Tales to Tell

Returned Peace Corps Volunteers carry “two passposts — one stamped American, the other Human Being.” — Bill Moyers Former Deputy Director of the Peace Corps

In the summer of 1962 I went to Washington, D.C. and Georgetown University to train for service in Ethiopia.

Towards the end of our training, we went to meet President Kennedy in the Rose Garden. On the White House lawn that August afternoon, President Kennedy told us, "I hope that you will regard this Peace Corps tour as the first installment in a long life of service, as the most exciting career in the most exciting time.”

Those of us who left the White House lawn and went to Africa are older now than Kennedy was on that summer day. Time and tragedy have touched us all. But fate has an odd way of balancing the scales.

The Peace Corps was not considered the bold new stroke of the New Frontier. Yet it is the Peace Corps that is the shining memory of those thousand days of Camelot.

Our service overseas was often silent and often went unheralded. Some of the bridges we built did not stand, a few of the schools where we taught are now closed, and many of the people we organized did not stay together. We were seldom as successful as we had hoped. But the Peace Corps took us out of America and taught us to be citizens of the world. Because of the Peace Corps, all of us are forever changed.

And we were not the only ones changed.

In the mountains of Ethiopia after John F. Kennedy’s death I stopped my Land Rover to pick up an old man to give him a lift across the high plateau. On the side of the car he read the Peace Corps name, written in Amharic script as Yesalaam Guad. It meant Messenger of Peace.

I nodded and told him, yes, Yesalaam Guad. Kennedy’s Peace Corps. He asked me then if I had known President Kennedy, and I told him how I had once shaken his hand on the White House lawn.

For a moment the old man looked out across the flat brown land at the distant acacia trees and small tukul villages we were passing, and then he grinned and seized my hand and shook it, shouting over the road of the Land Rover engine,  "Yesalaam Guad. Yesalaam Guad.”

He was shaking the hand that had shaken the hand of John F. Kennedy.

We two, there on the highlands of Africa, as far away as one could possibly be from Washington and the White House Rose Garden, shared a moment, were connected by the death of a martyred president and his enduring legacy, the Peace Corps.

That is the success of the Peace Corps. It is a story of strangers who find that they have much in common wherever they meet in the world.

And this is only one story of many stories that Returned Volunteers have to tell. They are stories about Americans who travel in the name of peace and come home again to educate the next generation of Americans about the world. So, take your passport and stamp it, as Bill Moyers said, "American" and then leave our shores and become — as Bill Moyers also told us — a citizen of the world. And when you return, you’ll have tales to tell.

John Coyne