Early History of Peace Corps in North Borneo (Sabah)1 by Thaine H. Allison, Jr VP Programs Friends of Malaysia, El Chan Language Coordinator, and AJ Grantham RPCV North Borneo/Sarawak I 1962-64 This short essay is an attempt to record some of the early history of Peace Corps in the former British Crown Colony, North Borneo, now Sabah, Malaysia. It is, for the most part, an informal history, based on the personal memories of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) and staff at the time. The general perspective is that of the volunteers and looks at some of the global issues of training and selection. It examines the Peace Corps challenges in its early days and the host country perspective of accepting help from this new program. We also tie in the historic evolution of Peace Corps in the broader Malaysia and the continued interaction of these volunteers with current day Malaysia. Peace Corps can trace its roots to late stages of the Marshall Plan and US Technical Cooperation Administration, under the Eisenhower Administration, and various non-profit programs implemented after WWII. Hubert Humphrey is most often cited as the person who coined the phrase Peace Corps. The American Friends Service (AFS) pioneered voluntary public service during times of war and beyond and provided a basis for how to administer a voluntary government program. Starting in the 1950s the International Voluntary Service (IVS), a non-profit volunteer organization, was active in Africa, South America and South East Asia and served as a model to structure the Peace Corps. When Sargent Shriver was asked to establish the Peace Corps, under his brother-in-law John F. Kennedy, he turned to former volunteers and staff from these and other organizations for advice. Chronicling the early history of the Peace Corps is complicated by the fact that most of the early governmental records were lost in a warehouse fire in 1970. Many of the principals who imagined a Peace Corps and implemented the beginning projects have passed away. Our efforts here are to contribute to this historical record by pulling together unofficial recollections and personal documents from our Peace Corps experiences. In its early days Peace Corps projects were a two-way street in that Sargent Shriver and his small staff sought out countries that might host volunteers. Foreign governments heard about the possibilities of getting American staff and sought to bring volunteers to their country. Add to this the problem of training, equipping and supervising volunteers in a rapidly changing world and the tasks at hand might have seemed impossible. It is clear that there was an effort to get volunteers into Africa _______________________ 1. This is not an official document of the Friends of Malaysia. Several Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) contributed to this brief history but I take sole responsibility for any errors or omissions. My research is based on conversations with RPCVs from North Borneo/Sarawak I and other sources public and private. My primary goal was a short history during the brief time that Peace Corps Volunteers severed in North Borneo, before the creation of Sabah and Malaysia in 1963.
first, South America second. This has led to the long standing rivalry between volunteers who arrived in Ghana first, while the volunteers for Colombia started training first. The Colombia Volunteers were held back so that the first volunteers on the ground were in Africa I (August 28, 1961). Countries in Asia and South East Asia lagged behind but had volunteers in the first year of Peace Corps. Most would agree there was a global strategy to have volunteers throughout much of the developing world as fast as possible. The United States had no representation in North Borneo or Sarawak In 1961. Any issues between the governments were handled through the American Embassy in Singapore. American soldiers and pilots had experienced encounters with the Japanese during WW II on the island and in the skies above North Borneo but beyond a few early anthropologists very little was known about this British colony by American authorities. We might ask then, how did this small corner of the world come to host one of the first contingents of Peace Corps volunteers? In the late Fall of 1960 Mrs. Vera Chok, a native of Borneo, returned to Jesselton(now Kota Kinabalu) from advanced teacher training programs at San Diego State University and the University of Missouri. She had been instrumental and a driving force in re-establishing schools in North Borneo following WWII. By early 1961 she was the Deputy Director of Education responsible for the teaching of English in all North Borneo schools and for training teachers to teach English as a second language.2 During her years in the United States she had witnessed the election of John Kennedy and read about the founding of the U. S. Peace Corps. She was very much aware that many of the early PC Volunteers were teachers. She shared this information with her colleagues in Jesselton and with the British Colonial head of the Department of Education. She became the local advocate for securing Peace Corps Volunteers for North Borneo. Mrs Chok never missed an opportunity