In a video taken in February this year, Kah Walla, wearing jeans and a red t-shirt, stood facing the water cannon, her body leaning forward, both fists raised high in the air. High-powered blasts of chemical-tinged water wash over her and cloud the screen. Soon after, the police beat her and her companions with clubs. Read more…
The Providence Journal
September 18, 2011
By Donita Naylor
Journal Staff Writer
Nanci Martin (Smith), right, served in Buea, West Cameroon, in 1964. On the left is Mrs. Musako, head senior tutor at the Baptist Teacher Training College, and her children.
In 1959, Tom Wilson drove his Vespa back to college in Indiana from his summer job in a national park in California.
Two summers later, the Lincoln, R.I., native made the same trip in reverse, with his new wife, Anne, on the back of the scooter.
“We had to push it up the Rockies,” he recalled recently by way of telling how he and Anne came to join the Peace Corps in 1961. Wilson, now 73, lives in Warwick. The federal agency that President John F. Kennedy created to give Americans and people in developing countries a chance to work together and get to know each other is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week with events in Washington, D.C., and around the globe.
Kennedy had stopped at the couple’s campus, Earlham College in Indiana, during his run for president the year before. And they’d heard about his speech at the University of Michigan, when — with 5,000 students cheering at 2 a.m. — he issued an impromptu challenge from the steps of the student union, calling on students to “contribute part of your life to this country” to help solve “the problems that press upon the United States.”
In January, Tom and Anne Wilson were in Washington visiting Anne’s parents, while Kennedy and speechwriter Ted Sorensen drafted Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you” inauguration speech. The Wilsons caught a ride back to Earlham with Sorensen’s wife, who was going to see her sister, the wife of an Earlham history professor.
From D.C. to Indiana, Tom Wilson remembers, “We did nothing but talk about the Peace Corps.”
That semester, the Wilsons drove their scooter to Ohio to take one of the first Peace Corps entrance exams. Their applications were in the first 11,000 that Peace Corps Director R. Sargent Shriver reported having received by mid-June.
By then, via scooter and helicopter, the Wilsons had reached their summer job in California, a fire tower at 10,000 feet in King’s Canyon National Park with Ansel Adams views.
“The call came through on the park radio that President Kennedy wanted to talk to us, which wasn’t at all true,” he said. “It was the Peace Corps.”
The new agency needed to know if the Wilsons wanted to be in the first group of volunteers sent overseas.
“We said no, we wanted to stay in our fire tower.”
Another Rhode Islander, Frank Krajewski of Woonsocket, now 72 and living in Richmond, was in the first group sent to the Philippines in 1961. He’ll be in Washington this week attending some of the 50th anniversary activities, which culminate in a black-tie (or native-dress) gala on Saturday, with “Hardball” host Chris Matthews as emcee.
As one of the first wave of volunteers, “We’re having a lot of our own activities,” said Krajewski, who taught at the University of Nevada for 20 years and now does professional development for teachers at Rhode Island College. Out of 128 volunteers who went in 1961, “there are about 80 of us left.”
Krajewski’s group trained at Penn State, he said, then had to go home because Congress hadn’t yet authorized the Peace Corps. Finally, letters arrived with plane tickets to San Francisco, from there they were flown to the Philippines — the men on one plane, which stopped at every island, and the women on another. “The girls left a day later and landed the same time we did.”
Krajewski volunteered for a hardship assignment, on a remote island where he lived on the beach in a hut with a thatch roof and bamboo floor. He worked in an elementary school in the morning and a high school in the afternoon.
“They trained us, but the training was almost irrelevant to what we were going to do,” he said.
“We were kind of the guinea pigs. We had to create our own jobs.”
After their summer in the fire tower, Tom and Anne Wilson drove to Washington, this time in a VW panel truck, to Peace Corps headquarters. “They signed us up for Philippines III.”
Training started Dec. 27, 1961, and in February of 1962 they became the third wave of volunteers helping Filipino teachers improve their teaching of English and science. “My wife worked in the main school, in Daran,” Tom Wilson recalled, “and I paddled a boat to another village a mile away.”
Life in the Philippines wasn’t like life back home. He remembers being late one morning, paddling to his school in the heat of the day and arriving just in time for lunch and the siesta on his bamboo mat at the head teacher’s house. “I woke up in time to paddle home.”
