Peace Corps: The West at Its Best

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When the U.S. Peace Corps contingent arrived in Tanganyika nine months ago, recalled Corpsman Eugene Schrieber, 23, an engineer from University City, Mo., "a mere sign on a golf course fairway startled us into the realization that at long last we really made it." Planted near the jungle rough, the sign said: BEWARE OF LIONS.

Since then, the 35 corpsmen have become accustomed to lions, rhinos and other wild life while working with native trainees on a threeyear, $67 million road-building program. Geologist Allen Tamura, 23, from Pasadena, Calif., has also become an honorary blood brother in the nomadic Wagogo tribe for saving the life of a pregnant tribeswoman by rushing her in his truck over pitted jungle roads to a doctor 30 miles away. Said Tanganyikan Gabriel Bakari, assistant to a surveying team: "I can mix with the Peace Corpsmen in a way I never could before with white men and Asians. The Americans do not consider themselves superior to the Africans. They are extraordinary people."

This week, as Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver sent a massive report to the President on the first year of field operations, echoes of such praise are heard round the world. Even anti-Western Ghana has asked for more Peace Corpsmen. At home, the Corps has won approval from the initially skeptical U.S. Congress, which has agreed to double the first-year budget of $30 million. More than 1,000 members (one-third of them women) are now at work in 15 countries, and by the end of next month, 3,100 others will be in training for jobs in 22 other nations. Says Historian Arnold Toynbee: "In the Peace Corps volunteer, non-Westerners are getting an example of Western man at his best."

Muddy Shoes. Most countries that invited the Peace Corps asked for schoolteachers and instructors to train their own people in such trades as carpentry, plumbing, home economics, nursing. In the village of Rio Negro in southern Chile, Janet Boegli, 22, from Austin, Texas, shares a small house with two Chilean girls, teaches women how to use a sewing machine, knit, mix powdered milk, clean beer bottles to use for babies' formulas. Chilean volunteers have organized communities of 20-30 houses, called centros. They raise money to buy sewing machines and other needed equipment by organizing fiestas and raffles. "What's important," writes Volunteer Boegli, "is that we have shown that gringos don't mind getting their shoes muddy and their hands dirty."*

In Buenaventura Valley, Colombia, William F. Woudenberg, 32, a draftsman from Paterson, N.J., developed a loom to make forms for concrete out of plentiful bamboo instead of hard-to-find wood or expensive steel. In the East Pakistan village of Comilla, another inventive corpsman Robert Taylor, 24, from Oakdale, Calif., solved the problem of parboiling rice without using scarce wood; he uses rice husks instead, does the job ten times faster. Stephen L. Keller, 24, from Brooklyn, New York, watched a worker in a Punjab bicycle factory count 6,800 ball bearings one by one, built a ball-bearing counter that dispenses ten at a time.