to tell other department directors about the program and how American volunteers might assist in their respective efforts. British authorities had negotiated an agreement to end colonial rule and grant independence to mainland Malaya and were looking for options for their Borneo territories and Singapore. Retiring Colonial Service Officers were exiting their posts as the potential for independence drew near. The British Colonial Officers foresaw a shortage of college trained manpower for these colonies as their involvement wound down.2 Mrs Chok tenaciously nudged the then British Colonial government to consider seeking American Peace Corps Volunteers for many different fields of expertise. The British Colonial authorities initially were very apprehensive, skeptical and reluctant. Many in the British community __________________ 2 This section was contributed by returning Peace Corps volunteer, A..J. Grantham, a son-in-law of the late Mrs. Chok
adamantly opposed the importation of American “kids” to ‘their’ colony. In addition to Mrs Chok many locals in various departments also began to press for Peace Corps Volunteers. Notable local advocates included: Lawrence Lieu, Deputy Director of the Department of Agriculture and Jeffery Belton head of training at the Tuaran Agricultural Training Institute. As independence approached the Education Department staff saw the end of the British funded Nuffield Program Specialists who supervised teachers of English. The staff saw the potential to have native speaking English teachers who would not only teach children at all levels but also teach the local teachers. Resistance continued but over time weakened. There was some serious consternation over the issue of British English versus American English, which continues today. Eventually the greater interests of the colony and its people were recognized and there was consensus that adding trained teachers to the small local teacher corps, at a time when demand for education was soaring, was the important issue. By early Spring of 1962 Mrs Chok had requests from the Department of Public Works for surveyors and hydrologists; the Department of Agriculture for extension agents and 4H organizers; the Department of Health, for nurses and laboratory technicians; the Department of Education for English, science and math teachers; and the Department of Labor, for an economist with a background in statistics. As additional departments learned of the Peace Corps and began to ask for volunteers, the North Borneo Government, with the written approval of the Foreign Office in London, finally responded to these requests of the local administrators and requested a small initial group of volunteers. The North Borneo request was coupled with one from the British Crown Colony of Sarawak as well. The first group of volunteers arrived in late August 1962.
In passing, it should be noted that in
2002 the Sabah Government conferred on the 82 year old Mrs. Chok the title Tokoh Guru Negri Sabah, a lifetime achievement award honoring her outstanding services as a teacher in the State. Some PCVs who were assigned to teach English in Sabah schools--especially in those schools where transition from Chinese to English was the goal--used the textbooks authored by Robert Lado and Charles Fries of the University of Michigan's English Language Institute (E.L.I.). An E.L.I. specialist in intensive language instruction, William H. Buell, arrived in the Sabah Education Department from Ann Arbor in 1962 of 1963, where he provided language instruction oversight to those PCVs who were teaching from the Lado and Fries textbooks. In the mean time,the Peace Corps was still operating on an Executive Order from President Kennedy and an unconfirmed Director, Sargent Shriver, who was personally financing the organization on his American Express account and working for one dollar a year. There was no budget or formal bureaucracy to recruit and staff projects. Sally Bowles, a long time State Department staffer and
daughter of Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles , was on loan and she recruited the daughter of a famous judge and law school professor(Hardy Cross Dillard ) Joan Dillard to help organize things. Joan Dillard served as a PCV in Sabah Group I and, later, as a longtime staff member with the Peace Corps in Washington where she was an acknowledged expert in the trainee selection process. As government is prone to do, a contract, probably sole source, was let to a non-profit group Agricultural Technical Assistance Foundation (ATAF) to recruit, and manage the agricultural volunteers. (No current information about this organization is available.) A second contract was let to the University of Hawaii, which housed the East West Center and its capable staff and graduate students to develop a training program for approximately 100 volunteers. They were to arrive on campus June 15, 1962 for ten weeks of training in language, cultural, American politics, history of Southeast Asia, and the technical skills required of volunteers. In addition trainees were to be physically fit, including introduction to local games of soccer and badminton, and able to swim a mile and be certified drown proof. The