I am very proud to be here ... for many reasons.
First, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs was the first women’s organization to support the Peace Corps. The voices of the doubting Thomases were loud and cynical this time last year and it took an act of faith on your part to endorse us. The fact that you did demonstrates the vision and conviction of American women today.
Second, Mrs. Ozbirn has been a source of inspiration and encouragement to the Peace Corps ever since we set up shop. She has served faithfully and effectively on the National Advisory Committee. I wanted tonight to pay her a special tribute --- a “Can-Do” American woman who doesn’t believe “impossible” is in the English language.
Third, I wanted to be here tonight because you can help the Peace Corps strike out for even greater goals in the years ahead.
One year ago, in a commencement speech at De Paul University, I challenged American business, education, and labor to heed the call to do more for their country by granting leaves of absence to employees who wanted to serve in the Peace Corps.
Eye-brows were raised on skeptical foreheads. More than one pundit said: “It will never be done. People don’t do that except in war.”
The pundits were wrong.
One year later I am pleased to report that the response to our challenge has been magnificent.
Companies like International Business Machines, American Telephone and Telegraph, and Owens-Illinois… unions like the Building Trades Council, the American Federation of Teachers, the Firemen and Enginemen’s Union in Los Angeles, and the Retail Clerks Union ... and school boards in cities like New York and Philadelphia have united in one of the finest examples of patriotism I have ever seen,
Tonight I want to challenge you --- The women of America,
I want to ask the General Federation of Women’s Clubs to spearhead a campaign --- a national campaign --- to enlist American women in the service of their country through the Peace Corps.
We are at war, a war --- for peace. In this war a woman is every bit as good a soldier as a man.
We are not asking for “selective service”. We are asking for “self selective service.”
We want volunteer women who willingly set aside two years of their private lives to serve their country.
I think De Tocqueville was right when he said: “If I were asked to what the singular prospect or growing strength of the American people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.” So I have come to ask the help of superior citizens --- I have come to ask your help.
In 15 months the Peace Corps has set up training programs at 43 colleges, universities, and private institutions in the United States.
We have trained and sent 1023 Peace Corps Volunteers to 15 countries. Some 1000 potential Volunteers are in training tonight for 30 new projects. Another 2500 Volunteers will be trained in July, August, and September.
A field training center in Puerto Rico is operating on a year round basis to give Volunteers a taste of genuine frontier living,
Of the 1023 Volunteers overseas, 350 are women. Another 341 women are in training. One-third of the Peace Corps Volunteers, therefore, are women --- and most of us men look upon that number as a majority.
By the end of this year, the Peace Corps will have 5000 Volunteers abroad. The story is no longer what we can do, but what we are doing.
We are teaching English, science, math, history, and many other subjects to hundreds of children in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Malaya, the Philippines, Chile, St. Lucia, India, and Pakistan.
We are building roads in Tanganyika and doing community development work in Colombia.
Peace Corps nurses and laboratory technicians are working in Malaya, in Chile, and West Pakistan.
In these and other countries social workers, dental hygienists, community development workers, surveyors, geologists, carpenters, plumbers, librarians and electricians are working side-by -side with native co-workers in an effort to help the southern half of the globe catch up with the twentieth century.
In all of these activities our original policies --- which Mrs. Ozbirn helped us set up last year --- are working.
We have not sent anyone overseas who has not been asked for by the local government.
Volunteers are not “advisers” but “doers.” They are practitioners, not theoreticians.
Volunteers are living at a level comparable to that of their co-workers. Americans are able to get along on $70 a month in the Philippines, and $99 a month in Colombia.
Volunteers are doing without diplomatic privileges and immunities. They are managing without PX or commissary privileges.
Volunteers are learning to speak the language of the host country,
Finally, Volunteers are making friends for America. They are sharing their skills with people on the way up. They are learning from those people. And they are giving those people a fair picture of what America is really like.
What do all these facts and statistics mean to women?
They mean the end to a modern complaint, “It’s a man’s world.” For the role of the woman Peace Corps Volunteer is exactly the same as that of the male Peace Corps Volunteer.
She is putting her particular talents and skills to work to bring peace and understanding to the world.
She is encountering --- and mastering --- the same remoteness, the same rugged living conditions and the same minimum subsistence pay as her male counterpart.
She is sharing the enormous satisfaction of knowing that she is doing a job that badly needs doing.
She is helping where help is needed and requested.
She is sharing an experience that money could not buy --- two years in a foreign country learning to understand its people and its customs, learning something of what is happening in the world today, learning first-hand that the new frontiers of the world are not in Washington but in the villages and clinics, schools and farms where she is working.