And he recalls a morning when “I had to go down to deliver a document to the ferry boat that left at 5 in the morning.” He described the quiet road, the luminous water and the company of Tex, a dog belonging to one of the priests who lived next to the Americans.
Near the municipal building, “Tex took off, chasing a goat. A security guard at City Hall said, ‘He can’t do that, that’s the goat of the judge.’ I said, ‘That’s the dog of the priest,’ ” The guard weighed the social complexities. “You mean the dog of the priest bit the goat of the judge?” It was too much. “He just walked away. It blew his mind.”
And as idealistic young Americans ready to change the world, the volunteers learned quickly “how difficult real change is.”
Getting an idea or a project squashed, Wilson said, “made you more patient. You learned to watch and take advantage of opportunities instead of just having grand schemes.”
And working in a different culture, he said, “gives you an observing edge.” Outside your own culture, “you had to pay much more attention” — to grasp how things get done, “to learn quickly what this person is like,” to hear what people are really saying.
The skills worked well at home, too.
Back in Washington, he and other Peace Corps veterans turned around a school for inner-city youth. In Chicago, he helped invent a “school without walls.” He became a pioneer in education reform.
When he returned to Rhode Island with his second wife, Leslie Oh, to whom he has been married 26 years, he used the same skills to study the British system of evaluating schools. He helped develop the state’s SALT, or School Accountability for Learning and Teaching, program, and now he helps accrediting agencies improve how they evaluate schools.
“There’s no question that for me, it was one of these root experiences that really changed my life,” Wilson says now. “It’s had a lot to do with how I think about what’s good and what’s true.
“It really does have an idealism to it, an American idealism. It’s really a good thing to go try and really help somebody, even though you screw up. We felt really solid that we were doing something, and what we were doing was very American at its heart.”
Kennedy had hoped that men and women “doing the same work, eating the same food and speaking the same language” as those they helped would be a “source of satisfaction to Americans and a contribution to world peace.”
Nanci Martin was a senior at the University of Connecticut when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. She and a group of friends took the Peace Corps test in response.
In June of ’64, she started training and by September, she was one of about 70 volunteers in the western part of the African nation of Cameroon. She was stationed in Buea, which had only a few buildings: a post office, a prison, a large hotel, the Buea Mountain Club, the prime minister’s palace and the Baptist Teacher Training College, where she worked alongside Baptist missionaries and African educators.
Students who wore uniforms to school came from families that still wore loincloths, she said. She remembers girls spending whole Saturdays plaiting their hair in spectacular designs, like those that only recently became popular in the United States.
“We shared a Jeep with four other stations to allow us to get groceries at Victoria,” she said, and once the gas tank sprang a leak. “We came up with the idea to chew lots of gum and stuff it in the hole in the tank until we could reach help.”
Now Nanci Martin Smith, she lives in Portsmouth with her husband, a retired Navy officer, and keeps in touch with her friends in Cameroon. She still volunteers. She co-manages the thrift shop at the Navy base and serves on Portsmouth committees and the juvenile hearing board. She and her husband sponsor Cameroonian naval officers when they come to the Naval War College and keep in touch after they go home.
She helps support a women’s group that one officer’s mother started “way out in the bush,” and she collects books for the group. The Peace Corps gave her confidence and started her on a lifetime of service.
“It hasn’t stopped,” she said. “It just keeps going.”
On Oct. 25, the Rhode Island Returned Peace Corps Volunteers will walk on the South County Bike Path to honor those who died in service. The walk starts at 11 a.m. at the Kingston Amtrak station on Route 138.
NOTABLEThey also served
NATIONALLY
Lillian Carter (India, ’66). President Jimmy Carter’s mother was a volunteer at the age of 68. An award in her name is given each year to recognize an outstanding volunteer older than 50.
Christopher Dodd (Monción, Dominican Republic, ‘66-’68). U.S. senator, Connecticut.
Chris Matthews (Swaziland, ‘68-70). Host, NBC’s “Hardball.”
Jim and Jessica Doyle (Tunisia, ’67-’69). Former governor and first lady of Wisconsin.
