. The men went to the school and the women went to an empty hut next to the village chief’s hut.

After completing her service, Virginia maintained her commitment to Kabey Fo, securing a grant from the U.S. embassy to construct three concrete school rooms. In 2006, the first students graduated. The next year, they opened a school dormitory, a former hostel donated

by Peace Corps Niger 10 miles away in Kirtachi, where children from Kabey Fo and other small villages in the region can live while they attend secondary school. When Virginia became engaged to Niger RPCV Brett McNaught in 2008, he supervised construction of two more concrete classrooms, funded through Hope Through Education.

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In the rest of Niger, school attendance for children averages 40 percent. In Kabey Fo, it is close to 100 percent. Over 25 graduates of Kabey Fo primary school are enrolled in high-school and eight in universities. One of them competed in track in the Rio Olympics.

LOANS ACROSS THE GLOBE

I got to know Virginia when we served together as directors of the RPCVs of South Florida. By 2014, Virginia realized that education alone would not lift the village out of poverty. There were still no opportunities to apply what they had learned to improve their quality of life. Virginia asked if TCP Global could provide micro-loans to the village of Kabey Fo to inspire their entrepreneurial skills.

The same villagers who managed the school were enlisted to run the loan program which opened in May of 2015. Their first TCP Global loans were for four months and paid for goats they then fattened up and sold in neighboring villages during Ramadan. All WO R L D V I E W S P R I N G 2 0 1 9

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the loans were repaid in full.

Over the next three and a half years, Kabey Fo received $3,700 from TCP Global to fund $13,700 in loans. Today every family in Kabey Fo owns a cow and every family has a stockpile of grain for food security during the lean months. Now that the families have a way to earn money, Virginia anticipates they will soon pay for their children’s education, reducing her fundraising requirements.

Labor of Love

F

or 13 years, with support from Friends of Colombia and RPCVs, The Colombia Project built sustainable loan programs in marginalized Colombian communities. Five years ago it evolved as TCP Global and now delivers the same

programs to communities in Guatemala, Niger, Uganda, Senegal, Peru and a project in Miami, with the NPCA serving as the 501(c)(3) fiscal agent.

Small loans are a crucial part of any anti-poverty tool kit. This loan program is a labor of love and no one is better suited to support this work than a Peace Corps Volunteer who has lived in the community and knows the language and culture. If

you would like to introduce TCP Global micro-loans to your Peace Corps site, conANTI-POVERTY LOANS

tact helenedudley@yahoo.com. For more information, visit the TCP Global Facebook

page or colombiaproject.org.

Micro-loans are an important element of an anti-poverty tool kit. TCP Global is attractive to small grassroots organizations because it enables them to establish a steady revenue stream, primarily of interest earnings, THE RAMADAN MARKET to purchase equipment and implement special projects. Partners Most remote sites present their own challenges. Kabey Fo differs find that TCP supports their primary program goals both by pro- from other sites in charging a small fee instead of interest because viding funds they can use creatively to support their mission, and interest is prohibited in Muslim communities. by increasing the income level of their clients who are then better Since the TCP Global team does not speak their language, all able to achieve health and education goals. mentoring and communication are through Virginia. Even 20 years Although TCP loans are only for revenue producing endeavors, after living in Kabey Fo, she knows everyone in the village by name there are no restrictions on the partners’ use of earnings. Kabey Fo and is able to take the information in the local language.

We ask partners to send a very simple monthly spreadsheet uses its earnings to purchase grain and medicines to protect against reports of loans issued and payments received, but Kabey Fo has famine and malaria.

TCP Global works with partners like Kabey Fo that are already no electricity, computers, or internet. Initially, Virginia could call working effectively in a community. Because they know the commu- one of the administrators, sometimes reaching him as he worked nity, they are well prepared to evaluate loan applications and they in the field, to get loan information. It was easy at first because the have already earned a level of respect that fosters a good repayment loans were all for the same amount and the same time period, with rate. There are no additional expenses for salaries, rent, and utilities payments recorded at the same time. As the number of borrowin creating a small program of 30-45 open loans and therefore, 100 ers, the types of loans, and the loan amounts increased, accurate reporting became more difficult. percent of donations can be distributed as loans.

TCP Global partners have few restrictions, allowing maximum Virginia is working with one of the university students from the flexibility at the local level. We require that 100 percent of funds village to improve reporting by taking the loan papers to Niamey received by a partner be distributed as micro-loans to marginalized to copy and mail or photograph the log of loans and payments and entrepreneurs. The funds can only be used for revenue-generation. send it by smart phone.

When reporting improves, the village in Niger will become Interest charged may not exceed what banks charge for similar loans. The program must operate in compliance with local laws. All eligible for funds to expand the loan program if that is in the best other conditions regarding the loan process such as which loans to interest of Kabey Fo. A similar partner in Guatemala that reports by approve, interest or fee to be charged, and the duration of the loans smart phone received $11,350, as compared to Kabey Fo’s $3,700 in the same period, and issued $48,000 in loans. are made at the local level.

