The Peace Corps turns 60

Feb. 27—Monday marks the 60th anniversary of the Peace Corps, an international volunteer organization established by President John F. Kennedy that has seen many volunteers from Terre Haute.

This year also marks a restart of sorts for the U.S. government run social and economic development assistant program that has included more than 240,000 American volunteers over the past six decades.

That restart comes on the heels of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The Peace Corp for the first time in its history enacted a global evacuation in mid- March 2020 of all of its volunteers, affecting about 7,300 American volunteers and trainees, pulling them out of 61 countries.

Montgomeree Porter, a 2016 graduate of Terre Haute North Vigo High School and a 2020 graduate of St. Mary-of-the-Woods College in elementary education, was among those expecting to serve in the Peace Corps last year.

"I had been accepted to go to Indonesia. I had decided at the end of January (2020) that I wanted to join the Peace Corps and everything was ramping up, then all of a sudden it came to a halt," she said.

"I was so disappointed. As you can imagine, COVID-19 (in 2020) had already cut off the end of our school year and we did not have graduation as we had planned," Porter said. "I felt like my life was crumbling. In retrospect it wasn't, but in that moment I was like, 'this is my whole next two years of my life that I had felt that I had put together.'"

Porter, who currently is working as a teacher at DeVaney Elementary School, has since been reassigned to start in the Peace Corps this year, again starting in September.

"Knowing that I will still eventually get to go has made a big difference," she said.

The Tribune-Star also spoke to several local people who have served in the Peace Corps about their experiences in the Peace Corps and how they felt those experiences affected them and the people with whom they worked, as well as the relationships between countries.

Joe Seidenberg

Joe Seidenberg, who at the age of 24, began his work in the Peace Corps, servedn Ghana, West Africa. He was 26 when he left the Peace Corps, serving from October 2001 to November 2003.

Now 44, Seidenberg is the executive director of the nonprofit Red Feather Development Group in Arizona, a nonprofit that partners with American Indian nations to develop and implement sustainable solutions to locally identified housing needs.

"I have been able to leverage many of the tools I learned in the Peace Corps to excel in both my personal and professional life," said Seidenberg, a 1995 graduate of Terre Haute North Vigo High School.

He went on to graduate in 1999 from Butler University with a bachelor's degree in anthropology and is a 2007 graduate of Indiana University with a master's degree in public affairs.

Seidenberg started in the Peace Corps shortly after a terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001 shook the United States.

"I was supposed to leave a few days after 9/11, but my departure was postponed due to the attacks as our government assessed the security situation," he said.

"My heart and mind were already committed to going overseas, so the attacks did not play a big role in encouraging or discouraging my service. However, it just so happened that I would be assigned to a village called Samoa in the upper west region of Ghana, which had a large Muslim population," Seidenberg said.

"Seeing mosques and hearing the call to prayer throughout the day was a normal part of life. When I arrived, news of the 9/11 attacks was becoming well known, but it seemed in my opinion, to be more of something very foreign to everyone," he said. "They didn't share the same excitement and hate that was spreading widely in other parts of the world. It was more of a day time soap opera, that was happening apart from everyday life Ghana. People were focused on everyday survival trying to put food on their tables," Seidenberg said.

Looking back at the Peace Corps, Seidenberg said he "helped subsistence farmers (individuals that had to grow their own food for survival) identify and implement projects to improve the productivity of their land, create secondary income sources, and protect the local environment from desertification.

"... The biggest role I played was to serve as facilitator for my community in helping to identify what their greatest needs were, and using my networking skills to help them find the resources they needed to become more resilient," Seidenberg said.

Seidenberg said the Peace Corps is still needed today.

"I believe that ultimately we are one big human family and that the more we travel and connect with others the more understanding and peace we will have in the world," he said.

Mark Lewandowski

Mark Lewandowski went to a different part of the world, serving in Eastern Europe. Lewandowski, a professor of English at Indiana State University, served in the Peace Corps in Biala Podlaska, Poland, about 100 miles east of Warsaw.

His Peace Corps experience began about six weeks after graduating from Wichita State University with a master's degree in English in 1991. He requested Police because he is of Polish descent.

"I grew up with a lot of Polish customs and I just went traveling there the year before, back packing to Poland and other places in Eastern Europe. It was very exciting because the communist government had just fallen (in Poland) and it was changing very rapidly," he said.

The Peace Corps was important for Poland, he said.

