Word: corpsmen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Most Peace Corpsmen will agree that the volunteer's job is the most important part of his day. The rest--meeting the people, speaking the foreign language, the poor condition most corpsmen live in--these are incidentals. But the 88 who arrived in Brazil last November didn't have jobs for a very long time. Most of them had imagined that they would settle right into work slots. As it turned out, they had to find their own jobs and even make them up where there were none. It was a slow and frustrating process, and for 32 corpsmen...
Quite often the CVSF requested volunteers for projects not slated to begin until long after the corpsmen's arrival date. In Lapa, geologists Chase and Onstad are still waiting for a long-promised well-drilling operation which is slowly working its way south from Joazeiro. Any irrigation work that Howard Hunt might have done in Lapa could only follow the installation of electricity--which occurred in July, eight months after Hunt arrived...
...That formula hasn't worked in Brazil. Two geologists and one radio mechanic were unemployed this summer because they were no use at their jobs. Here were cases where the CVSF had come through on good jobs that were too specialized for the Americans. At least as many Peace Corpsmen in Brazil were out of work because of inexperience as because of negligence on the part of the CVSF...
...signing the contract with the CVSF. The CVSF expected experts and did not get many. The few specialists who came to Brazil were let down by the CVSF. The Peace Corps stood to lose every way, and did. Because they were promised jobs in their "field," the corpsmen were unprepared to find other work. Instead of looking around for other opportunities, they stayed home and cursed the organization that sent them, Said Judy Draper, 23, a sology major from the U. of Tennessee who found no lab work in Lapa: "When my job fall through, I felt the Corps...
...from a pragmatic U.S. point of view it has been effective. Ethiopia is fiscally sound, is one of the few nations to repay its lend-lease obligations in full. Selassie dispatched troops to U.N. combat in both Korea and the Congo. He has eagerly accepted 244 U.S. Peace Corpsmen as schoolteachers to raise the literacy standards of his people...