As a small organization, TCP Global has the flexibility that An essential attribute of the TCP Global micro-loan program is the nature of relationships within the organization. The standard allows partners to pace their own growth and to adapt the program management pyramid suggests the base supporting the top, but TCP to local conditions. And, like Virginia’s work in Kabey Fo, it is always Global overturns that concept and focuses on helping the grassroots a labor of love. 1 organization and the borrowers at the base of the pyramid to be Helene Ballmann Dudley served as an urban community development volunteer in successful in a sustainable way. This bottom-up approach requires Barranquilla, Colombia from 1968 to 1970 and as a small business development volunin Presov, Slovakia from 1997 to 1999. She is a founding member of The Colombia creativity and flexibility and also the cultural awareness acquired teer Project -TCP Global. The Colombia Project received NPCA’s 2003 Loret Miller Ruppe Award and Helene received Peace Corps’ 2013 Lillian Carter Award.

by RPCVs who served in the region.

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T R AV E L

The Places I’ve Been The art of traveling far, going alone

I

BY TIMOTHY CARROLL

can distinguish three different eras in my life on the road. The first focused on Getting the Furthest with the Most Stops at the Least Cost. My first overseas adventure started in 1956 thanks to Icelandic Air and Holland-American ships both offering dirt cheap student fares. We were contemptuous of that new book, Europe on $5 a Day. Why, we puzzled, would anyone spend that much money? There were great hostels for $1 a night, hearty meals the same. So that philosophy was pretty well settled by the time I arrived in Nigeria on New Year’s Day, 1965 as a freshly minted Peace Corps Volunteer.

It wasn’t long before we knew how to “dash” the railroad guy who would permit us to sleep in the “Post” car on top of reasonably comfortable mail bags anywhere Nigerian Rail was headed, or hitch a ride with lingering ex-pats to any corner of the nascent Republic.

Midway through my tour, PC/Washington sent me to Ethiopia to which I added a swing down the continent to South Africa by boat and returned north to the Congo by train and then boat, back to Lagos, and, naturally, the mail train back to my post.

The final orgy was, of course, The Trip Home: Up the West Coast by freighter to Casablanca; a hitch hike to Cairo that included one long bus ride in which I was employed as a scribe for immigrant workers needing their papers filled out in English; free passage through the Suez Canal and up the Gulf of Aqaba after persuading the German merchant ship captain; an overland trip to Beirut; a third-class train to Vienna via Istanbul to England; and home. And still keeping it at that $5-a-day option.

The Second Era of travel, with more cash available, was to entwine overseas jobs with W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

side-trips aimed at stimulating the heart and mind. A gig in Iran allowed picnics on the ruins of that step-pyramid of Chogha Zanibel which was destroyed in 640 B.C. While ensconced at the King Abdul Aziz University in Jedda, it involved trekking into the heartland of Saudi Arabia to “liberate” pieces of one of the locomotives T.E. Lawrence had blown up, laying in the sands the other side of Mecca (via The Christian By-pass). It also included having Aggie Grey, who was author James Michener’s model for

for some cherry pie. After the pie, I flew to Spain, then Greece, arriving a day before work began in Jidda. The cost was considerably more than $5 per day but was the kind of safari for the young and able adventurers for whom sleep, food, and energy never seemed to be an issue. I confess that I reverted to earlier habits when riding in 1962 on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Vladivostok to Moscow, paying for my travel by trading Kennedy half-dollars with fellow passengers for the far more valuable rubles.

PHASE THREE: THE CONCIERGE

This third phase carries a serious level of difficulty when getting into the remaining countries on my list. Call it: Engaging Others.

I thought I had found the best approach to this by badgering friends-of-friends assigned to Hard-to-Fill Embassy posts in places like Central Asia, West Africa and various, increasingly numerous war-torn countries. The best of those contacts were modestly helpful.

But, of late, I’ve settled on a far better approach: I book into a 4-star hotel, but not Travelling alone and with those 5-stars which are an an undying interest in the embarrassment, as is this lives of others, I continue whole business of inflating toward the last of this life- “stars.” Once unpacked, I make an endearing friend of the long quest: visiting each of the 193 countries with a concierge. If there is a team, vote in the United Nations. take some time to choose the one with the most interest in a challenge. Of course, carefully Bloody Mary in South Pacific, bake my 29th applied baksheesh may need to be part of the package, but not until the game is afoot. birthday cake in Western Samoa.

