back cover information:
Scanlon the letter-writer had reportorial skills. He was a peace, not a war, correspondent, sending back dispatches from places in southern Chile that few outsiders have ever penetrated .... Hundreds of books have been written by former [Peace Corps] volunteers ....Tom Scanlon's s among the finest,
----Colman McCarthy
Washington Post Book WorldI distinctly remember JFK telling Scanlon's story all those years ago, and now his excellent book reawakens the bright hopes I also felt when I joined the Peace Corps. This is a salutary story.
----Paul Theroux
Author of Mosquito Coast and The Great Railway BazaarWaiting for the Snow reminds of the enormous greatness that can happen when ordinary people do what is right and good.
----Sargent Shriver
Founding Director of the Peace CorpsWhen John Kennedy founded the Peace Corps in 1961, young Tom Scanlon of Scranton, PA was quick to enlist and join the first group of volunteers to go abroad after Congress passed the Peace Corps Act. Now three decades later, Scanlon's letters provide a vivid memoir of those very different days-when, for example, Communism was winning the ideological war for the minds of people in the developing world. Tom and forty-four others lived as Chile's campesinos lived, ate what they ate, sang what they sang, and realized dreams such as helping farmers organize to sell their goods cooperatively. Tom and his group invented something vital as they made one small piece of the world a slightly better place---as 7,000 Peace Corps volunteers around the world continue to do today. Perhaps things were not so different then---but as these letters relate, the early volunteers lived in times of gritty challenge, drama, romance and danger in the spectacular landscapes of southern Chile.
Recently I heard a story of a young Peace Corpsman named Tom Scanlon, who is working in Chile. He works in a village about forty miles from an Indian village which prides itself on being Communist. The village is up a long, winding road which Scanlon has taken on many occasions to see the chief. Each time the chief avoided seeing him. Finally he saw him and said, "You are not going to talk us out of being Communists." Scanlon said, "I am not trying to do that, only to talk to you about how I can help." The chief looked at him and replied, "In a few weeks the snow will come. Then you will have to park your jeep twenty miles from here and come through five feet of snow on foot. The Communists are willing to do that. Are you?" When a friend [Father Theodore Hesburgh] saw Scanlon recently and asked him what he was doing, he said, "I am waiting for the snow."
President John F. Kennedy
Welcoming summer interns to Washington
June 20, 1962
CONTENTS Forewords Sargent Shriver
The Need-Now More Than EverTheodore M. Hesburgh,
C.S.C. Present at the CreationIntroduction The Roads I've Taken Chapter 1 Training and Embarkation Chapter 2 Coastings: Introductions to Latin America Chapter 3 Discovering Chile: The Too-Leisurely Life at Lo Vásquez Chapter 4 Journey to the Province of Orsono Chapter 5 Year-End Report: A Respite in the Capital Chapter 6 Fiasco y Convivencia---Quisco and Hualapulli Chapter 7 To be a Volunteer: What It's Really Like Chapter 8 Beyond Our Region: Valdiva and Loncoche Chapter 9 We Have Found Our Work at Last: Río Negro and Beyond Chapter 10 Letter to the President: Catrihuala Chapter 11 Life and Work in Latin America: A Matter of Attitudes Chapter 12 A Victory in Vegetables: The Rupanco Co-Op Chapter 13 Winding Down for Another Year Our Work in Rural Development: San Juan de la Costa Chapter 15 Good-by to Chile Afterword Looking Back Acknowledgments
Maps
Portfolio of photographs
FOREWORD The Need---Now More than Ever
Sargent Shriver
Founding Director of the Peace CorpsTimes change, and the more times change the more the challenges remain the same. Tom Scanlon's motivation in 1961, his readiness to volunteer to go anywhere, and his success now as well as then all help to explain the success of the Peace Corps. The need for such initiative exists today more than ever.
In the days of Tom's youth, some Peace Corps volunteers were motivated by the threat of communism, or the glamour of travel, or the challenge of life overseas among the have-nots. Almost without exception, however, they were also inspired by the unselfish desire to serve the most needy, or forgotten, or rejected on earth. Today the world has grown smaller, but the mission of the Peace Corps is more important than ever. Why? Because today nothing unites all the countries of present-day Europe (all 52 of them), or the nations of Asia, or the Middle East, or Africa, or Latin America. Nothing unites them today, except their common humanity.
