Winter 2019: Exiting Syria Vol. 32 No. 4

WorldView NATIONAL PEACE CORPS ASSOCIATION CELEBRATES

YEARS

WINTER 2019 VOLUME 32 NUMBER 4

worldviewmagazine.org

Africans Get a Corps of Their Own p16

46 New Schools in Myanmar p25

Packer’s Life of Richard Holbrooke p36

Exiting Syria

CONTENTS

WorldView

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F E AT U R E S

32

OPINION

17 Exiting Syria

For once, Trump finally got it right

BY A MBASSA DOR ROB E RT FORD GALLERY

18 Before War Began P H OTOG RA P HS BY KE V IN BU BRISKI

23 A Digital Option In Moldova An RPCV’s readjustment allowance creates better jobs

BY A DA M L AWRE NCE

26 A Corps of Their Own

D E PA R T M E N T S

BY L I Z FA NNING

PRESIDENT’S LETTER

PEACE CORPS NEWS

2 We’re a Force for Good

14 Returning to Kenya & the Solomons, Better South African Clinic Services, & Congressman Joe Kennedy on Service

An RPCV brings public service to Africans in Africa

29 One School at a Time

How to build 40 schools in Myanmar for less than a million dollars

BY RO BE RT COR NWE L L

BY G LEN N BLU MH ORST EDITOR’S NOTE

4 Art & Democracy

BY DAVID AR N OLD

C U LT U R E

26 LETTERS

32 Africa in the Attic

5 American Refuge, Worthington Racism & What Life Expects of Us

The Hodges give their collection to American museums

F O R WA R D

B O O K E XC E R P T

6 Capitalizing a Coop, Protect Asylum Seekers & the First RPCV Writers Workshop NPCA EVENTS

8 Reaching Out to Washington

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NPCA and the documentary, A Towering Task, showcase the Peace Corps ADVOCACY

10 Honoring Senator Isakson

A retiring lawmaker who sought Peace Corps reforms

BY CARRIE HESSLER-RADELET GROUPS

12 Oral Histories: A Larger Context

The RPCV Oral History Archive saves the voices of Peace Corps experiences

BY PAT WA N D

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BY DAVID JAR MU L

36 Ambitious Diplomat

The wisdom and hubris of Richard Holbrooke in Afghanistan

BY G EORG E PACK ER LOOKING BACK

42 Writing On Edge

The world of Peace Corps books

BY J OH N COY N E ACHIEVEMENTS

44 Stacy Jupiter & Lisa Curtis ON THE COVER: In 2003 fine art photographer Kevin Bubriski spent a month documenting the archaeological treasures of Syria and the lives of people who would soon face eight years of devastating civil war.

Photograph of broken columns at Palmyra, compliments of the photography and Legacy in Stone: Syria Before War, published by powerhouse Books.

See pages 17-22.

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PRESIDENT’S LETTER 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.

We’re a Force for Good n

BY GLENN BLUMHORST

As we approach the holiday season and the culmination of National Peace Corps Association’s 40th anniversary celebration, I’m proud to reflect on your community’s collective impact and how far NPCA has come in the last few years.

Founded by and for RPCVs and former staff, NPCA truly is a community-driven social impact organization, championing lifelong commitment to Peace Corps ideals.

Membership is voluntary and absolutely free, making us a more diverse and inclusive organization working together toward common goals.

Together, we are: Ensuring the future of the Peace Corps. In Congress, we’ve prevailed in maintaining Peace Corps funding at $410 million and passing important health care reform legislation for Peace Corps Volunteers and alumni.

Yet, in recent months, 110 members of the House voted for an amendment to defund the Peace Corps in fiscal year 2020, and a bill introduced in the Senate would subordinate the Peace Corps agency to the State Department. It’s time for us all to stand up for Peace Corps!

Building a stronger community.

The more than 235,000 individuals who share the Peace Corps experience have become a vibrant network of over 180 grassroots affiliate groups committed to social change. Whether peacebuilding, resettling refugees, or cleaning park trails, affiliate groups rely on NPCA to engage members and achieve their goals. Let’s fight for the causes we care about!

Amplifying our global social 2

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impact. Through NPCA’s Community Fund, we empower RPCVs and our organizations to implement cost-effective, community-driven grassroots projects. We are scaling up our micro-loan portfolio with TCP Global and working with Water Charity to bring safe water to everyone in Liberia, Togo, and The Gambia by 2024. But we can do so much more!

Our mission is your mission.

Please advance these causes by staying informed, connected and engaged, whether you call your member of Congress, lead an affiliate group, or return to your country of service for a short-term project.

If you support our work financially as one of NPCA’s mission partners, we thank you. If not, I ask you to make a tax-deductible donation online or at development@peacecorpsconnect. org. Since NPCA no longer collects membership dues, your Community Fund gift provides financial support for WorldView magazine and NPCA’s other vital programs and initiatives. By contributing, you enhance our capacity to advance Peace Corps ideals like never before. And if you are seventy and a half years or older you can transfer up to $100,000 from your IRA to a qualified public charity such as NPCA. The transfer will be made free of federal income tax while still meeting your required minimum distributions.

We’re all in this together, and together I believe we are a tremendous force for good. 1 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.

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

Kenneth Lehman, Chairman Emeritus, Winning Workplaces

Ron Boring, Former Vice President, Vodafone Japan

Dennis Lucey, Vice President, TKC Global

Nicholas Craw, President, Automobile Competition Committee for the United States

Bruce McNamer, President & CEO, The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region

Sam Farr, Former Member, U.S. House of Representatives, California

Gordon Radley, Former President, Lucasfilms

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 Carrie Hessler-Radelet President and CEO, Project Concern International 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

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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 Rhett Power, Vice Chair Chip Levengood, Treasurer Mary Owen-Thomas, Secretary Mariko Schmitz, Affiliate Group Network Coordinator Glenn Blumhorst, ex officio

Nikole Allen Daniel Baker Elizabeth Barrett Keith Beck Bridget Davis Juliana Essen Evelyn Ganzglass Corey Griffin Katie Long Jed Meline Robert Nolan Thomas Potter Gretchen Upholt Faith Van Gilder

n STAFF Glenn Blumhorst, President Anne Baker, Vice President Jonathan Pearson, Advocacy Director Ana Victoria Cruz, Digital Content Manager David Fields, Special Projects Coordinator

Kevin Blossfeld, Finance & Administrative Assistant Elizabeth (Ella) Dowell, Community Technology Systems Coordinator Valeria Kurka, Development Officer Bethany Leech, International Programs Coordinator

n CONSULTANTS

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David Arnold, WorldView Editor

David Herbick, WorldView Art Director

Dawn Cacciotti, Human Resources

Marvin LeRoy, Fundraising

Lollie Commodore, Finance

Scott Oser, Advertising

INTERN Joe Mills

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VOLUNTEERS Peter Deekle, Harriet Lipowitz, Betty & K. Richard Pyle

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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We’re committed to bringing your vision to life.

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WorldView

EDITOR’S NOTE

Publisher Glenn Blumhorst Editor David Arnold

Art & Democracy

Contributing Editor John Coyne

BY DAVID ARNOLD

Contributors

Our Syria cover story in this issue of WorldView comes from a photographer who served in Peace Corps Nepal from 1975 to 1978 and an ambassador who served in Peace Corps Morocco from 1980 to 1982.

Bashar al Assad, an army doctor studying ophthalmology in London, inherited the presidency of Syria in 2000. Three years later fine arts photographer Kevin Bubriski decided to document the ruins of Greek and Roman empires that tower over parts of Syria. His work was published last year in the book, Legacy in Stone: Syria Before War. President Barack Obama appointed career diplomat Robert Ford to serve as U.S. ambassador to Syria in 2011. The Arab Spring revolutions began in Tunisia. After Ford arrived in Damascus, crowds protesting the arrest of 15 children in the city of Daraa were met with armed military force. Demonstrations spread through Damascus, Homs, and Deir ez-Zor. An estimated 100,000 protested in Hama. Assad replied with brigades of armed forces and aerial assaults with cluster bombs.

Then he added tanks.

In reporting from Washington for Voice of America’s Middle East Voices, I skyped with students during the street clashes. Mousab, a book collector in Palmyra mounted a motorcycle and reported to the world on social media. During the siege of Homs, an engineering student, Sami, explained how Free Syrian Army fighters protected protestors, drew Syrian army fire and offered civilians an avenue of escape.

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In Qusayr, Rifaat taped the first video by phone of Syrian air force planes dropping large barrels of oil, TNT and scrap metal on residential areas of the city. “I could even feel the air vibrating next to me when it dropped.” I could hear bombs explode as Syrians huddled under tables and beds.

During his year on the ground in Syria, Ambassador Ford defended Syrians’ right to speak out and protest peacefully. As a U.S. diplomat, no alternatives were left to him. He met with demonstrators, visited the mass graves of protestors and comforted their families. He met with opposition forces as an array of political dissidents created a complex of Free Syrian brigades looking for foreign military aid. He was cheered by protestors in Hama and targeted with eggs by government supporters. Threats of violence were made against Ford and the State Department accused the Assad regime of incitement against him.

The United States closed its embassy in February 2012. Ford served in that post from Washington for two more years but, frustrated by ineffective U.S. policy towards Syria, the much-decorated ambassador retired in protest in 2014. His criticism was supported by official letters of dissent filed by approximately 50 other American diplomats. Ford now teaches at Yale and serves as a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. 1 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.

Art Director David Herbick

Luis Argueta David Arnold Glenn Blumhorst Kevin Bubriski J. Caldwell Robert Cornwell John Coyne Ana Victoria Cruz Liz Fanning Robert Ford Gleb Garanech

Carrie Hessler-Radelet Celeste and Reggie Hodges Ron Ison David Jarmul Joe Jauregui Adam Lawrence Shah Maral George Packer Patricia A. Wand

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 receive WorldView magazine 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

American Refuge Regarding the Summer 2019 WorldView reports on the causes of Central American migration, as someone who has supported immigrants for many years I am not for opening the borders to all. But we do have a responsibility to continue offering refuge here and to support worldwide movements for better governance and infrastructure that allows people to remain where they reside.

An opposing point of view says that we have no social responsibility to anyone. Another says that refugees are a drag on society and they cost us money. Forty percent of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants.

When immigrants do not do well we are led to believe we have to pay for them through tax payer dollars and if they do well we are led to believe they are taking the position of someone native born that could have filled the spot.

People are the greatest asset or resource.

Use them well and they will greatly benefit the community where they reside. Here in Westwood on Cincinnati’s west side, almost all of the refugees who have been here five years or more have bought new homes in nice neighborhoods and have truly helped invigorate the neighborhood.

Ron Ison, Togo, 84-87

Worthington Racism While on my way to Worthington, Minnesota in September, I read the Washington Post front-page article about immigration backlash in Worthington. A year and a half ago, Jacobo, an unauthorized immigrant of 22 years, under threat of deportation

by ICE, left his wife and four U.S. Citizen children, the home they own in town, and a good-paying job as a hog farm supervisor.

I wrote about Jacobo in the Summer issue of WorldView.

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The Post article wrote about the driver of the bus Jacobo’s children ride each morning.

He represents so many other people in Worthington whose racism and fear of the stranger prevent them from fully comprehending that their retirement will be paid by the contributions which the unauthorized immigrants make to the Social Security Fund via their payroll taxes. The unauthorized immigrants will never have access to these contributions.

Luis Argueta, 2019 winner of the Harris Wofford Global Citizen Award

What Life Expects Of Us I read Mark Gearan’s article, “National Service,” in the Fall, 2019 edition with great interest.

I think one of the major benefits of national service would be providing an opportunity for those who serve to go outside their own small world and experience how others exist.

It seems our society is becoming more polarized.

I’m reminded of the words of Viktor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist, psychologist and Holocaust survivor. “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

Probably the major benefit I received from my Peace Corps experience was that I became a more informed citizen who appreciated others’ differences.

Joe Jauregui, Liberia, 1967-69 Editor’s Note: What are you thinking? Do you disagree with something we’ve printed in WorldView. Is there something more to a story? What’s your view? Send 200 words or less to the editor at worldview@peacecorpsconnect.org.

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know it’s still there…”

Protect Asylum Venezia’s doubt was Seekers understandable since all but one of the coop’s board Peace Corps Community for Refugees members had died in Gua- (PCC4Refugees), an NPCA affiliate group, temala’s 1973 earthquake encourages RPCVs to support their projects and the country has suf- aiding refugees in the United States and fered through civil war. But around the globe. PCC4Refugees offers when he recently moved to international opportunities for RPCVs to a retirement residence in return to the field and volunteer on shortMaryland, his stepson Goo- term humanitarian assignments.

NPCA and PCC4Refugees sent three gled Cooperativa Copecom es Micoope and discovered volunteers from the Peace Corps community the co-op Venezia started in to Lesvos in 2019 and hopes to send more 1964 was a brilliant success. in the next year. Assignment can be from “To my surprise,” Venezia 10 days to three months. The Aegean island writes, “Their web site cited of Lesvos continues to experience high me as the coop’s founder. It numbers of arriving refugees and asylum 3 Ron Venezia and Santiago Xit discussed the quality of a wheat showed an expansion of bank- seekers each week. RPCVs can match their thresher for the Cooperativa Copecom es Miscoope in 1964. ing services from the original skills with on-the-ground non-governmental 6,000 to 26,000 members, organizations that provide response services with seven branch offices and $18 million in to the approximate 14,000 refugees who Capitalizing a Co-Op capital.” The co-op’s predominantly Mayan have forcefully migrated to the island.

The Library of Congress oral history program membership now operates as a full-service In the Fall issue of WorldView, PCC4interviewed Ron Venezia after 30 years bank providing savings, loans, insurance, credit Refugees member Eirene Chen (Uzbekiworking for the U.S. Agency for International cards, electric transfer of dollars. The co-op stan 00-01) wrote “Asylum at 30 Degrees Development and ten years of consultancies has encouraged the growth of Comalapa, a Latitude” describing her work as a forced with the World Bank and the Department city that now has paved streets, shops, bakeries migration and development specialist of Labor. It was a foreign assistance career and a series of art galleries. in the Lesvos island offices of HIAS, a leading actor in protection that began in 1963 when Peace Corps assigned him as the first and resettlement of refugees.

