Peace Corps News

RPCVs speak out on the issues

Shalala pledges to continue fight for wounded soldiers
Shalala said she and Dole have every intention of continuing to push the administration and Congress for changes, including amending the Family Medical Leave Act to allow for up to six months leave for a family member of a wounded service member. Most of the recommendations can be implemented by the administration, though some would require legislative approval. To that end, Dole and Shalala made the rounds on Capitol Hill the day after the report's release, meeting with House and Senate leaders to gain their support.  Shalala balanced the demands of the commission — visits to various veteran health care facilities around the country and seven public hearings — along with her duties at the university. She also taught a class on the politics of health care to 150 students. "She's type triple A," Dole said, laughing. "I'm a type A, but she's triple A. She's either got the cell phone going, or the Blackberry or she's in a conversation. She doesn't waste any time. She's all business, 'Let's get this done and get this done right."'  "I was at the White House when they asked me about the commission and we sort of kicked names around," Dole said. "Donna's name came up and that was the end of the conversation. "I knew it wasn't going to be partisan, but solution driven," Dole said. "We knew there were problems, otherwise there wouldn't be a commission, but we weren't there to review complaints, we were there to solve the problem."  University of Miami President and former Clinton Cabinet member Donna Shalala served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran in the 1960's. Read more.

Caption: President Bush, right, meets veteran Sgt. Major Mike Welsh who is using the 'Nu Step Machine' as he visits the rehabilitation room at the Washington Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington, Monday, Aug. 13, 2007. Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, left, and former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, second from left, co-chairs of the President Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors look on. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Morocco RPCV Sue Hilderbrand brings energy, experience to Peace and Justice Center
Since April, Hilderbrand has been director of Chico Peace and Justice Center. A self-described political theorist, she speaks freely and articulately about what she thinks and believes, about what she has read and where she has been. Stopping funding of the war in Iraq is paramount to Hilderbrand. "Right now things like health care and the environment are taking a back seat."  Hilderbrand came to Chico two years ago when her partner, cartographer Seth Paine, got a job at the Nature Conservancy. Living in Phoenix and thinking about perhaps a trip to sub-Saharan Africa, the prospect of moving to a California valley town didn't thrill Hilderbrand at first. But she warmed to the idea when she found Chico's Peace and Justice Center online. Hilderbrand met Paine while they were serving in the Peace Corps in Morocco. "I was a rural-socio-economics planner. I worked on a national park, which was the largest cedar forest in Africa. I dealt with social, economic and political forces and saw that they all work together." Read more.

Caption: Sue Hilderbrand, director of Chico Peace and Justice Center, invited people to call Congressman.

Sarah Chayes writes: NATO didn't lose Afghanistan
"In 2003, NATO moved peacekeeping forces into Kabul and parts of northern Afghanistan. But not until 2005, when it was clear that the United States was bogged down in Iraq and lacked sufficient resources to fight on two fronts, did Washington belatedly turn to NATO to take the Afghan south off its hands. And then it misrepresented the situation its allies would find there. NATO was told, in effect, that it would simply need to maintain the order the United States had established and to help with reconstruction and security. In fact, as was clear from the ground, the situation had been deteriorating since late 2002. By 2004, resurgent Taliban were making a concerted push to enter the country from Pakistan, and intensive combat between American forces and Taliban fighters was taking place north of Kandahar." Morocco RPCV Sarah Chayes has made a home in Kandahar, Afghanistan, became fluent in Pashto, one of the main Afghan languages, and devoted her energies to rebuilding a country gutted by two decades of war. Read more.

Caption:   Sarah Chayes of NPR and Adam Brooks of the BBC, after the fall of Kabul, but before the Taliban fell, in a town just inside Afghanistan called Spin Boldak. People on the walls stare at the journalists while they apply sunscreen to their faces.

Uzbekistan RPCV John Smart writes: U.S. embassy or is it George W. Bush's palace?
It's not only the largest embassy in the world, it's the largest embassy ever constructed by any nation, anywhere, at any time in history! It's larger than Vatican City and much more secure — the outer walls are 15 feet thick. In a country that has only a couple of hours of electricity a day, the new embassy will have its own generators, and in a society where drinkable water is a scarce and precious commodity, it will have its own water filtration system. The people outside those 15-foot walls might get a bit testy about this display of wealth, don't you think? The Iraqis, accustomed as they were to Saddam's numerous marble extravaganzas are referring to this mega-complex as "George W's Palace." Again, I wonder why? It's costing us billions for sure, although that information is apparently classified. Don't you think we should know what it's for? Or maybe we do know what it's for. Maybe it's all of a piece with the expensive and evidently permanent military bases that the Bush administration is building in Iraq. Maybe the plan all along was to occupy this keystone country in the Middle East for the foreseeable future. Maybe that's why George W. Bush is so angered by the congress's repeated attempts to put timelines and deadlines on our occupation forces: He has no intention of us ever leaving. Read more.

