Born to Serve

Jason Carter, RPCV South Africa and author of the book Power Lines, carries forward a multigenerational legacy of service rooted in Peace Corps and his grandfather’s legacy.

At the end of 2024, just days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the world lost one of the most eminent moral voices ever to sit in the Oval Office. President Jimmy Carter, whose life spanned a century, was also the biggest presidential champion of Peace Corps since John F. Kennedy. Both his mother, Lily, and his grandson, Jason, served, and numerous RPCVs have found meaningful work at the Carter Center, joining the fight to eradicate global diseases and to promote democracy worldwide. WorldView’s Robert Nolan spoke with Jason Carter, now the chair of the Carter Center board, who reflected on his grandfather’s legacy, his experiences as an author, and his vision for the Carter Center as a new documentary about the effort to eradicate Guinea worm disease is released, and President Carter is honored with his own U.S. postal stamp. Below is a transcript of their conversation, edited for clarity and brevity.

Robert Nolan: Jason it’s great to see you again. The last time we met was when we were both Volunteers in southern Africa 25 years ago, you in South Africa and me in Zimbabwe. It’s been wonderful to see all you’ve done since then. There is such a special affinity between the Carter family and Peace Corps that really transcends generations. When President Jimmy Carter, your grandfather, passed away at the end of 2024, there was a tremendous outpouring of endearment from the Peace Corps community. What is it that has brought your family and Peace Corps together so closely over the years? 

Jason Carter: It’s nice to see you too. My great-grandmother [Lillian Carter] turned 70 while serving in the Peace Corps, before my grandfather was ever governor. And that experience she had in the Peace Corps really infected my whole family, including my grandfather, with this idea that people are essentially the same all over the world. You have the ability to make a difference in people’s lives all over the world. That global connection mindset, that global action mindset. When my grandfather left the White House [Lilian] was standing there saying, “You know, I turned 70 in the Peace Corps. What are you gonna do?” And I think that really inspired him to start the work of the Carter Center and was one of the fundamental parts of him winning the Nobel Peace Prize, et cetera. 

So when I finished college I said to my grandfather, “You know, PawPaw, the world is sort of my oyster here, what do you think I should do?” He didn’t hesitate at all and said, “If I were you, I would go to the Peace Corps.” This is a man who came from a 600-person village in the middle of nowhere, and given the respect that he has for people in villages like that across the world, I think he was a little jealous of my time in the Peace Corps, because I got to go be in a place where people carried their water from the river and built their houses out of sticks and mud. I just think that ethic of the Peace Corps is a really fundamental part of my family, of what the Carter Center’s done. And, I think, of who my grandfather was. 

RN: Did he get a chance to visit you when you were in South Africa?  

JC: Yeah, he came to visit me, and my place in South Africa was at a little crossroads with nothing but a gas station. So it was on the main road to Swaziland, and he rolled in with South African police and Secret Service and everything. And he left. And all these people in my village, everyone was just shocked. They were like, “Jason, if your grandfather is the King of America, what are you doing here?”

RN: Let’s talk for a minute about the Carter Center’s work, particularly on Guinea worm disease eradication. 

JC: One of the things that my grandfather did in the ’80s was to try to use the Carter Center to address problems that no one else was addressing. One of the giant vacuums at the time was this collection of neglected tropical diseases that were diseases of poverty. They only affected people that were essentially the poorest people in the world. And one of them was Guinea worm disease, a disease of poverty that came from drinking water that was contaminated. And all that was required to break the life cycle of the Guinea worm and to potentially eradicate the disease was for people to filter their water in a different way. 

What that meant is that the Carter Center was going to partner with people across every village in Nigeria, every village in Uganda, across the Sahel, to teach people, in essence, how to filter their water to remove Guinea worm larvae. A huge part of that health training occurred through Peace Corps Volunteers. In fact, my sister-in-law Mirabai was in Côte d’Ivoire as a Guinea worm worker in the Peace Corps, and then came back and married my brother John. And Adam Weiss, who’s the director of the Carter Center Guinea Worm Eradication Program, began his Guinea worm work as a Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa. 

So it’s a real close link. And the remarkable success that has come from partnering with people in these villages is that instead of three and a half million cases in the ’80s of this grotesque, debilitating disease, this year you can count it on two hands, about 10 cases or so. 