For instance, my embassy contacts had Perhaps this is a better example. I finished warned that Djibouti was off limits, and a job in Ahwaz, Iran in May 1970 and was not scheduled to start another in Jidda, Saudi Somaliland was definitely a no-no. In an Arabia, until October. My choice was to take earlier era I might have taken a pass but at a two-hour plane ride between the two or go my age one doesn’t have time to follow all the due east to Afghanistan, India, and Southeast rules. So, I booked into the Hilton in Doha Asia on a route that included Australia, Tahiti, where I passed some time seeing how vast Easter Island, and Chile. From there I took sums of money can be ill-spent in designing a train over the Andes to Buenos Aires, a extraordinary ways of ruining our planet. boat to Uruguay, a plane to La Paz, a train to After engaging each of the four concierges, Lake Titicaca, an overnight steamer to Peru, I judged Marcellus, a brilliant young Ibo a bus to Machu Picchu, a plane to Bogota, from the Eastern region of Nigeria, to likely a bus up thru Central America, and finally be the most helpful. home by plane to Traverse City, Michigan I explained not only my need to go to WO R L D V I E W S P R I N G 2 0 1 9

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T R AV E L

THE COMPETITION

You may have noted at the beginning of this third phase of my travel life the mention of 34

S P R I N G 2 0 1 9 WO R L D V I E W

 Timothy Carroll recently hiked to Bhutan’s Tiger’s Nest to cap a career of traveling to 179 coun-

tries of the world. “I count only voting members of the United Nations,” he says. But nothing looks better to him now than his home in a Michigan cherry orchard where he grew up.

“my list.” A little explanation is in order. In 1966, during a chance meeting with my Notre Dame mentor Father Theodore Hesburgh, himself an avid traveler, we compared our country “count.” It was not dissimilar and over the following 47 years, whenever we would meet, he would greet me with, “How many have you got now?” We declared a gentlemanly tie in 2013 with 146 countries each. Since his death I’ve continued my list.

I count voting members of the United Nations, although I keep a list of “Others.”

Our rules were to have a hotel receipt and send a letter from the country before we counted it. “Airport Only” was not acceptable. Other more-than-frequent travelers play by an assortment of rules but we considered ours The Gold Standard. I have continued the quest with other players, but the remaining

countries aren’t exactly pleasure domes.

One other bit of travel advice Father gave me was always to make friends with the Papal Nuncio when in a capital city. The only one of the Seven Deadlies the Pope’s ambassadors dare approach is the one related to food and drink. “Get on their guest list,” he urged, “They always have the best cooks and the best cellars in town.” When this strategy has worked, it has been a memorable night out.

That level of dining is a far cry from my origins, although maybe by not too great a stretch. Travel came early, easy, and unlikely in my family. Among the first tranche of Europeans to settle on the northern shore of Lake Michigan to raise cherries, we were a rural, one-room-school-house, Saturdaynight-square-dances-in-the-township-hall community. The country church bell ringing 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 of Timothy Carroll

Djibouti but that I wanted to also see some of this new “Somaliland” for myself. His response was the best, “I like the idea. Give me a day.” He cancelled the hotel I had booked in Djibouti, moved me instead to the Sheraton, where the concierge, Mohammed, was a pal of his, and dealt with all the paperwork. Marcellus found great joy in having pulled all this off in a day and laughed that mirth-filled West African laugh in showing how easy it all could be.

I found that Mohammed was equally keen. He hired a trustworthy cabbie with a broken-down hack. “You don’t want to draw attention,” he told me. I bounced around the pot holes of Djibouti, first to the “Embassy” of Somaliland for signed papers, then to a pock-marked building for another couple of imprimaturs, and finally back behind the barricades of the Sheraton, all accomplished in a day.

As an aside, the hotel’s breakfast room was reminiscent of the bar scene in the first Star Wars film because of the array of seemingly intra-planetary creatures, all hovering over laptops, whispering behind hands the size of baseball mitts, deals being struck and unstruck. These were the war lords of the Horn of Africa, our boys in cameo in the heart of it all.

Mohammad drove me into Somaliland where I saw nothing but relentless heartbreak.

Thankfully, my departure from that unhappy place, a fiction created by a complexity of interests beyond my understanding, was only held up three hours because the chief in charge of the barricade had to have an aching tooth pulled.

Another rich source of assistance in outings such as these are the missionary nuns and priests, still busy in nearly as many countries as is the Peace Corps. During the early days of the Biafra War in Nigeria, three nuns violating every rule in the playbook drove me through road blocks and skirmishes to a prison holding a Nigerian friend of mine.

Even to this day, a woman in a religious habit makes a great body-guard.

in mid-week to herald the end of World War II was one of my first conscious memories.

FINDING HOME

Shortly after that, two things happened which may have determined much of what followed.

In the school room was a very large map suspended on pulleys. When you finished your work, you could pull it down and study it. The peninsula we lived on was an 18-mile finger of land jutting out into Lake Michigan.

It was outlined on that globe and I remember thinking, “I could always find my way home.”

That was because my home could be seen even from outer space. That childish notion has always stuck with me, and it worked. I’ve always managed to find my way home.

