En dan komt het moment dat je begint met die delen van het interview die destijds op de laatste van de vier beschikbare CD’s zijn gezet. In dit deel van het interview met Bill Clifton spreekt hij vrijwel uitsluitend over de paar jaar dat hij deel uit heeft gemaakt van het Amerikaanse Peace Corps. Hij was destijds naar Mindanao gestuurd, een van de meest zuidelijke eilanden van de Filipijnen. We kunnen lezen dat Bill zich een beetje af begint te vragen of het wel zo’n goed idee was om deel van het Peace Corps uit te gaan maken. Een en ander bleek toch iets minder idealistisch te zijn dan hij in eerste instantie aan had genomen…

The Peace Corps years

Transciptie:

And I was supposed to only have one third of that, which was a huge island, and you can’t even find one third in a period of a year, because they’re on little islands out in the Sulu Sea somewhere or the China Sea. You can’t get to them and you can’t see them. And once you get them on-site, that’s it. Two years later you see them back again, you know and maybe you’ve talked to them once or twice since then. But that was really rare. Basically what happened was that the other people who were supposed to be running the  other thirds left and I was stuck with… The whole area. Well, I didn’t have the whole island; I had two thirds of it at one point. But that’s like two hundred volunteers. Well you can’t see two hundred volunteers in two years, much less in one year, you know. So I didn’t know what was going on most of the time and I knew what people wanted in the Philippines was help with their agricultural production. And all we were sending them were teachers. We were sending them white-collar workers; we were sending them teachers at elementary school level and at the high school level. And in some cases I would get a telegram, we didn’t have any phone service, but I would get a telegram from Manilla, from the director; who was this foreignservice man of 20 years’ experience, saying: ‘Washington has two volunteers that were supposed to, let’s say. Sierra Leone. I don’t know what the country was, some African country. And now they have dis-invited the Peace Corps and they need to go somewhere else. So find the place to put these two people. One of them teaches high school math, the other teaches high school Science.’ And I would have to go out and talk to somebody in the school district and say: ‘how would you like to have a high school teacher that teaches math and how would you like to have one that teaches Science?’ ‘Oh, let’s see. The Peace Corps pays for everything?’ Yeah. ‘I mean, you pay their salary?’ Yeah. ‘Well, then we could let Miss Reyes go, we wouldn’t have to pay her.’

We hebben destijds geen foto’s gemaakt bij het interview met Bill Clifton. Dat betekent dat het bij elk deel op Birdeyes een (leuke) puzzel is om passende afbeeldingen te vinden. In dit geval ben ik behoorlijk blij dat ik een site vond met (beeld)materiaal van het Peace Corps in de zestiger jaren van de vorige eeuw.

Yeah, that helps! Oh, great! Then six months later you would have this volunteer sitting at your desk saying: ‘What did these people ask for?’ ‘I’m sorry. They didn’t ask for anything. I asked them would they please take you because Washington needs to put you someplace.’ ‘I gave up two years of my life, for this?’ It was really discouraging. I tried to leave after two years. And I talked to the head of the program in Manilla. He said: ‘Well, if you want to you can leave but then you have to pay for your whole family and all your belongings to be shipped. If you stay one more year we pay for everything.’ I couldn’t afford to do that. I stayed on and I told him at the time. I said: ‘I would think you’d want somebody who’s really enthusiastic about the program. I’m not! I don’t feel that the Peace Corps is doing justice by the Filipino people and I don’t want to be here at this point. Because I don’t think that I can do anything for these people. I’ve asked for agricultural volunteers’, I said, ‘I finally got one!’ And I said: ‘I’ve asked for I don’t know how many over the years, the last two years, but I finally got one!’ And I said, ‘He’s working with one farmer. And I’m not saying that the neighbor’s farms aren’t watching this farmer, they are. And he is gonna make a difference, but one, for this whole island of Mindanao? Come on, we could do better than that.’