University had to house the trainees, provide food and logistics and identify healthcare providers to deal with dental and physical health. The University decided to house the training program in Hilo on the big island of Hawaii at its small two year campus. In the interim applications had to be garnered from college campuses and other sources, reviewed, potential applicants tested, an eight hour massive battery of tests. Physicals had to be scheduled at U.S. Air Force bases where a flight surgeon was stationed and a background check had to be conducted by the FBI for each applicant. Once applicants were invited to training, and they accepted, travel arrangements were made for 102 volunteer trainees. They congregated at San Francisco International Airport early June 15, 1962 from all over the country. The first problem for Sally Bowles, and her charge of eager volunteer trainees, was Pan Am assumed that they were traveling stand-by like other “military personnel” since they had orders from a “Sargent” Shriver. About half of the contingency went on the morning flight to Honolulu. The remainder were entertained by the airline with a bus tour of the city and lunch at Fisherman's Wharf. The last trainee arrived in a pouring rain in Hilo late in the evening, tired and hungry and ready to start training and the grand adventure. This was the largest group of Haoles(white people in the local language) to “invade” Hilo since WWII and the group was viewed with skepticism. Who were these kids and why would they volunteer to go half way around the world? As the summer wore on the community graciously welcomed these volunteers. The single male trainees were offered cots in the gym, the females went to the small dormitory on campus. That left five married couples to share a four bedroom house close to campus. Straws were drawn and one couple became house parents for the dorm, the rest drew straws for the bedrooms. One of the rooms was the nursery with only a crib, of course the tallest and largest couple by the luck
of the draw won that room, my wife and me. Meals were provide by the vocational school which offered a training program in culinary arts for local restaurants. Trainees settled in for the training which began at 7:00 AM the next day. There are three aspects of training seldom described. The first was the hunt to create a language program. There were numerous discussions about which language to teach. Malay was a language that had never been taught in America before. A similar language, Indonesian, had been taught at Cornell University. No suitable books were available, and few native speakers lived in the US as far as anyone could determine. The second issue was the physical and emotional evaluations that we were all subjected to. This included numerous vaccinations and questions about our mental and physical health. The third was the selection/deselection process. America had never sent civilians abroad in large numbers before. The president had promised that these volunteers would speak the local language. It was easy for Ghana, it was an English speaking country and Colombia, lots of American's had been taught and had learned Spanish. But exotic South East Asia Languages were seldom taught so it was up to the University of Hawaii to create something. One advantage that the University of Hawaii had was five graduate students from North Borneo , Sarawak and Singapore studying on campus. Three were Chinese and two were Baba-Nonya(see note below) and all had experience with bazaar Malay but no formal training in the language. Using other language text books and a mimeograph machine, language training materials were created and turned out nightly. There were usually 18 to 20 sentences for distribution and memorization the next day. Most of the instructors were learning the language at night and teaching it during the day. By the end of the second week trainees had to make up a sentence to get in to the cafeteria for meals and at the end of the third week they were required to speak Malay at meals. In the beginning there were some very quiet meals. Bazaar Malay3 was selected as the appropriate language to train the volunteers to speak. Bazaar Malay was widely spoken all over Sarawak, North Borneo (now Sabah) and Brunei, and in Singapore and Malaya. It originally developed naturally from the frequent inter-marriages between the Malays and Chinese in the region. This was before self government which then influenced interracial marriage negatively following the independence of the States in the region. The inter-marriage was widely spread among the peoples of Singapore, Malaya, Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei and some parts of Western Indonesia on the Island of Borneo. It formed an inter-racial group known as the Baba and Nyona. This racial group formed the basic "race" of people who were mostly Englisheducated and who provided the manpower for the British colonial governments that then ruled Singapore, Malaya, Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei at the time. ____________________
3. This section was contributed by El Chan who was the language coordinator for the North Borneo/Sarawak I, and other training groups.
