My Peace Corps Experience
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
I entered Peace Corps training at St. Johns College in Annapolis MD in June 1965 to be part of a relatively large group going to India to help build a modern poultry industry there.
Because of a border war between India and Pakistan
that broke out late that summer, our arrival in India was postponed. Happily, even fantastically, my group was sent to Israel to continue our training in the expectation that this border clash would be quickly resolved as others had been. Our group of around 90 people ended up spending 5 weeks in Israel, divided among four English-speaking kibbutzim that also had poultry operations.
We arrived in New Delhi in November 1965 and were then sent out to about six different states in Northern India. I was sent to the small city of Ghaziabad, an industrial suburb of New Delhi in the state of Uttar Pradesh. About 80 of us completed service in June 1967 with the usual range of results. A few volunteers extended their service, a few stayed to do other work and even get married. Most of us went home to the USA to enter graduate school or get a job.
There was nothing exceptional about my experience as a volunteer, nothing to brag about. This is partly due to having a very clear career reason for being in the Peace Corps. I was not worried about being drafted because I had just completed two years of active duty in the US Navy. I was intent on making a career as an economic development advisor and I had been told by people in USAID, the World Bank, and the Ford Foundation that my chances of being hired would improve greatly by having some grassroots experience in a developing country.
Another reason for not having a visible impact on the poultry industry in India was being posted so close to New Delhi and its urban attractions. A third reason was splitting my time to focus on two challenges beyond poultry: small industry promotion and family planning.
All of this is touched on in my oral interview without much appeal. The little stories I told that might be of some interest were about a guiding a young French woman to Chandigarh to see the work her mother had done in building this capital city for Punjab State, the wedding of two of my India XVI group mates in Udaipur, and the month I spent fighting triple pneumonia in Holy Family Hospital in New Delhi.
Looking back, by far the biggest impact that Peace Corps service in India had on my life was being informally adopted into an Indian family with five children my age. In addition, I acquired two life-long Indian friends. When I met them, one was a physics professor and the other was the son of the founder of one of the biggest industries in Ghaziabad (a steel rolling mill and foundry).
The historically most valuable part of my oral history, by far, is about the work I started in 2003 shortly after joining the Brookings Institution to assess the Peace Corps as an agency of the US Government. This work may have had some impact on how the Peace Corps has evolved since then. This work also included a significant investment to promote international volunteer service more generally, although it failed within ten years.
It is unlikely that a description of this work exists anywhere else now or will in the future. This is unfortunate because there many lessons to be learned from this experience. Individuals who played a significant role in this work and are mentioned in my oral history include Colin Powell, Harris Wofford, Strobe Talbott, Lael Brainard, Jody Olsen, Kevin Quigley, and David Caprara.
My oral history can be accessed from this web page:
Click on the tab "Play Interview".
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