Writers on the Chesapeake PCV to start a co-op in San Chen wrote in that report, Juan Comalapa in highland “I’m the only longer-term Author Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 63-65) discusses a first draft of Guatemala. expatriate volunteer in an a book being written by Amanda Noble (Philippines 83-85) at the first annual RPCV Writers Workshop.

Mueller was one of five “I created it as a credit coopotherwise all-Greek team of erative,” Venezia told his 1996 faculty critiquing the works in progress of six aspiring authors. The asylum attorneys and refugee interviewer, “with the idea that four-day writing workshop on the shores of Chesapeake Bay was advocates who provide free hosted by John Coyne, a founder of RPCV Writers & Readers and it should also be a multi-service legal aid and integration supMatt Losek, a co-founder with Coyne of The Peace Corps Fund. cooperative and I think it is port to the most vulnerable still that today.” Twelve citizens categories of asylum seekers, joined and they opened an office, including sexual minorities, built a warehouse, and bought a survivors of torture and sextractor. “Now I had never driven ual violence, and disabled people.” a tractor so I spent my time HIAS and other organitrying to keep one day ahead zations are eager receive volof the people I was teaching. unteers to help. Will the next …we began to plow and to work for farmers in the co-op, volunteer be you? Check out earn some money. The co-op the PCC4Refugees.org web will never be the world’s most site and their Aid Overseas successful co-op, but as far as I page. 1 6

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A S S O C I AT I O N

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U.S. Information Service (top), David Arnold (bottom)

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Reaching Out to Washington NPCA and the documetary, A Towering Task, showcase the Peace Corps

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he John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts counted more than 8,000 people who came to celebrate Peace Corps Day at the center’s stunning new architectural addition, The Reach, on September 22.

The Reach is an extension of the massive performing arts center that overlooks the Potomac River. The new venues provide visitors, audiences, and artists a place to collaborate, experiment, and explore the performing and visual arts.

Looming over the Reach’s new landscape is the 24-foot tall “Blue,” a new work by the renowned New York sculptor, Joel Shapiro, who served in India from 1963 to 1965.

The Kennedy Center and the National Peace Corps Association invited Alana DeJoseph to premiere A Towering Task, her new documentary film of Peace Corps’ origins and global impact. DeJoseph served in Mali from 1992 to 1994. Six former Peace Corps directors— Joe Blatchford, Dick Celeste, Nick Craw, Mark Schneider, Aaron Williams, and Carrie Hessler-Radelet—attended the gala premiere of the 105-minute film narrated by film actress Annette Bening.

NPCA and the RPCVs of 8

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Washington coordinated events in several of the Reach spaces and drew on the talents and dedication of 19 affiliate groups and projects of the Peace Corps community.

Exhibits included a replica of a Volunteer’s home, augmented reality stations that offered a glimpse into Volunteers’ lives, language learning activities, an RPCV photo booth, and audio clips from the RPCV Oral History Project.

Booths, displays and presentations from affiliates ranged among issues prominent in Afghanistan, Colombia, Iran, and Ukraine.

RPCV projects embraced social entrepreneurs, immigration, public education, microfinance, books about the Peace Corps experience, life in the rest of the world, foreign diplomacy, nuclear disarmament, advocacy for global engagement, conflict resolution and the history of the Peace Corps movement. 1

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Photographs by Ana Victoria Cruz

NPCA EVENTS

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Below: A Washington, D.C. crowd of more than 8,000 celebrated Peace Corps Day at the Kennedy Center’s opening of the Reach. They walked through the newly named Peace Corps Gallery, watched performances and films in the Justice Forum or passed through Studio F, where 11 RPCV groups talked about what it means to engage in public service on the international stage.

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Top right: Towering Task director Alana DeJoseph (Mali 73-75) introduced her daughter, Isabella, to former Peace Corps director Carrie Hessler-Radelet (Samoa 81-83) during NPCA’s Watergate Hotel reception.

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Middle right: The 24-foot tall “Blue” by sculptor Joel Shapiro (India 63-65) upstages the $350-million complex of the Kennedy Center’s Reach campus as it strides toward the banks of the Potomac River below.

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Bottom right: NPCA’s president, Glenn Blumhorst (Guatemala 88-91), welcomes attendees to a Watergate Hotel reception to celebrate the launch of DeJoeph’s Peace Corps documentary.

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ADVOCACY

Honoring Senator Isakson Retiring lawmaker led Congress to honor Kate Puzey and seek Peace Corps reforms

BY CARRIE HESSLER-RADELET

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Courtesy Senator Johnny Isakson’s office

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he Peace Corps and I, as its director, first intersected with Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson because of tragedy. WorldView readers know the heartbreaking loss our Peace Corps community suffered when Volunteer Kate 3 Preparing for their 2014 meeting with Benin’s president, Boni Yayi, are, left to right: Kate Puzey’s mother, Lois; Peace Corps country director Robert Friedman; Kate’s brother, David; Carrie Hessler Puzey was murdered in Benin in 2009. What Radelet; Sen. Isakson; U.S. ambassador to Benin Michael Raynor; and Africa regional director Dick Day. you might not know is how Kate’s homestate senator, U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson remains deeply committed to honoring But from the moment he saw Kate’s of Georgia, stepped up to lead a vital reform her memory and making a difference for obituary, Senator Isakson got involved. He generations of Peace Corps Volunteers to attended Kate’s funeral and met with her effort in her memory.

When I recently heard the news that come. I remain profoundly moved by Sen- family, promising to do all he could do honor Senator Isakson planned her legacy. He kept that promise, working to retire at the end of tirelessly with Peace Corps leadership and this year, the first place I the RPCV community to craft the Kate He traveled to Benin Puzey Peace Corps Volunteer Protection looked was at the photo multiple times in service Act, which President Obama signed into of Kate during her serof his commitment to law in 2011. vice, which still sits on justice for Kate. He met my desk to this day.

This legislation extended federal employwith President Boni Yayi Gifted to me by Kate’s ees’ whistleblower protections to Peace of Benin for hours at a extraordinary mother, Corps Volunteers and provided vital legal Lois Puzey, the photo of support for the transformative reform efforts time, going over details of Kate stayed by my side that were underway at the agency. As a result, the case and insisting the when I served as Peace Peace Corps developed and implemented a FBI be allowed to support Corps deputy director sexual assault risk-reduction and response the investigation. and director, and in my program in consultation with some of our current role as President nation’s leading experts that embodies best and CEO of Project Concern International. ator Isakson’s commitment to Kate and her practice in the sexual assault field. It is an Senator Isakson also kept a photo of family—ordinary citizens of the state he was effort that Peace Corps is committed to Kate on his desk in the U.S. Capitol, and elected to represent. They were strangers, continually improving. was inspired daily by her spirit, her smile at first, whose loss he first read about in the Senator Isakson wasn’t the type of public and her love for Peace Corps. Her family newspaper. servant who worked only behind his desk.

He traveled to Benin multiple times in service of his commitment to justice for Kate.

He met with President Boni Yayi of Benin for hours at a time, going over details of the case and insisting the FBI be allowed to support the investigation. Senator Isakson and I also accompanied the Puzey family on a trip to Benin, a deeply emotional and moving experience for all of us. We made the trip to the village where Kate served as a Volunteer, and were overwhelmed to see as many as a thousand community members, many wearing T-shirts bearing her name, greeting us for a day-long ceremony in her honor. The community chose to rename their local school and library in Kate’s memory.

This is truly the heart of Peace Corps. Even in our darkest hour, the power of human connection shines through.

Kate’s death has not been in vain. Since her loss, Peace Corps has transformed its approach to Volunteer care and support. The Puzey family became powerful advocates on a national stage. And their home-state Senator, Johnny Isakson, was there to support them every step of the way.

I personally learned a great deal from Johnny Isakson, who embodied the leadership qualities we all strive for. Senator Isakson was both kind and decent and dogged and insistent, a fierce advocate with a soft touch and a good heart. That is the kind of leadership Peace Corps needed in a very difficult moment for our agency, and we were lucky to have bipartisan allies like Johnny Isakson in Congress.

As we wish him health and happiness in his retirement, the Peace Corps community can send off Senator Isakson knowing that his efforts, his care and compassion for his constituents, made Peace Corps stronger and better prepared to serve our Volunteers for generations to come. 1 Carrie Hessler-Radelet is the President & CEO of Project Concern International, a global development organization working with families and communities to enhance health, end hunger, overcome hardship and advance women and girls in 16 countries around the world.

She served as Director of the Peace Corps (2014-2017) and Deputy Director (2012-2015), leading historic reforms to modernize and strengthen the agency to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer with her husband in Western Samoa.

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GROUPS

A Larger Context Saving the voices of complex Peace Corps experiences

BY PATRICIA A. WAND

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egan Patrick’s arrival in Togo in 2001 remains a deep and raw memory to this day. “It was a difficult time in the beginning, but not in the way I would have guessed,” she said during her interview for the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Oral History Archive.

“I had to learn all over again how to buy food, avoid certain foods, get clean water, wash and dry clothes, and dress (never show your knees!)— indeed how to ask for help in a local language I barely knew. I felt like a two-year-old walking in an adult body.

I’m not sure I could articulate it at the time, but those first few months felt like a loss of autonomy and self-identity.”

Patrick began her interview with this difficult recollection and continued with memories of training, her two years serving in Togo and multiple ways she engaged village girls, encouraging them to stay in school and gain confidence.

While serving in the Pacific, Betty Smallwood (Fiji 69-71) recalls, “If I just broke even in terms of what I did there…if I didn’t do any harm, it made me a better American.

It took me out of my comfortable, middle class life. ….It gave me a sense of ‘other.’”

MORE THAN JUST A STORY

An RPCV’s oral history interview records and preserves the unique experiences of each individual volunteer. The RPCV offers opinions and reflections in a subjective context, sometimes with surprising spontaneity, as was the case with Patrick. These personal histories become primary biographical sources, and in a broader context can be used for harvesting individual stories.

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National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Interviews are conducted

by RPCVs who were previously interviewed and were trained to interview others.

Since Robert Klein (Ghana 61-63) conducted the first interviews in 1997 we’ve recorded and archived 700 interviews. “We believe that the history of the Peace Corps lies within the unique experience of each Peace Corps Volunteer,” Klein wrote in 2011.

“Thus, the goal of the Project is to build up a comprehensive collection of firsthand narratives by those who have served. These interviews epitomize the special character of Peace Corps service—we are part of the Peace Corps project but we serve as individuals.”

Archivists at the JFK Library report that the RPCV Collection—which includes these oral history interviews—ranks in the top 10-15 percent of the library’s collections in terms of research room use. Considering electronic searches, in the first nine months of 2019 the RPCV Collection records received nearly 6,000 hits on the website, ranking it the second most searched collection in that time period in the JFK Library.

Christine Fitzpatrick, an archives spe-

Stories offer snapshots. They entertain and educate, introducing people to new ideas, aspects of life, and ways of thinking.

They differ from oral histories because they stand alone, with or without context.

In an oral history interview, stories and thoughtful reflections can emerge unexpectedly during these broader reminiscences.

When the interviewer asked Paul Milo (Fiji 75-77) why he joined Peace Corps, there was no simple answer.

“I don’t know what I expected, really,” he said. “I was looking for an adventure of learning, cultural exploration, and giving back to some degree. I would say that ‘giving back’ part got stronger as I was actually there. …when you …

Five longtime NPCA think of your students’ lives, and affiliates have launched realize if they pass 6th form math, which is not that common in Fiji, interviewing projects they can pretty much get a job in under our guidance and a bank, or a relatively good job bought digital recorders by local standards. So, you were for members to share. offering something that really did matter in their lives.”

In this recording project, our team has cialist at JFK Library, describes the RPCV realized that multiple interviews taken together collection as “first-hand evidence of how provide diverse perspectives on Peace Corps one of President Kennedy’s programs has experiences. Additionally, they form under- evolved over time. Not many aspects of his pinnings for critical research: Patterns of devel- legacy are able to be tracked this way.”

Fitzpatrick stresses the global impact opment in a country or region, the impact of particular Peace Corps programs, or the role of our service. “I think that documentation Peace Corps played in shaping international from volunteers is an essential piece of the development following decolonization. equation when you are trying to evaluate the impact that the Peace Corps has had on the WHY DO THEY MATTER? country and the world.”

The RPCV Oral History Archive is a growing collection in the John F. Kennedy Presiden- KLEIN’S VISION tial Library and Museum, part of the U.S. At the 35th anniversary celebration of Peace 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

RPCV Oral History Archive

Emerita at American University.

Together with William Mayer, my successor as University Librarian, the three of us established the Peace Corps Community Archive and broadened the collection of Peace Corps Volunteer papers already at American University.

A few weeks later, Robert Klein died, but not before he personally had interviewed 208 RPCVs. As the project’s new leader, Noble followed Klein’s lead and Robert Klein pioneered RPCV oral histories 20 years 3 ago when he heard that some of his friends in his Ghana 1 traveled at her own expense, creattraining group had died. Then he asked the JFK Presidential Library for help. ing analog recordings, sleeping on the couches of volunteers’ homes Corps, Robert Klein learned that several to reduce her expenses. With the advent of Ghana I volunteers had died. He realized their reliable digital recorders Noble directed the compelling stories were already lost; pieces migration from analog to digital recorders of Peace Corps history were disappearing. in 2015 and revised the guide.

Klein soon began recording interviews Before her own death in 2017, Noble asked among his Ghana 1 training group. With interviewer Evelyn Ganzglass (Somalia 66-68) dogged tenacity, he persuaded archivists and me to carry on the oral history project. at JFK Presidential Library and Museum to We created the Phyllis Noble Memorial Oral help him develop an oral history interview History Fund to finance the digitization of the protocol based on Oral History Association analog recordings of the first 520 interviews standards. JFK Library staff agreed to receive that are on cassettes in the JFK Library. and curate the interviews as long as they met those standards.