Bazaar Malay was wisely chosen for the Project because it was the most practical language spoken in the region where volunteers were to be assigned. Because it was widely spoken, volunteers and the local citizens would feel more at ease and volunteers would be more welcome by the locals. It was the most appropriate, practical and socially acceptable language. At the time the project was prepared for the region, there was no Bazaar Malay language book available for training Peace Corps volunteers. There were more formal Malay language books but there was no language more widely used than the Bazaar Malay. El Chan was studying at the University of Hawaii at the time as an East-West Center Grantee. He was the only student from the North Borneo/Sarawak Also he was the only student to come from the BabaNonya race and Bazaar Malaywas his first language. Also he was a product of the Batu Lintang Teachers Training College in Kuching,
Malay Language teachers Lucas Chin, left and El Chan, right
Sarawak. So it was appropriate for the the training project to select him to help prepare the lessons as a choice of language training for the volunteer trainees. Under the guidance of Dr. Floyd M. Cammack , a linguist who was head of the library at the University of Hawaii Manoa Campus in Honolulu, Hawaii he generated the training materials. Dr Cammack provided a practical conversational book for studying English as a second language that El Chan then translated the lessons into Bazaar Malay. These translations were done every weekend at the University of Hawaii recording studios and prepared where he created a set of lessons for the following week with recorded copies for each of the other language instructors from Sarawak, Singapore, and Malaya. The other instructors(three students from Malaya and one from Singapore who were Bazaar Malay speakers, and two graduate students in linguistics) in turn conducted language lessons from the tapes he recorded during the weekend. The method was developed by Dr Cammack and was based on the language training of foreign languages for US diplomats before they took up their assignments in foreign countries. The foreign language school for diplomats located at Naval Post Graduate School at Monterey, California served as the model. The lessons were common conversational phrases to be repeated over and over again until the students were able to pick them up and say them in a natural way and at natural speed rather than repeated each word of each phrase slowly. The trainees then connect the meaning of the words and phrases and would then speak the language in a natural way and at natural speed. It was as simple as that. This is the pattern of language teaching today widely used commercially and successfully in the
teaching of foreign languages. The Bazaar Malay as trained during the early groups was the most common Baba-Nyona Bazaar Malay as spoken by the Volunteers. It helped them to succeed in communicating more effectively with the local communities in the Region. Some volunteers who were assigned to Borneo later fed back information to the training staff how they were welcomed warmly when they spoke the "Bazaar Malay" as taught by the University of Hawaii training faculty. John Langraf, first in country director, later wrote “that a PCV in Tenom was teaching English in a Chinese school. under a British supervision...The usual medium of instruction in the school is Mandarin Chinese, but all of the students have grown up as native Hakka speakers...Because the PCV was given audio-lingual training in colloquial Malaya...he uses this speech for much of his informal communication with his students and with Hakka shopkeepers in Tenom. If the volunteer goes further afield in Tenom, however, he soon finds that most of the indigenous people around Tenom speak rudimentary Malay, and are really at ease only in the Temongun dialect of Murut. which has not yet been described by linguists...Each of the communities of North Borneo and Sarawak, where the writer worked as Peace Corps staff, offers different speech problems and the local variations are often as great in other PC countries...� 4 At later stages of Volunteer Language Training after independence in 1963, the language used was unfortunately changed to a formal Malay language that was "re-invented" by the Department of Education at the direction of the Federal Government of Malaysia. The language was "re-invented" so that even the Malays had to re-learn their own language. In an effort to formalize a form of national language, the Malayan government in Kuala Lumpur, Malayasia, "re-invented" a formal Malay language with new words that were never used before. It was not widely spoken in the region. The Volunteer Project at Hilo Campus of the University of Hawaii had to comply with the wishes of the Federal Malaysian Government and adopted the new formalized "re-invented" Malay language for the training of Volunteers to ensure that the University would retain the contract for training Volunteers to the region. At this point in time, seeing the impractical usage of the "re-invented" Malay language, Mr Chan removed himself from assisting the Volunteer Program and continued his education to pursue a degree in journalism at Syracuse University in New York where he earned his undergraduate degree.
The second aspect of training was the stress. It involved the psychological tests and multiple evaluations by the psychiatric team. One approach used was a test that the Space Agency (precursor to NASA) used to select astronauts: What three volunteers would you most like to be stationed with? What three volunteers would you least like to be stationed with? There were various combinations of ________________ 4. J. Landgraf, Aspects of anthropology and language study in the Peace Corps. Modern Language Journal 47: 305-310, 1963
these types of questions in sessions with the psychologist and other oral and written psychological tests. Often the trainees would try and game the system. Who was struggling with the language or the swimming programs? How can I help them out? Who could we get rid of because they wanted to deliver Bibles to the natives or some other reason? At the same time trainees were getting a battery of shots for a variety of dreaded diseases. The pain and side effects were distracting and sometimes hard to deal with. There were the regular visits to the psychologist to review statements we had made, attitudes we had expressed or answers to the test questions. Any tooth that showed any kind of potential problem was drilled and filled or extracted. Those with eye glasses were fitted with a reserve pair. Training was emotionally and physically exhausting. Long days, study sessions, stress and fear of failure, physical activities all contributed to the uncertainties of training. The third aspect of training was the deselection process. Almost every night someone would be tapped in their sleep, their belongings quietly gathered and they would be gone in the morning. No good byes, no explanation, just gone. This made it emotionally risky to share confidences and establish friendships. Your new best friend might be gone in the morning and you were left to sort it out without a good bye. Many would worry that if they shared a secret with someone that they might be pulled aside for conferences or questions from the staff psychologists. If your friend disclosed something told in confidence that could lead to deselection, of being tapped in the night. In the end, 62 of us got on the plane for the fabled Land Below the Wind. Meanwhile in North Borneo there was an effort to build about a dozen class three standard government houses to provide housing for the volunteers coming in September and landing at their assigned site in mid October. Peace Corps agreed to pay for the construction of these houses which were “standard issue� to teachers and other low level civil servants. They were usually built in a compound with other government workers and had two bedrooms, living room, kitchen and pantry, a shower room and a water closet or outhouse if no sewer was available. These houses were clean, safe and comfortable. They were built using corrugated asbestos roofing and flat asbestos panels for siding.
