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.

Recent RPCV Obituaries

Obituary for Nepal RPCV Loret Miller Ruppe
Inspired by her mother, who was director of the Peace Corps at the time and who later, was the U.S. ambassador to Norway, Dr. Ruppe served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal from 1985 to 1987. She married another Peace Corps volunteer and moved to Charlottesville where she received a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Virginia in 1990. While pursuing a doctoral degree in environmental engineering from the University of California at David, she completed the demanding Program in College Teaching and taught undergraduate classes. Dr. Ruppe organized conferences aimed at encouraging under-represented minorities and women to enter the engineering field. She also organized the National Science Foundation’s First Women in engineering Leadership Conference. She returned to the Washington area in 2003 to work at AID, where in addition to her role on the global climate change team, she also provided technical support on a range of climate-related issues to missions in Asia and the Near East and was a U.S. delegate to negotiations on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Dr. Ruppe received her doctorate in 2005. Read More.

Obituary for Jamaica RPCV Bonita 'Bonnie' Mather
Bonnie's life was rich with service to others. After nursing school, her nursing career began in the early 1950s with assignments in Billings, Williston, North Dakota, and Grand Forks, North Dakota. She received her bachelor of science degree in elementary/special education at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, and her master's in special education from Eastern Montana College in Billings, going on to teach regular and special education for Great Falls Public Schools until 1972. She also piloted the first elementary program for the emotionally disturbed. Bonnie again returned to nursing at the Montana Deaconess Medical Center (now Benefis East) in various units from 1985 to 1993. In 1995, Bonnie joined the Peace Corps and served two years in Jamaica as a primary health care and health education nurse. Bonnie retired to her residence in Monarch, where her intelligent wit, keen sense of humor, and desire to give to others made her a fast friend to the community. Read more.

Obituary for Pakistan RPCV Richard Bowman
After returning to the United States, he was among the first employees of the Peace Corps, joining in 1961. For two years, he spoke at college campuses and gave television and radio interviews throughout the country recruiting for the Peace Corps. He served with the organization in Pakistan from 1963 to 1966. Read more.

Obituary for Togo Medical Officer Albert E. Henn
He had been a Peace Corps medical officer in Togo in 1968 before working for the U.S. Agency for International Development. During 1970 and 1971, he served as regional medical officer for the Peace Corps in Washington, where he recruited, hired and trained Peace Corps medical staff and helped to formulate Peace Corps health policies; coordinated international emergency care; represented the Peace Corps with other government agencies; and conducted clinical research. Read more.

Obituary for Thailand RPCV Henry Ginsburg, Curator of Thai and Cambodian Collections at the British Library
Introduced to Asia with a stay in India, Ginsburg nevertheless studied Russian at Columbia, then joined the US Peace Corps, which sent him to Thailand. There he taught English in the provincial town of Chachoengsao, 1964-66. His interest subsequently took him to the only viable academic institution where he could pursue the topic of Thai literature, namely the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. Under the guidance of Stuart Simmonds, he wrote a dissertation on a set of embedded Thai fables, progeny of the Sanskrit Pancatantra, that, as can be learned from his 1975 scholarly article on the subject, serve to discourage humans from allowing identities to be perverted (don't marry a nymph, and remember that the mythic Garuda bird lost his credibility when he allowed the birds he ruled over to see him featherless while moulting). Read more.

Obituary for Malaysia RPCV Norman Leo Haug
He served in the Peace Corps from 1964 to 1966 and was stationed on a Malaysian island where he was often the only physician for a population of several thousand. After the Peace Corps, he joined the Army. While serving in Vietnam, he narrowly survived the Tet Offensive. He was a volunteer physician after the 1998 Hurricane Mitch in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and received many awards including the Colorado Rural Health Excellence Award in 1999, the Civis Princeps Award from Regis University in 2001 and the National Rural Health Practioner of the Year in 2003. Read more.

