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Peace Corps (3)
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118569200
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Peace Corps (3)
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Records of the Office of the Chief of Staff (Reagan Administration)
James Cicconi's Agency Files
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TIMES
No. 1
February 1983
Apple Gives
Computer
To Botswana
Apple Computers of Cup
Calif., has donated a compu
tem to Peace Corps for use
Self-Help School in Botswar
Africa.
"The small computer syst
be used primarily to train st
in data entry," says Botswan
try Desk Officer David Brow
"This will increase their cha
employment with firms in B
that do use computers."
Peace Corps Volunteer Bo
of Monroeville, Pa., a teache
Self-Help School who has be
Greets Volunteers (left) Jane Keple and Theresa Frisk, and returned Volunteer Freda Martin at the
Botswana since 1981, is resp
for the donation.
Before joining Peace Corp
Higgs had worked with com
Volunteers Greet President
After arriving in Palapye, a :
village northeast of Gaboron
ng
During Costa Rica Visit
capital, he began to solicit U
panies for computers to intr
me in its 21 years,
computer teaching systems t
begin sending Vol-
students.
next month.
Peace Corps Volunteers and staff
some of the most needy rural com-
As a result of his efforts, 4
inistry of Foreign
served in the welcoming party when
munities of this Central American
donated an $8,000 small con
the agreement as
President Reagan visited San Jose,
nation.
system and all the software.
will permit the
Costa Rica in December, as part of
Peace Corps' involvement in the
The school's student popu
like other coun-
his four-nation Latin American
Presidential visit came at the request
consists of Botswana's least a
pean, to benefit
Tour.
(Continued on page 5)
(Continue
stance from Peace
Co-Country Directors Pepe and
Jean Lujan served as official escorts
from the Haitian
for Presidential aides James Baker
after nearly eight
and Michael Deaver.
Use Private Sector More,
DDS, explained In-
The President's trip in support of
or Luis del Rio.
the changing emphasis towards de-
Council Advises President
anticipates the
mocracy in the Americas was fo-
be in agro-forestry,
cused on restoring economic growth
in praise of those Volunteers
on the two topics of private
and appropriate
to the Western Hemisphere and the
who have effectively served their
development and public awa
in home
President's Caribbean Basin Initia-
country and their host communities,
initially, the group develope
tive. "This will be a journey for the
often under trying circumstances."
major suggestions regarding
Haitian Foreign
cause of democracy and peace," de-
That's the first thought of the
topic:
ds of programs
clared the President upon his de-
thirty-member Peace Corps Ad-
Private Sector. (1) Private g
how Peace Corps
parture for South America.
visory Council's report to President
(and other government agen
ountry," del Rio
In conjunction with the Presi-
Reagan, submitted this month after
should: make available traini
ÁSM 253
dent's visit, Peace Corps Director
a six-month study of the agency.
grams to Volunteers; adopt
we received and
Loret Miller Ruppe announced
Chaired by Diana D. S. Denman,
project or program overseas
operating with
Peace Corps' participation in a joint
a San Antonio, Tx., rancher and
encourage host countries to
project with the Agency for Inter-
David L. Jones, a New York City
small-scale marketing; (2) A
Corps Represen-
national Development (AID) and
consultant and former top executive
"Adopt a Volunteer" pilot pl
Uniti
the Costa Picen Ministry for Dlan
of Densi Cole ...
Reagan Presidential Library
Digital Records Marker
This is not a presidential record. This marker is used as an
administrative marker by the Ronald W. Reagan
Presidential Library Staff. This marker identifies the place
of a publication.
Publications have not been scanned in their entirety for
the purpose of digitization. To see the full publication
please search online or visit the Reagan Presidential
Library's Research Room.
