Peace Corps

The Bush administration is considering a mass evacuation of Peace Corps volunteers from the Philippines because of threats to their safety from communist guerrillas, administration officials said last night. The State Department directed all 261 volunteers in the country to proceed to Manila, the capital, while the administration pondered whether to bring them back to the United States. The decision could be made as early as today, according to one administration official. "This is a decision the U.S. ambassador (Nicholas Platt)

WASHINGTON - After Karestan Koenen was raped by a local man soon after she arrived in Niger as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1991, she says she got no support from local Peace Corps officials and a chilling reception when she was sent back to Washington. "I was sent to speak with a Peace Corps staff investigator, who said, 'I am so sick of you girls going over there, drinking, dancing, and partying, and then if a guy comes on to you, you say you were raped,' " Koenen told a congressional committee Wednesday.

In an age of five-digit college tuition, who can afford to join the Peace Corps? The question has occurred to Greg Jackson, a recent graduate of Lafayette College who faces years of debt for his schooling. The idea of full-time volunteer work after graduation seems ludicrous, he said. "Who in their right mind would want to invest two or three years without seeing some dollar signs on the horizon?" he wondered. Yet Jackson has been persuaded to join. To put it bluntly, it will help his career.

The requests come in from Central America, West Africa, Eastern Europe and the newly formed states of the former Soviet Union. Nonprofit groups in poor countries are asking the Peace Corps for volunteers to help them organize, grow and perform the work that their governments are unable to do. They want to protect their environment, increase economic opportunities and improve health care and education. And part of the answer lies here, in one of the poorest cities in the United States - where the Peace Corps today is scheduled to join Rutgers University in announcing a unique master's degree program to prepare volunteers for the management of nonprofit organizations overseas.

While many government agencies are being squeezed, business is booming at the Peace Corps, which is implementing big program expansions after receiving a $21 million budget increase, its largest in 20 years. The extra money is being spent, in part, to respond to requests for volunteers in Central and Eastern Europe for the first time in the agency's 30-year history. The corps will also set up new programs in Africa and Asia. "This is a worldwide effort, not an isolated expansion," corps director Paul D. Coverdell said.

Fearing terrorist attacks inspired by Persian Gulf hostilities, the Peace Corps has abruptly evacuated 285 volunteers assigned to the predominantly Muslim nations of Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritania and Pakistan. "They were withdrawn because of a decision made by the State Department that their lives were at risk from terrorists, not from the government or the people they work with," said Peace Corps director Paul Coverdell. "The risk had just gotten too high in that region of the world.

An assault aimed at establishing an English-language beachhead in Poland has been launched by the Peace Corps, with a big assist from Philadelphia-area people. Of the 229 Peace Corps volunteers now in Poland, 165 are teaching teachers to teach English. The corps began gearing up in the spring of 1990 to send volunteers, and the first contingent arrived there the following summer. It was bolstered, as future contingents will be, by support from the Liberty Bell Foundation here.

New York management consultant Christine Donolo, 42, has it all. A supportive family, a nice Manhattan apartment, a thriving business. But upon arriving at Philadelphia's Barclay Hotel last Wednesday, she tossed it all aside. All for a two-year stint with the Peace Corps in Bulgaria, where she'll get paid about $150 a month. "I wanted the challenge and the excitement," said Donolo, owner of a 10- year-old management-consulting firm. There are lots of Christine Donolos.

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - The U.S. government's decision to pull out all its Peace Corps volunteers from Honduras for safety reasons is yet another blow to a nation still battered by a coup and recently labeled the world's deadliest country. Neither U.S. nor Honduran officials have said what specifically prompted them to withdraw the 158 Peace Corps volunteers, which the State Department said was one of the largest missions in the world last year. A U.N. report, released in October, said Honduras had the highest homicide rate in the world with 6,200 killings, or 82.1 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010.

Haverford College president Tom G. Kessinger has been appointed by President Bush to serve as a member of the Peace Corps National Advisory Council. The U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed his appointment this summer. He will begin serving on the 15-member council next month. In 1961, Kessinger joined the first group of Peace Corps volunteers in India while he was an undergraduate at Haverford College. He said he was looking forward to playing a role in the Peace Corps' expansion into Eastern Europe beginning with programs in Romania and Bulgaria.