Standard House Built by North Borneo Government, Bandau for Peace Corps Volunteers and Other Government Officials
Staffing of the Peace Corps office was also a problem. A director(John Langraf), finance person(John J. “Skip� Conway who later became the deputy director in Sabah), secretary, and a physician(Dr Richard Tompkins) were the basics. The first in-country director was John Landgraf a professor of anthropology at NYU. Dr Landgraf had studied the Murit people and maintained contacts in the Kadazan community in Penampang in the early 1950's. He knew the territory, native people and some government officials. Peace Corps hired him because he knew the culture and had a sense of place, but he was not an administrator, in the traditional US government structure. He had a successful career in academic administration at NYU following his departure from Jesselton in January 1963. Others were added as more volunteers arrived(most notably Dr Charles Parton who served as associate director under Skip Conway). Other early staffers included: David Griffith, MD, who became the Peace Corps Physician in Jesselton. Roger Flather was the third Peace Corps director in Sabah. John Hurley was his associate director, and Gus Breyman followed Hurley to Jesselton in 1966. Gus Breyman provided a picture of the Peace Corps office, a 1966 (pre-Kota Kinabalu) view of Jesselton from Signal Hill. The Peace Corps office was located on the 3rd floor of what was then the Chung Khiaw Bank Building, upper right center of this image.
John Landgraf and North Borneo Students 1962
Peace Corps Office 1962
A power struggle developed between Dr landgraf and a long time state department employee, Joe Fox the deputy director with broad State Department administrative experience who was assigned to the Kuching, Sarawak office. The bureaucrat won the battle and we lost our leader that had been through training with us from the beginning. Landgraf and the Kuching secretary were put on planes and bundled out of Sabah in a weirdly hush-hush operation, Joe Fox. This left the volunteers with mixed feelings, on the one hand Dr. Landgraf knew the people, the volunteers and the country but wasn't a great administrator versus Joe Fox who knew the rules and
wanted more structure and accountability but did not know the volunteers as people or the problems we faced on the ground. Mostly we were left alone by Peace Corps, we made our own way and excelled at the things we could and coped with the short comings of Peace Corps politics. This occurred shortly after our first Christmas in North Borneo, 1962. In early December the Bruni rebellion took place in Northern Sarawak, Lembang and a married couple stationed in Sebetang were caught in the cross fire with their British District Officer. No one was hurt, and unlike the volunteer in Labang they were able to escape the rebels. Mimi(English teacher) and Tom Kajer(Agricultural Officer) were sent to Washington for debriefing and eventually reassigned to Belize. The Bruni Revolt is documented in a film, Return to Limbang and is part of the Sarawak history of Peace Corps, Fritz Klatenhoff was captured by the rebels. After he was rescued he eventually wound up in Hawaii as a Peace Corps trainer. It is not clear how much these events contributed to Dr Langraf's departure but they all happened in the same time period. Once local training was completed and volunteers were sent to their sites supervision was pretty much left to the local government counterparts. Many of the English teachers were supervised by Canadian Colombo Plan advisers attached to the Sabah Department of Education. These included: Martin Williamson; Martin Collacott; and Bill Tremaine. Volunteers were placed throughout the colony of North Borneo. The most isolated was a nurse, Gay Kinard, who was four days up the Kinabatangan River at an outpost. Shortly after she arrived a young man was brought to her who had been gored by an elephant. She brought him down river to the hospital in Sandaken. Several volunteers were placed in and around Jesselton, a couple of volunteer teachers at Beaufort, a married couple at Sebetang, who were caught up in the Bruni uprising in December 1962. Several teachers were stationed in Ranau and Keningau. There were also agricultural and teacher volunteers in and around Kota Belud. My wife, a teacher, (at the time, we celebrated our first anniversary in Honolulu after training) and I (Assistant Agricultural Officer) were stationed in Bandau, now called Kota Marudu. Others went to Tauwau and Sandaken. In December 1962 an additional group of about 30 volunteers arrived including a veterinarian, a home economist and several more health workers and teachers. There was a radio technician to assist Radio Sabah with programing and engineering challenges. The third group (teachers) arrived in December, 1963. A fourth group arrived in April 1964 to take the place of group I. Volunteers arrived about every six months through 1979 or 1980. The last volunteer left in the fall of 1982, shortly after my first return visit. While there is no detailed record of who and how many volunteers served in those twenty years, Friends of Malaysia has estimated approximately 600 to 700 Volunteers passed through Sabah. Of course after September of 1963 North Borneo gained independence and became a state of