Memorial tree planted for Uzbekistan RPCV Melissa Reynolds
Reynolds, who was in her second year of the sociology and anthropology masters program, was studying to become a historical archeologist when she came to ISU in 2005. Born in the Netherlands, Reynolds joined the Peace Corps for two years and taught English to elementary students in Uzbekistan before attending ISU. She aspired to become an archaeologist when she was in elementary school and was well on her way to achieving that goal. Read more.

Obituary for Colombia RPCV Bill Bullard
Mr. Bullard retired in 1976, and he and his wife promptly joined the Peace Corps, spending 1 and a half years in Colombia helping to plan new national parks there. Most of the volunteers were much younger, but "we could keep up with them pretty well," Jean Bullard said. Read more.

Obituary for Chile RPCV Charles Grier Johnson Jr.
After graduating from Glassboro High School, he earned a bachelor's degree in forest resource management from the University of Idaho in Moscow in 1967 then joined the Peace Corps and served in Chile. While in Chile, he met and wed Angelica Gonzalez Sotomayor. Read more.

Obituary for Poland and Sierra Leone RPCV Ellen Elliot
Mrs. Elliott's passion for social causes provided the framework for an adventurous life. Her charity work took her to West Africa, Nigeria, India and Poland. In the Bay Area, she championed fair redistricting rules in state government, opened educational opportunities to poor children on the Peninsula, started a message service for inmates at the San Mateo County Jail, fed the poor in East Palo Alto, and, as the public face of the League of Women Voters, advocated for more open government on television and radio.  She tried her hand at book publishing, after returning to the Peace Corps with her husband to help promote tourism in Poland during its transition back to democracy in 1991. While she was leading community-building groups there, Mrs. Elliott was also editing a book about the history of the large prewar Jewish community in the area, "Jewish Bialystok and Surroundings in Eastern Poland." The book was favorably reviewed by the New York Times and is now in its second edition. Read more.

Obituary for Somalia RPCV Laurence Bourassa who led Catholic Relief Services in Cambodia during the bloody era of the infamous killing fields
Mr. Bourassa's life was most notably shaped by two episodes, friends and colleagues said - his stint in Somalia with the first group of Peace Corps volunteers, which first gave him a taste for overseas humanitarian work, and two harrowing years he spent in Cambodia during the bloody era of the infamous killing fields. He first went to Cambodia in 1973, as the conflict in Vietnam was spilling across the border and the brutal Khmer Rouge communist regime was gaining power. Mr. Bourassa was in charge of field operations for Catholic Relief Services, where he worked for 40 years. He provided food, medical assistance and water to Cambodians who were fleeing to government-controlled pockets of the country. He set up a relief operation and field hospital in Neak Loeung, where he briefly was stranded in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge was shelling the city round the clock. "We were in a siege situation," said Pat Johns, the director of emergency operations for CRS and a fellow worker in Cambodia. "We couldn't get a chopper in there to get them out." Mr. Bourassa and several medical personnel finally escaped via helicopter just 12 hours before the city fell to the Khmer Rouge. "When the helicopter landed in Phnom Penh it was a sight to behold," Mr. Johns said. "It was shot to hell. There were bullet holes all over." Read more.

Obituary for Lesotho RPCV Ruth Dunn
In 1984, Ruth Dunn joined the Peace Corps and went to Lesotho, a country surrounded by South Africa, said her son. "You have to remember that South Africa was in upheaval with apartheid," he said. "Nelson Mandela was in prison. Lesotho was not a place you wanted to be." Dunn, described as "about as big as a bird," thrived. Assigned to set up business cooperatives, she became a beloved and trusted member of the community. "Everyone called her 'Miss Ruth,' " her son said. "She adopted a dog she called Chang II after her cat Chang at home, and they went everywhere together. It was the best time of her life. " Read more.

Obituary for Tonga RPCV Ervin "Duane" Lassen
Duane received his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from ISU in 1972 and, after serving in the Peace Corps in Tonga, he returned to ISU, where he completed a residency in veterinary clinical pathology and obtained his Ph.D. Duane was an avid runner, weight lifter and scuba diver. He biked the Leadville 100 and was an avid sports fan. Beyond his hobbies and his career, Duane's great love was his family, and he will be missed as a son, husband, father, grandfather, brother, friend and teacher. Read more.