Yet too many politicians are driven by their lust for power, too many business magnates by their greed for profits, too many religious elders by their belief that only Christianity (or Judaism, or Hinduism or Islam) can save humanity, too many scientists by their conviction that human beings can know and control everything. In fact, all of these must accept our common fragility, our universal dependence on one another, and (as many have come to believe) our reliance on God who made and makes us all and without whom nothing and no one would even exist.
Once in a while a book comes along that strikes a special note, charts a course, and nourishes our souls. Tom Scanlon's memoir does all that. His Peace Corps papers let us imagine what America's role should be in a new world without order, without a cold war, without strong ties that bind. In a world now filled with ethnic strife, Waiting for the Snow reminds us of the enormous greatness that can happen when ordinary people do what is right and good. This is a great read, for the serious student of international affairs and for the dreamer, the lover of a gentle story about the humanity of humankind.
Tom Scanlon was a creator of the Peace Corps, the real Peace Corps. While his book mentions other founders---President Kennedy, Father Hesburgh, myself and all the usual suspects---it was Tom and a few hundred others who actually created the Peace Corps. He was among the first volunteers to go into the field in 1961. These early groups made the Peace Corps in villages and towns. They defined the programs and projects in the real developing world. They identified the people to be served and the issues to be faced. In the invisible ink of their boundless energy, they wrote the living philosophy of the Peace Corps, and with their sweat they conceived the can-do tradition that made the Peace Corps unprecedented and inspiring.
In his inaugural address President Kennedy said, "Now the trumpet summons us again; not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are; but as a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out... a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself." For the first time Americans were called to volunteer in peacetime to serve their country and the world. And volunteer they did, in numbers unmatched since the days following Pearl Harbor. Tom Scanlon's generation was called to enlist in the battle against "the common enemies of man," and Tom was one of the first in line.
His willingness to give two years of his life to people in the mountains of Chile sent a powerful message, then and now. He chose to face down communist leaders---not by anger or words or public relations or diatribes on behalf of a free market, but by his deeds. By being there, and staying there, and bringing hope to people who thought no one cared for them, Tom served his adopted land of Chile, just as he served his own country and his own soul.
Today when much of America and its leaders want to withdraw from leadership in the world, the letters of a Peace Corps volunteer explain why we cannot drop the mantle nor eschew the glories and the challenges of leadership. In a letter to President Kennedy---which could reach the White House only after passing through channels---Tom singed our souls by saying in essence, "It is the responsibility of every Peace Corps volunteer to educate the American people in their enormous possibilities for doing great things in the world."
We had already taken Tom's message to heart. In a historic first we had previously sent one of his earlier letters to Congress, when we made it the preface to the Peace Corps budget presentation asking for Congressional support. We carried Tom's message, and our own, like a banner throughout the early years of the Peace Corps.
Now, more than 140,000 men and women have served under that banner in 130 countries, carrying the message that Americans believe in the "the enormous possibilities for doing great things in the world." Today, 7,000 Peace Corps men and women are serving in 90 countries including Russia and seven other nations once ruled by Communist regimes. But given the enormous challenges and the huge numbers suffering from the common enemies of mankind, an American Peace Corps of 7,000 is not enough. Mankind needs a worldwide Peace Corps, a universal Peace Corps. It should have 70,000 volunteers or even 7,000,000 volunteers, God willing. It should be the greatest army for peace in the history of the world, and it can be created if only we Americans follow the vision. All of us should commit ourselves to the service of all human beings through cooperative help and non-nationalistic efforts---to the work that must be done everywhere, by everyone, for everyone, and for peace.
How can our common humanity be effectively made the centerpiece of all our works? By agreeing---all nations and all peoples---that we must all unite as volunteers to help the world. Who will pay for all these volunteers? Each and every country or its citizens, acting with or without the help of their political leaders (who are too often brain-bound and ego-bound by their lust for power). If the people don't have the money, the United Nations and worldwide foundations could come forward and help in a multitude of ways. Let "Volunteers to and for the World," inspired by the cry of 140,000 Peace Corps alumni, call us all to volunteer to save the world from our baser selves.
