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4,000 Peace Corps Alumni Gather on 25th Anniversary

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From the Washington Post

As a Peace Corps volunteer in the mountains of Brazil in 1962, Yale University graduate John Schley shared a small room with 200 squawking chickens and gagged through most nights after closing the window to keep out the chill.

But Schley was not trying to mimic the quaint housing of the local residents. He let the animals live with him because he wanted to keep his promise to the Brazilians to raise 2,000 chickens, and he had fallen behind in his quota.

“That’s how nutty we in the Peace Corps were at the time,” said Schley, now 49 and a real-estate salesman in New Jersey. “It was the most important, intense period of my life.”

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His sentiments were also expressed by others Saturday as 4,000 former Peace Corps volunteers gathered under a huge tent on the Mall to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the launching of the program by President John F. Kennedy. Its founders looked on it then as an experiment to counteract the image of the “ugly American” overseas, and they had little hope that it would last more than a year or two.

Symbol for Service

But to a generation of Americans, the Peace Corps became a symbol for selfless service, and among its 120,000 alumni are three U.S. senators, five other members of Congress and more than 500 employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Inside the tent, silver balloons marked with the names of countries--Sri Lanka, Tonga, Tunisia--drew the alumni to the right reunion spot. There were shrieks of recognition, hugs and some tears as longtime friends met for the first time in years.

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“These people are in some ways closer to me than my own brothers and sisters,” Henry Mitchell, 41, said of the people who worked with him in the jungles of Borneo in the mid-1960s. Mitchell, from rural Louisiana, left his football scholarship at Grambling State University in his freshman year to teach agriculture to the Iban people, known for their tradition of headhunting.

‘People Come First’

“There is something very useful we learned from rural people all over the world--that people come first,” David Magnani, a Massachusetts state representative who taught economics in Sierra Leone in the 1960s, told the gathering.

Like many volunteers, Magnani said his years overseas represented his political awakening. He learned that U.S. companies were paying Africans 8 cents an hour to mine bauxite, and a little girl died in his arms from a bladder illness. “I lost my emotional and political innocence in Africa,” he said.

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The Peace Corps’ current annual budget is $128 million. Although that is a third of its 1966 budget adjusted for inflation, the agency is thriving under Director Loret Miller Ruppe.

Although some Administration officials have recommended its demise, the Peace Corps has 6,000 volunteers in 62 countries. Their average age is 30, contrasted with 23 in 1961.

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