Living Poor A Peace Corps Chronicle

At the age of 48, Moritz Thomsen sold his pig farm and joined the Peace Corps. As he tells the story, his awareness of the comic elements in the human situation--including his own--and his ability to convey it in fast-moving, earthy prose have madeLiving Poora classic. "Hilariously funny at times, grimly sad at others and elavened with perceptive insights into the ways of the people and with breathtaking descriptions of the Ecuadorian landscape."-St. Louis Post-Dispatch

For more than 35 years, the Peace Corps has pursued John F. Kennedy's vision of helping people of the Third World build a better life. Yet with the exception of a few celebrations of its early years, little effort has been made to document that organization's history. Now a former deputy director of the Peace Corps offers a first-hand look at life in the agency—both in the field and at headquarters—and a radical reinterpretation of its history during the Nixon and Ford administrations. By the end of the 1960s, the Peace Corps was in disarray. Debate raged over its effectiveness, and many new volunteers embraced the antiestablishment behavior of the day's youth. When President Nixon appointed Joseph Blatchford as director in 1969, some insiders felt the agency's days were numbered—especially when Blatchford set about re-evaluating the Peace Corps' mission and initiated a program called New Directions to reorient its work. Many observers simply lump Blatchford's efforts with the failures and faults of the Nixon administration. David Searles, however, contends that the new director's initiatives revitalized the Peace Corps and made it a more relevant organization. Searles faithfully relates the history of these policies and their implementation in the field, drawing on his personal experience as country director for the Peace Corps in the Philippines. He shows how, despite constant carping from veterans of the early Peace Corps and much furor at headquarters, New Directions reenergized the agency and renewed and reaffirmed the Peace Corps' mission. Searles's descriptions of political maneuverings are incisively observed, and his firsthand characterizations of Peace Corps life richly impart the joys and frustrations of volunteer work. The Peace Corps Experience will give historians a new perspective on the agency and will also interest anyone who has served in the Peace Corps or who wants to understand it.

An irreverent tale of an American Jew serving in the Peace Corps in rural China, which reveals the absurdities, joys, and pathos of a traditional society in flux In September of 2005, the Peace Corps sent Michael Levy to teach English in the heart of China's heartland. His hosts in the city of Guiyang found additional uses for him: resident expert on Judaism, romantic adviser, and provincial basketball star, to name a few. His account of overcoming vast cultural differences to befriend his students and fellow teachers is by turns poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. While reveling in the peculiarities of life in China's interior, the author also discovered that the "other billion" (people living far from the coastal cities covered by the American media) have a complex relationship with both their own traditions and the rapid changes of modernization. Lagging behind in China's economic boom, they experience the darker side of "capitalism with Chinese characteristics," daily facing the schizophrenia of conflicting ideologies. Kosher Chinese is an illuminating account of the lives of the residents of Guiyang, particularly the young people who will soon control the fate of the world.

In the 1960s, twenty-thousand young Americans landed in South America to serve as Peace Corps volunteers. The program was hailed by President John F. Kennedy and by volunteers themselves as an exceptional initiative to end global poverty. In practice, it was another front for fighting the Cold War and promoting American interests in the Global South. This book examines how this ideological project played out on the ground as volunteers encountered a range of local actors and agencies engaged in anti-poverty efforts of their own. As they negotiated the complexities of community intervention, these volunteers faced conflicts and frustrations, struggled to adapt, and gradually transformed the Peace Corps of the 1960s into a truly global, decentralized institution. Drawing on letters, diaries, reports, and newsletters created by volunteers themselves, Fernando Purcell shows how their experiences offer an invaluable perspective on local manifestations of the global Cold War.

This work looks at inter-related post WWII case studies to analyze the ways in which different groups, mostly governmental agencies and emerging activist organizations, invoked the idea of "community" in anti-poverty initiatives during the late 1950s and 1960s.

In the middle of the twentieth century, liberal intellectuals and policymakers in the United States came to see poverty as a global problem. Applying Progressive era and Depression insights about the causes of poverty to the post-World War II challenges posed by the Cold War and decolonization, they developed new ideas about why poverty persisted. The problem, they argued, was that the poor at home and abroad were alienated from the enormous opportunities industrial capitalism provided. Left unsolved, that problem, they believed, would threaten world peace. In The Poverty of the World, Sheyda Jahanbani brings together the histories of US foreign relations and domestic politics to explain why, during a period of unprecedented affluence, Americans rediscovered poverty and supported major policy initiative to combat it. Revisiting a moment of triumph for American liberals in the 1940s, Jahanbani shows how the US's newfound role as a global superpower prompted novel ideas among liberal thinkers about how to address poverty and generated new urgency for trying to do so. Their sense of responsibility about deploying American knowledge and wealth as a beneficent force in the world, produced such foreign aid programs as the Peace Corps. As Americans came to recognize the problem beyond the country's borders, they turned the idea of "underdevelopment" inward to explain poverty in urban neighborhoods and rural communities at home, inspiring Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and his domestic peace corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). Drawing on a wide variety of archival material, Jahanbani reinterprets the lives and work of prominent liberal figures in postwar American social politics, from Oscar Lewis to John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael Harrington to Sargent Shriver, to show the global origins of their ideas. By tracing how American liberals invented the problem of "global poverty" and executed a war against it, The Poverty of the World sheds new light on the domestic impacts of the Cold War, the global ambitions of American liberalism, and the way in which key intellectuals and policymakers worked to develop an alternative vision of US empire in the decades after World War II.