EXPANDING OUTREACH Klein began his recorded interviews Evelyn Ganzglass now serves as coordinator with what was then state-of-the-art analog of the eight-member RPCV Oral History technology, an audiocassette tape recorder. Archive Project team. We became an NPCA He traveled across the United States interview- affiliate, created a web site on the NPCA’s ing members of Ghana I. He also recruited community platform, launched a social media and trained other RPCVs to join him and presence, updated our interviewers’ guide expanded the oral history interviews to and recruited more interviewers. include any RPCV willing Our team is committed to to share those Peace Corps Contact us at oralhistorypro attending each annual Peace memories. And with the help ject@peacecorpsconnect.org Corps Connect national conof one of his recruits, Phyllis ference to present workshops, Visit the Returned Peace Noble (Nigeria 65-67), they Corps Volunteer Collection at sponsor exhibits, conduct more interviews and recruit worked with JFK Library the John F. Kennedy Library archivists to develop an and Museum at jfklibrary.org/ and train more interviewers. asset-viewer/archives/RPCV interviewer’s guide.

Watch for an RPCV Oral Klein was also hearing and listen to online interviews. History training workshop The interviews on analog tape about correspondence, may be requested. during Peace Corps Connect diaries, photographs, and in Seattle, July 16-18, 2020! reports RPCVs had saved Support the digitization of Since Klein began the analog tapes, contribute to the from their years of service. Phyllis Noble Memorial Fund interviews in 1997, the interHe brought the question to at peacecorpsoralhistory.org/ viewers who volunteer have me as University Librarian cpages/donate. paid all of their own expenses W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

including travel. To make their work more affordable, we obtained a grant in 2019 from the NPCA Community Fund to buy recorders to use at events such as RPCV reunions and to lend to new interviewers just getting started.

Five longtime NPCA affiliate groups have launched interviewing projects under our guidance and bought digital recorders to enable more RPCVs to interview: Friends of Fiji, Heart of Texas Peace Corps Association, New Jersey RPCVs, Northern Virginia RPCVs, and West Virginia RPCVs. We encourage others to join the movement to record our individual Peace Corps experiences.

STORIES, STORIES AND MORE STORIES

Many RPCV interviews reveal the harsh realities of our service. In his work as Peace Corps doctor, organizing for inoculations, identifying health conditions in rural areas, writing and distributing health-related curriculum, E. Fuller Torrey (Ethiopia 64-66) wrapped up his interview observing. “Although PCVs were overall healthy in those two years, we nonetheless lost one volunteer—eaten by a crocodile—while swimming with four friends in a river shunned by local people.”

Stories, even some like Torrey’s, abound and we envision harvesting them to produce new products for education and entertainment. Although the interviews themselves are part of NARA and are open for use by the public, when we find stories we wish to use in another printed or audio format, we seek permission from the storyteller.

A member of our team, Cedar Wolf (Namibia 06-08), produced “In Their Own Words,” a series of stories and photographs based on project interviews that aired at the September 22, 2019 Peace Corps Day events in the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ new REACH addition. Check out Wolf ’s production on our homepage peacecorpsoralhistory.org. 1 Patricia Wand is a member of the RPCV Oral History

Archive Project team and served in rural community development and health education in Nariño, Colombia from 1963 to 1965. She was University Librarian at American University 1989-2006 and served eight years on the NPCA board, 2 years as vice-chair, and now co-chairs the Committee for a Museum of the Peace Corps Experience.

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PEACE CORPS NEWS

More than five years after the suspension, Peace Corps will reopen its Kenya program with volunteers who will teach secondary math, secondary science and deaf education. The first new Peace Corps volunteers are expected to arrive in country in September, 2020 to undergo three months of comprehensive cultural, language and technical training before they receive their two-year assignments.

More than 5,000 Peace Corps Volunteers had served in Kenya since the program was established in 1964. Peace Corps suspended its Kenya program in 2014 and evacuated all 50 education and economic development Volunteers due to escalating security concerns Better South African as al-Shabab terrorists threatened Kenyan communities near their border with Somalia. Clinic Services “Since the departure of our volunteers in Peace Corps Response Volunteer Brian Sway 2014, the Government of Kenya, the Peace used a lifetime of professional experience Corps and the U.S. embassy in Nairobi have to improve medical clinics for the National been steadfast in our desire to return to Department of Health in South Africa. the important work volunteers were doing Drawing on his background in business throughout the country,” said Jody Olsen, process re-engineering, Sway overhauled the director of the Peace Corps. “Based on the Pretoria clinic records management systems results of a thorough assessment earlier this 3 The staff of Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute at Johanyear, we have deter- nesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand evaluated work conducted

by RPCV Brian Sway (in blue sweater) to re-engineer procedures for mined that in-country the South African government’s healthcare resources. conditions support the return of Peace Corps volunteers. We look forward to working with our friends and colleagues in Kenya, continuing to build bonds of international peace and friendship together.”

In mid-October Peace Corps also signed an agreement to send teachers back to the 14

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Congressman Joe Kennedy on Service Congressman Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts stressed the importance of sending American volunteers to live and work around the world when he recalled his own Peace Corps service in the Dominican Republic more than a decade ago. He served in a rural town in that country from 2004 to 2006 and 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

PEACE CORPS

Returning to Kenya & Solomons

Solomon Islands after a 20-year absence.

In mid-October the agency celebrated the agreement with the Honorable Harry Kuma, minister of finance and treasury, during a reception at Peace Corps headquarters. Olsen said, “We are grateful to the Government and people of Solomon Islands for their invitation to have Peace Corps Volunteers serve side-byside with Solomon Islanders in their beautiful country.” The federal agency will recruit shortterm volunteers with experience in Peace Corps’ education sector to help re-establish the program. This first group of volunteers is scheduled to arrive mid-2021. Peace Corps left the Solomons in 2000, having sent more than 700 PCVs there since 1971.

streamlining files and patient flows. He helped write a scope of work and trained personnel on the new standard operating procedure. The results were so dramatic that the procedures were shared with approximately 350 clinics across South Africa and administrators of the National Department of Health.

“I’m making use of all the skills I’ve developed over my personal and professional life,” said Sway. “Moreover, I like to think I’m making a contribution, in some small way, getting to meet and work with wonderful people, and I can’t wait to go to my Peace Corps Response job every day. It’s a great feeling. Life away from home isn’t all easy, but it certainly is fulfilling.”

Before Sway revamped the clinics’ filing system, staff had to search for over three hours to find a single patient file. This delay, in turn, created long patient wait times at many of the health clinics engaged in the fight to defeat HIV. Clinical staff were forced to manage irritated patient crowds rather than dispense treatment. In locations that have received support, files for individual patients can now be retrieved in less than five minutes. Patient wait times have been significantly reduced, leading to better patient flow and more satisfied clients.

The U.S. Department of State recognized Sway’s contributions with the Franklin Award, which recognizes individuals, foundations, associations and corporations that actively contribute to advancing America’s ideals around the globe through public diplomacy.

Since Peace Corps Response began in 1996, more than 3,000 Americans have served in over 80 countries around the world. For more information, go to www.peacecorps. gov/response.

worked on improving worker conditions and the region’s scenic areas to increase tourism revenues.

Kennedy was speaking at the Peace Corps’ longstanding Loret Miller Ruppe Speakers Series. The series honors the agency’s longest-serving director and is a forum for world leaders to speak about issues related to the Peace Corps’ mission, including volunteerism, public service, and international peace and development.

“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t draw from that experience,” he said. Peace Corps Director Jody Olsen pointed out that Kennedy’s project is still in operation and serves as a model for new volunteers.

Kennedy then remembered his going-away party when he was about to close service in the Dominican Republic. A man skeptical of outsiders approached the young American volunteer and said, “You did a good job here, but it took us over a year to trust you.”

The Massachusetts congressman and co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Peace Corps Caucus recalled the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. “We will, as humanity, reject hate and violence. What is the best response to hate and violence? I’m not sure I can come up with a better answer than the Peace Corps.

By sending Americans to other countries to simply say, “How can I help?”

Peace Corps Director Jody Olsen introduced Kennedy at the event and asked if he had a message for serving volunteers.

“Every volunteer is an ambassador of the United States, and the impacts they will have on the community are going to last well beyond their term of service,” Kennedy said.

“The opportunity, the responsibility that volunteers have to be selected by the United States government to be good stewards, it’s an extraordinary opportunity, and you will also see the expectations the world places on us. This matters.” 1 As of September 2019, there are 7,376 volunteers in the field. More than 230,000 Americans have served overseas since 1961.

Material for this column is provided by Peace Corps and is available on their website at peacecorps.gov.

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OPINION

Exiting Syria For once, Trump got it right

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BY ROBERT FORD

.S. policy on Syria has had plenty of twists and turns, but President Trump’s October 6 announcement that he would pull a small American military force back from the Syria-Turkish border in northeastern Syria created unprecedented confusion. The President’s abrupt decision surprised the State and Defense Departments. The implementation was incredibly clumsy and there oddly seems to have been no military contingency plan. We even had U.S. jets bomb American ammo dumps that couldn’t be evacuated in time. I have never seen such anger from U.S. military personnel towards a presidential decision as was expressed openly in the American media.

But was Trump’s decision so shocking? Trump since his 2016 campaign has repeatedly stated that American military engagement in the Middle East is a mistake and that he would get out of what he calls “endless wars.” He repeated this several times in 2017 and 2018. The question is not where Trump stands but why the military and the diplomats keep making policy statements that are some distance from the President. Senior Syria policymaker at the State Department, James Jeffrey, said in June 2019 that U.S. forces would stay “indefinitely.” U.S. military personnel on the ground in northeastern Syria formed close bonds with their Kurdish allies who in turn called with American withdrawal in the face of the impending Turkish attack a “betrayal.”

Is the President betraying the Kurds? The short answer is no.

Kurdish fighters and their Arab allies in the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were not doing us a special favor fighting ISIS. They themselves wanted to repulse ISIS as far away from their communities as they possibly could. They wanted to do so for entirely understandable reasons, and they shared that specific interest with the United States.

By contrast, we have no clearly identifiable national security interest in defending the Kurdish-run autonomous region in eastern Syria. The region is not strategically vital. The Syrian affiliate of a Kurdish organization on the American, EU and Turkish terrorism lists established the autonomous zone under the American military W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

umbrella over the fight against ISIS. The autonomous administration has operated schools, hospitals, municipalities and police as well as a hardnosed intelligence service. It has maintained stability and promoted gender equality but it is not democratic. Its security apparatus harassed and arrested Kurdish and Arab political opponents, journalists, and civil society activists.

The Syrian government rejects the autonomous administration as part of Assad’s drive to recapture all territory he lost in the civil war. Turkey, whose government fears it will stir up such problems with Turkey’s Kurdish population that Turkey’s own territorial integrity will be at risk, is also ready to fight the autonomous administration. Given the President’s clear preference for withdrawing from Syria, one has to wonder why State and Pentagon personnel were not warning the Kurds to expect an American withdrawal sooner, not later, and urging the Kurds to cut a deal with Assad. After Trump’s October 6 announcement, the autonomous administration allowed the Syrian government to enter into some of its towns to protect against Turkey while it finally negotiates with the Syrian government over the future of the administration itself. It’s a little late now.

After much gnashing of teeth in Washington and in the field in Syria, the American military and diplomats, as they had done after Trump’s December 2018 withdrawal announcement, clawed back policy space and secured Trump’s approval to keep a small foothold in Syria. Now the U.S. military will maintain about five hundred soldiers in eastern Syria, near the Iraqi border, to control several oilfields. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley said the troops need to stay in Syria as long as ISIS is present in Syria.

That could be a long time. ISIS is not the threat it was in 20142017, to be sure. It has lost its territories and the vast majority of its financing. It has lost much credibility among Sunni Arab communities in Syria. It still has small guerrilla bands in parts of central and eastern Syria. ISIS could remobilize larger numbers of fighters over time, drawing from, for example, detention centers housing thousands of ISIS fighters and tens of thousands of ISIS families. Moreover, WO R L D V I E W W I N T E R 2 0 1 9

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GALLERY the underlying economic and political grievances which spawned ISIS in Iraq and Syria largely remain. A survey of public opinion in ten Arab countries in 2017 highlighted domestic economic and social factors as the key elements behind recruitment. After the Iraq war, it is abundantly clear that American Humvees, air force jets and special operators can’t fix the kinds of grievances that drive people to extremist groups. Thus, ISIS will not be able to recruit as easily as before, but it likely will remain as a residual presence. There is no perfect security from extremists; ISIS is now also embedded in west Africa and southeast Asia, and so we have to ask again what we are still doing in eastern Syria.

These remaining American forces include heavier armed units whose real mission is to hold the oilfields against Syrian, Russian or Iranian-backed militia attack. In February 2018 we bombed a Syrian/Russian mercenary column trying to seize one of the oilfields, killing many Russians. This is part of an American strategy of squeezing the Syrian government into making political concessions to end the civil war on better terms. Syria, and Russia and Iran, will fight back, and we can expect them to pursue unconventional tactics like roadside bombs, assassinations and mortar and rocket attacks against our positions. In the past the Syrian intelligence services helped extremists to attack American military targets in Iraq, and they likely will do the same again. In this sense, our staying may help ISIS, not hurt it. Some Syria war hawks claim that we must keep troops in Syria as a final withdrawal would give Syria to Russia and Iran. That is absurd. President Assad, with Russian and Iranian help, has already won the horrific civil war; he isn’t leaving. It helps to remember that Syria was never in an American “sphere of influence.” It was rather always a close ally of Russia and Iran. Moreover, American control of the oilfields will be hard to justify under international law; Syrian government sovereignty is internationally recognized. Likewise, U.S. military operations in Syria come under a 2001 Congressional authorization to use military force against al-Qai’da after 9/11. Assad is bad, but he’s not al-Qai’da.

