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...
Michael McCaskey: In Memoriam
Longtime Chicago Bears leader, his service in Peace Corps in Ethiopia changed how he saw the world. By Jonathan Pearson and Steven Boyd Saum Photo courtesy the Chicago Bears Michael McCaskey was the grandson of the legendary George “Papa Bear” Halas and inherited the mantle of leading the Chicago Bears football team for nearly 30 years. He was president and CEO of the Bears 1983–89 and then chairman of the board 1999–2011. The team won their first (and so far only) Super Bowl in 1985. Peers voted McCaskey NFL Executive of the Year. He was born in 1943. He earned degrees...
From the Editor: Unfinished Business
The evacuation of Peace Corps Volunteers serving around the globe is unprecedented. So is the way our nation is coming to terms with the truth that Black Lives Matter. By Steven Boyd Saum For most Peace Corps Volunteers, the news broke on the Ides of March: due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, every single one of them would be coming home. In its 59-year history, Peace Corps had never undertaken a global evacuation. But then, in so many ways, these are unprecedented times. In one sense, we feel the precariousness of institutions that we want to sustain — and...
Pandemic has changed our community forever. Another disease we must fight: racism itself.
By Glenn Blumhorst DO YOU REMEMBER WHERE YOU WERE when you heard the news? That the U.S. Peace Corps had made the difficult and unprecedented decision to suspend programs indefinitely, evacuating 7,300 volunteers serving in more than 60 countries due to coronavirus, and informing them that their service had ended. That more than 100,000 Americans had died from COVID-19. That more than 40 million had applied for unemployment. That George Floyd had died after a policeman in Minneapolis pressed a knee on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. But George Floyd’s name is only one of a...