The Peace Corps was born during the dark days of the Cold War, but its mission has never seemed more relevant.

At an early-morning campaign stop in October of 1960, John F. Kennedy threw out the idea of an international volunteer organization to promote world peace. Forty-one years later, the success of his off-the-cuff proposal is apparent in the enthusiasm of returned volunteers and in the friends the program has made for America in countries around the world.

“Sharing cultures is one of the major things that attracted me to the Peace Corps,” says Elizabeth Hayward ’99, an anthropology and psychobiology major currently serving in Nicaragua.

She adds that the fact that countries and communities have to request volunteers helps make the program so welcomed abroad. Many people she talks to remember the uninvited Americans in Nicaragua during the 1980s. But Peace Corps, they tell her, is different.

Since the first call for volunteers went out in 1961, the program’s commitment to cross-cultural understanding and service has attracted at least 48 Centre volunteers, according to College and Peace Corps records. Most went as recent college graduates, although the program accepts all ages. One of the earliest volunteers, William Bridges ’33, served in Pakistan while in his forties.

The Class of 2001 was especially interested in the Peace Corps challenge. Two spring graduates have left for assignments: Adam Paioff ’01 in Siberia and Michelle Gross ’01 in the Dominican Republic. Another three from the class got well into the application process.

Milton Reigelman, director of international programs and Cowan Professor of English, attributes the recent surge in interest to Centre’s international emphasis. “The culture of Centre has made a dramatic change,” he says. “Two-thirds of our students have gone abroad. International relations is the fastest-growing major.”

Alumni also cite Centre’s long-standing emphasis on service and, more recently, on conversations with Peace Corps veterans on the faculty. Rick Bradshaw, in the history program, was a volunteer in the Central African Republic. Lori Hartmann-Mahmud, in government, spent two years in Niger.

Although participants receive a monthly living allowance, $6,075 upon completing their tour of duty, and access to educational and professional benefits, the program is not to be entered into lightly.

About a third of would-be volunteers do not make it through the multi-level application process of forms, interviews, and health clearances (a big hurdle).
Once they’ve accepted an assignment, volunteers go through three months of intensive training. Then they’re dropped in their new communities and told to get on with it. Many find themselves in unimaginably harsh conditions, living side by side with a nightmarish array of insects and diseases. Often they are in remote villages, with few resources but their own ingenuity and wits. Sometimes they must deal with political instability. Many do not last the two-year term.

And tragically, some, like Lois Lane ’69, give their lives. Lane died while serving in Gambia, western Africa, as the result of an allergic reaction to an immunization.

But those who make it seem to embrace the Peace Corps slogan: “The toughest job you’ll ever love.”

Here are some of their stories.

Alan O. Bryant ’67
Country: Brazil
Assignment: agriculture and health
Major: biology and government

It should have been his senior year at Centre. Instead, idealism and a quest for adventure led Alan Bryant ’67 to explore a different kind of classroom—the country of Brazil—as the first Centre student to join the Peace Corps.

“It was a very enlightening experience to realize that there are different cultures,” he says. “I was twenty-one years old and had never lived outside of Kentucky.”

Bryant spent his Peace Corps years in the far southwestern state of Mato Grosso (now Mato Grosso do Sul). The lights worked a couple of hours a day, and there were no paved streets. In addition, a military coup had overthrown the nationally elected government in April of 1964, just a few months before he arrived. By early the following year, he recalls, the military had taken control of the state offices and local institutions barely functioned.

Bryant’s projects were small: agriculture, food distribution, some vaccinations. “In reality, it was difficult to accomplish much,” he admits.

Yet the less tangible accomplishments were great. “I think the biggest impact was simply being and living there,” he says. “My little village had never seen anyone from the United States. In fact, many had never seen anyone with blue eyes. We talked about democracy versus communism. They were a wonderful people and I like to think that because I was there, they became a little more aware of the rest of the world.”

After completing his two-year stint, Bryant returned home to Kentucky, where he graduated from Centre and the University of Kentucky law school, followed by a career as an executive with a Louisville insurance company. Yet his Peace Corps days are still with him. “Part of me will always be Brazilian,” he says.


Janet Morrison Bell ’64
Country: Peru
Assignment: economic development
Major: art

Janet Morrison Bell ’64 was one of the first Centre graduates to join the Peace Corps. Thirty-five years later, she describes it as “probably the most important thing I ever did.”

For much of her two years in Peru, Bell lived in a small village high in the mountains and worked on a number of community development projects through the schools.

"One of the things the Peace Corps did was to make friends for America,” she recalls. “Just living with people, learning their language, talking with them. I don’t know if that was considered a primary purpose or not. But I do know that’s what happened.”