Samuel Gillespie III (Kenya, ‘67-‘69). Senior vice president, Exxon Mobil.
Robert Haas, (Ivory Coast, ‘64-‘66). Chairman of board, Levi Strauss.
Edward Dolby (India, ’66-‘68). Director, Family Dollar Stores.
Reed Hastings (Swaziland, ‘83-‘85). Founder, CEO of Netflix.
Michael McCaskey (Togo, ‘62-‘64). Chairman of board, Chicago Bears.
Priscilla and Thomas Wrubel (Liberia, ‘61-‘63). Founders of the Nature Company.
dnaylor@providencejournal.com
Rachel Hoy Deussom (’99) is co-founder of Education Fights AIDS (EFA) International. After graduating from Georgetown University in 2003, she served as a Peace Corps
community health volunteer in northern Cameroon. During her service, a fellow volunteer, Andrew Koleros, introduced Rachel to a concerned group of HIV-positive youth, which became EFA’s original HIV-positive youth support group in February 2005. In 2006 they officially established EFA International as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with the mission to promote the successful future of HIV-infected and –affected African youth through education, enterprise, and empowerment. EFA International urther develops the work that these volunteers started during their Peace Corps service and has grown to include both returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) and other individuals that care deeply about youth and the development of sub-Saharan Africa.
Since the Peace Corps, Rachel received her M.Sc. in Global Health and Population from the Harvard School of Public Health. Rachel and her husband Gabriel are currently based in Washington, DC where she works for the World Bank on health and HIV projects in Africa. Her work has brought her to India, Liberia, Mali, Malawi, Niger and Southern Sudan, but her heart remains in Cameroon.
For more information about EFA and how you can support the work being done, go to http://efainternational.org/ or http://educationfightsaidsinternational.cmail5.com/t/ViewEmail/y/8422986F856E06CB/14333B19E7948F6244D0DD5392A9C75A
(from the Pingree School blog)
мека мебелThe welcome193 campaign is using the power of social media to turn this global news event into a world wide show of support for the people of South Sudan as they celebrate their first independence day. On July 9, with your support, we aim to generate 10 million individual hellos from people all over the world in a collective welcome to the South Sudanese. At the same time, the Welcome193 web portal will connect people to opportunities to learn about South Sudan and non-profit organizations working to build the foundations of the new country.
For more information visit welcome193.orgикониПравославни икониикони на светци
Canandaigua resident Jennifer Brownell during the late-1990s, served with the Peace Corps in Cameroon. Here she is seen holding a baby at one of the clinics there where she helped with health care for women and children.
By Julie Sherwood, staff writer
Messenger Post
Posted Feb 01, 2011
http://www.mpnnow.com/canandaigua/x1868084764/Local-Peace-Corps-stories-part-of-global-anniversary?img=5
After Peace Corps founder R. Sargent Shriver died this month, President Obama called the in-law of President John F. Kennedy “one of the brightest lights of the greatest generation.”
Shriver’s accomplishments spanned several decades, and his work led to the Peace Corps, sending almost a quarter-million volunteers to aid 139 countries around the world over the past 50 years.
Among those who left their comfortable, middle-class lives in Ontario County were three recent college graduates, a director of nonprofits and a retired couple.
Their stories of life in the Peace Corps are varied. They range from an unexpected, swift evacuation from a violent political rebellion in Haiti to a period of agonizing homesickness followed by tears of sadness when it was time to leave a West African village.
A different, better person
“I had lived a relatively sheltered life up to then,” recalled Canandaigua resident Jennifer Brownell, who grew up in Geneva.
After earning a bachelor’s degree, at age 22, she fulfilled an urge to do something significant by joining the Peace Corps.
“I wanted to do good, wanted to do positive work,” said Brownell.
It landed her in the French-speaking Republic of Cameroon, West Africa.
“I didn’t unpack my bags for the first six months,” said Brownell, who ended up serving from 1992 to 1995.
The dropout rate for Peace Corps volunteers is more than 60 percent. Brownell thought she’d become part of the statistics.
“It’s not easy being lonely,” she said.
The nearest fellow volunteer was hours away. The language barrier and cultural differences were more than she thought she could bear.