The Peace Corps woman is the sum-total of the 305 women Volunteers serving abroad tonight.
She is Charlotte Hough, a teacher in the Philippines --- “We have been welcomed many times -- one group of four ate 10 meals in one day. The children are wonderful. They are eager to learn and to follow us around the village. To establish truly human, sensitive relations with these children is one of our most clearly defined challenges -- and the most fun.”
She is Carol Armstrong, a Peace Corps Volunteer from Pennsylvania who met another Volunteer from Virginia, Roger Hamilton. In Ghana, Roger and Carol were married --- and are working together for the Peace Corps.
She is Mary Cahill, a chemistry teacher in Pakistan who says: “People here are fascinating and they have received us warmly. They are very pleased that we know their language. Nothing must do but at every tea we attend we must sing their national anthem and another song we have learned in Urdu. They are as anxious to learn about us as we are to learn about them.”
To women of all ages the Peace Corps is offering a chance to do a job to match the strength and understanding that is uniquely female against the physical strength and understanding that is uniquely male.
They are helping their country, they are helping those in other countries and they are, therefore, helping themselves and their own world.
These women are also helping the Peace Corps to explode some basic myths about America.
There is the myth that we are too soft for the job. This myth has been exploded by the women Peace Corps Volunteers who have successfully completed our training camp in Puerto Rico. It was best summed up by an older woman -- not the one whose name made the headlines recently -- who entered heartily into our tropical jungle training program. She failed to climb a small cliff but an hour later she did scale down the edge of a huge dam. She climbed over the facing with rappelling ropes, jumped off backwards for a clear drop of about forty feet down the face of the dam. Climbing down with one hand on the rope and bouncing off the wall with her feet, she landed safely and exclaimed, “Climbing takes some strength and brawn and I don’t have that any more. Going over the dam just takes a little self assurance and skill and I believe I have as much as that of these young folks.”
Another myth says that American people -- especially the young – are interested only in the material comforts of life --- good salary, air conditioned cars, retirement benefits and annual leave. Who has exploded this myth? The 26,000 men and women who since March 1, 1961, have volunteered to join the Peace Corps! Applications are still reaching Washington at the rate of almost 3,000 every month --- and these people know that there will be no air conditioned automobiles, no high salaries and no pension benefits when they join the Peace Corps.
Another myth -- Congress is too cynical and to provincial to support a Program like the Peace Corps. This myth has been shattered twice -- last year when the Peace Corps Act was passed in the House by a 3 to 1 vote and in the Senate with only one dissenting vote, and again this year when it passed the House by a 4 to 1 vote and the Senate without a single dissenting vote.
We have destroyed still another myth -- the myth that Americans cannot serve overseas without financial compensation to accommodate the physical inconveniences. In fifteen months, Peace Corps Volunteers have demonstrated that the greatest rewards of service abroad are personal rewards --- not financial rewards. They have demonstrated that right attitudes are more important that convenient accommodations. One Peace Corps Volunteer, for example, had to ride a mule in his work in rural Latin America. His work was threatened when he discovered that he was allergic to mules, and broke out in a rash while riding. He went right on working, however --- with a horse provided by the villagers. Other Volunteers have overcome isolation, homesickness, strangeness of food and new living patterns, and the bugaboo of “culture shock”. They have done so with patience, geed judgment and an indomitable spirit.
We also exploded the myth that it is impossible to train large numbers of Americans to speak new languages in a short period of time. Language abilities of Peace Corps Volunteers have had stimulating results in many countries. Earlier this month the Associated Press reported from Malaya: “A group of American Peace Corps Volunteers astounded Malaya today by speaking Malayan as soon as they arrived for a two-year stint in this multi-racial, Asian country. Some Malayans confessed they couldn’t speak the language as well as the Americans. This government, with an English heritage, has been trying to make Malayan the national tongue.”
We have also exploded the myth that the Communists are tougher and smarter than we are. In Chile, for example, one Peace Corps Volunteer, Tom Scanlon, works in a village 40 miles from an Indian community which prides itself on being communist. The village is up a long, winding road which Tom traveled four times to see the chief.
Each time, the Chief avoided seeing him. On the final try, he relented.
“You’re not going to talk us out of being communists,” the chief said.
“I’m not trying to do that,” Tom said, “only to talk to you about how I can help.”
The Chief looked at him and said: “In a few weeks the snow will come. Then you’ll have to park your jeep 20 miles from here and come through five feet of snow on foot. The communists are willing to do that. We’ll see how sincere you are.”