Communic
Reprinted from Communicate,
the magazine of RCA
The Peace Corps
and the Corporate Employee
RCA retiree Betty Lucich on assignment with the Peace Corpsin Hondums
"You Look Like Us,
But You Wear
Lipstick"
Former Peace Corps volunteers now
working for RCA Corporation have
some good stories to tell-and some
thoughts on how the experience
changed their lives
hatever changes the Peace Corps
W
has seen in the tumultuous years
since its inception, its original
goals remain constant: to pro-
mote world peace and friendship
and to improve mutual understanding between
Americans and the people of other nations. Since
Then and now: Nancy Tollefson.
the first planeload of volunteers-"PCVs"-
touched down at Accra, Ghana, in 1961, an addi-
five-foot hooded cobra), and the infamous tumba
tional 80,000 have served in 85 developing
fly, which often lays eggs in drying laundry. "You'd
countries, with nearly 6,000 on current two-year
have to iron everything 16 times or else the flies
assignments.
would dig into your skin and drive you mad with
Today, returned volunteers are making contribu-
itching," she says. "Once I had 26 at the same time."
tions in all areas of American life. Recently,
Other encounters were friendlier. Walking on the
ex-PCVs now working for RCA Corporation recalled
beach one morning, she met three Chinese men,
their experiences and reflected on how the Peace
one of them wearing an oriental rice planter's hat.
Corps shaped their lives:
"When I admired it, he insisted that I have it," she
says. "I agreed to accept his hat only in exchange
If it hadn't been for Humphrey Bogart, Nancy
for mine. We made the swap, thanked each other
Tollefson might never have gone to Sierra Leone.
warmly, and went our separate ways, I in my sun
"I was living in a sorority house at the University
hat, he in a Kansas City Royals baseball cap. Later
of Kansas," recalls Ms. Tollefson, a financial cost
I found out he'was the Chinese ambassador to
analyst for RCA Cablevision Systems in Van Nuys,
Sierra Leone."
Calif. "College was fun but I looked forward to doing
Ms. Tollefson returned to Kansas in January,
something a little different after graduation." After
1980, then moved to southern California, where
seeing The African Queen, the 1953 film classic
she joined RCA. "My Peace Corps experience
with Bogart and Katherine Hepburn, she says. "I
taught me to be less critical of things not familiar
knew I had to see Africa."
to me," she says. "It helped me shed my blinders."
For two years starting in the summer of 1977,
Ms. Tollefson worked in Freetown, capital of Sierra
To her students at Woizero Sisin Secondary
Leone, as a statistician in the planning division of
School in Ethiopia, Arwilda Haynes was something
the department of education. "I had an office
of an enigma. Black like themselves, she wore
downtown," she says, "but the best part of the job
western dress, down to the tennis sneakers she
was traveling into the interior, collecting data on
taught in, and spoke only halting Amharic. Her first
the schools and meeting the people."
day in class the kids cackled in glee at the sight of
The weather, however, proved less to her liking:
her name on the blackboard. The first syllable, she
searing equatorial heat interspersed with tropical
later learned, is a local profanity.
rainstorms of unimaginable intensity. "The water
"The Peace Corps really opened my eyes," says
would come down in sheets," she says. "The peo-
Ms. Haynes, who served from 1962-64 and is today
ple didn't know what raindrops were." There were
Manager, Safety and Insurance, at the RCA facility
also some nasty run-ins with the local fauna, es-
in Lancaster, Pa. "I grew up in Mineola, Texas,
pecially sharks (which menaced the very waters in
where segregation was a way of life and Africa
which she water-skied), poisonous snakes (in-
might as well have been part of another galaxy."
cluding one eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with a
But she was 21, fresh out of college, and "full of
"My Peace Corps experience
taught me to be less critical of things not familiar to me.
It helped me shed my blinders."
idealism and wanderlust." Her brother Albert
joined with her, "and our parents backed us 100
percent."