Obituary for Ethiopia RPCV  Claudette Renner
It was natural for Claudette Renner, who passed away Feb. 6, to find ways to help others. She dedicated her life to helping others who couldn't help themselves. She was an active member of the Peace Corps volunteering in Ethiopia from 1965-1967. After Africa, she came back to the United States as a social worker in the Appalachian Mountains. Read more.

Obituary for Mali RPCV Clarence Wilson
Clarence Wilson, born in 1916, was inspired by the exploits of Charles Lindbergh to join the Navy as a pilot. After fighting in World War II, Wilson continued working for the Navy until he was hired in the early 1960s to work on unmanned space exploration by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He helped launch a satellite in 1963 that allowed the United States to watch the 1964 Olympics from Tokyo, his wife said. When Wilson's first wife died, he joined the Peace Corps in Mali, where he taught agriculture. "He had to learn French in no time flat, because that is what they spoke," his wife said. "He joined the Peace Corps to get his life back together." Read more.

Fathers and Sons: Tom Bissell tells the story of how Vietnam came home to the family

Tom Bissell tells the story of how Vietnam came home to the family
Tom Bissell was not yet born when his father, Marine Lieutenant John Bissell, spent his combat tour on the battlefields around Danang. He was barely out of infancy when Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) fell to communist forces in 1975 – itself an event that was highly traumatic for many returned war veterans like the elder Mr. Bissell. The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam, by Tom Bissell is a highly ambitious and ultimately successful work by a very talented young writer. Part history, part travelogue, part painful family biography, it centers on the two men's 2005 trip to Vietnam.

There had been a close but sometimes uneasy relationship between the two ever since Tom Bissell's parents divorced when he was still a young child in northern Michigan. That prickliness flared now and then on the trip. But there was also an opening up between father and son. " 'Look at these hills,' my father said, pointing at the slopes and rises all around us. 'How we fought and scratched for them.' "Some brief, terrible recognition in his voice and eyes – some distance closed too quickly, some unexpectedly recovered past – spooked me deeply. My father was softly shaking his head." Having studied the war in great detail (which he analyzes quite convincingly in "The Father of All Things"), the younger man finally asks his father: " 'Dad, forgive me, but how the hell did you guys manage to lose? You had every imaginable advantage.' " 'Funny,' my father said, looking away. 'I was just thinking the same thing about that myself. What can I tell you?.... We had a lot of advantages, that's certainly true. But this wasn't our country. We were all a long way from home.' "  Read more.

Daniel Ford reviews:  Tom Bissell's "The Father of All Things
In the end, I found myself liking the father more and the son less. The Bissells' visit to Hue -- the city near the Demilitarized Zone where, during the 1968 Tet offensive, the U.S. Marines won the battle but lost their country's support -- captures the flavor of "The Father of All Things." When the two men arrive at the Citadel, an imperial palace complex, Bissell Sr. pronounces the enclave "neat." That's not good enough for Bissell Jr., who prods his father throughout the trip for therapeutic exchanges that never come. At Hue, Bissell Jr. chides his father ("Come on, 'Neat'?") and then launches into a description of how the French, who once ruled Vietnam, found it "humbling" that Vietnamese culture was "hundreds of years older than French culture." Thus, Bissell Jr. says, the French were willing to negotiate once war started.

He asks his father repeatedly whether he is "bitter" that the Marines didn't train him in cultural sensitivity. Bissell Sr. won't confess to bitterness on that score, but after sucking his teeth and thinking a bit, he allows that the U.S. could have accomplished a lot with humanitarian aid in rural areas if we had understood the country better. Read more.