And secondly, my father loved the AAA Road Atlas, so even before Route 66 was of note, he would bundle the five of us into the car and, in successive years, drive us to Tucson, New Orleans, Miami, Canada, and Mexico.

We made no reservations, stopped at every roadside museum along America’s two-lane

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highways, and were allowed one song each in the jukeboxes of our diner stops. This was capped by my being chosen at age 15 as a 4-H Exchange Student to the largest hog ranch in Iowa. An immersive cross-cultural experience never to be matched.

So travel was in my bloodstream. My high school graduation present was an eight-country European outing headed by my mother; after my Bachelor’s degree, it was a year of study in Ireland. Most summers found me back in Europe, including a bus trip to Russia in the midst of my Masters study. Peace Corps opened the vein further. Travelling alone and with an undying interest in the lives of others, I continue toward the last of this life-long quest: visiting each of the 193 countries with a vote in the United Nations.

To celebrate my 80th birthday I booked a little outing to Bhutan, my 179th country to visit under the Hesburgh/Carroll Accords. If you haven’t tried it, let me suggest “The Happy Nation.” They have chosen not to build consul-

ates around the world to control their immigration issues. Think of the overhead they are saving. Instead, you book your stay through their government tourist agency, pay them 50 percent immediately and they send you a paper which you hand to Customs plus $20 upon arrival and, bingo, you’re in. No standing in lines with two photos and uncertainty. The altitude must be good for them.

I climbed to Tiger’s Nest on one of the more modest of the Himalayans, still 10,420 feet, and declared victory. Increasingly, I’m finding the borders of my 18- mile peninsula enough of a challenge and as satisfying as my outward-bound experiences. And it may not be all that long before I test out the premise that you can see it from outer space.  Following his Peace Corps service as a television production advisor in Nigeria from 1962 to 1964, Timothy Carroll was the first executive director of the thenNational Council of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers; Peace Corps country director in Pakistan, Poland and Russia; and served as protocol officer at the Justice Department. He received the Sargent Shriver Award for Distinguished Humanitarian Service in 1986 for co-founding the non-profit Eye Car, Inc. in Haiti.

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GA L L E RY

Taibatou Women Photos and text by BETH AENELLI

â—?

THE GAMBIA

These are people who lived in towns and villages in the upper region of Taibatou in the Upper Region of the The Gambia. My town was Nyakoi where I worked as a community health volunteer on malaria and nutrition projects from 2013 to 2015. I traveled in my work and there was never a night when I worried about a place to sleep or a meal to eat. I had homes throughout the nation.

Muso Keba is the mother of Nyakoi’s village leader. We ate lunch on the day I photographed her. We laughed together at the lizards on the ceiling of her house. She gave me my final goodbye as I ended my work in Nyakoi. She prayed for me and kissed my hand when I left. I cried as I got into the Peace Corps car to leave.

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These three women of the household of Jallow Kunda run his compound, which is usually crowded with a dozen or so of his children. These women work incredibly hard to keep everything running smoothly, and they never stop laughing.Â

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BOOKLOCKER

A Path We Still Follow Review by Bob Arias

W

ant to know what Peace Corps was like then and now? Into The Backlands: a Peace Corps Memoir takes you by the hand into the early years of JFK’s Peace Corps and the spirit and challenges of the times, 1961-1963. Ken Flies was 19 years old when he reported to training at the University of Oklahoma as part of Brazil II, one of the first groups of Peace Corps Volunteers. I doubt if Ken knew what he was getting himself into, and Brazil? Where’s that?

Ken’s memoir shares the beauty and innocence of Kennedy’s “kiddie corps” as the press portrayed the first Volunteers.

Prior to his arrival in Brazil, he had never considered that the isolated community of Correntina would be his home, that he would be “adopted” by a BraInto the Backlands: zilian family, and that A Peace Corps he would speak PortuMemoir

By Kenneth E. Dugan Fliés guese! Ken paints his Lost Lake Folk Art Books, new home with words 2018. 236 pages. $17.95 and emotions that are paperback. new to this 19-year-old.

Ken will never be the same, and Brazil will always be his second home! He found himself, faced the challenges of being a Volunteer, and added new friends and adventures beyond his expectations. The two years he spent as a Peace Corps Volunteer would be the foundation of who Kenneth Flies becomes and is.

The beauty and charm of the early years of Peace Corps with giants such as Sargent Shriver, Jack Vaughn, Warren Wiggins, and Frank Mankiewicz is that they laid the groundwork for what we have now, some 50-plus years later. The fears, frustrations, happy moments, love of our neighbors, and meeting people who will be our “families” is what Peace Corps is all about. Ken and fellow Volunteer Dave made a path that we followed and still

do. Meeting new Volunteers in 2018 is like talking to the newbies of 1962. The current Volunteers seem a bit smarter than us, but they have that flame of pride and warmth of friendship they want to share. That flame is still within us. I can feel the warmth and strength. Be proud of what you and Brazil II brought with you, Ken. Padre Andre saw that in you, and so did Millie.