At the school, a 12-hour drive north of the
Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, Ms. Haynes
joined a staff of 25 and taught typing, shorthand
and bookkeeping. She roomed with four other
PCVs in town, where, she recalls, life was more
than amenable. The weather was cool, the insects
innocuous, and she learned easily to boil her
drinking water and eat with her hands. With some-
what more effort she adjusted to life as an object of
daily curiosity.
"I'd get stares on buses and in shopping ba-
zaars," she says, "just like other PCVs all over the
world." But in Africa, black Americans are a spe-
cial cause of incredulity. "You look like us," her
students would tell her. "But you wear lipstick."
Home from Ethiopia, Ms. Haynes earned an M.B.A.
degree from Indiana University and later taught in
Mississippi, where she was swept up in the civil
rights movement in the mid-1960s. With her hus-
band Bill-a former PCV from Malaysia-she
settled in Lancaster in 1972.
"The Peace Corps was a growing experience for
me in a lot of ways," she says today. "It made me
a lot more willing to reach out and take risks and
less quick to judge people different from myself."
Ex-Panama volunteer Rod Angle.
Rod and Karen Angle had little notion of what
underdeveloped. "There was virtually no electricity,
they would be doing for the next two years when
few paved streets, and work was low-paying and
they stepped ashore on the tiny Panamanian island
seasonal," says Rod, who today is a member of the
Technical Staff at RCA Laboratories in Princeton.
of Bastimentos in the fall of 1965. Reachable only
by boat-the Angles motored out from the Panama
For his first project, Rod rounded up a work
coast in a 12-foot dugout-Bastimentos was a
crew of 15 and set out to install street lamps along
community of endless needs, impoverished and
the island's mile-long main drag by Christmas.
"There were some light poles lying around and an
unused diesel generator and the job didn't seem
Lancaster's Arwilda Haynes.
like a big deal, but nobody believed we could bring
it off." When the lights went up-on deadline-
Rod was hailed as a miracle worker. "My land-
lady even bowed to me and called me God."
Having established his credentials, Rod prom-
ised himself "not to push any project the people
really didn't want." The vow hardly left him idle. He
ordered cement from the Panama government and
helped put in sidewalks, taught third and fourth
grade math and science, encouraged local farmers
to vaccinate their cattle, and, with Karen, started a
4-H club in their house. Karen also ran hygiene
classes for the women at the cantina, a local gath-
ering spot.
The Angles, who joined the Peace Corps out of
the University of Kansas, returned to the U.S. in
1967. "I joined out of a feeling that my life had been
devoted to myself and it was time to do something
for others," says Rod. Among their souvenirs of
1
"You can't imagine the humidity. When we got off the plane,
it was like being hit with a wall of water."
Bastimentos are a taste for broiled iguana and wild
boar, the lingering odor of mildew in the books they
brought with them and back ("You can't imagine
the humidity-when we got off the plane, it was like
being hit with a wall of water") and thousands of
color slides, which their three children view with
unmasked envy. Says their dad, "They're dying to
go. Maybe some day."
Raised in New York, Bruce Felton had never
been further from home than Chicago when he
joined the Peace Corps in the late 1960s. His ven-
ture took him to southeast Asia, via six weeks'
training in an abandoned schoolhouse in Hawaii.
"I was in Sarawak, Malaysia, a land of tropical
rain forests in northern Borneo," says Felton, who
is Director, Internal Communications, and editor of
this magazine. "I taught high school English in a
small frontier town called Bau, about ten miles from
the Indonesian border."