Now a bookkeeper and assistant to a general contractor in Massachusetts, Bell worked briefly as an IBM programmer after her return from Peru, and then in several capacities with President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Over the years she has sponsored many foreign exchange students from Spain, Germany, and Japan.

“That was part of the Peace Corps idealism,” she says. “The idea that you can, in fact, make a difference.”


David Goff ’68
Country: Libya
Assignment: teaching English
Major: drama

When David Goff ’68 and his roommate, Rich Lockett ’68, joined the Peace Corps, it was the height of the Vietnam War. Goff thought the opportunity to immerse himself in another culture sounded appealing, but he also appreciated the draft deferment benefit it brought.

After a three-month crash course in Arabic, Goff went to teach English in Libya’s Sahara Desert. Many of his students were Bedouin children who lived outside the village. “Instead of a bike rack, we had a place where donkeys were tied up,” he recalls.

In addition to teaching English, Goff also provided villagers with an image of his own country.

“I was the first American they’d ever seen,” he says. “Their impression of America was that we were the Wild, Wild West.” “They were very welcoming,” he adds.

Unfortunately, his tour of duty was cut short when Muammar Qadhafi seized power in a 1969 military coup and threw the Peace Corps volunteers out of the country.

Goff went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina and spent 20 years in television. He now sells real estate in Indiana.

“The Peace Corps is the best way in the world to find out what you’re made of,” he says. “I often think to myself that no matter how I have to live, it will never be as challenging as it was in Libya.”


Bob Butler ’80
Country: Samoa
Assignment: math teacher
Major: economics

When he graduated from Centre, Bob Butler ’80 thought he was off to Africa. At the last minute, the Peace Corps sent him to Samoa, an island archipelago in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and New Zealand.

Now a career counselor in Kansas, Butler reiterates a common theme: one of the most difficult aspects of the experience is making the transition from college student to adult.

Yet despite initial difficulties, he enjoyed his time in Samoa teaching high school math so much that he has returned twice to visit friends. And Butler believes that making friends, both personally and for the United States, is what the Peace Corps does best.

“I think it’s one thing that the U.S. does that is pretty much universally liked overseas,” he says. “When we’re over there, there’s no agenda. We’re just there to do our jobs and to fit in as best we can. And at least on a local level, that has a real profound effect on how we’re perceived as a country.”


Emily Prater ’90
Country: Cote d’Ivoire
Assignment: health
Major: government

Emily Prater ’90 is an adventurer at heart. After seven years with the Centers for Disease Control, she decided it was time for a change.

Which is why she found herself, at age 29, bound for a small village in the Cote d’Ivoire (formerly, Ivory Coast), in western Africa. At first she focused on prenatal and baby care, “and it just branched out from there,” she says. “Whatever the village needed, I tried to figure out a way to do it.”

Teaching, for instance. “What happened is the kids would come over to my house and say, ‘teach us English.’ So I got some of their textbooks. I wasn’t very good, but I enjoyed it a lot,” she says.

So much that now she is teaching English in Japan.

The only time she was really scared was when she was caught in the midst of a coup d’état during a trip to the capital city of Abidjan.

“The Peace Corps was talking about taking us to Ghana, which is right next door. But I had Mariette [a girl from her village], who was only fifteen and didn’t have a passport. I was responsible for her. If we were evacuated, what would happen to her?”

Fortunately, things quieted down and the two caught a bus back to their village the next day.

“It’s a full-time, twenty-four-hour job to be an American living over there,” she says. “I can dress like the people in my village; I can even carry water on my head. But the way I act toward people is always going to be an American way.

“But if you’re flexible, and have a sense of humor, and are pretty self-confident, I think you can make it.”


Genny Ballard ’91
Country: Costa Rica
Assignment: community development
Major: government

Genny Ballard ’91 grew up in rural Appalachia, which is perhaps why her assignment to rural Costa Rica did not faze her a bit. A “teacher by nature,” she set up a kindergarten in her village, taught high school classes, and tutored in an orphanage. She is now working toward a Ph.D. in Spanish at the University of Kentucky, where she is also teaching.

Why the Peace Corps?

“I think Centre really encourages travel abroad, so you already have your passport and have been away from your family,” says Ballard, who spent a semester in the College’s London program.

“And there’s a service component to our Centre education,” she adds. “I volunteered through my sorority with a tutoring and recreation program at Toliver Elementary.” She started a similar program at an orphanage in Costa Rica.

Did her experience have a lasting legacy?

“I think if you asked any Peace Corps volunteer that question they’d give you the same answer,” she says. “You always feel split between two cultures, between two countries.