Those defending the indefinite deployment in Syria justify it in part by its small size, noting this is no Iraq 2003 kind of deployment. They conclude that our battle in Syria isn’t “endless” if it is smaller in scale. Moreover, the small force in Syria has cost about $2 billion annually over the past five years. Even if the annual cost drops a bit, we should ask if $1 or $1.5 billion spent in Syria is buying more benefit to American citizens than using the money back home in healthcare, education, rural development or infrastructure projects. Governing is about setting priorities for limited resources. As much as I don’t like saying it, this time I agree with President Trump about finishing with an “endless war” and focusing more of our effort at home. 1 Ambassador Robert Ford resigned from the U.S. Foreign Service in protest of U.S. policies in Syria in February, 2014, after serving as ambassador for three years. He was appointed by President Barack Obama. He had served as ambassador to Algeria for three years and held posts in Baghdad, Manama, Izmir, Cairo, Algiers and Yaoundé.

As a PCV he taught English in Fquih ben Salah, Morocco from 1980 to 1982..

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Before War Began The shape of Syria’s personal and architectural heritage PHOTOGRAPHS BY KEVIN BUBRISKI

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ine arts photographer Kevin Bubriski went to Syria 16 years ago to photograph the nation’s architectural heritage and its people. His work was published in the new book, Legacy in Stone: Syria Before War, by powerHouse Books and was named the best photography book of the year by RPCV Writers.

The book is a powerful monument in print to the long history of Syria and of cultures and empires long gone.

In his book’s photographer’s notes, he begins, “It was November 2003, the rainy season, and Ramadan. The U.S. war in Iraq was six months old. The mood in Syria felt quiet and expectant.

Aleppo was busy and thriving, both the modern city and the endless covered labyrinth of stalls and retailers known as the Suq. Herbal medicines, olive oil soaps, fabrics, wedding dresses, spices, hardware, rope, electrical fixtures, antiques, figs, and more were all available in the ancient market.”

The civil war that devastated the nation and led to a shift in the global balance of powers in the Middle East had not yet begun and Bubriski’s brilliant photographs document what may have been altered or destroyed in an eight-year conflict that has not yet run its course. He writes about the Citadel, an ancient fortress in the commercial capital, Aleppo, “as life went on with easy uncertainty.

At dusk, the city would become quiet as traffic evaporated on the wide streets and pedestrians hurried home or to restaurants to break the Ramadan fast. The Baron Hotel is practically empty of guests. At the bar, a framed unpaid bar bill left by T.E. Lawrence eight decades earlier, and a Pan-Am airline advertisement from five decades ago share a wall unpainted for almost as many years.”

He carried his Hasselblad camera to many of the nation’s historic ruins such as early Christian sites of Kharrab Shams, the Mushabak basilica on a rocky hilltop where young shepherds tended their flocks of sheep, and the site of the fourth-century St. Simeon basilica he calls “a Byzantine gem of its time, outdone only by the Hagia Sophia.”

In this Gallery from his book, we include the kilometer-long colonnade at Apamea with its mixture of Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian columns crowned and those of the Roman city of Palmyra.

“As the ruins took shape on the ground glass lens of my Hasselblad film camera,” he writes of the “haunting beauty and profound history of these ancient monuments,” while in the nearby town merchants were hawking ancient pieces of Hittite sculpture for sale, just arrived from the war zone in Iraq. 1 Kevin Bubriski served in Nepal from 1975 to 1977. His photographs hang in the

Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bibliothéque Nationale de Paris and other collections. These images are reproduced with permission of the photographer and the publisher, powerHouse Books.

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n The ruins of Palmyra stand behind an old man holding his bicycle.

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% Two Koranic students stopped to watch Bubriski photograph them on their way to a school in Aleppo.

, The Valley of the Tower Tombs remains outside the ruins of Palmyra, an ancient Semitic settlement occupied in the first century A.D. by the Roman Empire. Local traders gained vast wealth when it became a popular stop on the Silk Road. % The Citadel of Aleppo is a large medieval fortification and part of the ancient quarter of the city designated a UN World Heritage site in 1986. Greeks, Byzantines, Ayyubids and Mamluks have occupied the hill since the third millennium B.C. During the civil war Syrian government forces occupied the Citadel. The central gate was damaged in shellings during the 2012 Battle of Aleppo, nine years after this photograph was taken.

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n The Great Colonnade of Apamea on the banks of the Orontes River was a milelong main street leading to a 20,000-seat amphitheater.

Built over time by Greeks and Romans, the city later became the capital of Macedonia.

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A Digital Option In Moldova An RPCV’s readjustment allowance creates better jobs

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BY ADAM LAWRENCE

I saw the nation’s economic troubles as a lack of job opportunities and wondered how I could create good jobs here in Moldova.

The local office of the UN Development Progamme estimates that a million Moldovans have emigrated to Europe to find work and send money home. Many others have given up their rural gardens— a staple of Moldovan life—and flocked to the capital city of Chișinău— pronounced Kish-e-now—to look for work, a place where they are

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A web design and development company founded in Chisinau in 2016 is creating new opportunities for some of Moldova’s urban young. The nation is one of Europe’s poorest economies where men in Grigorauca chop wood for a living.

REUTERS/Gleb Garanich

he Republic of Moldova is a small nation of beautiful landscapes, vineyards, never-ending fields of wheat and sunflowers and broken roads nestled between Romania and the Ukraine. Going to Moldova is a little bit like going back in time. The countryside of day laborers and subsistence farmers move at it their own pace in villages where horse-drawn carts are still common.

It is also often called The Poorest Country in Europe. I personally do not like that title because it focuses on the wrong problem. The root of the problem is the lack of job opportunities in the country where I served as a small business advisor in city of Drochia from 2014 to 2016.

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surprised at the high cost of city living and the competition for jobs.

I was working on information technology-related projects such as Technovation, a competition for girls to design and develop an app to address a social issue. I attended information technology events, and mentored youth programs and competitions.

I was familiar with the tech community and I wondered how I could target what I considered a social problem by creating a company that could create jobs for Moldovans who could compete in the international market.

For starters, Moldova’s internet runs on fiber-optic lines were installed more than 15 years ago. It remains one of the world’s fastest. It’s also relatively inexpensive by U.S. standards. I also knew young women and men in Moldova who were tech savvy and liked working in technology. People I worked with believed these young creatives should be able to choose to stay and work in Moldova if they had an opportunity.

A few months before my Peace Corps close of service I met with tech leaders in Moldova, local and foreign. I knew that local creatives were some of the most hardworking, intelligent, and dedicated of

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The web development company, Enspire, was launched three years ago by RPCVs and serves a global clientele. These nine Enspire tech staff are Moldovans who work in the company’s headquarters in Chisinau.

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Moldovans. But it would be hard to keep the good talent because many would leave for international companies abroad. I met with information technology department heads at several universities.

I read through the curriculum to gauge the quality and level of students on graduation. The technology and computer codes or languages they were learning were severely outdated. Many of the graduating students were only about 30 percent ready for the caliber of a modern internet-driven technology job. They would need more training. They also lacked some of the soft skills of time management, how to identify the client’s needs, and how to explain best practices. I discovered important pieces missing from their educational experience.

I was warned that the local government’s problems were high taxes, out-dated laws, and corruption. From its history as a former member of the Soviet Union the government had inherited the bureaucratic idea that everything goes in a box and everything has to be done in the same way. The problem was that when you don’t fit in the box, you are wrong and must fix what is wrong. There was no flexibility for change and new ideas. Fortunately, I have since then learned that the Moldovan bureaucracy is becoming more flexible to change. Improvements have been made since I founded the company three years ago.

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I concluded that most of the web-based developers in Moldova were at a junior level, with a limited amount at mid-level, and a solid but small group of senior developers. So I decided that our website development company would focus on WordPress, one of the world’s most popular content management systems because it was a good entry point for local employees. It allowed me to fit the company to the talent and resources in Moldova and address a global need.

STARTING ENSPIRE

My start-up capital was $2,500 drawn from my readjustment allowance. I started our firm’s corporation structure as a limited liability company in Virginia and opened a fully-owned subsidiary in Moldova. It took me 30 days to find and file the necessary notarized and translated documents in Chișinău.

Two months after my close of service in July, 2016, Enspire was officially registered in Moldova. It took three months to get a foreign investors visa so I could stay in Moldova. But I had already registered the company, moved into a Chișinău office, and hired our first official employee, George, who was a junior web developer. I didn’t receive the visa until a week or so after the expiration of my 90-day visa, so I had to pay a small fine.

I was off to a rocky start but with the help of the Moldova community of fellow entrepreneurs and RPCVs—others like David Smith and Kelsey Walters who chose to stay in Moldova after service and start their own businesses—we moved forward.

My experience building Enspire just goes to show that the Peace Corps community is truly a unique and lasting bond that works in ways you can never imagine.

I stayed in Moldova for two more years to hire, train, and work with the initial team. Over the course of three years, we have grown into a full creative agency with a social impact. We have expanded to three offices: Chisinau, Moldova, Washington, D.C. and Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

hired him a year ago, Sergiu has dramatically improved the way we develop websites, our systems, and processes and boosted the team’s talent level.

There are four RPCVs working at Enspire. Three served in Moldova. For all of us, our wages, work flexibility, the office culture and the projects we manage reflect the atmosphere of many of the Silicon Valley startups. But interestingly, our work practices are being noticed by other businesses in Chișinău.

We started out working predominantly with small businesses. A Moldovan honey producer, Dulce Plai, was one of our first clients.

Moldova’s internet of fiber-optic lines was installed more than 15 years ago. It remains one of the world’s fastest and is relatively inexpensive by U.S. standards.

THREE YEARS LATER

We created an opportunity on a small but increasing scale to start the process of change in Moldova. Ten of our 15 employees live and work in Moldova. Elena Putina just celebrated her two-year anniversary with Enspire in June. Her story is truly one that makes me smile. She joined the team as a marketing specialist with great English skills. Elena is an avid reader, reading 81 books in 2018, which beat her own reading goal for the year. Elena is now our senior user experience designer and leads many of our design projects. Elena has led many of the design process changes and conducted company-wide changes at Enspire. Our technical director and senior fullstack developer is Sergiu Negară. Since we W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

The woman who owns the company is a social entrepreneur who hired workers from economically disadvantaged communities. They were giving back to their community and ran a transparent and bribe-free business. Liza, the founder, needed to tell their story and present their products in an easier way. We gave their old-fashioned blog a better look, fleshed out the details of their online products, updated their hosting to load faster, and introduced them to a larger market with multi-language capabilities. The company has grown with sales on the global market.

One of our largest customers is an investment firm in Colorado with more than 75 U.S. branch offices. This U.S. company understood and saw first-hand how we work as a company with our Moldova design team.

As a growing company offering branding, web site design and development and search engine optimization we and our staff in Moldova work on large-scale projects with multi-million dollar companies, some of which are publicly held: a tech news site in Belgium, a West Coast investment firm, and a publishing company on the East Coast.

Our goal is to expand Enspire and start new companies using seed capital from Enspire’s profits. By the end of 2020 our plan is to open another office in a new country to provide opportunities for more employment that changes people’s lives. We want to get connected and support local communities in the world with programs, initiatives, and social projects that serve those communities. 1 Adam Lawrence served in Drochia from 2014 to 2016 before founding Enspire Devel-

opment, LLC, a full-service web development and marketing firm serving organizations in several countries including the United States. Go to enspiredev.com or Facebook and Instagram for more information.

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A Corps of Their Own An RPCV brings public service to Africans in Africa

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BY LIZ FANNING

3 Morocco: Nadia in Tizi Ousem painted the walls of a village preschool in 2015.

STARTING WITH MOROCCO

When young Africans in Morocco, Senegal, Malawi, and Rwanda ask if they can serve like Peace Corps Volunteers, we can now answer, ”Yes.” We started CorpsAfrica in Morocco in 2013 with seven volunteers and we now have almost 200 alumni in four countries and 75 more about to start their service. When we expanded beyond Morocco, we began inviting volunteers that had successfully “COSed” to serve again in other CorpsAfrica countries. We call them “Exchange Volunteers,” serving across borders and building a Pan-African community along the lines of our own RPCV network.

It wasn’t easy getting started. I spent many years raising money for CorpsAfrica in my spare time while working full-time as a fundraiser for the America Civil Liberties Union, and it eventually took its toll. There were times I thought about giving up on the CorpsAfrica dream, but realized that wasn’t an option: This idea had to happen, and no one else was doing it. I had heard about 26

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some interesting volunteer programs in Africa but they weren’t capitalizing on Peace Corps’ established successes.

The fact that so many young Africans want to be Peace Corps Volunteers is, I think, the greatest testament to the organization that Sargent Shriver founded so many years ago. It was time for somebody to pass Peace Corps’ baton to our host-country nationals.

We’re so fortunate to have received early support from the biggest company in Morocco, OCP Group. Their commitment at the 2015 Clinton Global Initiative helped us expand to Senegal and Malawi and then to Rwanda last year. OCP’s endorsement provides a great deal of credibility, especially as we seek support from other donors in Africa.

We started in Morocco, Senegal, Malawi and Rwanda because they are geographically diverse, politically stable, and have a long history with the Peace Corps. That was important as we were just getting started; the context was already in place, and the young people in those countries wanted to be volunteers. CorpsAfrica’s long-term goal is to be in all 54 African countries. Unlike Peace 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

All photographs courtesy of CorpsAfrica

was sitting in a Marrakech café 26 years ago when I struck up a conversation with a lovely young Moroccan woman named Fatima. She had recently graduated from college and was looking for an entry-level job, unsure of what she wanted to do with her life.

Over steaming mint tea and sweet biscuits, I told her I was working on environmental projects in a small Amazigh village in the High Atlas Mountains as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

She asked what the people living in rural areas were like and how I was able to live without electricity or running water. She was intrigued and asked if she could join the Peace Corps so that she, too, could help her country. It was like a lightbulb had gone off in her head and she suddenly realized what she wanted to do: be a Peace Corps Volunteer.