When Father Hesburgh of Notre Dame visited Tom and asked him what he was going to do, Tom said, “I’m waiting for the snow.”
There is one more myth that we have sent to oblivion --- the myth that it “costs too much money for the government to run a program like the Peace Corps.” The other day, a nationally noted columnist called me and said: “Mr. Shriver, I have been impressed by the Peace Corps until today, but I have just learned that it costs you many times what it costs to send a missionary overseas and I just don’t think we can afford it.” Somewhere he had heard that it costs the Peace Corps $20,000 to send a Volunteer overseas. I told him he was wrong -- it costs $9.000 a year and that includes training, transportation, living allowances, clothing allowances, housing, medical examination and care, proper equipment and materials, termination payments of $75 each month, and all administrative costs.
This, I told him, compared favorably to what the missionaries tell us it costs them to send a person overseas -- a Presbyterian missionary costs $6,000; a Methodist missionary costs $7,500; and a Church of Christ missionary costs $8,000 to $9,000 annually -- but none of these includes administration. Exploding this myth convinced the columnist that the critical column he was about to write was a waste of effort.
There is no such thing as a “box score” of our results so far. Figures can never tell the real story of what the Peace Corps is accomplishing. Building a bridge is no more important than building a friendship in Peace Corps terms.
But I do want you to know something of our work so far.
In Ghana, where our Volunteers in one year came into contact with 43% of the students in Ghana’s secondary schools, Peace Corps teachers have already organized sports programs, are running teacher training programs in the summer or are doing after-hours social welfare work. In their spare time they are assisting in a medical health research program.
In Colombia, 100 Volunteers are helping villagers discover their own abilities. In six months, sixty volunteers worked in 115 villages. They are building twenty aqueducts and have ten more to start. They have built five health centers and are starting ten more. They will start ten recreation fields, seven bridges and sixteen roads. The Volunteers have started five laboratories and are teaching nine courses in agriculture and health. They have helped with three parks, five cooperatives, three villages and three, telephone systems. They have helped to build houses in three areas and begun four literary programs. They also battled a plague of red ants.
In Nigeria, 109 Volunteers are teaching approximately 9, 000 secondary school students and 500 college students. Many of the Volunteers teach night courses in addition to their regular loads. They have helped build a water tower, a dining hall, a school and several latrines.
In India, 26 Volunteers are helping Improve agricultural techniques. Two Volunteers are running a poultry-raising training program for 200 Indians who will to turn teach poultry raising in eight to ten villages each. Two Volunteers are organizing a youth group with 600 boys. Five are showing educational movies after hours for audiences of from 500 to 1,000.
In Malaya, ten Volunteers are teaching more than 1,000 Malayan students in biology and mathematics and general science.
And in Sierra Leone our teachers are teaching in new schools with 80 to 100 students, and older schools with up to 600 students.
These are but a part of the story. I’m not sure the rest of the story can be measured with a yard stick.
How do you measure the impact of one American teacher on the impressionable minds of the young - in Africa, Asia or Latin America?
How do you gauge the impression an articulate, intelligent and deeply committed young American will leave on, not only the mind but also the heart of a villager in Chile, or a surveyor in Tanganyika, or a farmer in India? What would that village be like 50 years from now if no Peace Corps Volunteer had ever served there?
It’s not the mineral resources, or the climate, or even the technical knowledge of America that has made her the greatest democracy in history. Her people --- their spirit, their character, their passion for progress and change -- have made her what she is.
De Tocqueville knew this when he said that the Americans “have all lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene in which nothing is or ought to be permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.”
This is the Spirit of America -- and this is our most important export.
This spirit is what the Peace Corps is all about.
Rarely, if ever, have American women been offered such an opportunity to display their ability, their skill, their courage -- and their charm -- in such good cause.
Some of you may volunteer. Looking around, I don’t see a sing le person in this audience who looks too old for the Peace Corps. A few, like Mrs. Ozbirn, may look too young.
But even if you are unable to go personally, you can help us to recruit and select the kind of people you want to represent you overseas.
Each of the countries where Peace Corps Volunteers are now serving has asked us for more men and women. They want nurses, home economists, secondary and elementary teachers, social workers, youth workers, laboratory technicians, and many other skilled Americans.
We know, from the work of our women Volunteers in the field, that truly “there is nothing like a dame!” We want more of them --- and we want you to help us find them. Send us your daughters and your granddaughters. Send us your sons and grandsons. Send us the men and women who can serve their country well in the pursuit of peace.