Caption:  Blueprints for the new US Embassy in Iraq.

Chris Dodd says no easy election for Democrats in 2008
Democratic presidential hopeful Chris Dodd warned his fellow party members not to get lulled into believing the 2008 election will produce the same sweeping victories that Democrats enjoyed last November. "There’s an assumption that people are making that any Democrat can win in ’08," said Dodd, a U.S. senator from Connecticut who has won seven elections since arriving in Congress in 1974. "I don’t believe that." "This is about leadership, it’s about proven ability, it’s about the ability to go with bold ideas and not half measures that I think the country is desperate and hungry for," said Dodd, who attended a minor league baseball game, a farmers market and addressed Iowa’s largest state employees’ union during his latest campaign swing. Read more.

RPCVs speak out on the issues. Read more.

Forestry and the Peace Corps

Nepal RPCV Joe Krueger has been to Liberia four times in the past two years as part of a program that is drawing on skills from the U.S. Forest Service to restore Liberia's timber industry
The Liberian Forestry Initiative came about as a means of re-establishing a viable and responsible industry, as the country operated under a shaky interim government. While the initiative is driven by a U.S. Forest Service team, it is funded by the State Department with the cooperation of the United Nations. The program is aimed at establishing laws and regulations and a general framework for managing Liberia's forests. Krueger said he was tapped for the program because he had worked on a community forestry project in Senegal in 2004, and had served in the Peace Corps in Nepal in the early 1990s. He first went to Liberia in April 2005 and has been back three times since, most recently in December. Krueger said there has been progress in rebuilding the country's timber industry, and a big part of it is due to the relative stability that's developed since last year, when a competent, Harvard-educated president was elected, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

"Right now, the industry is completely unregulated," he said. But many of the pieces are falling in place for an organized, regulated timber industry to start up soon. And there is pressure for Krueger and his fellow advisers to make it happen. "There is a lot of pressure on the Forest Service to get this sector back up and running," Krueger said. "People want to know, where are the logs, where is the revenue?" The old contracts have all been nullified and new ones will be issued under a system that will more closely monitor the movement of products. A "chain of custody" system is being developed to track logs from the stump all the way to their export destination. Read more.

Niger RPCV Clark Fleege helps rebuild Afghanistan's forests
Fleege, who directs the Lucky Peak Nursery for the Boise National Forest, will make his second trip to Afghanistan to continue working on a United States Department of Agriculture project to plant native tree species for reforestation, soil improvement and beautification. The country has lost a lot of its forests to a drought that has plagued the area for the past several years.

"By us going in there and helping improve their natural resources, we can help these people improve their lives and have a more stable country," Fleege said. The U.S. compound where Fleege will stay includes dorm-style housing in metal shipping crates. He will be confined to working in and around Kabul because of safety concerns, and will need an armed escort everywhere he goes. "What we do is management of natural resources, and sound natural resource management is just fundamental for anything, for life: having good water, good soil, clean air," he said.  Read more.

Ed " Redwood" Ring writes: The best thing that ever happened to me was going to Central America to help treeplanters. I was fortunate to have a first-hand look at some of their finest work, when I went there with Stuart Conway, an EcoWorld Hero and co-founder of the reforesting group, Trees Water and People.

Stuart Conway has been living half in the U.S., half in Central America for about 25 years now. He and his wife Jennie Bramhall joined the Peace Corps, went to Guatemala for their honeymoon, and didn't come home for three years. They lived and worked in a small town just south of the beautiful highland colonial city of Antigua. Since then, they return to Central America several times a year, specializing in helping small communities grow trees and protect their watersheds.

Stuart co-founded Trees Water and People (the name grows on you) in 1998 with Richard Fox, a veteran forest arborist, who specializes in North American forest preservation and watershed protection. Both of them moved with their families to Ft. Collins, Colorado, rolled up their sleeves and got their organization up and running. They work along with a small staff in a lofty 2nd floor suite in an old brick and timber building on College Avenue between downtown and the University. Towering Plains Cottonwoods hang huge limbs overhead (Cottonwoods decorate the whole city, and why they aren't planting new ones is beyond me), and just one block north the main train line intersects the street. If you call them and hear a roar in the background, it's just a freight train about two hours on the tracks from Denver.