As you read Ken’s awesome memoir, remember what Mankiewicz believed in, “A Volunteer’s first job is to get to know the people and the setting of their lives; then the Volunteer starts building a community.” It isn’t the monuments you leave behind, but the communities that are now a part of you.

I recommend Into the Backlands to RPCVs, Trainees, PCVs, and Peace Corps staff.

Jody Olsen, I am sending you a copy!

Ken gave us a message: the Peace Corps community is as strong now as it was in 1961! Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

I encourage you to read and learn from this memoir and share your thoughts!

As Ken would say, bate papo [chew the fat]. Thank you, Ken, for sharing your life in Brazil and the person you became. I read your memoir twice, reliving my memories.

My family is very Peace Corps. My brother, Ron, went to Peru 1963–1965 and I went to Colombia 1964–1966. I believe we were some of the first brothers to serve at the same time. It changed my life.

Tragedy for the Stewarts Review by Peter V. Deekle

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here is a story in each of us, often more than one. In Ruben Gonzales’s case, he demonstrates a strong capacity for storytelling.

Drawing on his keen powers of observation and, indeed, an individual immersion in a culture honed by his Peace Corps experience in Liberia, he tells a compelling story of the

multi-generational Stewart family.

Ruben’s story is really a sweeping saga of a multi-generational family in the Carolinas from the opening of the Civil War and into the early twentieth century.

The tale’s central character, Martha Stewart, is the unusually determined and committed oldest daughter of the Scots Grove Plantation owner John Stewart. Martha must contend with the prevailing social mores of the time concerning a woman’s place in society. She does this with a fierce and persistent determination to champion the rights of enslaved people even as her husband, Captain Harold Thorpe, serves as an officer of the Confederacy during the war and post-war Union army imprisonment that renders him severally The Cottage On the mentally impaired. His Bay: Family Saga condition ultimately of Scots Grove prompts Mar tha Plantation by the Sea toward a committed in the Carolinas romantic relationship

By Ruben Gonzales Moonshine Cove Pubwith James, a freed lishing, 2018. 282 pages. slave and carpenter $14.99 paperback, $6.99 on her family’s planKindle. tation. The book’s title refers to the cottage beyond the plantation mansion where Martha is exiled following the birth of her only son, Randall, from her union with James.

Gonzales uses the voices of family narrators, Martha’s nephew Francis, and a former slave, Violet, to adroitly convey the personal circumstances and impressions surrounding the rapidly advancing changes in relations among the races after Emancipation. This literary convention supplies both differing perspectives and welcome historical background associated with the fictional events in Martha’s life. A helpful and needed “Principal Characters” list provides the reader with identity guidance throughout the novel.

It is difficult to find a tangible triumph amid the tragedies that confront the Stewart family. Yet the author describes a pervasive strength possessed by both Martha and her

Editor’s Note: These reviews previously appeared on Peace Corps

are reprinted here with permission, sometimes in excerpts of the orig-

Worldwide, edited by author John Coyne and designer and editor Mar-

inal review. See peacecorpsworldwide.org. If you order from Amazon,

ian Haley Beil who served in Ethiopia beginning in 1962. These reviews

Peace Corps Worldwide receives a small sales commission.

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father. Surrounding them are carefully drawn portraits of family members, freed slaves, and the many events that challenge them all.

Despite her withdrawal from the daily life of the manor house, Martha remains connected in her extended family as well as the formerly enslaved plantation community. The connections include her practice of ministering to the sick with herbal medicines and also her ambition to open a school for local black children in the Scots Grove mansion house after her father dies.

The broad appeal of this novel relies on its capacity to interweave a storyline involving multiple characters and events with references to both imagined and actual occurrences in the region. This appeal engages the reader from the novel’s opening chapter to its conclusion. The Cottage on the Bay demonstrates Ruben Gonzales’s talent as a practiced observer of human nature in an historical context.

Lorenzo, Margarita and Licha Review by Bob Arias

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his is not the first book I have reviewed written by “traveler” Lawrence Lihosit.

Lihosit and his Mejicana wife Margarita and her sister Licha, took me to Mexico City and the wedding of friends in Jesus Was Arrested in Mexico City and Missed the Wedding. Who can turn away from Travels in South Jesus being arrested America and not making it to

By Lawrence F. Lihosit CreateSpace, 2017. the wedding? I was Second edition, hooked.

418 pages. $22.95 in Travels in South paperback.

America is not a quick tour of South America. This is not Lorenzo’s style. He, Margarita, and Licha feel they are home among new friends in exciting environments. Go with them as they explore Quito, meet the Incas, and share a bus ride with a goat and some chickens. This is the way to travel. Pack a copy of the book, add

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your own events!