Iets meer informatie over het Peace Corps...
On October 14, 1960, at 2 a.m., Senator John F. Kennedy spoke to a crowd of 10,000 cheering students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor during a presidential campaign speech. In his improvised speech, Kennedy asked, ‘How many of you, who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world?’ His young audience responded to this speech with a petition signed by 1,000 students willing to serve abroad. Senator Kennedy’s challenge to these students—to live and work in developing countries around the world; to dedicate themselves to the cause of peace and development—inspired the beginning of the Peace Corps. Just two weeks later, in his November 2, 1960, speech at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, Kennedy proposed ‘a peace corps of talented men and women’ who would dedicate themselves to the progress and peace of developing countries. Encouraged by more than 25,000 letters responding to his call, Kennedy took immediate action as president to make the campaign promise a reality. The Peace Corps program was an outgrowth of the Cold War. President Kennedy pointed out that the Soviet Union ‘had hundreds of men and women, scientists, physicists, teachers, engineers, doctors, and nurses . . . prepared to spend their lives abroad in the service of world communism’. The United States had no such program, and Kennedy wanted to involve Americans more actively in the cause of global democracy, peace, development, and freedom. A few days after he took office, Kennedy asked his brother-in-law, R. Sargent Shriver, to direct a Peace Corps Task Force. Shriver was known for his ability to identify and motivate creative, visionary leaders, and he led the group to quickly shape the organization. After a month of intense dialogue and debate among task force members, Shriver outlined seven steps to forming the Peace Corps in a memorandum to Kennedy in February 1961. The Peace Corps was established by executive order on March 1, 1961, and a reluctant Shriver accepted the president’s request to officially lead the organization. Shriver recruited and energized a talented staff to implement the task force’s recommendations. On his first trip abroad as director, he received invitations from leaders in India, Ghana, and Burma to place Peace Corps volunteers in their countries. Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania) and Ghana were the first countries to participate in the program. President Kennedy welcomed the inaugural group of volunteers at the White House on August 28, 1961, to give them a personal farewell before their departure to Africa. Congress approved the Peace Corps as a permanent federal agency within the State Department, and Kennedy signed the legislation on September 22, 1961. In 1981, the Peace Corps was made an independent agency. In the 1960s, the Peace Corps was very popular with recent college graduates. But in the 1970s, the Vietnam War and Watergate eroded many Americans’ faith in their government. Interest in the Peace Corps began to decline and government funding was cut. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan tried to broaden the Peace Corps’ traditional concern with education and agriculture to include more current fields such as computer literacy and business-related education. For the first time, a rising number of conservative and Republican volunteers joined the largely progressive Peace Corps contingent overseas. Peace Corps membership and funding increased after the opening of Eastern Europe in 1990.

Yeah, but if you don’t have any volunteers… Well, that’s right. That’s a big problem, of course. Well, it wasn’t just that. Now they and I’m saying this, because I think that was happened was that Kennedy was faced with, as president, he was with a lot of people graduating from universities, for whom there was no job. So here’s his brother in law. Sargant Shriver, with his Peace Corps. You know, do something for society, DO something! GIVE! And these people, fresh out of universities were saying: ‘yes, I would like to give something back, you know, to somebody. I will do that for two years and you will…’ What the Peace Corps did was they gave them the same salaries as the local teachers made. So and they were able to provide accommodations for the family and so they paid what school teachers there were paid. And they got the same sort of benefits as those schoolteachers got. This was nothing, basically. But at the same time they were given two weeks a year to go on holiday, fully paid, from their site, wherever they were. And they could do anything they wanted to do and they had money to do anything that they wanted to do. And at the same time, each month, in America they had an amount of money put in there. Like, I don’t remember the total amount, but at the end of the service they had like three thousand dollars, or three thousand six hundred dollars maybe it was at the end of their service. In the bank, at home. So, you know, it wasn’t such a bad deal at all, financially, either. Meanwhile they got a wonderful experience, living in a different culture. Some of them. Some of them had a terrible experience; you’d have to send them home. I had one girl who became catatonic. If she raised her arm, the only way it could be put down was if you put it down yourself, you know. And I had to send a doctor with her from where she was. I had to go over to the place where she was living and get a doctor to come down from Manilla, American doctor. Who would fly back with her to the States? She was blonde, blue eyed, attractive, young girl. All Filipino’s loved white-skinned girls but particularly this one. This blonde, blue-eyed girl, you know.

She was having a real hard time? Oh, she was having a horrible time. And this was something I had to get her out right away, you know. So I had things like that happening also but overall I felt that the United States was doing the United States a favor. We were supplying recent graduates from the universities, who couldn’t get jobs. And therefore we were giving them something to do. At the same time the Philippines…

And giving them experience. Yeah, and giving them experience. At the same time the Philippines had the largest program in the world. Well, they were a country of 33 million and we had up to nine hundred volunteers there at one time. India never had more than six hundred. Look at the population of India. So I mean: ‘Why?’

The Philippines is closer to home. Well, we wanted a democratic outpost. We didn’t want a chance, you know, that it would turn into anything else. The Peace Corps was not supposed to be political. But it was being used for political purposes.

Vorige post Volgende post

Onderaan de post is een blokje waar u een reactie achter kunt laten. Ik stel dat zeer op prijs! U wordt gevraagd om een mailadres. Dit mailadres wordt niet gepubliceerd, maar stelt mij – als beheerder van deze site – in staat om te reageren op uw reactie.