RN: This issue of WorldView is about Peace Corps authors and the literary legacy that Peace Corps Volunteers have created over the last 60 or so years. What inspired you to write Power Lines about your service, and what gave you the confidence to write a book on such a big topic as equality in post-apartheid South Africa? 

JC: [Laughs] I’m not going to pretend that it’s a great piece of Peace Corps literature, like [Mike Tidwell’s] Ponds of Kalambayi or one of these really incredible memoirs, you know? I’m not an author in that way. But I did have a remarkable experience at a remarkable moment in history. Two of the pieces of advice that my grandfather gave me, he said, “Number one, you should join the Peace Corps, and number two, you should keep a journal.” I don’t know if every Peace Corps Volunteer does that, certainly these days. We were just in the pre-internet days, right? When you and I were in the Peace Corps in the late ’90s, we had to take our computer down to a phone, plug it in, and upload our emails and download our emails. 

So I was writing a journal with a pen on blank sheets of paper in a leather-bound book. And every night sort of like scrambling to get my experiences down. I knew when I was doing it that there were some pieces of insight, not just about South Africa, but about the country that I had left, because of the similarities between the American South and South Africa at the time, sort of in the post-apartheid moment, in the same way that I had sort of missed the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement in the American South.  

I think it’s funny to be 25 years on from having that book come out and to look back on it and realize there’s a level of immaturity that’s associated with it, and the ways in which I’ve changed. Sometimes I look back and think, “Man, I wish I was still like that [laughs], with that much idealism.” So I’m proud of it, and obviously I was lucky, as I have been in many other ways in my life, to get that opportunity.

RN: Is there any advice you would pass on to a young, idealistic Peace Corps Volunteer thinking about writing something for publication? 

JC: At the end of the day, I’m so glad I wrote the book, but I’m even more glad that I have the journals. My journals are still some of my prized possessions. I think my biggest recommendation would be to keep posting whatever you’re going to post, but also to keep a private journal that is not for public consumption.

RN: So the Jimmy Carter stamp just came out from the U.S. Postal Service. I imagine you all must have been enormously proud of that; obviously it was well deserved. As you carry on the work started by your grandfather at the Carter Center, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what your vision is moving forward, or the collective vision of the people you are working with there.

JC: The great thing about the stamp and about my grandfather’s funeral is the time that we all had, at the Carter Center, in my family, and more broadly in the United States and in the world, to reflect on their legacy. I mean, this is a different moment that is very different than the legacy that my grandparents built. But the Carter Center is really here to meet that moment because of how strong they left the organization.  

RN: What issues are you currently working on? Do you intend to pivot given some of the dynamics that you just referred to in terms of the environment we’re living in today, both domestically and internationally? 

JC: We intend to continue to be a leading human rights organization that is supporting human rights and democracy around the world, that is promoting democratic values, free and fair elections, resolution, and rule of law. And we’re going to continue to work in the places that we have before, in Sudan, in Mali, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and across Latin America. 

In addition, we’re going to continue our work on disease eradication and strengthening public health worldwide. The types of efforts that we’ve made on Guinea worm disease, we’re making them now on river blindness, lymphatic filariasis, and a variety of health challenges that require the same kind of broad-based partnership with people in villages that is so familiar to the Peace Corps. In Uganda alone, there are 35,000 public health volunteers across all of these villages who have worked on Carter Center programs in the past. The question is, what will that group of people do next? We’ve been great at listening, based in part on this Peace Corps ethic of recognizing the power that people have in these villages rather than necessarily needing external instigation. 

The biggest change for us is the way that this new regime has impacted our partners, because so many of our partners were reliant on American money. We take zero dollars at this point from the United States government. So we’re able to—with a $140 million budget and 3,000 employees—do what we need to do. It’s just a question of how we support our partners and how we step up in areas where those partners are going to have to scale back. We just don’t know what the world’s going to look like in a year. 

RN: Are you all doing anything to address some of these issues at home?  

JC: One of the things we decided in 2020 is that we needed to pivot. We’d never done any domestic work at all. My grandmother [Rosalynn Carter] had a mental health program that worked on issues in the United States, but our democracy and human rights programs were always focused outside the United States. And we realized that in order to maintain our credibility and in order to really fight the fight for democratic values, we also had to ensure that we were looking at American elections, looking at American electoral politics. So we have built some conflict resolution programs in the United States. We’ve built some democracy resilience programs in the United States that are designed to work at home, in our backyard, to ensure that those principles that we are espousing across the world are also being respected at home.