50 years of esprit de Corps

Please Discuss

July 10, 2011|By Katharine Whittemore, Globe Correspondent

Sargent Shriver, shown with the first Peace Corps volunteers, made the… (REUTERS/JFK Library )

A little name-dropping, and then we’ll move on. Two former New England senators were Peace Corps volunteers: Chris Dodd (Dominican Republic) and the late Paul Tsongas (Ethiopia). Other heavy-hitting ex-volunteers include Donna Shalala (Iran), secretary of health and human services under Bill Clinton, and Reed Hastings (Swaziland), founder of Netflix. And journalists have long been core to the Corps: MSNBC’s “Hardball’’ host Chris Matthews (Swaziland), Vanity Fair’s Maureen Orth (Colombia), and travel writer Paul Theroux (Malawi).

Note: When I say “journalist,’’ fix on the first two syllables. For as we brook the Peace Corps’ 50th anniversary this year, realize there are now 200,000 former volunteers in our midst - and seemingly all of them kept journals. Go to peacecorps worldwide.org and click on Peace Corps Experience Books, and you’ll feel either charmed or besieged. Forgive me, but most are syrupy, mediocre reads. Maybe because “the essence of the experience is as hard to describe as a Beethoven symphony,’’ as Moritz Thomsen writes in “Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle’’ (University of Washington, 1969).

Luckily, some writers make fine music. Thomsen’s book is a classic of the genre - Larry McMurtry calls his writing “exhilarating.’’ A rich man’s son, World War II bombardier, and California farmer, Thomsen writes of hauling bamboo to build chicken houses in Ecuador, and how to burn a field to clear for planting corn and oranges. He gets sick with a lung fungus (almost every Corps memoir boasts at least one dire illness). He makes friends with the more adventurous locals - one names his newborn after him - though most believe he’s yet another gringo come to bilk them.

That’s another trademark of the Peace Corps memoir: combating suspicion. (No wonder founding director Sargent Shriver made the CIA promise to never stock the Corps with spies). Then there’s depression, which strikes most volunteers as they slam up against a frustrating, enigmatic culture. Here’s Thomsen’s confession: “It came as an ego-shriveling shock to discover after the first month that I wasn’t doing much of anything but reacting naively and emotionally to the poverty around me.’’