Read Tom's wonderful story. Be inspired by the history, the truth and the timeless challenge. Draw from it the spiritual energy to believe again that human beings can be good to one another. Read and become a creator of the next great generation in the history of the world, the first generation to defeat those enemies of mankind. In the next millennium let us resolve that there will be no more Kaisers, no more Lenins, no more Mussolinis, Hitlers, Stalins or Mao Tse-tungs. Read Tom's letter to President Kennedy, which is as timely in its essence as it was thirty-five years ago. See Chile through his eyes and glimpse the challenges that await us now, everywhere.
Introduction THE ROADS I'VE TAKEN Sometimes it seems that John Kennedy created the Peace Corps for me. I was ready to join before it even existed, so ready that I decided to volunteer the day the organization was announced. That decision---made thirty-five years ago---changed the direction of my life.
The fact that the Peace Corps was such a critical and formative experience in my life was reason enough, I guess, to open the drawer that contained these letters and papers last winter and decide to publish them. I am doing this for my family, especially for my children who love to hear "Peace Corps stories" at bedtime. Also, I am publishing these papers for my friends and professional associates to give them an idea of how I became involved in international development work in the first place. In addition, this book is intended for a broader public: for other Peace Corps volunteers, past, present and future; for volunteers going abroad with other development organizations; and for anyone interested in glimpsing life "in the field" a generation ago when international development itself was in its formative stages. Thirty-five years ago few people spoke about "international development." Certainly I didn't. I was fresh out of Notre Dame, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in philosophy at the University of Toronto. In fact, this story of the transformation of a scholar into a Peace Corps volunteer begins at the Notre Dame graduation ceremony on June 5, 1960, and with the friendship I had with a brash humanitarian, Dr. Thomas A. Dooley.
That commencement was one of the most stellar in the history of the university, thanks to its popular and charismatic president, Father Theodore M. Hesburgh. I saw the prop-driven plane carrying Dwight D. Eisenhower fly directly over the main quad of the campus an hour before the ceremony, bringing the President of the United States to give the commencement address. I saw Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini celebrate the Baccalaureate Mass less than two years before his election as Pope Paul VI.
However, of all those receiving honorary degrees that day, Tom Dooley was the most important to me. He had left Notre Dame twelve years earlier (without graduating) and had gone on to work with refugees fleeing Communist persecution in Indochina. He was a prototype of the Peace Corps volunteer, although we did not know that then. His work in Asia, and his talent as an electrifying communicator, made him immensely popular in the United States. The Gallup Poll called him one of the ten most admired Americans in 1960. His book about working with Vietnamese refugees, Deliver Us From Evil, was a best-seller; he appeared on the Today Show and was featured on "This Is Your Life." Touring the United States, he raised millions of dollars for MEDICO, the organization he created that had established fourteen hospitals in nine Asian countries.
In the spring of 1960 I met Dooley (as he preferred to be called) and had the opportunity to work with him. He was to make an appearance at Notre Dame, and because I was chairman of the Blue Circle Honor Society, I had the task of organizing his visit. A previous appearance had been sparsely attended, and I vowed this one would be different. Rather than reserve a lecture hall or the campus theater, I decided that Dooley's "lecture" would be given at the Field House, the largest arena on campus, the place where pep rallies for the Fighting Irish were held.
Students packed the Field House, transfixed by Tom's stories about his work in Asia. When the thousands of idealists filed out, they found trash cans for cash donations at every door, and they filled them. The event was a great financial success and a moving expression of support for Tom's work. We became friends.
At four o'clock one morning the following October, 1 was awakened in my dormitory in Toronto. Passing through town on another fund-raising tour, Dooley was on the phone inviting me to join him for breakfast and take him to the airport. I called a student I was dating and invited her to join me. As she lived in a dormitory at St. Michael's College, this involved waking up the nuns, and such was Dooley's reputation that the sisters deemed it to have been a good idea. By six, we were in the coffee shop of the Royal York Hotel, where Tom resumed kidding me for being a philosopher rather than getting involved with the real problems and opportunities of the developing world.
I don't think he had slept that night. In fact, in those last months he was fond of quoting Robert Frost about having "promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep." He was obviously functioning on nervous energy, and there was an even sharper edge to his humor as he joked with me about the words of consolation Cardinal Spellman had spoken to him in the hospital after his recent cancer surgery. "Remember, Tom," the Cardinal had said, "our Lord died at the age of thirty-four." Tom had not found that particularly consoling.