“I think you don’t ever come back.”


Kristin Cook Crinot ’91
Country: Benin
Assignment: rural community development
Major: economics

As soon as Kristin Cook Crinot ’91 graduated from Centre, she started working for a bank. For the last several years she’s worked for a family hotel-management business in Louisville. But in between those two corporate careers, she spent four years in Benin, western Africa, as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Her first assignment was Savalou, a regional town of about 12,000, where her array of programs included maternal and baby healthcare, economic cooperatives for local women, and AIDS education. Later she moved to the larger city of Cotonou to concentrate on preventing the spread of AIDS. While in Benin she met her husband, Alain; their first child was born this fall.

Crinot believes one reason the Peace Corps is so successful is that its volunteers work on a small scale with individuals. Perhaps even more important, the volunteers do not have much money. They are paid just enough to fit into their community and have access to very little additional.

“I saw a lot of great community-based efforts destroyed by money,” Crinot says, citing as just one example a mother’s cooperative in Savalou. The women made soap that they sold for a small profit.

“But they were so successful that all these different foreign entities became interested in them,” Crinot recalls. “They got a project to make mosquito nets, but because of the foreign organization’s regulations, the money had to be managed by a local nonprofit. And so the women had to work for this nonprofit. And then it became a huge issue of money, and people began threatening each other, and the whole group, which had worked together for seven years, pretty much disbanded.”

Yet Crinot continues to believe passionately in the value of the Peace Corps, both abroad and at home. “I think the thousands of Peace Corps volunteers in this country have a profound impact,” she says. “Because of my experience, I do care about the African refugees who come to Louisville. I’ve worked with some of the kids, and I’ve tried to help them get integrated.”

“If you join the Peace Corps expecting to change the world, you’re going to be sorely disappointed,” she adds. “The problems are so huge. The difference you are going to make is going to be in individual lives, in the people you meet and the smiles you share.”


Melanie Driscoll ’91
Country: Thailand
Assignment: community forestry extension agent
Major: biology and French

“I had always wanted to live in a non-modern way,” says Melanie Driscoll ’91 of her decision to join the Peace Corps. “I wanted to live somewhere where I could learn the language and really get to know people.”

It took her almost two years to get through the lengthy application process, but Thailand, her assigned country, was worth the wait. In fact, the hardest part for Driscoll was leaving it.

“I felt like something broke when I first came back to the U.S.,” she says.

A biologist who just finished a master’s degree at Syracuse University, Driscoll says her job in Thailand was trying to figure out different ways to get people to plant trees. During three years there (she signed up for an extra year), she estimates she and the people of her community planted more than 300,000 trees.

Did they survive in an area where water is a precious commodity? She doesn’t know, but says in a way it doesn’t matter. It was enough that she, an American, tried to help.

“If you talk to older Thais around the country, many, many of them will say they had an English teacher who was an American,” she notes. When the Peace Corps decided Thailand no longer needed volunteers, the Thai government asked to pay the housing and other costs if only the Peace Corps would stay. “Even government officials, who tend not to want to shake up too much, see the value in having a completely different perspective throughout the country,” she says. “They think it will help Thailand continue to progress.”

Driscoll acknowledges there were many challenges to life in Thailand. Her apartment windows had no screens, and running water was available twice a day—mostly. Then there was “the situation with women,” “that Thais really repress all emotion,” and “living in a fishbowl twenty-four hours a day.”

But, she adds, “I think because I went and became a part of things, I was a lot happier. I ended up with a family there. I ended up with people I could trust.”


Donna Feldkamp ’91
Country: Mauritania
Assignment: waterborne disease control
Major: psychobiology

Donna Feldkamp ’91 joined the Peace Corps straight from college and asked to go to Africa.

“I really believed in the ideals of the Peace Corps, that you could go and teach people to improve things for themselves with a minimal amount of resources,” she says.

She also wanted to travel “in an adventurous way.” She got more than she bargained for.

It was Africa, all right, but instead of the lush jungle she had imagined, Feldkamp was sent to Mauritania, a desperately poor desert country in north Africa on the border with Libya. She lived in a two-room mud house in a very small village of about 600 people during the growing season, fewer during the remaining 10 months of the year.

The Peace Corps had trained Feldkamp to build wells and improve water systems. Unfortunately, her village was built on rock. “While I was there I frequently felt that it was a big charade,” she says. “These people needed so much. And here I was trying to teach them to dig wells into solid bedrock.
“I was overwhelmed by the obvious need for so many things, and I was just one person and I didn’t know much.”

She was also overwhelmed by the barriers to communication. People in her village spoke a dialect of Arabic, and she had “not quite three months” of instruction in the language.