"At that time especially, as two years before I went to Poland, the United States had nuclear weapons pointed at it," Lewandowski said. "All of that changed dramatically and I still think it is important for the United States to befriend all countries, actually. The Peace Corps was politically intended. It was part of (former President John F. Kennedy's) nation building program, to work from the inside to develop alliances with countries as opposed to more aggressive stances with them. I think that is still very important," Lewandowski said.

And the importance of teaching in Poland became quite apparent to Lewandowski when he started. He would teach at a new college — so new in fact, it was just two rooms in a high school.

"So, I went to meet the director of my college, and I didn't know this, but there was an assembly going on for the high school students," he said. "When I walked in, I was looking for my college's office and I got pulled into this assembly by the director of the high school. I could barely speak Polish. I hadn't been there that long.

"He kind of thrust me up to a podium and a microphone and asked me to address, I think, like 300 students. ... I don't remember exactly what I said, but I do remember when he announced to the audience that I was the new American teacher, they just went crazy and were screaming. I felt like the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show," Lewandowski said.

"... It did kind of encapsulate the reaction that Americans got when we went because there was so much optimism about what was happening in Poland at the time. And that the United States was doing all of this in order to help Poland economically as well as other things," he said.

Lewandowskin, now 56, lives in Casey, Illinois. His Katie, is a professor of geology at Eastern Illinois University.

Robert F. McDavid, Erin Soto

Terre Haute has a direct link to the Peace Corps' start through the late Robert F. McDavid, a professor at Indiana State University, whose resume includes patenting the first injury-preventative knee guard in 1968.

In early 1962 while at the University of Michigan, McDavid was hired by R. Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps, as a consultant/technical advisor to develop the physical training component of the Peace Corps pre-service training program.

Four of his daughters would later serve in the Peace Corps. One of those daughters is (Martha) Erin (McDavid) Soto, a1978 graduate of Terre Haute South Vigo and a 1982 graduate of the University of Wisconsin. She taught in the Vigo County School Corporation before entering the Peace Corps and serving in Escuintla, Guatemala, and the surrounding area from 1984 to 1986.

Soto, now 60, was 24 when she left the Peace Corps. The youth development volunteers were assigned to help run programs at sports complexes.

"Through these programs, that focused on nutritional needs of poor mothers with children under 5 and establishing sports programs in remote and poor villages, I used sports as a means to development, to improving the lives of the most poor " Soto said. "Beyond that, I think I served as a model for young women. For many, it was the first time they say a young, single, independent woman living by herself."

For Soto, the 60th anniversary of the Peace Corps "means the dream continues, bridges between nations and between people continue to be built, understanding continues to expand," she said.

After the Peace Corps, Soto joined the United States Agency of International Development, serving around the world. She also taught leadership at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., before retiring to start her own company called TLC Solutions, which provides leadership training.

Soto now lives North Carolina, where she also coaches volleyball.

Todd Nation

Todd Nation, a Terre Haute City Councilman, served in the Peace Corps from 1987 to 1989 in Thailand, starting immediately after graduating from Purdue University with a bachelor's degree in psychology. He is a 1983 graduate of Terre Haute North Vigo High School.

"In Thailand I was a teacher at a rural middle school in the northeast by Laos. I taught English and was also a staff mentor for the future farmers of Thailand club," Nation said.

"I had a couple hundred of students over the two years that I taught there. I think that just knowing somebody who was not from the village and looked different and had a different way of looking at the world, I think that went a long way for some of them to demystifying the rest of the world," Nation said.

He remains in contact with staff and some students from Thailand.

"I know that some of my former students have gone out into the world," Nation said. "One lives in Berlin. One lives here in the United States. And they have told me that studying English with me and being exposed to a non-Thai person made an impact on them. They both further developed their English language skills and used those skills to get out into the world."

The Peace Corps, he said, may look different in 2021 as the global COVID-19 pandemic continues, but Nation said the organization is needed.

"It has a remarkable, positive impact not just on the countries where we serve, but on our country, too. I think having people among us who have gone and lived in places and gotten to know the people of countries for many of us are only names or places on maps, I think that has a lot of value in making the rest of the world real to us and into our families and into the rest of communities," Nation said.

When Nation entered the Peace Corps, he was 22, ending his serve at age 24. Now, Nation, 55, said his time in the Peace Corps "was the most defining experience in my life and it was one of the most meaningful things that I have ever done."

Reporter Howard Greninger can be reached 812-231-4204 or howard.greninger@tribstar.com. Follow on Twitter@TribStarHoward.