On the way to the airport, Dooley gave us a wry lesson in bipartisan politics. I asked him whom he was supporting for President in the election just a few weeks away. Seated in the front seat, he whipped around toward us and turned out the inside of one lapel where he had hidden a "Nixon for President" button. We groaned. Then, with a devilish look, he turned over the other lapel and displayed a "Kennedy for President" button. Dooley was for anyone who would support his work as he prepared to return to Bangkok, via New York, and to his hospitals. It was to be his last trip, and the last time I was to see him. Three months later, he died of melanoma at the age of thirty-four.
Tom Dooley had his detractors during his lifetime and afterward---for using out-of-date medical techniques, for having a big ego and a gift for public relations. Formerly a Navy officer and always stridently anti-Communist, he was accused of collecting intelligence, of accepting help from the U.S. government, of regularly briefing the CIA on happenings around his jungle hospitals. The facts remain: that he served humankind as a medical missionary; that in mobilizing support for his work he awakened thousands of Americans to the plight of people in distant Asia; that the Vatican sanctioned a group to investigate his cause for sainthood!
Tom's life reflected the geopolitical context of the 1950s. He responded to the world with energy, humanitarian concern and love of country. News of his death appeared on the front page of the New York Times on January 19, 1961. Between his obituary and a photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy preparing for the inauguration was a speech by Nikita Khrushchev in which he predicted the defeat of capitalism and establishment of Communism throughout the world. Typically----and persuasively, many of us feared---Khrushchev claimed that the Communist bloc was the true supporter of liberation throughout the developing world. In urban slums, and rice paddies, and remote mountain villages, ideological battles were being fought and the Soviet Union was winning as impoverished people prepared to make the Faustian bargain of trading their human freedom for material progress. Dooley had a profound understanding of this and acted accordingly.
* My transformation from philosopher to Peace Corps volunteer continued six weeks later. I had applied for a Rhodes scholarship and was invited to Philadelphia where over thirty candidates participated in a competition that would choose two representatives to compete against ten candidates from the other five states in the Middle Atlantic Region. Four Rhodes scholars would be chosen from these twelve.
When the lengthy interview process in Philadelphia concluded, a young medical student named Gil Omen and I were chosen, and we traveled to Baltimore for the finals. A reception was held on a Friday evening in the home of Milton Eisenhower, the president of Johns Hopkins University and chairman of the selection committee. Dr. Eisenhower and his colleagues engaged us in pleasant but scrutinizing conversation, weighing our responses carefully and eyeing our social demeanor.
I had good reason to believe I had done well when I was invited back for a second interview on Saturday afternoon. As my second interview ended, Dr. Eisenhower asked a few casual questions about my academic schedule in order to assure the committee of my availability to go to Oxford in the fall. Things looked awfully good as a few candidates had dinner together and the committee deliberated. The best thing, I thought, was that the process was over; the interviews were done.
When we returned at the appointed hour, however, Dr. Eisenhower announced that the interviews were not entirely over. The committee had chosen three Rhodes scholars but not the fourth. Committee members wanted to interview two candidates one more time, myself and a classics scholar at Fordham by the name of Brian Daley. Each of us went back before the committee for an hour-long interview. Late that night, the committee emerged with its decision. I had come about as close to a Rhodes scholarship as one can---without becoming a Rhodes scholar. Daley was chosen and I was crushed.
Had the committee emerged from the room that December midnight and uttered my name, my whole life would have been different. It was one of those setbacks which, though devastating at the time, turns out to be fortunate. There was no way I would have turned down a Rhodes scholarship to join the Peace Corps, and I would have continued my studies in philosophy and gone on, most likely, to a career in higher education. (As for Daley, he did go on, became a Jesuit priest and now teaches theology at Notre Dame!)
The idea of teaching philosophy at a university didn't seem as bad to me as it did to Tom Dooley. I was more interested in teaching than scholarly research. My exposure to truly great teachers at Notre Dame had awakened a desire to share what I learned with others. Besides, I was good at philosophy. I was attending Toronto on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship and, with a heavy summer reading program and an oral exam, I was allowed to finish a two-year master's program in one. Soon I was accepted in the doct
My transformation to a Peace Corps volunteer became complete during a long walk around the Toronto campus one cold afternoon in February. Dooley had died less than a month earlier and my graduate studies, while stimulating, were leaving a very important part of me unfulfilled. The University of Toronto and the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, where many of my courses took place, placed strong emphasis on scholarly analysis of historical texts. Discussion of the ideas in these texts was played down. I can remember the conversation I had with myself that day (we philosophers do a lot of that kind of thing); it went like this. "Let's face it. I'm not happy. Everything here is logical skeletons. There's no flesh and blood." "OK," I continued, "what would make you happy?" "I would like," I said to myself, "to do what Tom Dooley did; to be with people of my own age and motivation, to help needy people in a foreign land."