Some of Felton's earliest impressions of Sara-
wak, he says, remain his most vivid: "Whether you
were in a classroom, a village half a day's hike into
the bush, or a fancy downtown store, there were
always a half-dozen or more tiny 'chik-chak' lizards
Bruce Felton (seated at right).
skittering along the walls and ceiling at any given
moment. They'd even dart across screens in
Felton found the people of Sarawak, a mix of
theaters and turn up in your laundry. In restaurants,
Chinese, aboriginal Dayaks, Malays, and Indians,
it was considered proper to inspect your straw for
"generous and hospitable," and the living com-
bugs before sipping a soft drink and to mix in a
fortable. But he wouldn't have guessed it to be a
large pinch of salt. Popular dishes included dog,
very pleasant place from the government-published
'rat noodles,' ice cream sandwiches made with real
"English-Malay Phrase Book" he was handed his
bread, and durian, a strange-looking fruit with the
first week in the country. "The first three phrases
consistency and smell of rancid cheese. In hotel
on page one," he says, reading from the battered
bathrooms, there was a shower-head on the wall
paperback, "are: 'Wait while I remove these
and a drain in the floor. When you turned on the
leeches,' 'I have been bitten by sandflies,' and 'The
shower, the whole room became a shower stall."
cockroaches have eaten my shirt.'
Doña Betty
The ex-PCVs profiled on these pages waited till
after college before joining the Peace Corps.
Betty Lucich waited till she retired.
"I got hooked on joining through an article in a
retiree's magazine after leaving the company in
1975," says the 61-year-old Ms. Lucich, who has
been in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, since last fall
serving as an actuarial troubleshooter for a
merchants' savings and loan cooperative.
Often addressed as "Doña Betty," she'll be in
Honduras through November, 1982. After that?
"Working for the Agency for International Develop-
ment and VISTA are both possibilities. I certainly
won't be looking to retire."
Betty Lucich chats with a Tegucigalpa merchant.
2
Update:
Doña Betty
Tegucigalpa, Honduras, is a city of
Editor's note: Since the original appearance of
hilly streets, blistering weather, and
the following story in June, 1982, RCA retiree Betty
Lucich has completed her Peace Corps service in
endless surprises. RCA retiree Betty
Honduras and returned home to Northridge, Calif.
Lucich talks about her current expe-
ith her two-year hitch as a Peace
riences as a Peace Corps volunteer
W
Corps volunteer in Honduras
there-and her plans for the future
soon to run out, Betty Lucich fig-
ures it's not too early to think
about packing. It's far too early,
however, to think about retiring. "The Peace
Corps," she says, "is just a beginning."
Ms. Lucich, now 62, has been in Tegucigalpa,
bustling capital city of the Central American
republic, since September, 1980. Her assignment:
actuarial troubleshooting for a merchants' savings
and loan cooperative. "I got hooked on joining the
Peace Corps through an article in a retiree maga-
zine after leaving RCA in 1975," she says. While
it seemed a daring move at the time, her closest
Betty Lucich makes the rounds of Tegucigalpa's
open markets with co-op officers Carlos Flores (left)
and Melchor Nunez.
3
"When you are first introduced to someone, it is common to be asked, "How old are you?'"
friends and two grown children were hardly sur-
prised. After all, she had already traveled exten-
sively throughout Latin America and the South
Pacific and taken part in an Earthwatch archae-
ological dig off the coast of Ecuador.
"Actually, my first choice for Peace Corps
service was not Central America, but Africa," she
says. "I was hoping to get into communal vege-
table gardening." But her current assignment is by
no means inappropriate.
"I'd had a lifetime of accounting experience,
with RCA and elsewhere," she says, "and since
bookkeeping methods here are much the same as
in the States, it's fairly easy recognizing debits
from credits-even if the books are six months
behind." Like most volunteers in Honduras and
elsewhere in the Third World, she finds her work by
turns challenging, gratifying, and frustrating.
To be sure, advance planning "doesn't seem to
be a major priority here," she reports. "Buses
jammed to bursting with passengers, live poultry,
mail, and merchandise often pull into a gas station
because the tank has gone dry. The phones and
electricity often go dead with no notice. The down-
town stores right now have displays of Halloween
masks and Valentine candy. The windows say
'Merry Christmas."