Eventually she did manage to make friends with a woman who could understand her halting Arabic better than most and a veterinarian who spoke French, which she had studied at Centre.

And, like most Peace Corps volunteers, she proved adaptable. Since she couldn’t dig wells, she persuaded a few people to try growing vegetables with seeds she brought back from the capital city. “Some of them didn’t even know what a vegetable was,” she says. “I got probably three families to plant the seeds in their fields and water them every day. They got a harvest, and they were thrilled.” It was a way to make some money.

Although Feldkamp had one of the most challenging Peace Corps experiences of any Centre volunteer, she remains sympathetic toward the program.

“My idealism is less, but it was because I became educated in the real world,” she says. “I wasn’t reading the opinion pages in Newsweek any more. I was out there getting my own opinions.”

Her two years in Mauritania also convinced her to go to medical school. Now finishing a residency in South Carolina, she plans to return to Kentucky in a year with her husband, Damon Gatewood ’91, and their new son, Aubrey.


Elizabeth Hayward ’99
Country: Nicaragua
Assignment: healthcare
Major: anthropology and psychobiology

“What a gift it is to be able to see the United States from a third-world perspective,” says Elizabeth Hayward ’99, who has lived in Nicaragua since January 2000.

As a community healthcare volunteer, she teaches nutrition and personal hygiene in three rural schools, runs a mother’s support group, and helps communities plan for disasters. Her farthest school is about a 90-minute walk into coffee-covered mountains.

Hayward lives with a family in a small village of 700 people in northern Nicaragua, about 20 kilometers from the Honduras border. She has a room of her own, which she describes as “quite a bit like a college dorm room—minus the windows, air conditioning, closets, etc.,” and sleeps on a cot “covered with billowing white mosquito net.” For luxury, she recently splurged on a small refrigerator.

Hayward credits two Centre experiences—a term in London and a short-term trip to Ecuador—with sparking her interest in the Peace Corps.

Her advice to potential Peace Corps volunteers: “Hold out for what you want, even if that means waiting an extra two months,” she says. “It really makes a difference in how you will feel about your service.”


Ben Friedman ’99
Country: Honduras
Assignment: economic development
Major: anthropology and international relations

“The work here is not exactly typical office work,” says Ben Friedman ’99, an economic development volunteer in Honduras. “In the beginning it involves a lot of trust building, a lot of chatting and joking and asking questions.”

It also requires adapting to the local ways of doing things. “In the U.S. we say, ‘Time is money,’” Friedman notes. “Hondurans say, 'Hay más tiempo que vida,’ which essentially means, ‘There’s plenty of time in life.’”

Friedman works with teachers who want to integrate computer skills into their classrooms. He is also helping a youth group start a ceramics business by teaching them to write a proposal and business plan to apply for start-up capital. His most exciting project to date is working with a United Nations agency and the national telephone company to get a telecenter (with computers, Internet access, and telephones).

“We are basically here to help the local economy run better,” he says. “Volunteers don’t do what Hondurans can do themselves.”

Why join the Peace Corps? Friedman’s three reasons turn out to be almost universal among Peace Corps volunteers: “First off, I wanted to work internationally, on a grass-roots level,” he says. “Second, I wanted real-world work experience before going to grad school. “And third, I had no idea what I wanted to do professionally.”

The Peace Corps has a way of answering all three.


Joseph Conrad ’00
Country: Zambia
Assignment: economic development
Major: biochemistry and molecular biology

Like the novelist of the same name (though no relation), Joseph Conrad ’00 is finding his experience in south-central Africa both exhilarating and tempering.

His official assignment is aquaculture: everything from building fish ponds to teaching villagers how to sustain and harvest the fish. He works with about 60 farmers scattered over 10 villages within a 20-kilometer radius. He also teaches at a local school, works with a local clinic on a variety of projects, and helps coordinate HIV/AIDS activities in the province.

Many Peace Corps volunteers, fresh out of college, struggle with adjusting to the real world. Conrad is no exception. “Sometimes I think the farmers don’t really want to improve their lives with fish ponds, or if they want the improvement, they want it to be done for them,” he says. “In so many cases, their current situations, while not great, are good enough to get along pretty well.”

Yet in spite of the occasional frustrations, Conrad remains enthusiastic about his decision to join the Peace Corps before starting graduate school.

He lives in a small village about 60 kilometers north of the provincial capital of Mansa. His house is a thatched-roof house made of mud bricks. His mode of transportation is a bicycle. “My favorite thing is life and work in the village,” he says. “I get to be outdoors a lot, I ride about 250 kilometers in a work week, and I am able to help people reach a more comfortable place in their lives.”