Paul McLeary reviews: Tom Bissell's "The Father of All Things
Their exchanges, in revealing the chasm between father and son, suggest how war creates two kinds of people: those who lived through it and those who will never understand what it was like to live through it. During the trip, Tom tries, time and again, to get his father to admit that the war isn't finished for him, and the more the father protests that he has come to terms with it, the more the gap between them seems to grow. When they visit the beach where his father first set foot in Vietnam, Bissell tries to get his father to talk. His father asks for a moment, staring at the ocean in confusion and recognition. "This was where the man I knew as my father was born," Bissell writes. "It was as though he were looking upon himself through a bloody veil of memory."

Sons have always had to tell themselves a great many things about their fathers, those tall, whiskered, larger-than-life figures they aspire to be — and sometimes fear becoming. Perhaps no son ever fully reconciles himself to his father, for good or ill. Bissell's beautifully written book adds a chapter to the rich literature of familial struggle. Read more.

Joe Klein reviews: Tom Bissell's "The Father of All Things
It is a supreme act of authorly self-abnegation, and an utter relief from the solipsistic memoirs that clutter the shelves, that Tom Bissell allows his father to be a far more sympathetic character than he portrays himself to be. After a visit to the Cu Chi tunnels, young Bissell insists on firing an AK-47 at a shooting range the Vietnamese have opened next to the museum, as if unaware that the very sound of the gun would raise horrific memories for his father. '' 'Now imagine,' my father piped up, 'that 20 guys are firing back at you, and people everywhere are screaming.' ''

It would be wonderful and heartwarming to report that the Bissells eventually have a transcendent moment of father-son bonding, but this is far too honest a book for that. The distance between them diminishes, but it never really evaporates. John Bissell does have an emotional moment where he puts the war to rest, but it is with a South Vietnamese veteran, not with his son, and I won't ruin it for you by describing it in detail.

Tom Bissell seems more frustrated, and incomplete, than his father in the end -- which may well be the fate of his generation, and the next generation, of soldiers' kids. The devastating, messy slog of Bissell's literary journey reminds us that the answer to his question -- ''Why another?'' -- applies not only to books about Vietnam but also to arrogant, futile wars like Vietnam ... and Iraq: Why another? And again, why another?  Read more.

Read more about Uzbekistan RPCV Tom Bissell and his writing.

Read more about Peace Corps fathers and sons.

Uzbekistan RPCV Tom Bissell writes: Rolling Estonia

Uzbekistan RPCV Tom Bissell writes: Rolling Estonia
The paths available to nations coping with the grim and often sanguinary legacies of communism are few. There is the Russian way: Retain, defend, and celebrate the most singularly awful aspects of communist rule. There is the Uzbek way: Swap the name of the Uzbek communist party for the People's Democratic Party of Uzbekistan; carry on forthwith. There is the Vietnamese way: Preserve communism's ceremonial, revered-elders overlay; disown most of the economic advice. And there is the Chinese way: Change everything, admit nothing. In light of all this, it is sadly difficult to imagine a post-communist nation achieving governmental transparency, an uncorrupted economy, and lives for its citizens untouched by the tentacles of a busy secret police force.

"Estonians would kill me for saying this," Hillar Lauri, a Canadian-born ethnic Estonian who relocated to Tallinn in 1991, told me, "but it is essential to the Estonian psyche to say that we are not Russian. And this country is about proving that Estonia is not Russia. How do you prove it? By working harder, by reforming, by changing." Near-Shoring, Lauri's Tallinn-based company, does accounting for non-Estonian businesses operating in Estonia. His work, combined with his Canadian upbringing, gives him a panoramic view of both how far Estonia has come and how much further it needs to go. "Any area that is state-regulated," he went on, "is corrupt. Hospitals and health care are terribly unreformed areas. ... But it takes time. There are a thousand Soviet mindsets that linger."

"Estonia was an independent republic between the two world wars," Andrus Viirg, the director for Foreign Investments and Trade Promotion for Enterprise Estonia, explained to me. "This mentality has helped us because of the existing memory of a market economy and democracy. The cultural closeness to Finland also helped. We were able to watch Finnish TV. No territory under the Soviet Union had this opportunity. After regaining our independence, it was very easy for the government to proceed with Western ideas."

Author Tom Bissell served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan. Read more by Tom Bissell.