Coming Home: China
Nobody wanted it to happen this way. Evacuation stories and the unfinished business of Peace Corps Volunteers around the world. Photo: Family portrait with Andrew Avitt, right, and his host family, Mr. and Mrs. Zhen and host brother Yanyu. “We received a lot of instruction during training about language, culture, and teaching. Perhaps the most invaluable part of that experience was getting to know my host family,” Avitt writes. China | Maura Joul Home: St. Cloud, Minnesota My cohort came in summer 2019. We had one semester teaching, three to go. All China Volunteers served in the education sector: teaching English...
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Evac Support via Facebook
A group to link evacuated Peace Corps Volunteers with the help they need. Sometimes that’s just someone to listen — and hear. By Steven Boyd Saum The day after Peace Corps informed Volunteers around the globe that they were being evacuated, a new group took shape to help them: Returned Peace Corps COVID-19 Evacuation Support [Community-Generated]was launched by returned Volunteer Joshua Johnson. The group had 200 members within the first hour. By the end of the day on March 16 that number had grown to 2,000. Soon nearly 10,000 returned Volunteers and parents joined. And a dozen administrators began to...
Lawmakers ask: How can we help?
In addition to legislation to support evacuated Volunteers, members of Congress have also taken time to share encouragement. Peace Corps Volunteers dedicate two years of their lives to serve their country abroad and are an important component of American foreign policy and international aid efforts. I’ve been a proud supporter of the Peace Corps for many years and hope to see Volunteers return to the field as soon as it’s safe to do so. While the COVID-19 pandemic continues, it’s important we support Volunteers and keep working to make emergency benefits available to them. I’ll keep working to...
Work on the Hill
Here’s how we’ve been advocating for evacuated Volunteers — and a Peace Corps in a changed world. By Jonathan Pearson and Steven Boyd Saum The coronavirus pandemic and temporary suspension of all Peace Corps programs marks the greatest existential threat to the agency in its history. When Volunteers were evacuated, they were ripped from communities with hardly any notice; in March they came back to a pandemic and an economic maelstrom. Regulations typically would not allow them to be eligible for unemployment insurance; their health insurance coverage would expire in a month. In some cases they had no home to...
Groundbreaking Work: Richard Paul Thornell in memoriam
By Jonathan Pearson and Steven Boyd Saum Richard Paul Thornell was only 24 years old when Sargent Shriver and Harris Wofford sent him to Ghana as director of the Peace Corps Africa Regional Office. “For him, it was a lifelong sense of pride,” his son Paul Thornell told the Washington Post. “The Peace Corps is the thing that has lasted, in a meaningful way, longer than other things, and the fact that my dad had a central role in launching it, that meant a lot to him.” Yet that was only one of the groundbreaking roles Richard Paul Thornell played. A graduate...
One Idea a Minute: A Remembrance of Bill Haddad
He shaped the beginnings of the Peace Corps — and so much more. By William Josephson William F. (Bill) Haddad died on April 30. He was 91. He was the subject of long obituaries in both the Washington Post and New York Times. Bill was an extremely important early Peace Corps person. He created the inspector general position long before inspector generals became ubiquitous in every federal and many state agencies. Bill’s work gave birth to Charlie Peters and his unique Peace Corps evaluation office. Instead of “bean counters,” it employed journalists and lawyers to write down-to-earth evaluations of how well or...
Shoulder to Shoulder
Every Volunteer has a counterpart. That’s Peace Corps lingo for one person in the community tasked with helping make this endeavor possible. Interviews Edited by Steven Boyd Saum and Cynthia Arata Photo: Sharmae Stringfield (left) Chippie Ngwali. Courtesy Sharmae Stringfield. Malawi | Sharmae Stringfield, Volunteer Home: Virginia, United States The day I had to leave my village in the district of Blantyre was the day the painter I hired finished our mural at the health center: a dedication to sanitation and critical times to wash hands. Seeing as the evacuation was due to a virus that spreads rapidly through a lack...
Coming Home: Morocco
Morocco | Joshua Warzecha Home: Clayton, California Joshua Warzecha was an Arabic studies and linguistics major at Dartmouth College before joining Peace Corps in September 2018. He was on vacation with his family in the northern part of Morocco when he got the evacuation message and had to race back to his post in Tata, a province in the southwestern part of the country. He worked in the youth development sector, spending much of his time teaching English to teens and young adults. Back at his parents’ home in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the weeks under self-quarantine he...
Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean: In Memoriam
By Steven Boyd Saum She was a mother and wife and human rights attorney. She was granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy and daughter of David Lee Townsend and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland. She was a woman of boundless energy and an avid advocate for social justice and human rights, with a focus on issues relating to women, girls, and communities affected by HIV/AIDS. Her passion to make a difference in the lives of others greatly shaped the remarkable career she established for herself. She served in the Peace Corps in Mozambique, worked with U.S. Senator...