My husband was in the Peace Corps in India 45 years ago, but we were surprised when our second son announced he was applying. Spinal meningitis at 17 months had left our son severely hearing impaired. Despite his normal speech and college graduation, we privately wondered if he would be accepted and could successfully learn another language, as well as adapt to another culture. During our trip to visit Justin at his Peace Corps site in the Dominican Republic at Christmas 2011, we learned how wrong we were and gained a new appreciation of today's Peace Corps.

When the Allies hit the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, Michele Anguenot scoffed at the rumors she heard at her school in eastern France. That day happened to be her 16th birthday and, she told her family, she thought the invasion reports were a birthday hoax dreamed up by her school friends. "It took her until that night," her son, Christian, said in a phone interview, that her family "convinced her that it was real. " It was not her only memorable birthday. When she turned 70, she was a Peace Corps worker in a West African village.

CHINESE FOOD FOR THOUGHT In 2005, the Peace Corps sent Philadelphian Michael Levy to China to teach English. Levy shared so much more with new neighbors, becoming the resident expert on Judaism. Levy will talk about his experiences and his book, Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching and Eating with China's Other Billion, at the Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St., 7 p.m. tomorrow, $18-$38, 215-545-4400, gershmany.org. ALL BRUCED UP "The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town," the 2010 documentary about the creation of Bruce Springsteen's 1978 album, screens at 5 p.m. Wednesday at the National Constitution Center.

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - The U.S. government's decision to pull out all its Peace Corps volunteers from Honduras for safety reasons is yet another blow to a nation still battered by a coup and recently labeled the world's deadliest country. Neither U.S. nor Honduran officials have said what specifically prompted them to withdraw the 158 Peace Corps volunteers, which the State Department said was one of the largest missions in the world last year. A U.N. report, released in October, said Honduras had the highest homicide rate in the world with 6,200 killings, or 82.1 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010.

WASHINGTON - Artists from remote sections of Colombia, Peace Corps volunteers, and musicians sharing the history of rhythm and blues are gathered on the National Mall this weekend and in the coming week for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The three-part free festival, which some years draws more than a million visitors, continues through July 11, except for Tuesday. Each day includes performances and demonstrations on the mall, and evening concerts. More than 100 Colombian artists and performers traveled to Washington.

Established by President John F. Kennedy on March 1, 1961, barely a month after he took office, the Peace Corps has always seemed such a quintessentially '60s initiative. The volunteer program, which has sent more than 200,000 American volunteers to 139 countries over the last half-century, is as robust as ever, said organizers of Sunday's Peace Corps Around the World Expo at the National Constitution Center. "Actually, the number of volunteer applications has been going up," said Anne Baker, vice president of the National Peace Corps Association, which cosponsored the event.

WASHINGTON - After Karestan Koenen was raped by a local man soon after she arrived in Niger as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1991, she says she got no support from local Peace Corps officials and a chilling reception when she was sent back to Washington. "I was sent to speak with a Peace Corps staff investigator, who said, 'I am so sick of you girls going over there, drinking, dancing, and partying, and then if a guy comes on to you, you say you were raped,' " Koenen told a congressional committee Wednesday.

WASHINGTON - It was a dramatic scene, even for Congress: Three Peace Corps volunteers raped while serving overseas, plus the mother of a fourth who was murdered in Benin, complaining to lawmakers about one of the government's most revered agencies. Their theme was similar: The Peace Corps, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, did little to train its workers about how to avoid or deal with violent attacks. And it reacted insensitively and unhelpfully in the aftermath of the crimes, they said.

There are many iconic figures associated with the 1960s. But perhaps no one played as understated yet lasting role in the idealistic times of that turbulent decade than R. Sargent Shriver. Shriver was the founding director of the Peace Corps, which was the brainchild of his brother-in-law, President John F. Kennedy. Later, Shriver became the architect of President Lyndon B. Johnson's "war on poverty. " Out of that effort came effective antipoverty programs that are still around today, including Head Start, Job Corps, Volunteers in Service to America, the Community Action Program, and the Legal Services Corp.

Kathryn Cunningham Hall had a comfortable upbringing in Chadds Ford, raised in the privilege of not having to sweat such small stuff as whether the lights would come on. So the horror was especially profound when, as a summer volunteer at a hospital in West Africa four years ago, Cunningham Hall witnessed a frantic - and ultimately futile - scramble of doctors and nurses trying to save the life of a newborn. The 3-day-old girl would die because Sulayman Jungkung General Hospital had run out of fuel for a generator needed to power a breathing machine.