Peace Corps 45th Anniversary in the Dominican Republic
Remarks at the 45th Anniversary Luncheon
Melia Hotel, Santo Domingo
February 9, 2007
Jody K. Olsen, Deputy Director, Peace Corps
Your Excellency, Foreign Minister Carlos Morales Troncoso, and members of the mesa de honor, Returned Volunteers, currently serving Volunteers, friends and families, former staff members, it is an honor to share this celebration with you.
I want to give special thanks to the Friends of the Dominican Republic and Fondo Quisqueya. You all have helped make this country a very strong Peace Corps partner, have given extensive resources for community-based projects, and have continued to honor in so many ways the country that changed your lives throughout these past 45 years. You represent the Peace Corps’ third goal so well.
President Kennedy established the Peace Corps on March 1, 1961, and within a year, the first Volunteers arrived in this great country. Peace Corps has been serving in the Dominican Republic ever since: over 4,500 Volunteers in 45 years. Three years into the program, 1965, a Peace Corps staff person wrote this about the Volunteers:
“…the Volunteers in the Dominican Republic seem to be in rhythm with the country and its people. Not a single Volunteer interviewed expressed serious disappointment … with his experience. All were working…in a steady, deliberate and undramatic way … and the Volunteer in the Dominican Republic enjoys as nearly complete acceptance by the Dominican people as could be wished…. The Volunteers are protected and cared for by their neighbors.”
In 1990, I accompanied then-Peace Corps Director Paul Coverdell to the Dominican Republic, my only visit before today. I was significantly influenced by the experience. HIV/AIDS was not yet well known, and treatments to sustain a quality of life were not available.
We spent a morning in a large room of a community center in downtown Santo Domingo, where HIV/AIDS positive former prostitutes brought their children and made jewelry to sell. Many were actually children themselves. The Peace Corps Volunteer who worked with these women was a former craftsperson from San Francisco. She had arranged for the women’s products to be sold in the States. This Volunteer committed herself to these women, talking with them about their work, playing with the children, creating an environment for them to give love and care to each other and their young children, even as they knew their own lives would probably be short.
Today, the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic is a strong example of the program worldwide: 7,800 Volunteers in close partnership with the 73 nations in which we serve. Our number of Volunteers is the highest in 30 years, our recruitment is up, we are beginning new programs in Cambodia and Ethiopia this spring, and many additional countries have invited Peace Corps. In December, three American Senators, including Senate Majority Leader Reid, went to Ecuador and Bolivia and came back praising Peace Corps Volunteers and expressing the desire for a larger program.
The Peace Corps’ three goals,
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helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women,
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helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of peoples served, and
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helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans,
remain the core of our work, even as we respond to different environments.
When I was a Volunteer in Tunisia in the late 60s, I put a stamp on an envelope and hoped it would get home before I did. Today, almost all Volunteers have connectivity through cell phones, websites, and e-mails. They are in touch instantaneously with their in-country counterparts, students, colleagues, and families and friends back home. I listened to a phone call by a Volunteer in South Africa double his counterpart’s spinach income with three phone calls to schools with lunch programs, and I participate in a blog of a Volunteer friend currently serving in Ukraine. Through our World Wise School Program, currently-serving Volunteers have recorded their experiences on podcasts that are being downloaded by schoolchildren from the Peace Corps website, 6500 this last month.
This vast reach brings thousands more people to Peace Corps’ third goal every day, parent on-line support groups for Volunteers, additional resources for secondary projects, more family visits to Volunteers, and a much greater understanding of communities where we serve and the work we are doing.
This connectivity also expands Peace Corps Volunteer project opportunities. A Volunteer in Micronesia tracked a 350-mile swim of a sea turtle with a satellite hookup so the village could better understand the turtle’s built-in radar system, and she and the village are now part of an effort to save this vanishing species. Another Volunteer introduced electronic means for school grade averaging in his school in Senegal. All the schools in the region have now adopted the method, saving an estimated 100 hours of work per teacher per year.
Here in the DR, Matt and Brian and their students scanned the one English textbook they had so that students could work in pairs interactively on the school computers. Brian then recorded the audio parts on MP3s for each English activity. So when you see students with IPods, it might be English lessons rather than music.
Today, because of the tremendous need, the majority of Volunteers have a primary or secondary project in HIV/AIDS. A Volunteer in Lesotho, after observing so many students coming to school each Monday with their heads shaved to mourn a relative (often a parent) who had just died, worked with the community to create a primary school puppet show on HIV/AIDS prevention. She drew in parents, teachers, and village chiefs, many of whom had never worked together before.
In the United States, 28 percent of the population are baby boomers, many of whom heard President Kennedy’s speech but were not able to join the Peace Corps at the time. Peace Corps has launched a new initiative to take advantage of the experience of our older population and encourage them to serve. We all know many older serving Volunteers, some who are doing it a second time. We will offer more opportunities for this service.
Volunteer safety and security is so important today, as it will be in the future. However, host families and Volunteer communities and counterparts help ensure that Volunteers are safely integrated with the host communities around them. Providing good technical assistance, sharing ourselves as Americans, and learning about the culture of which we are apart, is our strongest safety asset and it is working.
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A Peace Corps Volunteer went to Peru many years ago. As she walked down the street in the poorest section of Lima, a twelve year-old boy rushed up, inviting her to live with his family, 11 brothers and sisters and parents in a small three-room house without plumbing or electricity. Surprisingly, his mother and the Volunteer both agreed.
That began two years of sharing language, family life, and stories. When the Volunteer married the next year, her husband joined them in that house. They spent time with the boy, encouraging him, understanding him, and he them. They stayed in touch when they returned to the States, and later encouraged him to come to San Francisco for college.
Last year, thirty five years later, that boy, Alejandro Toledo, now President of Peru, came to Peace Corps Washington to speak. He said he owed who he is to the couple who lived with his family. They didn’t know it at the time, but they made a huge difference in his life. President Toledo said in his speech:
“There is no sophisticated technology that will substitute for the warmth of a human heart. Yes, let’s teach our kids to navigate through internet. But never deprive them of touching the hearts of a man, of a woman in Africa, in Afghanistan, in Bolivia, or Peru. Don’t let competitiveness and technology interfere with the power of the human being.”
This is the gift of each Volunteer, whether for a future president or for a campesino next door. We do make a difference.