57 Fun Facts About Peace Corps

The 1961 Peace Corps Act set the agency the mission of promoting world peace and what else?

Friendship. Congress wrote the phrase into the law that made Kennedy's six-month-old agency permanent, and the Peace Corps still describes its purpose as 'world peace and friendship'.

Who was the Peace Corps' first director?

Sargent Shriver, President Kennedy's brother-in-law, turned a line from a campaign speech into a working agency and had its first volunteers overseas within months.

How long are Peace Corps volunteers expected to serve in their host country after training?

Two years, after about three months of training. Students took to the idea at once, and would-be volunteers were writing in as soon as the agency existed.

Who mostly trains new Peace Corps volunteers today?

Host-country staff. The first volunteers were prepared on American university campuses, but the agency later moved training to the countries where they would serve, taught mostly by people who live there.

On the steps of which building did Kennedy first pitch the Peace Corps idea in 1960?

The Michigan Union in Ann Arbor. Kennedy arrived at 2 a.m. meaning only to sleep, found some 10,000 students waiting up for him, and asked how many would give years of their lives to working abroad.

Which union leader urged that young Americans be sent abroad with slide rule, textbook and medical kit?

Walter Reuther. The auto workers' president argued that the more young people America sent abroad with the tools of peace, the fewer it would need to send with guns.

Which senator introduced the first bill to create a Peace Corps, to little enthusiasm?

Hubert Humphrey. He recalled that even liberal senators thought the idea silly and unworkable; once a young president was urging it, he pushed the Peace Corps Act rapidly through the Senate.

The 'Point Four Youth Corps', a 1950s forerunner of the Peace Corps, took its name from which president's foreign-aid programme?

Harry S. Truman. Sharing American know-how with poorer countries was the fourth foreign-policy aim of his 1949 inaugural address; Wisconsin congressman Henry Reuss proposed sending young volunteers to do it.

Richard Nixon predicted in 1960 that the Peace Corps would become a haven for whom?

Draft dodgers. To head off the charge, service earned young men only a deferment, never an exemption: the draft board could still call them up once they came home.

The 1961 executive order that created the Peace Corps placed it inside which cabinet department?

The State Department. The new agency ran at first on foreign-aid money already voted, and gained permanent standing only when Congress passed the Peace Corps Act that September.

Which organisation did Kennedy acknowledge in 1962 as the progenitor of the Peace Corps?

Operation Crossroads Africa. Presbyterian minister James H. Robinson founded it in 1958 and sent American students to work alongside young Africans.

A White House send-off in August 1961 honoured the first Peace Corps volunteers, who were bound for which two countries?

Ghana and Tanganyika, which is now part of Tanzania. Only the Ghana group was at work that month: the Tanganyika volunteers started at the end of September, three weeks after a group sent to Colombia.

A 1961 postcard from a volunteer describing squalor and primitive living conditions caused a diplomatic row in which country?

Nigeria. Margery Michelmore's card never left the country: it is said to have been found on the Ibadan campus, copies went round, and angry students demanded that the volunteers be deported.

The Peace Corps sends volunteers only to countries that have done what?

Invited it in. A host government has to ask for volunteers and say which skills it needs, a rule meant to calm early fears that the agency carried a hidden agenda.

By 2020, roughly how many Americans had served in the Peace Corps since 1961?

240,000. The tally climbs slowly because the agency is small: even at its 50th anniversary in 2011 it had only about 8,500 volunteers in the field.

Kennedy's inaugural address pledged America's 'best efforts' so that people in the world's 'huts and villages' could do what?

Help themselves. He said America would act 'because it is right', not to outdo the communists; the Peace Corps followed six weeks later.

What did the Peace Corps deliberately avoid to prevent any appearance of favouring the Catholic Church?

Placing volunteers with religious agencies. Planners had hoped to subcontract work to church groups, but Catholic bodies were the keenest to take the money, and the White House wanted no church-state row.

Which future NASA astronaut ran medical care for Peace Corps volunteers in Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1980s?

Mae Jemison. Besides treating volunteers, the young doctor worked with the Centers for Disease Control on vaccine research, and on coming home she applied to NASA.

Where was the camp at which early Peace Corps trainees finished their preparation after weeks at a US university?

Puerto Rico. Instructors borrowed from Britain's Outward Bound schools put recruits through mountain climbing, 'drown-proofing' swimming drills and a four-day survival trek.