Lorenzo, as Latinos called him, knows Latin America, speaks Spanish as a native, and is accompanied by a wife that makes for exciting travels, as long as Licha and she can do some window shopping! These two are awesome “hermanos” for traveling and having the best of times.

Unlike most travelogues, the Lihosit team maps out the entire route they will take, and how they plan to enjoy the beauty of what South America offers. They read and learn about the cultures they plan to experience, foods they will encounter, living conditions, and means of transportation. I was very impressed how thoroughly they planned their itinerary; travel agencies cannot out-do the Lihosits!

Their travel takes them from the comforts of Arizona to the quien sabe of South America: Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. I hope book three takes us to the beauty and charm of Colombia and Paraguay, worlds unto themselves. There is a book three, correct?

I related with them in Ecuador, especially Otavalo where I spent my honeymoon during my first year as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Colombia. It brought back great memories of trying out my Quechua, or as we heard it, Queeechua! That was the best honeymoon I have ever been on! Eating Cuy--guinea pigs? Ouch!

Lorenzo, his wife, and her sister create awesome memories in Ecuador as they make their way to Peru, Bolivia, home of the Incas.

Then off to Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay.

Read this travel book if you plan a trip to any country on the list as a “bible” of what to do, where to do it, and how. Carry Travel in South America in the same way that many seasoned travelers keep Lonely Planet guides wherever they go. Lorenzo brings more detail with smiles along the road. I would like to have companions like Margarita and Licha on my next trip.

Mexico goes with the team on this trip or as Lorenzo says, “My house is your house, Mi casa es su casa.” The Vatos in East Los Angeles have their own twist…”Mi casa no es su casa…My house is not your house!”

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The East Los Angeles plaque hangs by my door here in Panama where I now live.

The pen sketches throughout the book add a charm that I did not expect. They tend to be stories by themselves. Are they available as a free-standing collection? Lorenzo has talent as an artist.

Read Lihosit’s colorful travelogue and share the joy to see South America from a Gringo who loves the people and their cultures. Keep a copy with you and take notes as you follow their path. Remember, this is a travelers bible. As Lorenzo shared it with us, you will also make friends along the way even if you do not speak Queeechua.

Joy of Language Review by Kathleen Coskran

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en Berman is in love with language. His melodious triptychs on life lived and remembered are so seductive that I began to wonder if his name wasn’t some sort of three-part word play: Ben enclosed in (or freed from) BErmaN, or the man in his surname scrolling out mythic memory of the life of one man. I googled him to reassure myself that he was, in fact, a single human being and not an allegorical creation. That’s how enticing this slender volume is.

Then Again is a collection of three-paragraph narratives that could be called prose

poems or flash memoirs or short essays–or all of these. The one-word title of each of the 42 pieces,from “Breaks” and “Tears” to “Notes” and “Rests,” alerts you to not only to the richness and multiple meanings of each single word title but also leads you seamlessly into a longer story that Then Again emerges from piecing

By Ben Berman these words together.

Vine Leaves Press, The joy in lan58 pages. $9.99 pre-order guage is only one of in paperback. the pleasures of Then Again. Berman seamlessly weaves disparate threads of his life together in no particular order as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Zimbabwe, as a young husband and father of two, as a boy in high school. Each entry, complete in three paragraphs, offers insight into apparently unconnected moments of one man’s life, but with a weight and body that make up a whole.

These short pieces can stand alone and many have appeared in literary journals, but I am glad I met them first as a collection. All are interesting, deft, clever, and moving, but it is the whole that resonates, lingers, and inspires. Perhaps we all should play with the multiple layers of meaning in a single word.

My guess is that like many experiences of exploration, Berman uncovered more than even he knew was latent or possible.

I will resist my temptation to spell out the magic of Then Again in more detail. I urge you to read the book yourself, and discover Berman’s reentry into his own life under the spell of homographs. 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS AND REVIEWERS

Into the Backlands:

Travels in South America:

Author Kenneth E. Dugan Fliés served in Brazil from 1961 to 1963. Reviewer Bob Arias is a third-generation Mexican-American from East Los Angeles. He served as a CARE rural community development volunteer in Colombia from 1964 to 1966, accepted several staff positions in Latin America and returned in 2009 for Peace Corps Response in Paraguay and Panamá.

Author Lawrence F. Lihosit served in Honduras from 1975 to 1977. See Into the Backlands for information on Bob Arias

The Cottage On the Bay:

Author Ruben Gonzales served in Liberia from 1971 to 1976. Reviewer Peter Van Deekle served in Iran from 1968 to 1970. Deekle has been an academic administrator in public and private colleges and universities and serves as NPCA’s community news editor and provides advocacy and outreach services for the Peace Corps Community for Refugees.