When the folks at Trees Water and People aren't providing funds and expert assistance growing trees and protecting watersheds in Central America, they are working closer to home, protecting watersheds in the Rocky Mountains of the U.S. This is Richard Fox's area, and he brings to his work a lifetime of experience in forests throughout America, but mostly in the Rockies. In his time, Richard has had crews of planters where, using a special planting tool, each person could plant up to 1,000 trees per day. I didn't believe him, but we timed the motions, and I did the math. I guess it's true. We could have fun with this! One thousand people could plant a million trees a day. A billion trees in less than three years!

Planting trees is only part of the solution, though, and managing a forest and a watershed is complex work that is never done. Richard's trees and watershed protection has so far enlisted the support of communities throughout Colorado and Wyoming, mostly along the "Front Range," the eastern slopes of the Rockies.  Read more.

Read more about the Peace Corps and forestry.

Louise M. Pascale is republishing the collection of Afghan children's songs that she had compiled as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s

Louise M. Pascale is republishing the collection of Afghan children's songs that she had compiled as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s
Rummaging through her bookshelf five years ago, Louise M. Pascale, an assistant professor of creative arts and learning at Lesley University in Cambridge, came upon the collection of Afghan children's songs that she had compiled as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s.

It was sort of like finding an old yearbook, but instead of illustrating how hairstyles and skirt lengths had changed over the years, the tattered green songbook called attention to a greater change: The devastation reaped on Afghanistan after years of Taliban rule. Holding the relic, Pascale was certain that all remaining copies of the songbook, which she distributed in Kabul during her time in the Peace Corps, had been destroyed. She assumed they were lost, along with instruments and archives of local folk songs, when the Taliban outlawed music.

"I said to myself, 'I want to give this back to the kids in Afghanistan,' " Pascale recalls. " 'It's not doing me any good in my bookcase.' "

The songbook has come a long way from its creation nearly 40 years ago, when the 22-year-old Pascale realized, while traveling to Afghan schools to teach music, that students lacked books of songs. She worked with local poets and musicians to transcribe traditional songs.

Pascale's goal, to return these songs to a country stripped of its music, will be realized in the coming months. But the project is not over yet. The Afghan minister of education has asked that songs now be gathered for adults, so a second book can be created. Pascale takes the request as a good sign: "It makes me feel that they see the importance of it, and they know that music is a way to solidify and connect the country."

Learn more about "Children's Songs from Afghanistan."

"Peace Corps Online" and NPCA collaborate on story "Snowshoe Bob" in Worldview Magazine

"Peace Corps Online" and NPCA collaborate on story "Snowshoe Bob" in Worldview Magazine
Robert Paul died September 8 of this year when a suicide car-bomber struck his Humvee in Kabul, Afghanistan. Sgt. Paul was in his third year of active duty in the Army reserves and had completed two years in Iraq commanding a civil affairs unit in Baghdad. Paul had also served in Peace Corps in Kenya and last year, while studying Thai at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, joined a 2005 e-mail debate peacecorpsonline.com (sic) about Peace Corps as an incentive for military recruitment. Read more.

He served with honor
One year ago, Staff Sgt. Robert J. Paul (RPCV Kenya) carried on an ongoing dialog on "Peace Corps Online" on the military and the peace corps and his role as a member of a Civil Affairs Team in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have received a report that Sargeant Paul has been killed by a car bomb in Kabul. Words cannot express our feeling of loss for this tremendous injury to the entire RPCV community. Most of us didn't know him personally but we knew him from his words. Our thoughts go out to his family and friends. He was one of ours and he served with honor. Read the original discussion with Bob Paul on "Peace Corps Online" here.

Friends and Family remembers Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Robert Paul killed in Afghanistan
Paul's mother said her son never stopped charting his own path, whether it was taking German when French and Spanish were the only languages offered, or announcing over dinner that he had joined the Peace Corps. "His first year there, he learned Swahili, and that's a very hard language, I understand," she said. "Then when that year was up, he called and said he was staying another year."  When he left for Afghanistan "I asked, 'Is there anybody I can call to get you out,'" his mother recalled tearfully. "He said, 'You don't understand; I want to go.' Kenya RPCV Robert Paul worked in a Civil Affairs unit in Afghanistan.  He was killed in a car bombing in 2006. Read more.