In 1960, Beltway bureaucrats called the idea pie in the sky. Promoting world peace and friendship by dispatching young, inexperienced Americans to developing countries for two-year volunteer assignments sounds nice, foreign aid officials said, but it won't work.
The Kennedy administration ignored the naysayers, and this year the Peace Corps turns 50. Since 1961, the independent U.S. government agency has sent more than 200,000 volunteers to 139 countries to work in education, community development, health care, business, technology and other areas. Among them are 1,350 Stanford alumni; more than 200 of them returned to campus in April for anniversary events coordinated by the Haas Center for Public Service.
Another alumnus came back, too—a man instrumental in creating the Peace Corps, albeit from behind the scenes. The idea of a young volunteer corps serving overseas originated in 1948 with Sen. Hubert Humphrey, as the Stanford gathering heard from Peter Grothe, emeritus director of international student programs at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Humphrey was preoccupied with other issues through the 1950s, but when Grothe, '53, MA '54, became his foreign policy adviser in 1960, he came across the idea in the files and got the senator's go-ahead to pursue it.
Although the aid administrators Grothe consulted were dismissive, Humphrey told him to draft a bill. He did, and came up with the name Peace Corps. The agency is a trademark of John F. Kennedy, who tapped his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver (husband of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, '44) to launch it. JFK lit the flame in his inauguration speech ("Ask not . . .") and in a more targeted address at the University of Michigan weeks later. Shriver sent off the first volunteers by the end of August, before the bill reached Congress.
BACK HOME: More than 200 returned volunteers marked the Peace Corps anniversary at Stanford in April. (Photo: Linda A. Cicero)
The Peace Corps has three goals: "to help people in interested countries meet their need for trained men and women; to help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the people served; and to promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans."
An undertaking so ambitious and with so many far-flung moving parts was bound to have its shortcomings. In 1965, Stanford anthropology professor Robert Textor, who helped create training programs for the first volunteers going to Asia, edited Cultural Frontiers of the Peace Corps (MIT Press), in which he and 15 other experts analyzed the young agency's strengths and weaknesses. In 2010, the Peace Corps released its own Comprehensive Agency Assessment. Despite the long interval between the two volumes, they address similar problems, such as the difficulty of securing sufficiently meaningful jobs for volunteers and of adequately training inexperienced people. (Language and cultural training normally lasts 10 weeks.) Moreover, doubts about how much the Peace Corps contributes to host countries' development have persisted for 50 years.
Textor also flagged the often conflicting interests of volunteers, in-country agency staff and Peace Corps administrators in Washington, D.C.—three separate cultures, in the anthropologist's terms. This spring, Congressional testimony underscored a disconnect when several former volunteers, victims of sexual assault and rape while on assignment, alleged that the agency "belittled and blamed" them instead of giving support and adequate training. Peace Corps director Aaron Williams apologized and said that procedural reform was under way.
Despite such failures, even its critics acknowledge that the Peace Corps promotes Americans' understanding of other peoples and develops leadership qualities in its volunteers. Five alumni whom Stanford interviewed would agree. It is difficult to measure the agency's impact on other countries, but requests for volunteers continue to outstrip supply. One valid yardstick might be volunteers' achievements after their Peace Corps service. As Peter Laugharn, '82, remarks, "Spending two years in another culture where you're learning about others will give you a more solid grounding for making a mark than anything else can. It will help provide direction for your next four to five decades."
Bottom-Line Results
Jan Orsini's Peace Corps stint in Thailand jumpstarted a lifelong career that touched rural communities across Asia.
Orsini, '63, was assigned to help farmers with rubber production, from planting and tapping trees to marketing finished sheets. He also became fluent in the local language, Jawi, and at the end of his Peace Corps term, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization hired him for a rubber development project with the Thai government. He and his Thai counterpart, Poom Siri, helped small producers band together in order to produce a marketable volume of high-grade rubber.
"I learned the most important thing of my career: how to use successful groups to train new groups," Orsini says. He and Siri called their methodology Success Case Replication and formed more than 600 successful rubber-marketing groups from 1968 to 1973. During a five-year period, members' incomes grew 14 percent on average, and Thailand's grade 1 rubber jumped from 1 percent to 11 percent of rubber exports.
After earning a master's in development and agricultural economics at Cornell, Orsini returned to Thailand in 1976 with the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. During the next 23 years, he worked in other developing Asian countries, from Mongolia to the Philippines. "We'd go to rural areas, find the most successful people—everyone from cassava farmers to basket makers to rug weavers to diamond grinders—and we'd have them train the poor in their successful crafts and marketing." Orsini reports that 71 percent of those trainees established successful new enterprises, increasing their income by an average of $449 in the first year—enough to send their children to school.
