by Aaron Barlow
“My experience as a teacher in New York City and in the Army in Korea both convince me that it is important to reach out to people. We Americans are a privileged people and too many of us go overseas and become ‘Ugly Americans,’ arrogant and insensitive. I would like to teach in another country because I am an experienced teacher and I would like to live in another country so I can learn more about it.”
On June 24th I was accepted to train to become a Peace Corps Volunteer teacher in Ghana.
Robert Klein served in Ghana from 1961-63. He retired in 1994 after careers as a teacher and a supervisor in special education. For the past several years he has been involved in developing the RPCV Archival Project in cooperation with the Kennedy Library. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
There at the Beginning
Tom Katus, George Johnson, Alex Veech, and L. Gilbert Griffis
The first Peace Corps Volunteers were guinea pigs as well as tough young Americans.
Julius Nyerere, Leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and pending first Prime Minister and later President of Tanzania, was the first Head of State to request the Peace Corps in April 1961. Following Neyerere’s request, Sargent Shriver, Franklin Williams, and Ed Bayley, Public Relations Officer, visited eleven countries in twenty-six days beginning April 22nd.
According to the biography Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver, “Shriver...stayed up all night on the flight from New York, playing cards and drinking gin martinis with Thurgood Marshall who happened to be on the same plane.” Their first stop in Ghana resulted in a commitment from President Kwame Nkrumah to be the second Head of State to request the Peace Corps providing, “you get them here by August?”
Williams, a former NAACP lawyer and protégé of Marshall’s, had gone to college with Nkrumah at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Williams was the first African American executive hired by Shriver. He was former California Assistant Attorney General, later to become Ambassador to Ghana and still later, my boss as President of the Phelps Stokes Fund. I was commissioned by Williams to conduct a Self-Study of the Phelps Stokes Fund—so I got to learn much of the behind-the-scenes history.
All three—Marshall, Nkrumah, and Williams—had large and frequently clashing egos. Franklin was upper-class Harlem, and Kwame was a poor African student who worked in the Lincoln University cafeteria. Kwame resented Franklin’s airs and initially refused him when President Johnson nominated Williams as Ambassador to Ghana. Nkrumah told Johnson, as the first African Head of State, he deserved the best top-flight ambassador. However, Nkrumah relented when Johnson told him that Williams, the first African American ambassador to be assigned to an African nation, had to be better qualified than the “white boys.” (Ralph Bunche was already a U.S. ambassador assigned to the U.N.)
Williams was ambassador when Nkrumah was deposed by the CIA. As a consequence many Ghanaians and other African heads of state turned on Williams. A close friend of Williams and a fellow ambassador later confided in me that CIA had set up Williams and he was unaware of the coup until after it had occurred.
—Tom Katus
As I remember it, Tanganyika went into training at Texas Western on a Saturday, Ghana went into training on a Sunday, and Colombia went into training on a Monday. So, really, there were three groups that can claim to be first. Our group got the first Peace Corps Volunteer Numbers. Jake Feldman from our group, now a professor of civil engineering at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, is Peace Corps #001. I’m #014.
Ghana didn’t have to do the Puerto Rican training program (lucky them), so they got to Ghana first. Every once in a while, I see a picture of their group getting off the plane in Accra, captioned as the “nation’s first Peace Corps group.” More power to them, although I will continue to tell my relatives that I was in the first Peace Corps group.
—George Johnson
Despite Nyerere being the first head of state to request Peace Corps, Tanganyika would not achieve independence until December 9, 1961. It would have been embarrassing to have Peace Corps serving under Colonial rule. Thus, we were placed in a holding pattern. After seven or eight weeks of training at Texas Western College and the Rose Garden meeting, we were sent for four weeks to Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to open Peace Corps’ Outward Bound Training Camp. The camp was run by Bill Coffin, civil rights activist with Martin Luther King and former OSS (CIA predecessor) officer, and ably assisted by Freddie Fuller, former head of commando training for the Brits during World War II.