Malaysia. The Peace Corps program was then administered from Kuala Lumpur although still quite independent. The focus of this effort is on the issues most directly associated with starting the Peace Corps assignments in North Borneo(Sabah) and not the broader geo-political issues that were going on in South East Asia during this time, including the build up of the war in Vietnam and Indo-China. It was a significant era in which PCVs entered North Borneo and Sarawak events included: the Cobbold Commission investigations; the transition to Malaysia; Singapore's ejection from Malaysia; Konfrontasi with Indonesia; and the Philippines claim to Sabah. All of these events transpired while volunteers went about their daily activities and are documented elsewhere. Peace Corps celebrated the twenty fifth anniversary of its founding in Washington DC in 1986. There were no volunteers serving in Malaysia at that time but a small group of us met under a scraggly tree to try and find some relief from the sun and “created” Friends of Malaysia. Our objectives are to: Promote a better understanding of Malaysia and its people among Americans; Foster improved education in Malaysia; Support the Malaysian people in protecting their environment; and Support the Peace Corps Agency in its work around the world. We continue, twenty-seven years later, with a variety of ongoing service projects that we support in Malaysia. Our general focus has been health care issues and education, particularly in rural areas. We lost two of our members to breast cancer in 2002 and used this as an impetus to start a breast cancer awareness project working with the University of Malaysia Medical School. We have ongoing donations to this special fund and are looking for opportunities to provide additional training aids to help women identify infections early and get treatment at an early stage. We try to use our funds in situations that will not replace government funds but add to the resources in a community. Our goal is to establish a long term relationship with these organizations and have a sense of connection between our RPCVs and the current NGO projects we support. Other projects include: contribution to the Borneo Project to supply native language books to Penan schools in Sarawak (US$250 for printed posters of the “Frogs of Borneo” illustrations from their books); US$250 contribution to the Rotary Club of Klang to improve a kidney dialysis center; work with a 4th grade teacher in New Hampshire who has a new student from Malaysia to acquire books for the student to read in Bahasa Malaysia as she integrates into an English medium environment; US$250 contribution to the Malaysia Run for the Cure Breast Cancer Prevention Fund; purchase of computers for rural Sabah Schools, US$1,000; assist the Borneo Project to create hydroelectric power for rural villages, US$3,000; assist in training health professionals by providing US$300 scholarships; provide training equipment for breast cancer awareness projects in Sabah and Sarawak, US$4,000; contribute
US$200 to the Malaysia Cancer Society; contribute US$500 to World Wide Schools; foster a reading program for International Children’s Book Day featuring Malaysian children’s favorite stories. In total, we have contributed nearly US$10,000 to projects that foster understanding and development between America and Malaysia, our adopted country. In total we have contributed nearly US$10,000 to projects that foster understanding and development between America and Malaysia, our adopted country. Our web site http://friendsofmalaysia.org/ and our newsletter Apa Kabar (available on line at http://issuu.com/friends-of-malaysia) are the primary means of keeping in touch with former volunteers and students in Malaysia who live all over the world. As VP of Programs and webmaster of Friends of Malaysia, nearly every month I receive a request from someone who is looking for a teacher that taught them, or their parent, and wondering how to contact a former Peace Corps Volunteer. Sometimes I am lucky, sometimes I'm not, but I make an effort to reunite a returned Peace Corps Volunteer with someone in that far off place we came to love so many years ago. Friends of Malaysia has won the Lorett Rupy award twice and also the National Peace Corps Association newsletter award.
_______________________ Thaine H. Allison, Jr. can be contacted at thaineallison@gmail.com or through his web site http://ThaineHAllisonJr.com or through http://FriendsofMalaysia.org