Orsini, now 71, practiced what he preached, learning from the intensely communal Thai rural culture. "I know I'll continue living here for the rest of my life," he says. "People take care of one another here in a way you just don't find in the West."
DOING WHAT WORKS: Orsini made Thailand his home. At the Burmese border last fall he distributes clothing to elderly refugees. (Photo: Courtesy Jan Orsini)
Getting Her Gumption
By her own reckoning, she was a "clean-cut" hippie, a premed student who studied Mandarin in Taiwan, went to Stanford in Germany, hitchhiked around Europe and survived organic chemistry. But when the Vietnam war became "too real," Charlene Hsu-Winges, '70, joined campus protests. "I was attracted to the Peace Corps because, true to the organization's mission, I sincerely wanted to help create peace in the world," she reflects. "The larger world beckoned."
The day after graduation, Hsu-Winges left for training camp in Puerto Rico. Posted to Valverde Mao, a dusty provincial capital in the Dominican Republic, she "endured cockroaches, small rats and outhouses" to teach women about family planning, nutrition and health. She also delivered babies.
"It was a Catholic country with one of the highest birthrates in the world at the time," Hsu-Winges says. "Women frequently had three children by the time they were 18, and often would end up with 15 by the time they were 35." Many accepted family planning—that meant condom use—only as a means to space children farther apart to alleviate rampant maternal anemia. Operating under the friendly but watchful eye of religious authorities, she had to be sure her charlas, or talks with women, respected local mores.
"In the Peace Corps, I developed a true passion for getting skills that could really make a difference in the world," she says. She left her post early to finish premed requirements, went to Tufts Medical School, married her Peace Corps sweetheart and discovered the subspecialty of pediatric ophthalmology. Back in California, Hsu-Winges embarked on a 30-year career at Kaiser Permanente while teaching at UCSF, doing occasional research and raising a family. She still teaches and works in private practice.
ENTRY LEVEL: Work in the Dominican Republic spurred Hsu-Winges's medical career. (Photo: Courtesy Charlene Hsu-Winges)
"The Peace Corps experience emboldened me and gave me a sense that if I wanted something I could get it," she says. "I was fearless in medical school and in pursuing my subspecialty, even though back in the 1970s these were still not common paths for women. My time in the Dominican Republic also taught me the importance of seeing the world and making decisions based on my values. If you pursue things that allow you to make even a small difference, it makes your whole life worthwhile."
Coming full circle during the past four years, Hsu-Winges has gone overseas on several medical missions, teaching and performing surgery in Ecuador, Myanmar, India and the Philippines.
Schools and Safety Nets
It was a Stanford course, History of Education in the United States, that led Peter Laugharn to the Peace Corps—then to an internationally focused vocation. "[Professor] David Tyack told us, 'You're not a community until you have a school,'"says Laugharn, '82, recalling images of one-room American schoolhouses that the education professor showed the class. "I became fascinated by education and the potential it gives people to move out of poverty." The 21-year-old American studies major headed for the Sefrou region of Morocco to teach English. Within a decade, he would help the country of Mali establish 800 new grade schools.
SCHOOLMASTER: Laugharn's Morocco assignment led to a lifelong focus on African children. (Photo: Courtesy Peter Laugharn)As with many young volunteers, the assignment charged him with far more responsibility than others his age. "It teaches you self-reliance, and the realization that you can pretty much meet any challenge," he says. The experience left him with something else: "In the Peace Corps, you gain far more than you give, and you feel a debt toward the people that you spend the rest of your life trying to return."
The desire to keep giving—and going—back to Africa prompted Laugharn to pursue a master's in Arab studies at Georgetown. From there, he went to work with Save the Children, rising through the ranks to become an education adviser for its continent-wide operations. In Mali, his efforts led to a 20 percent increase in the number of schools—all operating on a revolutionary local financing model that freed them from dependence on the government. Laugharn parlayed his fieldwork into a doctorate in education from the University of London.
His focus continued to be the welfare of African children, particularly those orphaned by HIV/AIDS, at a foundation in the Netherlands and since 2008 as executive director of the Firelight Foundation in Santa Cruz, Calif. Having learned in the Peace Corps about the power of community in Africa, he has concentrated on grants that support and bolster local households. "Extended families and community organizations provide an essential safety net for vulnerable children."
Rocking Slovakia
When Mike Hochleutner signed on for the Peace Corps in Eastern Europe in 1997, he figured he'd be stationed in a small village. Little did the 26-year-old know he'd end up at the center of an international movement to usher a new country into democracy.