Then Again:

Author Ben Berman served in Zimbabwe from 1998 to 2000. His set of poems, Strange Borderlands, received the 2014 Peace Corps Writers Award for the best book of poetry. Reviewer Kathleen Coskran served in Ethiopia from 1965 to 1967. Her collection of short stories, The High Price of Everything, won a Minnesota Book Award as did Tanzania on Tuesday: Writing by American Women Abroad which she co-edited. Coskran also received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Three volumes of her flash fiction, The Pocket Story Collection, are available on her web site, www.kathleencoskran.net.

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ACHIEVEMENTS

EDITED BY PETER DEEKLE

A F G H A N I S TA N and PHILIPPINES

Barbara Settles (89-93) spoke at a public

Veterans Day ceremony honoring both military veterans and Peace Corps volunteers in Ashland, Oregon. She is president of the Rogue Valley Returned Peace Corps Volunteers and was accompanied by approximately 50 other RPCVs who took turns announcing the countries and years of their Peace Corps service. Among them were former Jackson County commissioner John Deason and his wife Ginny, who met during their service in Colombia in 1963.

ARMENIA

(09-11) is president of the United Methodist Women, a 150-yearold faith-based national organization that advocates for women and provides teachers, doctors, and missionaries with health, education and micro-loan services to communities in more than 126 countries around the world.

She serves the New York headquarters as a volunteer and consults on fundraising to non-government organizations.

Shannon Priddy

CHINA

Peter Hessler (96-98) was awarded a 2018

Missouri Honor Medal by the University of Missouri School of Journalism for his distinguished service in journalism. He is the author of three books about China and is a staff writer for The New Yorker and is the magazine’s correspondent in Beijing and Cairo. His book about teaching as a PCV in China, River Town, won the Kiriyama Prize in 2001. His Oracle Bones was a National Book Award finalist in 2006 and he was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

(11-14) is the community engagement policy advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union in Bakersfield, California. This southern California affiliate, founded in 1923, is the oldest in the ACLU network and a leader in landmark legal cases Rosa Lopez

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Fitzgerald Took a $51 Million Leap Inc. magazine recently featured Jennifer Fitzgerald, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Policygenius, a company that has built a comprehensive digital marketplace for insurance by raising more than $51 million in venture funding. The company helps people compare and buy all types of insurance, including life, home, health, disability, rental, car, travel and pet. In the Inc. article, Fitzgerald said “people have asked, ‘How do you know when you know enough to actually leave the cushy corporate job and do it?’ I don’t think you can know enough. You just kind of have to take a leap of faith, which is what I did when I decided on a whim to join the Peace Corps. You can always talk yourself off a cliff. But if you really want to jump, you just gotta jump.”

Peace Corps sent her to Santa Barbara, Honduras on an urban planning project in 2001.

After she completed her Peace Corps service in 2003, she stayed in Honduras to work for the World Bank for 2 years. She received a law degree and went to work for McKinsey & Company, where she discovered that insurance companies were struggling to reach younger customers in the digital age. Fitzgerald left McKinsey and started Policygenius. com in 2014 with her co-founder and former McKinsey colleague, Francois de Lame. of free speech, racial discrimination, gender equity, police practices, immigrants’ rights, education equity, reproductive justice, and LGBTQ rights.

Scott Coppa (15-17) teamed up with friends

in South Bend, Indiana after his Peace Corps service and founded Puente, a non-profit organization making it easier for volunteer groups to identify specific communities for small-scale development and select projects based on data-driven research about current needs of those communities.

THE GAMBIA

Malcolm Velasco (13-15) received a Benja-

min H. Kean Travel Fellowship in Tropical Medicine from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene to conduct research last summer in The Gambia on genetic ties to production of protein and weight regulation during fluctuations in food supplies.

He is a second-year medical student at Mercer University’s Savannah, Georgia campus and was one of 21 fellows 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

selected this year from medical schools across the country.

G U AT E M A L A

vided adult education, youth services and other community resources to over 2,000 immigrants in the region.

The University of Missouri honored NPCA President Glenn Blumhorst (88-91) at their 51st Faculty-Alumni Awards banquet November 9 on the Columbia campus. As NPCA president and CEO over the last five years Blumhorst has shifted the organization’s membership-based structure to a global social impact model. Following Peace Corps, he remained in Guatemala for several years and spent 18 years directing USAID-funded projects on education, health, clean water, and sanitation for ACDI/VOCA in Bolivia and Colombia.

HONDURAS

Matthew (Mateo) Peters (99-01) is director of the non-profit Chesapeake Multicultural Resource Center. The center reduces cultural barriers of language, appearance, and ethnicity in Maryland’s Eastern Shore communities and has pro-

JAMAICA

(64-66) was named Napa Valley Grower of the Year by this California vineyard community. A former Bay Area social worker who helped workers in farm labor camps, Moulds and his wife Betsy, who served in Brazil, moved in 2000 to 57 acres northwest of Napa and planted 11 acres of cabernet grapes to start the Moulds Family Vineyard. He has served as president of Napa Valley Grapegrowers and currently is president of the Napa Valley Farmworker Foundation.

to students, regardless of socio-economic status. Cymone is a sales development representative focused on math, Spanish, coding and several SAT prep courses for Midwestern schools.