Two weeks later, President Kennedy announced the creation of the Peace Corps. I had already decided to join.
Breaking the news to my parents seemed harder, a phenomenon so common that the Peace Corps later issued a pamphlet called "Over My Dead Body" to help potential volunteers address parental opposition. I sat down and wrote my dad a letter---to his office, not home---telling him that I wanted to volunteer. A few days later I was speaking to both my parents over the phone from Toronto and Dad exclaimed that he thought joining the Peace Corps was a terrific idea. In the end my concerns that my mother would be opposed were unfounded too. In a flash I applied.
The next step came after the spring semester ended and I had returned to my hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania. A telegram from Washington informed me that I had been selected to go to Ghana with the first Peace Corps group that would begin work overseas---as teachers. A package followed containing the paperwork for enrolling in the Peace Corps, including requests for letters of recommendation. Delighted with the success of my application and fully committed to go to Ghana, I picked up the phone and called Father Hesburgh at Notre Dame to ask him to recommend me. To my surprise, he turned me down. "There's no way you're going to Ghana," Father Hesburgh said. "Notre Dame is organizing a group for Chile and you're going with us." I answered that I would be happy to join his group but I would not turn down the Ghana invitation unless I had the Chile invitation in hand. Very swiftly, it arrived.
Yes, that's the way things happened in those days, when the president of Notre Dame had a special connection with the Peace Corps---though that had nothing to do with the fact that Notre Dame was a Catholic university and John Kennedy was the first Catholic elected President of the United States. (Administration officials and Kennedy himself pointedly avoided any kind of overt or special relationship with Notre Dame or its president.) Father Hesburgh had been "present at the creation" of the Peace Corps because he had been friends with Sargent Shriver since the days when Shriver was chairman of the Chicago Council for Inter-Racial Justice and Father served on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Another link was Harris Wofford, a close associate of Shriver's on the task force creating the Peace Corps and previously a Notre Dame law professor whom Father had personally recruited from a Washington law firm. Most important, Father Hesburgh helped the Peace Corps get off to a quick start. A few weeks after its founding, he and a representative of the Indiana Conference on Higher Education, Peter Frankel, went to Chile to set up a Peace Corps program there. They identified the private institution with which the volunteers would work and developed the Chilean government's invitation to the United States to send a contingent the following summer.
Not only at the beginning, but throughout our service and in the thirty-three years since then, Father Hesburgh has remained close to our Peace Corps group, called "Chile I"---the first in that country, of course, and the first to go abroad after Congress passed the Peace Corps Act. We counted ourselves blessed that we were adopted as special family by this remarkable individual, the man who served as Notre Dame's president for thirty-five years, who is today the president of Harvard's Board of Overseers, who has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, who has served fourteen Presidential appointments and received 130 honorary degrees---more than anyone else in history according to The Guinness Book of Records.
Father Ted became a priest to all of us, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, agnostics, and atheists. Over the past three decades years he has seen us through personal crises, helped us find jobs, married us and baptized our children. This summer, Father Ted hosted a reunion at Notre Dame for the Chile I group, thirty-five years almost to the day after we gathered there for our training program to become what we soon called Piscorinos. I was there with my wife, Faith, and our children, Cashel and Garrett.
* Waiting for the Snow contains four kinds of papers which emerged from my Peace Corps experience. There are "hello-goodby" letters which I wrote in the field and which my dad's secretary, Mary Kiesel, transcribed and mimeographed to send out to fifty or sixty friends. These generally positive accounts describe the excitement and challenges of our early experiences as volunteers.
Also, there are extended letters to my parents and my brother, Jim. These contain the details of more personal experiences and provide a narrative of some of the difficulties we encountered that I did not want to broadcast to "everybody."
