Our Peace Corps Evacuation Journey
The Director of the Peace Corps chronicles the events that led to an unprecedented global evacuation of Volunteers. And the hardest decision she’s had to make in her life. By Jody Olsen I will always remember 2 p.m. on March 15, 2020, as the moment I made the most difficult decision of my life. I had just received a call from Patrick Young, the Peace Corps’ Director of International Operations, who himself had spent the previous 24 hours in phone conversations with almost every one of our country directors around the world. Each told him of impending host-country...
The Peace Corps in the Post-Pandemic World
COVID-19 upended systems. Now we’re focused on structural racism like never before. So how can Peace Corps help this nation live up to its ideals? By Lex Rieffel Illustration by Sandra Dionsi / Theispot The COVID-19 pandemic that erupted at the beginning of this year massively disrupted behavior that has for a long time been taken for granted — between people and between nations. Then in May the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis under the knee of a policeman sparked unprecedented demonstrations around the world to end systemic racial discrimination and improve social justice. Years will pass before new patterns of...
Words and Deeds
The weather: We talk about it but don’t do a blessed thing about it, right? Until we did, without intending to — into the Anthropocene era we rode, brave new world of climate instability. But that climate changing is accompanied by some very predictable results — at least for small-landed and big-oceaned island nations in the Pacific: catastrophic storms, king tides washing across communities, threatened fresh water supplies and health and well-being, and the very land itself disappearing. The first autumn that I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ukraine — as the weather cooled and the names of the...
Islands in Peril
Climate change and Pacific nations heroically trying to save themselves By Mike Tidwell Dying trees, sandbagged shore. Photo for Humans of Kiribati by Raimo Kataotao At the United Nations building in New York, the national flag of every country on earth hangs from a pole outside. Whenever a new country is born — South Sudan being the latest in 2011 — a new pole is set up and a new flag raised. But what happens when a country dies? What happens, for example, if unchecked global warming wipes entire Pacific island nations off the map in the coming years? Will we have...
On the Front Lines
FIJI & BEYOND: A MacArthur Fellow takes stock of climate change loss and damage — and immediate solutions By Stacy Jupiter Under threat: Low-lying islands and coral cays, like barrier islands Wallis and Futuna, are extremely vulnerable to impacts of sea level rise. Photo by Stacy Jupiter. In August 2019, as Pacific Island leaders arrived to their annual forum leaders meeting in Tuvalu, an atoll nation of less than 12,000 people with its highest elevation at 15 feet above sea level, they were greeted by children submerged in water in a moat around a model of their sinking island holding...
Day Begins Here
Kiribati: Land is tied to identity. But the land is vanishing. By Michael Roman Kiribati is the center of the world. Here the international dateline crosses the equator. It is the only country to have territory in all four hemispheres—north, south, east, west—and the first nation to see the sunrise of each new day. It is also predicted to be one of the first nations to vanish because of global climate change: summoning powerful king tides, devastating cyclones, and prolonged droughts. In the face of all this, how does a people stay resolute and try to preserve land—and a deeply...
Dengue Fever Blues
The Marshall Islands: Climate change and healthcare By Jack Niedenthal I work with a group of health care workers whom I will forever consider to be heroic. And this is why this is so: In the Marshall Islands climate change to us is not a “threat,” it already weighs heavily upon our island lives each and every day. Climate change not only means battling periodic inundations from rising sea levels that began to become routine in 2011, but now it also means fighting numerous and unpredictable disease outbreaks. And it will undoubtedly continue in this manner well into the future. This...
Writ on Water
Tonga: Lessons and memories, hopes and fears By Siotame Drew Havea Forty years ago I started working with Peace Corps Tonga. When I came on board in the mid-1980s as training director and then associate director, our two main projects focused on education and health. We had also launched an agricultural project, focused on research and agribusiness, in the 1970s. Some of our volunteers complained of not enough happening in their structured jobs. So we made sure volunteers’ time and energy went to secondary projects focused on the environment. Volunteers worked directly with farmers and community members to plant trees—to...
Full Circle
In the wake of a devastating natural disaster, Returned Peace Corps Volunteers mobilized. And the nonprofit Friends of Tonga was formed. By Michael Hassett and Chiara Collette On February 11, 2018, Cyclone Gita, with winds that topped 233 km/h — category 4 hurricane strength — slammed into the Pacific island nation of Tonga. It was the worst storm in over 60 years and wrought horrendous damage on the islands of Tongatapu and ‘Eua, resulting in two deaths and numerous injuries. More than 2,000 homes were damaged, crops were destroyed across both islands, and 80 percent of the Tongan population was...
Tilting with Windmills
Connect turbines from wind alley to where people need the juice, and you could transform the American energy grid. Even get us to 50 percent renewables. That was Michael Skelly’s grand vision. By Russell Gold This is not a story with a happy ending — yet. It’s a tale of former Peace Corps Volunteer Michael Skelly (Costa Rica 85-87), who set out to build an interstate energy transmission superhighway system. Over a decade, the roadblocks proved immense. Here are excerpts from Superpower: One Man’s Quest to Transform American Energy by Russell Gold. When he was 25 years old, Michael Skelly felt directionless. He wrote...