Although her age is more than twice the
average for Peace Corps volunteers, Ms. Lucich
sets a fast pace through her nine- and ten-hour
days. ("I'm not the oldest volunteer in my group,"
she is quick to point out. "There is a 70-year-old
anesthesiologist assigned to a hospital.") Much of
her time is spent in an office, but there is ample
opportunity to mingle with the merchants served by
the co-op and to record her impressions of life in
the crowded. metropolis:
"Tegucigalpa is cool by night, blistering by day,
and as hilly as San Francisco. The streets are
thronged with vendors selling newspapers, cotton
candy, fruit, soft drinks, and nacatamales. These
are large tamales stuffed with meat, potatoes, rice,
olives, tomatoes, sometimes raisins, and I don't
know what else." But Honduras is self-sufficient in
few industries, "and there are frequent shortages
of everything, including staples like eggs." Housing
too is scarce and expensive, and creature com-
forts, living standards, and health care are a far cry
from what she had been used to back home in
Northridge, Calif. "In Honduras," she says, "a
sixth-grade education is considered excellent."
The people? "Friendly, helpful, and polite. I am
often addressed as Doña Betty and offered seats
A day in the life of Betty Lucich includes a lunchtime
stroll downtown with co-worker Belinda Juarez
(right) and a visit with a co-op merchant.
4
"I had no choice but to learn Spanish, since English is rarely heard here."
on buses. When you are first introduced to some-
one, it is common to be asked, 'How old are you?'''
Ms. Lucich spoke no Spanish when she showed
up for pre-assignment training in Miami two sum-
mers ago; now she is fluent enough todo her job
and manage most social and professional situa-
tions. "I had no choice but to learn the language,
since English is rarely heard here," she says.
She still practices her Spanish on host-country
friends every chance she has, although some
Hondureños insist on practicing their English on
her. That, she says, can be frustrating. Local
English students have also posed some knotty
linguistic questions that never cropped up back
home. "One young man asked me, 'What is this
word, "gonna?" I hear it all the time, but my teacher
cannot find it in the dictionary.' A pair of her co-
workers, both around 20, have developed a unique
way of fine-tuning their English. "They walk around
with transistor radios tuned constantly to a station
that plays nothing but low-grade American rock
songs-stuff like My Eyes Adore You, I'm Gonna
Make It With You, and Come On Over Tonight. They
both love to sing along, and their pronunciation,
phrasing and inflections are perfect. When I asked
if they understood what they were singing, they
laughed and said, 'Not a word.' The fact, is neither
speaks any English."
Away from her job, Ms. Lucich has found time to
experience aspects of Honduran life that would
normally be inaccessible to tourists or business
travelers. "With my Honduran host families, I have
been to a wedding in a local Baptist church; a large
birthday party with music, dancing, and a piñata
like those in Mexico; a burial service; and a high
school graduation ceremony held in a large soccer
stadium." There was also a memorable visit to
the nearby town of Santa Lucia, marked by "steep
cobblestone streets, tile roofs, a big white church,
and green mountains all around."
But all has not been smooth sailing. So far,
Ms. Lucich has contracted amoebic dysentary and
food poisoning, suffered a nasty fall on a rain-
slick street, and been stung in her sleep by a
scorpion. The low point in her Peace Corps sojourn
came when her host family's dog attacked her,
scratching her face badly and gouging out a suffi-
ciently big chunk of her arm to require plastic
surgery and 22 stitches. "The worst part," she says,
"is that it was my adding machine arm." The
wound has long since healed, although a nasty scar
remains. These days she makes her home in a
boarding house four blocks from the office.
"It's nice having such an easy commute," she
says. Unlikely words from a woman with such a
pronounced passion for long-distance travel.
"RCA is pleased to honor the Peace Corps
and the men and women who make up this distinguished organization.
Volunteers contribute to better American foreign relations
while serving their host nation and gain valuable experience for careers
in private industry, the professions, or government service."
Thornton F. Bradshaw
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
RCA Corporation
RCA