50 Years Later - A Call to Serve

Jess writes:

Aside from the entrance of “Kamikaze October Bugs” for PCVs in South Africa, this October holds some special meaning for Peace Corps worldwide. And before continuing with our typical posts, I would like to take a moment to mention this milestone in Peace Corps’ history…

Last week, hundreds of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, students, professors, and government officials joined at the University of Michigan to honor a call to service that occurred exactly 50 years ago: On the steps of the Michigan Union building, in Ann Arbor’s University of Michigan campus, at 2:00am and in the drizzling rain, then-Senator John F. Kennedy made a speech urging students to serve in developing countries:

“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?... On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer as to whether a free society can compete. I think it can. And I think that Americans are willing to contribute.” (October 14, 1960)

It was dubbed the great “Call to Serve”, and while 2011 will be the momentous “50 Year Anniversary” for Peace Corps (as it was founded in 1961), last week actually started it all.

Aaron Williams, our current director of the Peace Corps, made a statement at the ceremony, commenting on Kennedy’s vision of the Peace Corps, "The movement that began here in Ann Arbor went on to change the way America sees the world…” and, most importantly, he added, “…and the way the world sees this country.”

The ceremony itself drew people from every corner of the country, and gathered together people that have experienced Peace Corps in very different ways. One man, Bob Dascola, has a barbershop just a couple blocks away from the Union building, and was only 14 years old at the time. But he convinced his parents to wait up for Kennedy to arrive, heard his speech, and the next day rode his bicycle alongside Kennedy’s motorcade as it left the campus. Bob was never in the Peace Corps, but he says he remembers that experience like it was yesterday.

Gene Schreiber, age 72, was one of the first volunteers in Tanzania in 1961 and is astonished to see that the Peace Corps has continued for half a century. He says candidly, “It was a pioneer type of spirit then… You go and do something new, you don’t really expect it to last.”

Perhaps my favorite mini-story of the occasion was that of Tom Hayden, age 70, who was editor for the Michigan Daily when JFK made his speech and when the Peace Corps formally began months later in 1961. He told reporters at the ceremony last week, “I wouldn’t have missed this. You simply don’t get many opportunities to relive important moments like this in your own life.”

Over the last 50 years, Peace Corps has had more than 200,000 volunteers respond to Kennedy’s “Call to Serve” in 139 countries around the world. So, to the Peace Corps, from a currently serving Peace Corps Volunteer, I say this: “For all your good and your bad, your tough and your insufferable, your hot and your buggy, your patient progression and small steps forward… for your vision of change, one volunteer at a time… Happy early anniversary.”

(Excerpts of this post taken from Detroit Free Press, Ann Arbor Chronicle, NPR, and Google Images)