He'd first been drawn eastward traveling through Europe after college. An economics and political science major at UC-Santa Cruz, Hochleutner, MBA '01, says he was "amazed to see what I had studied playing itself out in countries that were moving out of totalitarianism. I wanted to be part of that experience."
After a few years managing small businesses in the Bay Area, Hochleutner was assigned to serve as a small-business consultant in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, which four years earlier had split from the Czech Republic. Assuming he'd be helping companies operate in a market economy, he was surprised to be placed with a branch of the USAID-funded Foundation for Civil Society (now Pontis), which helps emerging economies develop their nonprofit sector. "The foundation was pulling out of Slovakia, so I was engaged to help the local staff create a plan for an independent organization," Hochleutner says.
He arrived just before the country's pivotal 1998 election. All Europe was watching to see whether the country would move forward into democracy or backward into autocracy.
"All around me, I saw that young people were energetic and forward thinking, but not politically active," Hochleutner recalls. He came up with a bold idea: Mobilize youth as a political force through a nonpartisan media campaign modeled on America's Rock the Vote effort. With Hochleutner working "behind the scenes," the foundation staged a 16-city concert tour with popular rock bands, during which volunteers handed out voter information. One of the national TV stations ran ads to inspire young people to cast their ballots.
As a result, 80 percent of voters ages 18 to 21 turned out, compared with an estimated 20 percent in 1994. More than two-thirds of them supported the opposition, giving the pro-reform coalition a majority in the government. Slovakia since has become the fastest growing economy in Europe.
"I went into the Peace Corps to challenge myself to have a little impact on the world while being outside my element," Hochleutner says. "I ended up being part of something much bigger. The experience shaped my expectations for myself and gave me more clarity and confidence about how I define success."
Today Hochleutner focuses on improving business education. As executive director of the GSB Center for Leadership Development and Research, he has set his sights on helping Stanford share its knowledge in leadership education internationally. "Taking more of a 'systems view' is the only way business leaders will avoid the mistakes that led to the [recent] financial crisis."
YOUTH VOTE: After Slovakia's 1998 election, Hochleutner and colleagues give the prime minister thousands of postcards supporting reform. (Photo: Courtesy Mike Hochleutner)
From War to Peace
Many of Will Prescott's contemporaries went from protesting the Vietnam War to joining the Peace Corps, but Prescott found himself shipped off in uniform in 1968. At the time he, too, had considered volunteering for a more friendly mission. That wouldn't happen for another 40 years.
When he received his draft notice, Prescott, PhD '80, was a first-year graduate student in math at UC-Berkeley, where student protests were bringing almost daily teargassing of Sproul Plaza. "The government had changed the rules such that first-year graduate students were no longer exempt," he explains. "It was a very emotional time for me, what with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and university riots and protests. I wasn't for the war, but I decided going to jail or Canada weren't options, either."
For a year in Vietnam, Prescott was in charge of "direction control," giving coordinate instructions to those who handled large ammunition. "It was war," he says steadily.
Returning to Berkeley, he finished his master's and then changed fields to work with the National Center for Earthquake Research at the U.S. Geological Survey. After a few years studying the movement of tectonic plates at their unstable intersections, he scaled down to part time to earn a doctorate in geophysics at Stanford. He stayed with the center until 2002, then served until 2007 as president of UNAVCO, a National Science Foundation-funded consortium of universities doing similar research. At that point, with his children grown, the 63-year-old found the field wide open. "It was time to think about something different, and that's when I finally applied for the Peace Corps."
Wanting to go "someplace warm and Spanish-speaking," the native Alaskan landed a volunteer post in Mexico, with the Comisión Nacional Forestal, the national forest service. He worked on various projects designed to keep tabs on the health of the nation's wooded areas.
BETTER LATE: Geophysicist and Vietnam vet Prescott, left, joined at age 63, working with Mexico's forest service. (Photo: Courtesy Will Prescott) "It's not what you typically think of as a Peace Corps assignment, but it was very rewarding to help the country think about its long-term environmental sustainability," says Prescott, who was based in Guadalajara, Mexico's second largest city. "Mexico is very concerned about the health of its forests, which are subject to logging not only by lumber companies, but also by local people, who survive by cutting down trees but who don't plan and replenish the supply."
At the conclusion of his Peace Corps service in 2009, Prescott decided to retire, buy a house in Guadalajara and stay on. "It never would have occurred to me to move to Mexico," he says, "so the Peace Corps has completely changed my life."
For 50 years, that has been its promise.
Marguerite Rigoglioso is a freelance writer based in the Bay Area.