At that time, women in Cameroon lived in a polygamous society with few choices, she said. They weren’t allowed to own land, have their own business or a bank account. Their choices were mainly to either stay with their father, get married or be a prostitute.
Brownell’s role was to work with health care professionals to raise the quality of life for mothers and children. It involved teaching moms about nutrition, pre-natal care and other ways to be healthy and raise healthy children — not an easy task in a country where meat in a home goes first to the men.
Peace Corps work “is not for everyone,” said Brownell, now executive director of the nonprofit Partnership for Ontario County.
But it was for her.
“I came home a different person, a better person,” she said.
The changes also made her less tolerant of the American way of life. In Cameroon, people take care of each other and behave as a true community, she said. Even strangers are welcomed as guests and given the best food and best bed in the house.
There, “it was like one big family … here, it is every man for himself.”
She cried when it was time to go, said Brownell, but this time, for a different reason: “I didn’t want to leave.”
домейнBy Whitney Isenhower (RPCV Cameroon ’06-’08)
(pictures by Amber Byrne of Live It Out Photography, LLC)
Nearly 100 Washington, D.C.-area residents gathered in the Eighteenth Street Lounge’s warmly lit Gold Room on the evening of April 29 for a fundraiser supporting Education Fights AIDS (EFA) International, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that empowers African youth infected with and affected by HIV and AIDS in Cameroon and Rwanda.
Alim Ousmanou, EFA International’s Cameroon country representative, spoke at the fundraiser—one stop on a visit marking his first time in the U.S. Invited to participate in the U.S. State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program from April 3-23, Ousmanou remained in the country for two weeks after the program to visit supporters of EFA International’s work carried out in Cameroon.
Alim Ousmanou
“It was wonderful to see how young Americans are helping the community of youth living with HIV and AIDS in Cameroon,” Ousmanou said of the Washington event.
EFA International’s efforts focus on creating associations for individuals infected with and affected by HIV and AIDS in Cameroon and supporting a center for orphans and vulnerable children in Rwanda. The organization began when Ousmanou and Andrew Koleros, then a Peace Corps Volunteer in Maroua, Cameroon, identified dozens of HIV-positive youth in the city who lacked the psychosocial, educational and financial support to live positively with the virus.
Along with Koleros, returned Peace Corps Volunteers Rachel Hoy, Michael Nilon, Erin Nilon and Nicole Sheldon-Desjardins officially incorporated the organization in 2006 to continue this work. Koleros, who currently sits on EFA International’s Board of Directors, said Ousmanou’s visit deepened members’ commitment to the organization, which advocates the Peace Corps’ Third Goal.
“It’s really motivated the board and volunteers,” Koleros said of Ousmanou’s presence at EFA International events in the U.S. “It reminded us of why we all got involved in this organization in the first place.”
For EFA International’s benefactors, Ousmanou’s presence at the fundraiser made the organization’s mission more resonant, clarifying what their involvement means for the youth the nonprofit enables to live positively.
“It was nice to hear somebody from the area where it’s being helped speak,” said Michael Causey, a Washington-based lawyer who attended the fundraiser. “It’s easy for Americans to say, ‘Look at the great work I’m doing.’”
(AJEPS photo taken by Caitlyn Bradburn (PCV Cameroon ’08-present)
EFA International currently supports eight independent groups in the Extreme North province of Cameroon. Income-generating activities to advance members in their communities and peer education programs to raise awareness about HIV transmission and prevention have empowered more than 120 young men and women.
Doumtigai Guibai, member of an EFA International-sponsored association in Mokolo, Cameroon, said her participation in peer education training motivated her to speak openly about HIV.
“People come up to me to congratulate me for my courage to speak about HIV in the community,” Guibai said in EFA International’s 2009 Annual Report. “At school, students call me the ‘mama’ for teaching them about HIV.”
During his visit, Ousmanou also attended fundraising events in Massachusetts and spoke at a Harvard Divinity School panel discussion on development and HIV in Africa. He said he was extremely affected by returned volunteers’ commitment to both EFA International and Cameroon.
“I saw so many people during my time in the U.S.,” Ousmanou said. “Seeing former Cameroon Peace Corps Volunteers was the most significant to me.”
To find out more about EFA’s work, go to http://efainternational.org/