Sadly, I had to explain, “It’s only for Americans.”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Fatima’s question and those of so many other young Moroccans dogged me for 20 years and eventually changed my life. In 2011, I started CorpsAfrica.

Corps, we can operate in countries with civil unrest because the volunteers are from those countries – they’re not going anywhere and they’re looking for a way to be part of the solution.

A MODEL FOR A CONTINENT

What we’re creating with CorpsAfrica is a model of national service and participatory community development across the continent.

We’re engaging young people to promote civil society; to build alliances and understanding between diverse communities; and to develop innovative solutions through communication, education, and, most importantly, friendship. We strive to recruit volunteers

from across socioeconomic classes, regions, and ethnicities. During pre-service training, they learn human-centered design and assetbased community development tools that are grounded in the belief that communities are perfectly capable of addressing their own unique challenges.

The CorpsAfrica Volunteers live in remote, high-poverty areas in their own countries for one year without preconceived agendas.

Rather, their goal is to form relationships, identify local needs and assets, and work with local counterparts to facilitate projects that have been identified by the local people. They listen to the people, help them identify what they want for their communities, and then connect them to the resources to help make it happen.

That’s it – they’re the facilitators. Their projects happen through them, not by them. And what they get in return is the understanding of poverty that can only come from living it, hands-on professional development experience, and the chance to be part of a community unlike their own. This is the transformative experience.

To be clear, CorpsAfrica isn’t just about creating the Peace Corps opportunity for Africans. It also stems from my deep cynicism of development efforts that

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Senegal (left): Children said goodbye last year to Gorgui Ba Toure the day he closed service in Senegal to become an Exchange Volunteer in Malawi.

Rwanda (below): Four CorpsAfrica volunteers built a mudbrick structure for agricultural cooperatives in a banana tree forest earlier this year.

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Number of CorpsAfrica Volunteers

are led by outside saviors and my their own boards and cultivate local desire to create a new paradigm of donors and partners. The organization 265 CorpsAfrica Volunteers in smart, humble, effective, locally-led is about Africans for Africa, and that is Four Countries development that leads to smallits greatest strength. As CorpsAfrica More than 400 community-led projects impacted 63,000 people. scale, high-impact projects that are expands across the continent, cultural appropriate and sustainable. You can’t diversity and pan-African experience 80 tell people what to do, you have to will create a powerful network for 75 72 15 show them. CorpsAfrica gives young humble, collaborative, and innovative Morocco 13 70 Africans the chance to be agents of social change.

Senegal change that lead by doing.

Malawi What amazes me most about CORPSAFRICA’S GROWTH 60 20 Rwanda 22 the Volunteers is how much they This summer, we received more than 1,600 applications for 75 positions in resemble us in our Peace Corps days.

50 43 They’re eager for adventure and full the four countries. We get daily requests of questions; they’re patient, proud, from young people from countries such 12 38 40 21 and idealistic. They’re having a blast as Lesotho, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tunisia, 18 21 and making friendships that will last a Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Ghana who 30 12 lifetime. Like Peace Corps Volunteers, wonder when CorpsAfrica will come to their own countries. Most of these CorpsAfrica Volunteers learn the 18 20 nations are on the short list for expanimportance of listening, respect, and 20 19 19 18 16 friendship in development efforts. The sion, which we hope will happen soon.

7 10 new alumni association will provide Our goal is to have 250 volunteers in 7 every African country in ten years. continued support for these emerging 0 African leaders through job fairs, proThat’s 13,500 CorpsAfrica Volunteers 0 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 fessional development conferences, annually, a mix of people serving in their scholarship programs, and the “entrepreneurship incubator” fund own countries and in other African countries, and funded primarily for alums with job-creating ideas. by new African donors, as local ownership and sustainability remain fundamental to our mission. Then we can start talking about CorpsAsia.

BELLE ANGE AND ALPHA Ambitious, yes, but I’m driven by the knowledge that this is so doable.

If the Volunteers take just one thing away from this experience, I hope Getting this organization to the place it is now has required me to harness many of the skills I developed during my two years it’s humility because that’s what will help them change the world.

Belle Ange Niyonshuti, a CorpsAfrica Volunteer in Rwanda, as a Peace Corps Volunteer: resilience in the face of uncertainty, discovered the difference between helping and serving. Liz Fanning received unrelenting dedication to the mission, and, most impor“Every time I was in my community,” she told me, “I NPCA’s 2019 Sargent tantly, an ability to recognize how much I have to learn.

Award had the feeling of gratitude, and I knew that I was just Shriver I definitely had a transformative experience during my for Distinguished as served as the person I was serving.”

Morocco service and I gained at least as much as I gave.

Humanitarian Service Alpha Ba had studied English and German at the in June.

The community-led projects we implemented and the University of Saint Louis in Dakar before joining the extraordinary cultural exchange that took place made the first Senegal volunteers and organized a recycling program. As Peace Corps unique at its inception and remains at the heart of what an Exchange Volunteer, he used his French skills at the Dzaleka keeps the organization relevant today. These are life lessons that we Refugee Camp in Malawi. learned not in the classroom but at our individual sites.

Alpha is extremely tall — maybe that’s why the refugees asked Now is our chance to pass this baton and promote African-led him to build a basketball court. Alpha wrote the proposal and we development, philanthropy, and leadership. Together, we can build helped him pitch it to the National Basketball Association. To our on Sargent Shriver’s original vision and on Peace Corps’ decades-long delight, the NBA funded it and sent some of their legendary players investment in human development so that young Africans—who to coach the team of African refugees. It seemed like a dream to all also want to learn, grow, and make a difference—can do so too, of us, including Alpha, and he extended his service in the camp for through service. 1 another year to implement the project. Alpha has gained greater Fanning served in Morocco from 1993 to 1995 and is the founder and executive confident about his own abilities as a young leader capable of making Liz director of CorpsAfrica. She hopes all RPCVs will pay the Peace Corps forward by positive change. I can’t wait to see what he’ll do next. supporting CorpsAfrica with a monthly donation at www.corpsafrica.org/pay-it-forwardEach of the CorpsAfrica countries is staffed by locals who maintain campaign.html. Contact Liz at lfanning@corpsafrica.org.

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One School at a Time How to build 40 schools in Myanmar for less than a million dollars

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BY ROBERT CORNWELL

Build a School in Burma

first visited Myanmar as a tourist in 1996, a few years after the country’s name changed from Burma. Years later, I was curious to return to Myanmar because I have grown to love Asia’s art, its culture, and Buddhism.

I’ve traveled in more than 100 countries and many of them were very poor, but I never had the impulse to jump in and help solve a problem until the day in 2010 I walked through the hills of Myanmar’s Southern Shan State.

In the market town of Kalaw, I met people working with a local non-government organization called the Rural Development Society. Despite the political and economic challenges of the country now known as Myanmar, this rural development organization has since 1990 been building schools in several surrounding villages.

Two more communities were “school ready,” meaning they had a donated school site, a commitment for government teachers, a school committee, a strong desire from parents to see their children educated, and a commitment from villagers to do the unskilled labor to build a school. They needed only funding, organization and a plan to execute the vision.

We went to see one of these villages, the ethnic Danu farming community of Nan Auw which was about one and a half hours over

rutted tracks from Kalaw. The villagers had carefully carved out space for a school by redrawing their own house lot boundaries. Two days later the chief of Nan Auw came to Kalaw with a petition signed by all the villagers asking for help. Most of the signatures were ‘X’s. That night I thought long and hard about what it meant to be illiterate in the 21st century: no ability to use the internet, no access to further education, vulnerability to human trafficking and no prospects in life except to be a subsistence farmers like their parents. What could be done to keep the children of Nan Auw from a similar fate? The answer, I realized was to help the village build a school to educate them.

Returning to San Francisco, I talked to my friend Andrew Lederer, another RPCV who served in farm mechanics in Pune, India from 1969 to 1971. Andrew agreed to help raise money to build the Nan Auw school and we created Build a School in Burma to do it. Andrew and I wrote the first checks and started a campaign for donations. To our surprise we quickly raised enough money to

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Residents of Pyin Ka Doe Gone in the Ayeyarwady River Delta gathered last year to celebrate their new school. Teachers are the women in dressed in white blouses and blue skirts and the two men standing on the far left and far right. Build a School in Burma country director Naing Lin Swe is in center foreground. Author Robert Cornwell and board member Frank DeRosa stand at the back.

build Nan Auw Primary School.

We have gone on to build 45 more schools with villages and partners in Myanmar. Most of our schools are quite similar in design, because of government requirements and the type of materials available in most rural areas of the country. We also seek to build cost-effective, durable buildings that can be maintained with locally available materials and labor skills. This means that buildings are simple. We strive for a brightly lit learning environment, and make sure the school has furniture, a water supply and sanitary toilets.

fundraising, accounting and disbursement, press, managing projects and programs from 9,000 miles away. Most of the seven volunteers providing services are in the United States but we’re now getting increased support from Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Norway.

Over time we have found generous donors who had a personal connection to Burma: Burmese emigrants who left and became successful elsewhere, travelers who had been touched by the graciousness of Myanmar people and wanted to help, Buddhist and Christian individuals and organizations with connections to the country.

FISCAL SPONSORS

UNDER THE COUNTRY’S RADAR

Neither of us had any real experience raising money. That first year we put up our own donations and wrote to friends, relatives and professional associates asking for contributions. The goal was to raise $18,000 to cover the building costs for Nan Auw Primary School. But generosity foiled our simple-minded plan. Total donations topped $24,000. We decided to find another village needing a school. And so a “one-off” school became an organization.

Andrew and I had long been involved with non-profit organizations; we knew how time-consuming creating a 501(c)3 would be. A professional fundraiser friend suggested we work with a fiscal sponsor to get started, rather than spend our energy becoming a non-profit.

A fiscal sponsor provides its tax-exempt status to non-profit organizations. The fiscal sponsor usually charges a fee and sometimes provides other services, such as an on-line donation platform. Donors can take their tax deduction because of the fiscal sponsors IRS status.

Build a School in Burma is a non-profit organization with a specific focus on education in Myanmar. Our first 40 schools were built for less than $1 million. We were deeply fortunate to hire Naing Lin Swe as our country director. He is a longtime NGO worker who had just left the Karen Women Action Group, our longest active school building partner. Naing Naing’s patient community development skills, as well as his knowledge of construction and his facility in dealing with people at all levels in Myanmar society have been powerful reasons for our success.

We keep our costs down to ensure compliance with all of our board’s policies and IRS rules for each project. Naing Naing is our only employee and a board member contributes the cost of Naing Naing’s salary. When advisory board members like Andrew and I travel to Burma we pay our own expenses. Operating expenses were about 7 percent of last year’s budget. This allowed us to focus on raising money and building schools to build a track record.

Early results strengthened our fundraising and our experience working with communities to build their schools. Donations gradually increased, and we were faced with the problems of growth.

Both Andrew and I have experienced the disappointment of donating to high salaries and perks to executives and seeing the ineffectiveness of many NGO foreign assistance efforts.

We decided to organize Build a School in Burma as an all-volunteer effort and invited people who showed interest and had skills to join us on a volunteer advisory board and to manage web and social media,

Myanmar is a challenging environment. It remains one of the poorest countries in Asia. When Build a School in Burma began in 2010 the country was still a xenophobic military dictatorship. At that time, the average 25-year-old had only four years of formal education, the lowest in Asia. Foreigners were viewed with suspicion, and were prohibited from visiting many parts of the country. Transparency International had ranked only Somalia as more corrupt than Myanmar. Roads and communications were poor—many parts of the country lacked cell phone signals. The residue of many of these problems persist, but conditions are slowly improving and the government is devoting more money and effort to education.

Being old Peace Corps Volunteers, we decided on a ‘bottom up’ approach in-country: Build a School in Burma would work with local Myanmar non-government organizations and 18 community-based groups to build the 46 schools completed to date.

We collaborate with the local NGO or religious organization and the school committee, use local materials, designs, contractors and workers. Our goal was to remain “under the radar”, and to empower the local people to resolve problems and deal with the government. To this day we have not had a formal meeting with the Myanmar’s ministry of education. We’re already active in communities to find villages which needed schools that were willing to contribute to building them.

Even now, the violent ethnic conflicts in this country are intense, particularly between the dominant Bamar (Burmese) and the more than 130 minority groups that make up 40 percent of the population. Ethnic conflict is still a risk in many parts of the nation and clashes between ethnic militias and the Burmese Army are a daily occurence.

We‘ve been surprised at how quickly a project can come together.

Working directly with communities rather than government ministries has been a key. I don’t think we would ever have considered trying this without the cross-cultural training and experience Andrew and I had from Peace Corps.

Even under these circumstances, problems building schools in Myanmar have been fewer than we first expected. In one or two cases we decided not to build a particular school because we perceived someone had their hand out in getting approvals.

Most of our schools serve non-majority ethnic groups. None of our schools has been damaged in fighting but the bridge to one village school was blown up by the army a few years ago. Rapid urbanization

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New Schools Over Nine Years The cost of a three-room school on donated land is between US $ 25,000 - $ 30,000 today.

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5

Number of schools built per year

Completed 10

10

Under construction or approved

9 8

6

6 5

5

2014

2015

6

4

3 2

0

1

1

2011

2012

2013

2016

2017

2018

2019

and work abroad means populations are not growing in many rural areas, so a few schools have fewer students than we would like after expanding them. In a few cases the communities have not fully held up their end of the cooperative bargain or cooperation among villagers has broken down during or after construction. So far every school has been completed, is in use and is serving its intended purpose.

We began installing solar electricity in some schools in 2015.

Until recently, only about one quarter of Burmese households had electricity from the national grid. As many of our 46 schools are in remote rural communities, most do not have access to power.

Electric lights help students study at night, particularly to prepare for national exams given at the end of the 4th, 8th and 10th grades.

Perhaps the most important part of creating a school has been working with the community to discuss how to plan and organize.