Steve Moulds

(16-18) works for Elevate K-12, an education technology company with a mission of making online learning accessible Cymone Wilson

Peace Corps Alumni Scholarship

$35,000+ in scholarship for RPCV’s who attend Heinz College.

LIBERIA

Beverly Sweet (78-83) was selected as the

Outstanding Teacher of American History in the State of New York by the New York chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution. She teaches American history and government at Wellsville High School.

MALI

Richard Campbell (94-96) published River

Stones Grow Plants, a book about how to use micro-growing without using soil. He founded a family business called To Soil Less in 2010, advocating gravel-based techniques in agricultural and gardening communities. He recruited representatives of 11 African countries to create affiliates after one of his GeoAg

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workshops on geological agricultural (gravel gardening) at the Washington Mandela Fellows Young African Leaders Initiative conference in Washington, D.C.

and Youth. Bibee is a medical case manager for the Maui AIDS Foundation.

MOROCCO

photographer who recently published a new book on Nepalese photography, culture, and history, Mustang: In Black and White, in collaboration with Dartmouth associate professor of anthropology Sienne Craig. Mustang is the former Kingdom of Lo. Bubriski is a frequent contributor to WorldView and his work is found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Bibliothéque Nationale de France.

Teacher Jeffrey Aubuchon’s (07-08) 11th grade Advanced Placement history class at Oakmont Regional High School in Gardner Massachusetts has applied its studies of the Marshall Plan, foreign aid, and the Peace Corps to pitch their United Way proposal for funds for a project conducted by a Peace Corps volunteer to build a multi-use intergenerational basketball court in rural Costa Rica.

Justin Bibee (14-16) was selected by the

mayor of Maui County, Hawaii to serve on the Maui CountyCommission on Children

N E PA L

Kevin Bubriski (75-78) is a documentary

NIGER

The Millennium Challenge Corporation announced a partnership with Kuli Kuli

Literacy Hero She started as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala 1988, then signed up for Jamaica 1990 and Kenya in 1997. When she got back home to Carson City, Nevada, six years later Florence Phillips discovered something. “I could do here what I did overseas,” she told CNN when she became a candidate for the cable network’s annual CNN Hero of the Year award in December 2018.

Phillips started a non-profit to serve non-English speaking immigrants living in northern Nevada in English as a Second Language, GED Preparation, computer literacy and U.S. citizenship study at no cost at the learner’s availability morning, noon, night and weekends. Her volunteers have tutored more than 5,000 immigrants and refugees and their families in their homes.

Their students are those who work multiple jobs and cannot attend regularly scheduled classes. When a mother can’t come to class because her child is sick, Phillips’ volunteers make house calls.

A physician in Lima, Peru won the on-line voting competition and a check for $100,000 but as one of the 10 finalists, Phillips received donations totaling $88,440 for her program to help support her Nevada non-profit. The funds will be used to expand her program throughout Nevada. She received requests from 28 states outside of Nevada asking how they can start her program where they live. Therefore, she is developing a video and webinar on how to start her program outside of Nevada, hoping to have it completed by March 2019.

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Foods, a benefit company founded by Lisa Curtis (10-11). The grant supports private sector-led economic growth in Niger. Kuli Kuli makes energy bars from the tall leafy moringa plants collected from women’s cooperatives in Niger. The bars are sold in more than 7,000 U.S. retail outlets. Since its inception, Kuli Kuli has sourced an estimated $2 million in moringa from growers in partner countries. The Millennium Challenge Corporation is a foreign aid agency that focuses on helping countries find homegrown economic ways to fight poverty as one way to battle terrorism.

Ken Patterson (92-95) received the Leader-

ship and Service Award from Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa in recognition of his global efforts to address extreme poverty and disease. Ken is the director of grassroots advocacy at results,an international organization working to end poverty across the globe. The Washington, D.C. organization trains and supports volunteers who work with policy makers to guide them towards decisions that improve access to education, health, and economic opportunity.

SIERRA LEONE

Donald Lu (88-90) was sworn in as ambas-

sador to the Kyrgyz Republic in September.

He previously served as ambassador to the Republic of Albania and as deputy chief of mission to India, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan.

During the Ebola epidemic, he was deputy coordinator of the State Department’s response team.

TOGO

Maggie Fleming (02-04) received the Dr.

Kenneth K Bateman Outstanding Alumni Award from Pittsburg State University in October 2018 for her international service. Following her Peace Corps service, she became a senior disaster operations specialist with the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance within the U.S. Agency for International Development and then the deputy director of emergency response. Her current primary focus is an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  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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