And now for something completely different

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NOTE FROM RICH: "Hi everyone! This blog entry comes from an RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) who was one of the earliest to sign up, way back when the Peace Corps was only a few years old. I've been writing too much lately so I'll just be quiet after asking you to please welcome my dad, Richard F. Landrigan (Chile '66-'68)."

Richard invited me to submit a piece to add to his blog perhaps because he wanted to see a returned Volunteer’s impressions of the current generation of serving Peace Corps Volunteers. A couple of weeks after we returned from visiting Richard last August my own Peace Corps group from 40 years ago suddenly decided to have a first ever reunion. So next May nearly all 20 of us in the group are planning to return to the University of New Mexico where we trained in the summer of 1966 to go to Chile. Peace Corps friendships are truly unique. Richard’s Peace Corps is a lot like his father’s Peace Corps but different. Richard trained in the beautiful and fascinating city of Fes while living nearby with a Moroccan family, far removed from an American college campus. Richard has to use Arabic and some Berber and French on a daily basis and is surprisingly fluent in Arabic. We had it comparatively easy with just one language, Spanish. Morocco incorporates several very distinct cultures as does Chile and I found some of the insights of Richard’s Berber friends regarding the dominant culture to be evocative of fiercely held traditions of my indigenous Mapuche neighbors. Chile’s conservative Catholic culture of the 1960’s was easier to identify with but in many ways was surprisingly akin to the Muslim religiosity of Morocco. Both cultures were and are very different from American culture in significantly refreshing ways but both are constantly looking at us to see what’s happening next. The fact of ongoing US involvement in military action has served as a counterpoint to both of our experiences making it necessary to emphasize the apolitical goals of the Peace Corps. Yerba mate and Moroccan sweet green tea could well come from the same pot.

When you can call home anytime on your Peace Corps provided cell phone and when the country director can call you during lunch as happened while we were there, the sense of distance and isolation I felt in Chile is simply lost. Where I lived in Quilacahuín in the coastal mountains west of Osorno we did not have television, only one phone, and no email. Whatever showed up in the post office was our lifeline to the outside world except for an occasional ham radio call home. When we came back from Morocco I was able to email Richard some material that his town’s development committee could use in their environmental cleanup campaign and I was able to pass on micro-credit information that Richard’s friends could maybe use to overcome their sense of powerlessness to get business startup money. The ability to communicate so much more easily than in the 1960’s makes the current Peace Corps interactively accessible to the bigger world. But while I was sitting in the coffee shops of Ouaouizerth on several hot August afternoons with Richard, Brahim, Hisham and all the other friends the other forms of communication didn’t really matter. The Peace Corps experience still remains essentially one-on-one person-to-person.

Since the beginning the true test of the Peace Corps is bringing it back home. It has never been easy to communicate, explain, teach about what happens in those two years in a far off place that becomes in every respect another “home”. You have become the very people you live with in such an intense experience and the best part is it never ends.


Come to me and tell me you want to help me and you might as well not come at all,
but come to me and say that you want to be with me
because your liberation is tied up with mine, and we can walk together.
- Australian Aboriginal Woman

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