Cooperating with local partners, we select villages based on their knowledge of places they are already working. We have clear criteria for a school project: need, community participation, sustainability, readiness, interethnic and interreligious cooperation and keeping children together with their families.

A HIGH SCHOOL

Three years ago Peace Corps came slowly and haltingly to Myanmar.

I made a point to seek out the new country director, even before the first volunteers arrived. We offered to collaborate with Peace Corps Burma on education-related projects, but nothing came of that meeting. So when the chance came last year to work with current volunteer Abby Hester, we were excited.

Abby contacted Bob through our Build a School in Burma website. She wrote about the need for a large new building at Thanatpin Basic Education High School near Bego in Southern Myanmar, W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

where she was teaching. Several old buildings needed replacement; some were no longer safe to use. With a proposal drafted by Abby and the school staff and her counterpart, Naing Naing traveled to Thanatpin to assess the school.

The proposal was to build a new two-story, steel structure classroom building in early 2019. Abby’s family donated funds toward the new school building. We hired an experienced contractor to erect a two-story steel frame building and add eight new sanitary toilets and a water supply.

Partnership with local communities and organizations is at the heart of all of our school projects. The Thanatpin community helped plan the building and donated labor and money for new toilets. They also cut a trackway to get materials to the building site.

Thanatpin was a bit non-standard in that the school committee became our partner rather than a third-party NGO. Abby and her counterpart, You You Wah, eased the process as did the work of a couple of particularly strong school committee members.

The project had many twists and turns. Several challenges had to be overcome, including a lack of space and school yard flooding during the rainy season. The site was at the back of the school compound, with no road access and the region was prone to flood in the rainy season. We had to cut a track beside a canal to bring in building materials. The building pad had to be lifted with soil brought from elsewhere in this very flat region. The toilet water supply piping was improperly installed and had to be reversed.

A date had been set for an official celebratory opening just before Abby’s close of service date. We were operating under time pressure.

Naing Naing, Abby and the Thanatpin school committee worked diligently to gain approvals, prepare the site and start construction.

On June 1, Build a School in Burma and Thanatpin marked the building’s completion, just in time for the beginning of a new school year. The Deputy Chief of Mission from the U.S. embassy, the Peace Corps country director, several members of the state and national parliaments, local township and education officers, teachers and school staff, Abby’s family, our advisory board members, members of the local community…and most importantly, the students of Thanatpin Basic Education High School, celebrated the new building together.

One of our special guests was David Zweig, an RPCV I served with in Jamaica 38 years ago. When another Jamaica RPCV told him about our Thanatpin school construction project, David offered to contribute the cost of the classroom furniture. We already had a donor for that but I persuaded him to support another nearby school. He contributed enough to build the entire Taw Bot Su primary school and we opened it the day after we opened Thanatpin.

David came to attend both school openings and now serves on our Build a School in Burma board. 1 Robert Cornwell is the founder and executive director of Build a School in Burma. He served in the Peace Corps as an agricultural trainer in St. Mary’s Parish, Jamaica from 1981 to 1983. During his professional career he has advised cities, states and federal agencies on public-private partnerships and capital finance, including the Washington Nationals baseball park in the District of Columbia.

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C U LT U R E

Africa in the Attic The Hodges give their collection to American museums hen we climbed the stairs to the attic, almost all of the floor space was filled with objects.

It was the most amazing thing. There were masks, carved figures of all sizes, weapons, vessels, utensils … Oh, my goodness! Most fascinating and exciting to me were five or six large tables in the middle of the room on which were hundreds of masks.”

Sarah Schroth, director of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, is recalling the moment when she and two colleagues first glimpsed one of the world’s great private collections of West African art. Like Indiana Jones entering a treasure trove, they beheld the extraordinary artifacts in the Durham, North Carolina attic of two returned Peace Corps Volunteers, Reggie and Celeste Hodges, who met nearly a half-century earlier while serving in Sierra Leone.

Celeste hadn’t expected to go there.

She’d signed up for Ethiopia, but a Peace Corps recruiter said there was a problem. “I could hear him shuffling papers,” she recalls.

“What about Sierra Leone?” he asked me.

I said OK, although I wasn’t sure where it was.” She had no idea she was about to meet her life partner and stay with him in West Africa for nearly two decades.

SOMETHING INTERESTING TO DO

Reggie Hodges became interested in the Peace Corps during his junior year at North Carolina Central, a historically black university in Durham where he was studying to become a high school art teacher. He said he wanted to do something interesting and challenging before he drifted into the school classroom and to avoid being sent to Vietnam, where his brother had served.

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Much of two large shipments of African indigenous art collected by Celeste and Reggie Hodges over 32 years was stored in the attic of their home in Durham, North Carolina. Many are now being donated to museums in the region. Visit the Hodges web site at reggieceleste.com

The Peace Corps had about 300 volunteers in Sierra Leone then. Reggie was supposed to teach art in a teacher training college but, like Celeste, he got a surprise.

“The country director told us they didn’t have enough slots for everyone.” He agreed to

ner of a duck wrapped with limes in banana leaves. They talked about their backgrounds — hers in a white Catholic neighborhood in Chicago, his in rural North Carolina — and about their religious families. Both wanted a broader life. They began imagining it together.

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J. Caldwell, Nasher Museum of Art

“W

BY DAVID JARMUL

serve instead as a primary teacher in a village.

Reggie was the only foreigner in Sembehun, a village of about 900 Mende-speakers where during the next three years he helped build a school, a library and a village water system.

Celeste arrived in the coastal town of Shenge during the start of Reggie’s second year and met him at a Peace Corps training conference. They returned together to Shenge and shared an improvised Thanksgiving din-

“We were only 36 miles apart but it wasn’t easy to see each other,” Reggie says. “Trucks left her village every morning loaded with fish. They drove past my village and into Bo Town, the country’s second-largest city. On their way back, I’d hitch a ride, riding for three or four hours in the back of the truck, which smelled like fish.”

REGGIE’S EDUCATION

As his romance with Celeste blossomed,

professor, Reggie became an expert in what the world was just beginning to recognize as a compelling artistic tradition with its own aesthetics.

Reggie took photographs and made notes on what he was seeing. Celeste took photographs, too, creating a stunning photographic archive of the region. Reggie began collecting objects as examples to bring home to the American students he expected to teach. “I wasn’t collecting them as art,” he

and bought a loom of his own.

“What is so special about the Hodges collection, in addition to the great variety of styles and forms, is the documentation they collected on their objects, drawn from their years of contact with Sierra Leone artists,” says Frederick J. Lamp, retired curator of African Art at the Yale University Art Gallery who served in Sierra Leone from 1967 to 1969..

When Reggie ended his service as a Peace Corps Volunteer, he was hired as a

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Celeste and Reggie Hodges unless otherwise noted

Left: A Sande Society ceremonial helmet carved by Johnny Mong in nearby Bo and acquired

by Reggie Hodges in 1972. Right: Reggie acquired this Dan Poro Society initiation mask in Ganta, Liberia, in 1984.

Reggie also fell in love with the art and crafts that surrounded him. A talented artist himself whose paintings now adorn their Durham home, he admired the craftsmanship and cultural significance of what he saw in Sembehun. He asked his neighbors how they produced and used different objects, and about their meaning. He observed dances and ceremonies. Without books or a W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

said. “I thought these objects would help me be a better teacher.”

He began with a small soapstone figure and moved on to household items, musical instruments and hand tools. His Sembehun neighbors liked his plastic comb, so he traded his comb their hand-carved wooden combs, some of which are now worth $500.

His collection grew, supplemented by textiles Celeste began gathering. His neighbors gave him objects. When a student made a traditional Bundu mask for a class project, Reggie bought it for two dollars and then paid the boy’s father, a carver, to teach him how they made it. He asked the blacksmith to show how he made tools.

He learned how women made blankets

regional director for Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and visited more than 100 rural communities in the country. Everywhere he went Reggie found art. Local chiefs gave him gifts. In return he brought them school supplies he paid for out of his own pocket.

Some people who had recently converted to Islam and Christianity gave him family objects they regarded as conflicting with their new beliefs.

“I didn’t put a lot of money into this,” Reggie says. He and Celeste had moved in together after he began working on Peace Corps staff, and new artifacts began accumulating in their home. When he returned from visiting Volunteers at their sites, he arrived with new artifacts. Celeste began WO R L D V I E W W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

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wondering what Reggie was going to do with all of his collection.” She asked him. “Why are you spending every Saturday afternoon looking for new stuff?”

“It was sort of like an addiction,” Reggie laughs.

Others in Sierra Leone learned about his fascination with local art. When art scholars made their way to Sierra Leone, officials at the American embassy sent them to Reggie’s house. Years later when he visited Washington, D.C., Reggie met with Warren Robbins, a former diplomat whose legendary collection evolved into the National Museum of African Art. “When people like this talked with us, we began to realize the importance of what we were doing,” Reggie says.

CONSCIENTIOUS COLLECTOR

Reggie and Celeste married in 1972 and remained in West Africa far longer than they expected. They lived nine years in Sierra Leone, six in Liberia and two in Ghana. They had two children there, Kadiatu and Hassan.

Celeste held several jobs and Reggie continued with the Peace Corps, including

time as acting country director in Sierra Leone. He then took on other development work, including a four-year stint setting up technical training programs in Liberia.

He remained there with Celeste and their children even as the country descended into chaos following a 1980 coup. One day they found a body in their driveway. Reggie began sleeping beneath a window to avoid stray bullets.

Even after he completed that job, Reggie returned to Liberia every year until 2000 to work on programs and promote peace. In 1992 he assisted UNICEF and the Carter Center in assessing how Liberia’s children were affected by the violence and in developing demobilization and rehabilitation programs. He helped negotiate demobilization with the warlord Charles Taylor, who was later convicted by an international court for war crimes that included blood diamonds and sexual slavery. When former President Carter attempted to negotiate peace with Taylor in 1992, Reggie was there, too.

He and others helped to demobilize more than 5,000 combatants in Liberia and Sierra

An Art Windfall The former African art curator at Yale, Fred Lamp, calls the African art donations a windfall for North Carolina museums. Lamp served in Sierra Leone from 1967 to 1969. ”North Carolina has had some good collections of African art, but they have not been well known nationally or internationally, and they have been sparse on the art of this region. This changes things dramatically.”

Reggie and Celeste Hodges donated 27 works of art to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke and hundreds of Celeste’s negatives and prints to a Duke library. They also have donated pieces to the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and to the Gregg Museum of Art & Design at North Carolina State University.

“We also want to give back to Duke, where we were both treated for cancer and our daughter received a kidney transplant,” says Celeste, who worked at the university for 18 years.

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Two wooden carved Kongoli masks acquired by Reggie.

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The couple lived in a Peace Corps house in Sembehu when Reggie served on Peace Corps staff in 1970. Opposite: The Hodges Sierra Leone home was next door to the mosque in Shenge.

Leone, many of whom were child soldiers.

Reggie also interacted with the leaders of several other African countries, discussing both development issues and programs for promoting peace. He received several awards for this work.

His first job back in the States was to oversee vocational educational programs in Africa for OIC International. He later helped to build more than 100 African schools for the International Foundation for Education and Self Help.

Through it all, he kept spending time in Africa collecting African art, always with the knowledge and consent of the previous owners. “I never wanted to be one of those people who takes relics away from a people and deprives them of their own art and culture,” he says. “We got legal permission for what we sent home.” In contrast, “so many works in museum collections were obtained under less than ideal circumstances, sometimes blatantly stolen or looted,” says Amanda Maples, curator of African art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. “Reggie and Celeste’s careful cataloging of the artists and stories behind their objects carries an enormous amount of educational and cultural value that far outshines its considerable market value,” Maples says.

“The vast majority of material at many museums is unprovenanced,” says Raymond Silverman, a professor and authority in 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

Sierra Leone and Liberia. “Many of the items would no longer exist if we didn’t have them,” he says.

RETURN TO DURHAM

African art at the University of Michigan.

“Because most objects were collected without documentation, an object’s attribution may say something like ‘Yoruba artist’ and offer a general time period. There’s no artist’s name, no specific place of origin.”

Reggie believes his collecting also saved many of the artifacts from destruction during the years of political chaos and violence in

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Reggie and Celeste made a permanent move to North Carolina, where his aging parents lived, in 2000. They knew it was time.

“I got really sick with dengue fever,” said Reggie, who’d had malaria a half-dozen times and now discovered he also had lymphoma. Fortunately, his cancer and Celeste’s own bout with cancer were resolved. With their children growing up, they eventually settled in Durham, where he led the local literacy group and Celeste worked as a web administrator at Duke University.

They sent home the art they had collected over 32 years in two large shipments. The first arrived in 1979 and the second came six years later. They placed many of the objects

in their home freezer before shipment to kill any bugs. Most of the art went to their attic and remained largely unknown to the world until now.

They are working with local museums to catalog and donate much of the collection.

Their children want only a couple of the more than 600 objects — both are more interested in Reggie’s own paintings — and they support their parents’ decision to share it with the world instead of selling it privately.

“I learned in Africa that money is not as important as helping others,” Reggie says. “I don’t think people in the West understand that people who live in what we call an underdeveloped country can be happy. I went to Africa with an open mind and my mind opened up even further.”

Celeste says, “We still want to make a positive contribution. Sharing our art is a way to do that.” 1 David Jarmul served in Nepal (77-79) and Moldova

(16-18). He lives in Durham, N.C., and blogs at Not Exactly Retired.

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Ambitious Diplomat The wisdom and hubris of Richard Holbrooke in Afghanistan t seems inevitable now that he would end in Afghanistan. There’s a final circular logic to it.

You might remember that he first went there in 1970 when he was working for the Peace Corps. He found the country romantic, beautiful, and at peace. He didn’t return for 36 years—horrific years.

In the spring of 2006, he went back with Kati. Her nephew Mathieu was working for the United Nations in Kabul and suggested the trip. You can see why it would have appealed to Holbrooke.

