As a Peace Corps volunteer in the mountains of Brazil in 1962, Yale University graduate John Schley shared a small room with 200 squawking chickens and gagged through most nights after closing the window to keep out the chill.
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| John Schley at the 50th PC Anniversary Parade, Washington, DC |
"That's how nutty we in the Peace Corps were at the time," said Schley, now 49 and a real estate salesman in New Jersey. "It was the most important, intense period of my life. It enabled me to come back and live in harmony in my own country."
His sentiments were expressed by many others yesterday as 4,000 former Peace Corps volunteers gathered under a big tent on the Mall to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the program by President Kennedy. Its founders looked on it then as experiment to counteract the image of the "ugly American" overseas, and they had little hope it would last more than a year or two.
But to a generation of Americans, the Peace Corps became a symbol for selfless service, and among its 120,000 alumni are three U.S. senators, five members of Congress, more than 500 employes of the U.S. Agency for International Development and 10 percent of each class of Foreign Service candidates.
Peace Corps members may have joined with the most pristine of ideals, but in no time they found themselves sweating in mud huts in Ethiopia or Thailand or Peru, swatting mosquitoes, popping antimalaria pills and cursing the weather.
But the former volunteers said it again and again yesterday: Their time in the Peace Corps changed them for the rest of their lives. And they feel a special kinship for those with whom they shared their experiences.
Inside the huge tent, silver balloons marked with the names of countries -- Sri Lanka, Tonga, Tunisia -- drew the alumni to the right reunion spot. There were shrieks of recognition, hugs and some tears as longtime friends who had lost track of one another met for the first time in years.
"These people are in some ways closer to me than my own brothers and sisters," Henry Mitchell, 41, said of the people who worked with him in the jungles of Borneo in the mid-1960s. Mitchell, a black man from rural Louisiana, left his football scholarship at Grambling College in his freshman year to teach agriculture to the Iban people, known for their tradition of headhunting.
Mitchell said the Peace Corps gave him confidence, at a key time in his life, that he could compete with whites. Because he had won 4-H farming awards as a teen-ager back home, he knew more about farming than the white Ivy League Peace Corps volunteers. "Other people may not understand what it is I learned there or what it meant to me," said Mitchell, now the owner of a landscaping firm in Dallas.
"After 25 years, we can look at ourselves as a special people, united by common experiences," said Rodger Randle, who served in Brazil in the 1960s and is now president pro tem of the Oklahoma Senate. "We're an educated elite in human-to-human relations. We've learned the pleasures of simplicity, the value of a little nonconformity. We've learned our wisdom is not complete."
"There is something very useful we learned from rural people all over the world: that people come first," David Magnani, a Massachusetts state representative who taught economics in Sierra Leone in the 1960s, told the gathering in a speech.
Like many other Peace Corps volunteers, Magnani said his years overseas represented his political awakening. When he learned that U.S. companies were paying Africans 8 cents an hour to mine bauxite, and when a little girl died in his arms from a bladder illness, Magnani said, "I lost my emotional and political innocence in Africa."
Many in attendance spoke wistfully of the hope of the Kennedy era, before the dark cloud of the Vietnam War. Many applauded denunciations of the Reagan administration. "Our leaders now are more likely to quote Rambo and Dirty Harry than Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer," Magnani said to loud applause.
The Peace Corps' current annual budget is $ 128 million. While that is a third of its 1966 budget adjusted for inflation (and about the same as the annual budget for U.S. military marching bands), the agency is thriving under Director Loret Miller Ruppe.
Although some administration officials have recommended its death, the Peace Corps has 6,000 volunteers in 62 countries. The average age is 30, compared with 23 in 1961. In the Kennedy era, Peace Corps volunteers tended to be liberal arts majors. Now, because of pressure from the host countries, the great majority are specialists in fields such as nutrition and sanitation.