There are two sets of talks to new Peace Corps trainees, one about cultural adjustment and the other about our work in rural development. These talks discuss what I regard as the most difficult tasks that all Peace Corps volunteers must face: adjusting to the culture and making a meaningful contribution to the country where they serve.
In addition, there are two lengthy letters to two distinguished persons, the first to President Kennedy. Yes, I wrote a long letter to the President after hearing that he, in welcoming remarks to government interns, had told a story about me in Chile! The anecdote he told gives this book its name, and is quoted in the epigraph. It was told to him by the other distinguished individual, who had visited me while on an inspection tour of "Chile I" operations in April, 1962. That, of course, was Father Hesburgh.
My original purpose has been to weave all these papers together and tell the story of an early Peace Corps experience in a novel way. I have tried to tell what the Peace Corps was really like and to demonstrate that its real accomplishments were different---and even more important---than those described in the success stories that Peace Corps/Washington communicated so effectively.
The papers were first compiled in approximately their present form after I returned from the Peace Corps in 1963. During the next four years I sent them to at least a dozen publishers, all of whom rejected them as not appealing to a general audience. Then I put them in a box where they lay dormant for over half my life.
The papers, intentionally left very much as they were originally written, have undergone only very mild editing for publication. My editor and I reordered material in order to make it more reader-friendly three decades after the fact, and we have reorganized a number of passages---in some case combining actual letters, in other cases splitting them up---to make a smoother narrative. However, we have not deleted language used in the sixties in favor of terms that sound more "correct" today. For example, both men and women used the word "girls" in those days to denote adult females. Likewise "gay" meant lighthearted, happy, and had no sexual connotation. To sanitize such expressions to suit the tastes of the nineties would undermine this book's value as a verbal snapshot of the past. Likewise we retained passages that may appear to some readers today (myself included) as overly earnest. This was done to provide a more accurate impression of how things seemed to me then, a self-assured idealist in my early twenties.
In order to give an accurate description of what it was like to be an early Peace Corps volunteer, I have allowed many of the smaller and more mundane details of our experience to remain in the manuscript---details which one reader a quarter-century ago warned would interest "only Mom." These details and some entire sections may be of wider interest now, because we live in a different world. Also, they allow me to give the full flavor of the experience.
* I know better than to think that some things have changed much since receiving those rejection letters thirty years ago. Now as then, a universal complaint of Peace Corps volunteers is that few people are interested in hearing about their experiences when they return home---experiences which we found so incredibly vital and unique. Yet, last fall as I reread my contemporaneous accounts of those years, I began to hope that this book might reach other circles besides my immediate family and friends. Perhaps some people will be interested in it as a contribution to the early history of the Peace Corps because it describes how things were for us, the fortunate first few. Predictably perhaps I believe it was the volunteers themselves, not just officials in Washington, who defined what the Peace Corps was and what it could do. Also I hope that other former volunteers---of whom there are now over 140,000!--will find the book interesting and affirming. Finally I will be gratified if those who are considering a Peace Corps term, or who are Peace Corps trainees, find it helpful as they prepare to embark on what will be both great service and a great adventure.
One fact I realized in 1963 was that I had just returned from the greatest adventure in my young life, and that may have been one motive for compiling a book back then. In the course of working on this edition three decades later, I have developed a greater hope for it. In rereading these papers after so many years, I discovered that they are not only about the Peace Corps and about me. They are about the rural people with whom we worked in Chile. This was the ultimate purpose of Peace Corps service: to work in behalf of persons who were desperately poor; to share their lives and their humanity. Publishing these papers will be more than justified if it allows me to share this experience while reminding other Americans that more than 800 million persons around the world today live in similar poverty---and that we can do something about it. For as Harris Wofford said at a Peace Corps dinner during my first week of training, "If you have the means, it follows as day follows night that you have the responsibility to assist the poorer nations of the world."
We no longer have the threat of Communism to motivate the Dooleys, Kennedys or Peace Corps volunteers of today. But we do have a continuing sense of common decency and altruism. This should make our country remain a part of efforts like the Peace Corps, and other international development programs, that aim at reaching the poor throughout the world with hope and the promise of a better life.
Over the years I have met many outstanding individuals who wanted to join the Peace Corps but did not for one good reason or another. To these people I want to offer an invitation: Come along and share the experience with me.
---Washington, D.C.
September, 1996work under copyright
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