Iraq was disintegrating— a war he’d like to have forgotten. He had no desire to see Baghdad for himself. I never met an American, soldier or civilian, who wanted to buy a little villa with a garden on the Tigris River. Iraq was flat and hot and harsh, and every human touch, including ours, made it uglier. But Afghanistan was the good war, provoked by September 11—a war to rid the country of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. By 2006 the Taliban were returning to the Pashtun provinces in the south and east, but Kabul was still safe, a beguiling magnet for expats: the snowy foothills of the Hindu Kush, the mule-drawn carts and white Land Rovers in the muddy roads, the glittery wedding halls, the craft shops on Chicken Street, the British lodges and French restaurants and Lebanese tavernas, the pomegranate juice, the vast suffering, the idealism and opportunism, the gossip.

The scene drew a remarkable cast of foreign characters. There was Rory Stewart, a flamboyant Scotsman in his early 30s, who had tutored Princes William and Harry, served Her Majesty as a diplomat and perhaps a spy, walked across central Asia after 36

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September 11, wrote a fine book about it, and then, at the request of Prince Charles and the Afghan president Hamid Karzai, started a foundation to support local craftsmen in restoring the old city of Kabul. There was Michael Semple, an Irishman who wore a long beard and shalwar kameez and knew so much that he was suspected of being either MI6 or a Taliban collaborator, when he was just an extremely well-informed analyst. There was Sarah Chayes, the caustic daughter of a Kennedy administration official, who went to Afghanistan for National Public Radio and stayed on to start a soap cooperative for farmers in Kandahar, then to advise U.S. military commanders as a critic of the Karzai government. A certain type of imaginative foreigner fell hard for Afghanistan.

At the beginning of his trip, Holbrooke met the coalition commander, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, who was in the middle of his second tour in Afghanistan.

Eikenberry found Holbrooke amazingly opinionated for someone who hadn’t set foot in the country since 1970. Holbrooke packed his schedule day and night and grilled everyone he met—farmers, shop owners, journalists, officials. He even met Karzai in the Arg, the presidential palace in central Kabul, and informed him that the ancient minarets Holbrooke had seen in Herat were crumbling because of uncontrolled traffic. Karzai lied about the condition of the minarets, then got on the phone and shouted some orders. A white pigeon flew through the window and the president became distracted trying to chase it out.

Holbrooke came away unimpressed.

He stayed just a few days. On his way out, he met Eikenberry again and gave the

general a 10-point memo on Afghanistan’s various ills—corruption, poppies, bad police training, Pakistani subversion. Eikenberry used the document in his final assessment at the end of his tour. He decided that Holbrooke was the quickest study he’d ever met.

Holbrooke didn’t quite fall in love with Afghanistan. He was too American to go native anywhere. The only foreign language he ever learned was French, which he spoke fluently with a heavy New York accent, and when he bought local artifacts it was to give them away as gifts, not to furnish his own houses. He fell for problems, not countries, and it was the problem of Afghanistan that began to consume him. It had everything—geopolitics, beauty, tragedy, hope.

He believed that the war would be harder than Americans thought and would go on for a very long time—much longer than Iraq, longer even than Vietnam. Afghanistan would be America’s longest war. Al Qaeda was rebuilding itself across the border in Pakistan, a failing state armed with nuclear weapons. The security of those weapons was as intense a concern as the possibility of another terrorist strike at home. Perhaps, in 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

REUTERS/Shah Marai/Pool

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BY GEORGE PACKER

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U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke talks as Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus at Kabul International Airport in 2010.

fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, we were at war with the wrong enemy in the wrong country. But Holbrooke thought this was the region where the history of the present was being made, and where we should put our efforts. We had already abandoned it twice.

The story has been told again and again, but it makes me sad and angry every time.

It’s a story of our folly and waste.

Zahir Shah was overthrown in 1973 by his cousin, Prince Daoud, who established the Republic of Afghanistan. In 1978, Daoud and his family were slaughtered in the Arg

by Communist troops. For the next year and a half the coup’s leaders killed one another off, until the Soviets tried to impose order by invading on Christmas Eve of 1979.

That was the year political Islam first convulsed the world. In February, an Islamic revolution expelled the shah of Iran and seized power. In April, General Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan hanged the elected prime minister, whom he had overthrown in a coup, then abolished Parliament and began to institute sharia law.

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In November, hundreds of militant Islamists occupied the Grand Mosque of Mecca for two weeks of bloodletting before surrendering, and then the Saudi king decided to head off the radical tide by imposing even more severe religious strictures—banning cinemas and non-Islamic education, completely segregating the sexes in public life. The next month, in December, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan, provoking a jihad—backed by American and Saudi money, U.S. weapons, and Pakistani intelligence—that continues today.

No event since 1945 changed geopolitics more than the war in Afghanistan. Up to two million Afghans died during the Soviet occupation of the 80s, millions more were maimed, another five or ten million fled to Pakistan and Iran. The Soviets killed so many civilians that it amounted to genocide. The Red Army was forced to limp back across the border in 1989, speeding up the end of the Cold War, and we lost interest in Afghanistan, just as Arab veterans of the jihad were organizing themselves into a global terrorist

group called Al Qaeda. In 1992, the mujahedin entered Kabul and turned their guns on one another. The civil war destroyed the capital—you can still see the bullet holes and rubble today, along with the amputees—and Afghanistan fell into banditry.

Out of this chaos rose a movement of religious young Afghans, ethnic Pashtuns schooled in the harsh ideology of Saudi-funded madrassas in Pakistan or the border refugee camps. They called themselves Taliban—“students.” In 1994 their army emerged in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, led by a one-eyed veteran of the jihad named Mullah Mohammed Omar, and backed—controlled, to some opaque degree—by Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI. The Taliban swept through the country, and by 1996 they had three-quarters of Afghanistan, including Kabul. They were initially welcomed—so were the Khmer Rouge— and replaced the criminality with a form of law and order that amounted to extreme cruelty and ignorance. The strongest of the vanquished warlords withdrew up to the Panjshir Valley and formed a resistance army called the Northern Alliance that did little more than survive.

The Taliban held power for five years of terror. They turned parts of the country over to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, who paid the bills in exchange for shelter while plotting to provoke America into a war with Islam. Then came September 11, 2001. The United States told the Taliban to hand over the perpetrators, but Mullah Omar refused—even at the cost of his own rule.

After the Americans threw out the Taliban and Al Qaeda, it seemed as if the torment of Afghanistan was over. In Bonn that December, a U.N. conference established a loya jirga, a national assembly, which chose Hamid Karzai, from a family of Pashtun tribal noblemen, as Afghanistan’s interim leader.

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Taliban were barred from the new government, with fateful consequences. In 2004 Karzai became the first elected president in the country’s history.

He carried himself with a natural, regal grace. He wore a purple-and-green-striped Uzbek silk cape and lambswool karakul hat to symbolize tradition and national unity.

He was a brilliant retail politician with a sure touch for bargains that kept important players inside the tent. Like a tribal chief he spent his time receiving people in the Arg over tea and cakes, not governing. He saw power as something to hold, not to use in behalf of a vision for his country. He charmed everyone, Afghan and foreigner, with his openness, listening intently and responding with large, theatrical gestures.

Even the occasional twitch that made his left eye squint and the flesh of his cheek jump—nerve damage from an accidental U.S. aerial bombing in late 2001, when Karzai was leading a courageous Pashtun uprising against the Taliban—even this made him

sympathetic. He told visitors that Afghans responded above all to sincerity. “The moment an Afghan feels he’s being taken for a ride, or that he’s being cheated, then he’s the worst person to deal with.”

But soon, and for the second time, we Americans turned away from Afghanistan—Iraq sucked up all our attention and resources—leaving behind a small number of troops whose mission was to kill terrorists, not provide security. Bush and his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had no interest in the long, difficult work of building Afghan institutions and training an Afghan army.

The writ of Karzai’s state was so weak that he became known as the mayor of Kabul.

To gain control of the provinces he turned to the same warlords who had laid waste to the country and brought on the Taliban.

Among them were his relatives, his brothers.

He kept them close through patronage networks, and they fattened off cash from the exploding opium trade and the billions in American dollars for aid projects that seemed

to benefit U.S. companies and Afghan bigs more than the dirt-poor ordinary citizens.

The lavish mafia villas that arose in Kabul’s Sherpur neighborhood, which the locals called Chorpur, Thieves’ Town, became the symbol of Karzai’s rule.

It wasn’t all a waste. Schools and clinics were built, too, and millions of refugees returned, and life improved, especially for women and girls. But the torment hadn’t ended.

The narco-warlords and corrupt officials, and the American bombings that left so many civilians dead and wounded, disillusioned Afghans who had expected a little safety and justice from the new regime. All this created an opening for the Taliban to return.

They hadn’t been defeated, only withdrawn to Pakistan’s crowded cities and border mountains, where they were supported by the same ISI that had run the jihad in the eighties and midwifed the Taliban in the nineties.

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda was reconstituting itself in Pakistan’s tribal region of Waziristan.

The Bush administration didn’t care to

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look too deeply. President Bush saw Karzai and General Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani dictator, as friends and allies in the war on terror, even as the region started to slip back into chaos.

Holbrooke returned in March 2008, in the middle of the Obama-Clinton prizefight.

By then the momentum was slipping away from the Afghan government and its Western backers. The Taliban controlled entire districts of Pashtun provinces. Karzai, in spite of his friendly weekly videoconferences with Bush, began to feel that the Americans didn’t regard him as an equal partner. He complained bitterly to Condoleezza Rice about the rising number of civilian casualties, including one horrible case of an entire wedding party wiped out by an air strike on a hillside near the Pakistan border. He objected to American crop dusters spraying pesticides on poppy fields in Helmand, without regard for the livelihood of the farmers or the future of the soil and water.

But the practices continued.

Karzai began to sound like a nationalist—not an aggressive one like Milosevic, but more like Diem, proud and resentful, with the humiliated anger that a poor man feels toward a rich man whose help he sought. Karzai told visitors that the source of Afghanistan’s problem was Pakistan, and since the Americans refused to crush the Taliban there, they must want an endless war in his country for their own strategic reasons.

If the United States regarded Afghanistan as a client state rather than a partner, a tool to serve its interests, it would meet the same fate here as the British and the Soviets. His statements became so volatile that Western intelligence agencies speculated that Karzai was mentally unstable, perhaps even on drugs. He hardly ever left the palace for fear of assassination, while the corruption in his regime and his family became rampant—the inner rot that nourished the Taliban.

As a possible next secretary of state, Holbrooke was received again at the Arg. This time he criticized Karzai to his face.

“You are responsible for some of the failures of the past few years,” he said bluntly.

“What have I done wrong?”

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Paul D. Coverdell World Wise Schools Educators are seeking Volunteers to share their service.

Connect at peacecorps.gov/wws

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Holbrooke mentioned corruption and Karzai’s tolerance of violent warlords. Karzai blamed international aid contracts for the corruption, Bush administration policy for the warlords, and Pakistan for the Taliban. He had a point on all counts. After Holbrooke left, Karzai remarked to his chief of staff that it might be better if Hillary Clinton lost the election.

Holbrooke flew eastward on an aging Russian-made U.N. helicopter to Khost, a provincial capital on a dry plateau at the border with Pakistan. In the 1990s, Osama bin Laden had set up a terrorist training camp near Khost, and in 1998 a few dozen U.S. cruise missiles had just missed killing him there. In the winter of 2001, Osama and his followers had fled over a mountain pass north to Pakistan. Fewer than seven years later, the Taliban again controlled much of the countryside. A few miles east of Khost, over mountains that were greening with early spring rains, was Waziristan, the sanctuary of America’s sworn enemies.

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Khost wasn’t a place many American VIPs visited. It was as close to the ground truth of the war as a potential secretary of state could get.

A Foreign Service officer named Kael Weston had invited Holbrooke to spend the night at the U.S. base on a former Soviet airstrip. Weston was in his mid-thirties, from Colorado. He had spent four years as a political advisor to the marines in the extreme violence of Fallujah, where he came to the conclusion that Iraq was the wrong war. He asked to be posted to Afghanistan, the right war, and in Khost he found more welcoming locals. Weston was a rare American diplomat in the war on terror who didn’t live day and night behind blast walls and air-locked doors, chronically on email, sealed off from the country he was supposed to be trying to understand.

He wore jeans instead of pressed khakis and spent his time in markets and combat outposts, talking with tribal elders and students, patrolling with American grunts

and sharing their risks. He wrote cables back to the State Department criticizing a strategy that relied too heavily on military force and showy aid projects. He thought that the effort in Afghanistan needed to be both more modest and more tenacious than American politicians wanted.

“No one in Washington knows anything about Afghanistan,” Holbrooke said when he arrived at the base.

“Don’t tell me that,” Weston said.

“And what they do know is mostly wrong.”

They had met a few months before, in the Midtown Manhattan offices of Perseus, where Holbrooke had shown Weston a blackand-white photograph of himself walking down a street in South Vietnam with his boss, Ambassador Maxwell Taylor. Fifty-eight thousand Americans dead for a mistake.

“Why should we care about Afghanistan?”

Holbrooke had asked Weston.

There were obvious similarities between Afghanistan and Vietnam, structural ones— rural insurgency, corrupt government, unreliable client, cross-border enemy sanctuary, a muddled and endless war. Weston answered that the difference was strategic. The Vietnamese Communists hadn’t posed a threat to the United States—the domino theory turned out to be false. We could walk away from Vietnam. But America had been attacked from the valleys and plains around Khost, and could be attacked again. This was Holbrooke’s answer, too, and he added that the vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons to homegrown terrorists made the strategic stakes all the higher. Afghanistan and Pakistan—Holbrooke had begun to speak of the region as a single organism, “Af-Pak”—would be a major part of his portfolio as Clinton’s secretary of state.

Weston introduced Holbrooke to madrassa students, tribal elders, and a handful of former Taliban who had warily come over to the government side. Holbrooke slouched in his chair, hands folded over his belly, and listened as the elders complained about police shakedowns and night raids by U.S. Special Forces. “Not even my brother can enter my house at night,” an old man with a white beard said, “but you 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

Americans did not even knock.” Afghans were caught between their own predatory government, the heavy-handed foreigners, and the brutal insurgents. Holbrooke asked if the elders wanted the Americans to stay or leave. Without the Americans the Taliban would return to power, they answered, but if the Americans stayed they should build up the country.