—Tom Katus
Tom says that our training director in Puerto Rico was Bill Coffin, “ably assisted” by Freddie Fuller. Rather than “able,” I would describe the direction given the group by the Coffin-Fuller duo as a combination of prep school rah-rah, sophomoric anti-Communism (a reaction to a novel called The Ugly American, very current at that time, which held that the Communists were winning the battle for hearts and minds in the Third World because they spoke the local languages flawlessly, ate the local foods, and never got malaria or dysentery), and something which Jerry Green (the NBC producer of our one-hour Peace Corps special) once described as “muscular Christianity.”
The muscular Christianity was Bill Coffin’s special addition to the program. He used to call the group together for three-minute oral prayers, which included references to Christ our Lord and Master, despite the fact that there were several Jews and at least one atheist in our group. (Guess who the atheist was.)
The Arecibo program was equal parts both silly and objectionable. Nobody could argue that it wasn’t a complete waste of time. It was certainly the low point of my Peace Corps experience, and my vocal objections to it nearly got me fired from the Peace Corps before I started.
Coffin recommended to headquarters that I be fired at the end of the Arecibo training program because I was the kind of guy who, if ordered to hold a machine gun position to the death in order to save the others in my platoon, would eventually break and run. He was probably right, but other higher-ups who knew me at the El Paso training saved my neck. Maybe they appreciated my “intangibles,” as Eddie Stanky would have said.
I have since struck up a better relationship with Bill Coffin and continue to admire him a lot. Maybe we’ve both grown older, and maybe I at least have gotten a little bit wiser and more tolerant (not less atheistic, however). Thank goodness I never got the chance to test my machine gun resolve. All I was ever called upon to do was quietly build a road in far southern Tanganyika.
All that having been said, I did want the record to reflect this dissent to Tom’s opinion about the Arecibo training. No one should hark back to it as something to be remembered fondly or repeated. It’s best chalked up as one of the Peace Corps’ many youthful errors, one which it has hopefully grown out of.
—George Johnson
It is good that George has finally explained for me his animus toward the Arecibo experience. This was all lost on naive old me. I thought the training in Puerto Rico was very easy, mostly boring, just part of the adventure I’d opened myself to, and all in all rather silly. My main recollections of training there were playing volleyball, drinking raw sugar cane rum with McPhee in a field on our overnight test, seeing the most magnificent sunset I’d ever seen, and learning that the rifles issued to the geologists for fighting off lions had been confiscated because the State Department was afraid we’d appear to Cuba as an armed group just off their shore at the very time our relations with Cuba were on the run up to the Bay of Pigs. The objections to Coffin weren’t even on my radar, and I have only the vaguest impression of the man. Actually I have no impression, on second thought, he’s just a name I recognize. Looking back, the time we spent in Arecibo was sufficiently forgettable that it is essentially gone from memory. I recall training at Texas Western and Tengeru much more vividly.
—Alex Veech
Bingo!!
I thought my reference to Freddie Fuller’s “ab
le assisting” might generate some fire. George “ably” demonstrates why he remains our chief iconoclast.
I believe the vast majority of us would agree with George’s view—though some of us ex-military and young jocks for a while got off on the camp’s challenge to our masochism. I remember Jerry Parson (JP), ex-paratrooper that he was, jumping onto the Tarzan rope, grasping it firmly, graciously gliding high above the ground, sailing into the cargo net and scrambling over the top. PC always encouraged the press to be present to boost the PC image. Little did they know that one of the Puerto Rican news photographers was stringing for Cuba. The next day, in the Cuban press appears my future sidekick swinging into the net, with the caption: “Peace Corps Prepares for Next Invasion of Cuba.”
The cocky green kid from the Dakotas followed JP, grabbed the Tarzan rope and started to swing toward the net. My grip slipped and my matako scraped along the entire ground, leaving me ingloriously at the base of the net with considerable road rash, and I still had to scramble to the top. If the Cuban photographer had colored film, he would have found my face as red as my ass.