Holbrooke’s billet that night was the VIP room on base—plywood walls, cheap Afghan rugs, a cot, and a TV with American cable networks. Shoes off, feet propped on a coffee table, he flipped between channels and criticized the pundits and politicians on-screen while peppering Weston with questions about Khost.

“Ambassador, when are you going to visit our other war, Iraq?” Weston asked.

Holbrooke shot him a look. “I see no need to go to Iraq.”

Weston reminded him of himself, a lifetime ago in Soc Trang. “At your age I was already an assistant secretary,” Holbrooke told him. If Weston wanted to shape American foreign policy, he would need a Washington zip code and State Department badge. But Weston was more like Frank Scotton, who had spent a decade in Vietnam and kept his distance from Washington. It would hurt his career, but Weston was committed to seeing out the war here.

Holbrooke slept in cheap flesh-colored pajamas that looked like something given out by the airline in a plastic bag. He woke early in the morning for his helicopter back to Kabul. As in Sarajevo, 24 hours in Khost was enough for him.

He asked for some aspirin. Weston brought him Advil.

“Thanks, but I need aspirin, for here.”

Holbrooke pointed to his heart. 1

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George Packer writes for Atlantic Monthly magazine.

This chapter from the book, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, by George Packer. Copyright © 2019 by George Packer. Published by arrangement with The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. The first of Packer’s fiction and non-fiction books was his 1988 book, The Village of Waiting, about Togo, where he served from 1982-1983. WorldView previously reprinted a portion of one of Packer’s earlier books, The Assassin’s Gate.

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LOOKING BACK the same way that the writers and artists in Paris in the 1920s broadened the view of the world for Americans back home.

Writing On Edge The world of Peace Corps books

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BY JOHN COYNE

n my years of watching people join the Peace Corps, I have found that the most obvious PCV candidates are those who have an edge about them. They want more—whatever the more is—and are not satisfied with what America has to offer them here at home.

And the writers (and would-be writers) among these Volunteers go abroad because they want something to write about. The Peace Corps experience gives them that “something.”

We were all overwhelmed by the experience of the cultures that awaited us when we stepped off the plane. No one could have prepared a typical American for the ways of life in developing countries. But after the initial culture shock there was a richness of experience that the more talented writers could turn into vivid prose. It was raw material waiting to be shaped into books.

Paul Theroux recounts one of the more telling examples of how this happened to him. In this passage he describes the moment when he realized he had a mother lode of material.

“I remember a particular day in Mozambique, in a terrible little country town, getting a haircut from a Portuguese barber.

He had come to the African bush from rural Portugal to be a barber… This barber did not speak English, I did not speak Portuguese, yet when I addressed his African servant in Chinyanja, his own language, the Portuguese man said in Portuguese, ‘Ask the bwana what his Africans are like.’

And that was how we held a conversation — the barber spoke Portuguese to the African, who translated it into Chinyanja for me; and I replied in Chinyanja, which the African kept translating into Por42

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tuguese for the barber. The barber kept saying — and the African kept translating — things like, ‘I can’t stand the blacks — they’re so stupid and bad-tempered. But there’s no work for me in Portugal.’ It was grotesque, it was outrageous, it was the shabbiest, darkest kind of imperialism. I could not believe my good luck. In many parts of Africa in the early 1960s it was the nineteenth century, and I was filled with the urgency to write about it.”

WRITING FROM EXPERIENCE

Anyone who has read Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, Malcolm Cowley, or John Dos Passos can see how they used the experience of living in France, England, and Spain as subject matter.

In much the same way, Paul Theroux, Moritz Thomsen, Maria Thomas, Eileen Drew, Richard Wiley, P.F. Kluge, Bob Shacochis, Norm Rush, Marnie Mueller, Peter Hessler, George Packer, Kathleen Coskran, Mark Brazaitis, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, Eileen Drew, Chris Conlon, Sandra Meek, Tom Hazuka, Jeanne D’Haem, Joseph Monninger, Leonard Levitt, Margaret Szumowski, Ann Neelon, Roland Merullo, Charles Larson, Susan Rich, Mike Tidwell, Susanna Herrera, Peter Chilson, Geraldine Kennedy, Rob Davidson, and hundreds of other Peace Corps writers have used Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe in their short stories, novels, poetry, and non-fiction.

While writing about the developing world and emerging democracies, they have broadened the landscape of American readers by introducing new countries and new ideas about other cultures and societies, much

OUR WRITER IN PARIS

Closer to the Peace Corps, and closer to our decade, there is Black Girl in Paris by Shay Youngblood, who lived in Paris before becoming a Volunteer in Dominica. Of Paris, Shay writes, “it seemed to be the kind of place that, if you were a writer or artist, there was something in the air that could transform you.”

Shay Youngblood, however, was not following Ernest Hemingway. She was following another literary lion, James Baldwin, who left Greenwich Village in 1948 because of American racism. Baldwin would spend more than a decade in Paris where he wrote his first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain.

In Black Girl in Paris, Youngblood informs us that upon arriving in the Paris of 1924 in his early twenties, Langston Hughes had only $7 in his pocket; that an equally youthful James Baldwin followed two decades later with $40. Youngblood’s protagonist came with $140 hidden between her sock and the sole of her shoe. “They dared to make a way when there was none and I want to be just like them,” she writes.

“This is the place where it happened. Where it will happen again.”

With these writers as her touchstone, Shay doesn’t look back in anger, but expands on the expatriate theme to write about a young black woman who has fled the deep South in search of a childhood dream of a color-blind, liberal atmosphere in which a woman can become a writer. And in doing so, she pays her homage, not to Hemingway or Fitzgerald, but to her black expatriates: Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin.

POETRY IN THE PEACE CORPS

The intense cross cultural experience of the Peace Corps has produced in many PCVs a deep well of sentiment that has found its way, perhaps too easily, into poetry. Fortunately, this intense experience has also been a rich source of material for many fine 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

Courtesy of authors and RPCV Writers

None of the contributors are protagonists published poets including Charlie Smith, is important because without it there is no in their chapters, but each chapter is based Mark Brazaitis, Philip Dacey, Sandra Meek, mystical experience. on some event that the writer witnessed, Tom Hebert, Ann Neelon, Paul Violi, Keith “In Senegal, I gained many things useful to experienced, or heard about. By telling the Carthwright, Susan Rich, John Flynn, Mar- a poet. These included hours of direct exposure stories, the contributors seem to reconsider garet Szumowski, Virginia Gilbert, Tony to the oral tradition via West African griots, their experiences overseas and enable Zurlo, and many others. caches of exquisite bush and desert images, readers to consider (or perhaps reconsider) Poets, I believe, have been best able and French and Wolof syllables, but none of U.S. actions in the developing world. Those to explain the values of the Peace Corps these can compare with the opportunity to actions can serve as a metaphor for readers’ experiences with human and cultural difexperience as it relates to writing. Margaret have Africa erase who I was. Only after losing ferences. In this way, the book offers a triple Szumowski, who served in Uganda and myself could I find myself as a writer.” treat. Readers learn a little about parts of the Ethiopia, puts it this way: “I think the poet And in the Peace Corps the overwhelmworld they may never see for themselves, gains a great deal. She absorbs the sounds ing opportunity to “lose oneself ” makes they are entertained by a good yarn, and they of other languages, takes in imagery never writers of us all. can learn about themselves as well. seen before, observes the way families operate compared to her own experience, AS OTHERS SEE US What more could a Peace Corps writer want? sees the struggle other peoples have to On September 9, 2001, on the 40th annisurvive at all. versary of the agency, The Washington Post EXPATRIATES AND EXILES “The visual shock and splendor of Africa reported that the Peace Corps community is Peace Corps writers are, at least for a while, is enough to keep the poet writing for the “churning out enough works—thousands of expatriates and exiles from their culture, rest of her life—take as an example, the baobab. I’d never seen such a strange and magnificent tree, one that blooms at night, harbors night creatures such as lemurs, and provides food for humans from its fuzzy pods. I’d never seen donkeys in the streets of Addis Ababa, laden with their loads, or a woman dancing around our house, rags tied to her feet as she cleaned the floor. I’d never seen soldiers with their guns 3Distinguished RPCV authors include: Bob Shacochis, poet Ann Neelon, and Shay Youngblood. pointed at us, as I did in Uganda. All of these experiences gave me memoirs, novels, and books of poetry—to and from that experience they gain a new enough to think about and absorb for the warrant a whole new genre: Peace Corps perspective, even a new vocabulary, as Richrest of my life.”

Literature.” Also in 2001, Book Magazine ard Wiley recalls from living in Korea. “As The ability to “see” that poets have is wrote in the March/April issue about the I started to learn Korean I began to see that combined with what all of us gained from literary movement of Peace Corps writers, language skewed actual reality around, and the experience, as Chris Conlon puts it, quoting Paul Theroux, Bob Shacochis and as I got better at it I began to understand that “perspective, maturity, a larger and, one Kent Haruf. it was possible to see everything differently. hopes, better ‘self.’”

Then there is the review that appeared in Reality is a product of language and culture, But it is the “gift” of language that these the November 2001 issue of Journal of Ado- that’s what I learned” poets find more useful and which benefits lescent & Adult Literacy about the collection The experience is also intensely eduthem the most. Poet Ann Neelon sums up of Peace Corps stories that were published cational. The late novelist Maria Thomas her experience in Senegal, with one word, in Living On The Edge. The reviewer was said of her time in Ethiopia, “it was a great foreignness. “Foreignness is important to a Patrick Shannon of Penn State University period of discovery. There was the discovery poet because it teaches humility. Humility and he wrote: of an ancient world, an ancient culture, in W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

WO R L D V I E W W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

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John Coyne is editor of PeaceCorpsWriters.org and

publishes a blog at Peace Corps Worldwide. He served in Ethiopia from 1962 to 1965, teaches writing and has written more than 40 books of fiction and non-fiction. He is co-founder of the Peace Corps Fund, which encourages RPCVs to write and publish their work. This article is excerpted from an unpublished paper, “Writers from the Peace Corps,” with the author’s permission.

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MacArthur Grant Winner On Fiji The marine scientist Stacy Jupiter has been awarded a $625,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation to support her decade of work for the Wildlife Conservation Society on Fiji and in the larger Melanesia region. The award was made for her ground-breaking work as a scientist and her innovative ways of supporting the local coastal communities. Jupiter works to conserve the extraordinary biodiversity of Melanesia, a Pacific region that includes Fiji, Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea. She works with the Melanesian communities to manage coral reef natural resources by building on their traditional practices, such as periodic closing of the local reef fisheries.

Jupiter’s efforts were motivated when she returned from a 2009 vacation and realized the extent of the global warming crisis on the islands. She has accelerated community awareness of her wildlife conservation efforts among island youth by publishing comic books, staging live shows with barracuda as puppets and dressing in a sparkling blouse to perform at Fiji’s then-largest flash mob to the tune of “Stayin’ Alive” with 125 local supporters during a popular festival in Suva, the capital city. The 43-year-old environmentalist was a rural fisheries extension agent in Gabon between 1997 and 1999 before earning her doctorate at the University of California in Santa Cruz. 1

Moringa at Your Walmart Kuli Kuli’s chief executive, Lisa Curtis, just made a huge leap in the U.S. health food marketplace by announcing that the Oakland, California firm is launching into Walmart.

As of October, Kuli Kuli’s moringa-based Pure Organic Moringa Vegetable Powder and its Organic Chocolate Peanut Butter Moringa Green Smoothie are now on the shelves of 2,500 Walmart stories nationwide. That’s big news for the five-year-old company Curtis created after she encountered her first moringa tree Kuli Kuli donates 25 during her Peace Corps work in Niger in 2010. percent of product Moringa is a tropical tree with leaves that are more nutrisales to a PCV/RPCV group or project tious than kale and contain anti-inflammatory properties through a customrivaling turmeric. Kuli Kuli’s moringa products are sold in over ized affiliate link.

Email hello@kulikuli 10,000 U.S. stores. Inc. magazine ranks Kuli Kuli in the top 15 foods.com. fastest-growing food and beverage companies in America. Kuli Kuli provides livelihoods for 2,438 small farmers—many are women, Curtis adds—who harvest the moringa’s leaves in countries in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. Their supply chain has reforested with 12 million new moringa plants to fight global warming. Kuli Kuli’s bars, smoothies, and wellness shots provide nutrition.1 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

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

which culture is so deep in people that it becomes a richness.”

For all these writers, their Peace Corps years were a time to learn the rules of another culture, as well as a time to learn about themselves in relation to the world, as well as in relation to the United States.

John Givens, a Volunteer in Korea and author of three novels published in the 1980s, says that the Peace Corps “suggested that experience was not limited to the mores and expectations of central California where I grew up. The ‘wideness’ of the world came home to me vividly in Korea, and I’ve been exploring the world ever since.” And novelist and short story writer Eileen Drew makes the point that writers with Peace Corps experience “bring the outsider’s perspective, which we’ve learned overseas, to bear on the U.S. We are not the only writers to have done this, but because of the nature of our material, it’s something we can’t not do.”

Bob Shacochis characterizes the modern generation of writers as followers. “We are torchbearers of a vital tradition, that of shedding light in the mythical heart of darkness.

We are descendants of Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and scores of other men and women, expatriates and travel writers and wanderers, who have enriched our domestic literature with the spices of Cathay, who have tried to communicate the ‘exotic’ as a relative, rather than an absolute, quality of humanity.”

Peace Corps Writers do the same by bringing the world back home through their own writing. They have an understanding of parts of the world few Americans will ever know.

And as PCVs they have a “way of looking at this world” that is new and fresh and insightful.

Fulfilling the Third Goal of the Peace Corps means telling your tales at home.

So, see how far you can go with a good line or two. Begin today. Write. 1

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