As you may recall, the “Able Fuller” had one set of clothes, a net shirt and shorts he washed every night and jumped back into at 5 a.m., complete with drill sergeant whistle to jolt us out of our soggy sleep—it rained continuously in the Arecibo forest. We groggily ran down wet rocky paths in the dark. This nonsense continued until ex-paratrooper Jerry severely sprained his ankle—or was it a hairline fracture?
While I couldn’t give a damn one way or the other about the prayers—I thought they were silent—but maybe that was after George’s initial protest. I do know Coffin threatened to remove George. My recall was that many of us admired our self-appointed leader and threatened to go down with him.
George’s moment of silence or prayer protest, together with the engineers’ Bridge on the River Kwai were symbolic of the group’s tweaking PC’s nose. I recall that Shriver visited us late in training to reassure us that our beloved George would indeed remain in the Corps and admired the engineer’s bridge.
Despite the Mickey Mouse nature of the training, like the Combat Engineering training I had taken straight out of high school, I did enjoy the rappelling from cliffs and dams. One day, I was anchoring Bob Milhous at the top of a cliff as he was rappelling below. He lost his footing and was spinning in the air. The rope temporarily burned around my back and Bob’s dead weight nearly pulled this 155-pound kid off the cliff. Fortunately for both Bob and yours truly, the anchoring technique worked.
In spite of personally enjoying some aspects of Arecibo’s physical fitness routine and the four-day “live-in” with community families, I agree with George that it was totally irrelevant to our service in Tanganyika. I think PC just needed something to delay our entrance into Colonial Tanganyika and we were the guinea pigs.
Arecibo continued as an aspect of Peace Corps Latin American training for a number of years. Jerry Parson, Rodgers Stewart, Gil Griffis and I later used the community “live-ins” as an aspect of our Volunteer Training Specialists Inc. (VTSI) training of other PCVs for Kenya, Ghana, Malawi, and Swaziland. We even trained “Talking Head Chris Matthews” for the first Swaziland project in Louisiana—including a two-week live-in with small-scale Black American farmers. Rednecks harassed our farmer partners and trainees by cutting pickup cookies on their homesteads and firing shotguns to scare us all.
—Tom Katus
Tom and George certainly have better memories than do I re: the names of some of the characters who managed our fate in Arecibo. My memories of the training in Arecibo and examples of what they included are:
Terrifying: The event planned for the next day when I was to be tossed into the swimming pool with hands and feet tied behind my back, with the objective of learning how to overcome fear and adversity. And not drown.
Really Annoying: When the event was called off due to rain, and after I had spent the entire previous night mentally preparing myself for the challenge.
Pointless: Shaving with cold water.
Of Dubious Value: The early morning runs in the woods. The afternoon hike on a trail along which we were individually dropped off to spend the night by ourselves. I remember it being very dark and rather boring, especially after my jungle hammock fell and I had to sleep on the ground. I remember being surprised that some of the guys found the experience to be very frightening.
Of Some Value But a Lot of Fun: Learning to rappel.
Really Neat: The three-day, two-night hike through the Puerto Rican countryside. Taking the old USAF truck with the leaky muffler (The Rolling Gas Chamber) down to a local beach to swim and canoe. Visiting the dam below our campsite, especially now that it is the site of the SETI project. The great meals. The library. The group discussions
Something to Pass the Time: Bill Coffin’s daily homilies were of little bother in that I was at that time a born-again Southern Baptist and was used to sermons.
Overall, I remember wondering what was the point of the entire program, but having had a good time participating in it.
—L. Gilbert Griffis
Tom Katus was South Dakota’s first Peace Corps Volunteer, serving in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) from 1961-63. After graduating from the Colorado School of Mines and serving in the National Guard, he volunteered as a surveyor, building roads in what was that country’s first year of independence. He went on to found Volunteer Training Specialists, Inc. (VTSI), a private company that trained over 2,000 PCVs. He has served as a South Dakota Legislator and is now that state’s Treasurer.
George Johnson, PCV #14, served in the first group in Tanganyika.
Alex Veech, who served in Mtwarra, Tanzania from 1961-63, was able to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro during his time abroad.
L. Gilbert Griffis also served in Tanzania from 1961-63.
Editor’s note: RPCVs of good will often disagree on who the “first” Volunteers were. We take no side in this debate, leaving those who served in Colombia, Ghana, and Tanganyika (Tanzania) to their own interpretations of history.
Learning to Speak
Tom Weller
Sometimes triage on the subject tongue is the only way to learn a language.
During the first days of in-country training, the new Volunteers took oral French exams. One by one we sat under a baobab tree with the head language trainers, all of whom were Chadian, and did our best to carry on conversations in French. I spent most of my conversation trying to explain, using hand gestures and three-word sentences, why I liked using the drive-through at fast food restaurants. How I got on this topic I don’t remember. Perhaps I was asked what I liked to do on the weekends. Or perhaps I had been asked what I liked to eat, and when I groped for food words all I managed to conjure up was the image of Madame Doering, my tenth grade French teacher. Perhaps I saw her horned-rimmed glasses hanging from the chain around her neck, swaying and bumping against her chest as she floated around the room, pointing at objects, rattling through a series of nouns: “Le bureau, the desk, le bureau. La fenêtre, the window, la fenêtre.” Yes, good, the window, go with that, I might have thought.
After all of the new Volunteers had been interviewed and scored, the trainers divided us into small groups, five or six people, to begin our language classes. Some of my compatriots arrived in Chad already conjugating French verbs, mentally sifting through lists of French adjectives in a flash, understanding when to use the subjunctive as instinctually as understanding when to exhale. These people took classes together.
I sat in a class with four virtual mutes. We would arrange our chairs in a half circle around a blackboard resting on an easel in the center of a boukarou, a type of round hut that dotted the training center’s grounds like giant mushrooms. Our French teacher, a woman named Nemerci, would always jounce into class bedecked in one of her traditional Chadian dresses: several layers of vibrant wrap-around skirts circl
ing her legs, intricate gold embroidery surrounding her plunging neckline, short sleeves that poofed up like pastries rising off her shoulders. She would stop next to the chalkboard, her wide hips shimmying slightly as if some faint music tempted her to dance. Then she would chime, “Bonjour.”
We mutes all liked bonjour; bonjour made sense. We’d almost shout over one another demonstrating our comprehension. “Bonjour, bonjour,” we’d all squawk back like a nest of baby birds exercising their chirps.
But class would get difficult. Nemerci would lean in toward us, her head pivoting slowly so she could look each one of us in the eye. I’d watch her dark lips undulate, narrow and thicken as her tongue pushed syllables out of her mouth, linking one sound to the next to the next until she had constructed a complete French sentence. Often, Nemerci would pause, straighten her back, raise one finger in the air and instruct us to “Écoutez.” I quickly recognized that écoutez was a command to listen closely, a prompt I didn’t need. Nemerci couldn’t have stopped me from listening closely. I craved the ability to understand and control the French language. Unlike much of my formal education, the benefits of my Peace Corps French classes were obvious and immediate. Any word or phrase learned might illuminate some tiny corner of my new life and allow my own voice to develop.
After écoutez, Nemerci would lean toward the class again and repeat the exact same syllables, building the same sentence in the same measured, careful way. All of us mutes would nod to the rhythm of the growing chain of syllables. I’d rub my chin with my thumb and forefinger, stroking the beard I’d started to grow, a gesture meant to look thoughtful. “Yes, so there it is, indeed. A sentence. How interesting.” But the slight shuffle of our feet in the sand under our ladder-back chairs betrayed growing tension, for we all knew that, after Nemerci had laid the sentence in our laps twice, it would be our turn. We would be expected to do something with it.