Which 1958 bestseller about blundering American diplomats in Southeast Asia is credited with inspiring the Peace Corps?

The Ugly American. Its ambassador never leaves his compound or learns the language, while his Soviet rival speaks it fluently; Peace Corps volunteers were sent out to reverse that image.

What got volunteer Bruce Murray, a music teacher in Chile, expelled from the Peace Corps in 1967?

Speaking out against the Vietnam War. He signed an anti-war petition and wrote to the New York Times; he sued over his expulsion, and in 1969 a federal judge ruled that his free-speech rights had been violated.

In 1971 President Nixon folded the Peace Corps and domestic volunteer programmes into which new umbrella agency?

ACTION. Nixon, a critic of the Peace Corps since his 1960 campaign, merged it with the government's home-front volunteer schemes, and it stayed a subagency there until 1981.

Which president's mother served as a Peace Corps nurse in India, having applied at 68?

Jimmy Carter's. Lillian Carter, a registered nurse from Georgia, served from 1966 to 1968, and since 1986 an award in her name has honoured outstanding volunteers who served at 50 or older.

Which actor played a debt-ridden Yale graduate who joins the Peace Corps in the 1985 comedy Volunteers?

Tom Hanks. His co-star Rita Wilson played an earnest fellow volunteer, and three years later the two were married.

Which president chose Loret Miller Ruppe to run the Peace Corps as it added business programmes and drew more Republican volunteers?

Ronald Reagan. Ruppe arrived to a budget smaller than the military's marching bands, and recalled him blocking a further cut because the Peace Corps was 'the only thing I got thanked for' at a state dinner.

The Peace Corps' Crisis Corps grew out of 1990s emergency missions, including aid to refugees from which country's genocide?

Rwanda. In 1994 volunteers moved into a refugee camp to train health workers and show people how to grow their own food, and President Clinton cited that work when he launched the programme in 1996.

Why did the Peace Corps rename its Crisis Corps 'Peace Corps Response' in 2007?

Its work had spread beyond emergencies. Requests kept coming for its short-term specialists outside disaster zones, for HIV education among other things, so the unit took a broader name and kept 'Crisis Corps' for true disasters.

What did George W. Bush pledge to do with the Peace Corps after 9/11?

Double its size within five years. In the same State of the Union speech he asked the agency to join a new push for education and opportunity in the Islamic world.

What led the Peace Corps to suspend all operations and fly every volunteer home at once?

The COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020 the agency pulled some 7,300 volunteers out of 61 countries, fearing they would be stranded as international travel shut down.

Which country's programme, which had sent English teachers since 1993, did the Peace Corps close for good in 2020?

China. Volunteers were told the country had outgrown the need, while Senator Rick Scott cheered the exit, saying there was 'no reason we should prop up our adversaries with U.S. tax dollars'.

Peace Corps volunteers are assigned to one of six project sectors, including Agriculture, Health and which other?

Youth in Development. Its volunteers coach young people in job skills and health, and stage GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) camps, which build teenage girls' confidence and have spread to countries around the world.

Anyone who has ever worked for which agency is permanently barred from serving as a Peace Corps volunteer?

The CIA. The Peace Corps keeps a total separation from intelligence work so that host countries can trust its volunteers; staff of other spy agencies must wait at least ten years.

Peace Corps volunteers get a living allowance meant to let them live at what standard?

Their local neighbours'. The founding idea was that volunteers would be 'doing the same work, eating the same food, talking the same language' as the people they served, so the stipend covers only basic needs.

The Peace Corps' 'five-year rule' requires most of its own staff to do what after five years?

Leave the agency. The 1965 rule was meant to keep new blood and ideas flowing in and stop anyone making a career there, though the agency's own inspectors say the churn has cost it its institutional memory.

Which travel writer joined the Peace Corps in 1963 to teach in Malawi and was thrown out in 1965?

Paul Theroux. He drove a car 2,000 miles to Uganda for an exiled critic of Malawi's leader, Dr Banda, was accused of aiding rebels plotting against him, and was deported and dropped by the Peace Corps.

Which future Netflix chief executive taught high-school maths in Swaziland with the Peace Corps from 1983 to 1985?

Reed Hastings. He gave up Marine officer training to go, and later said that once you have hitchhiked across Africa with ten dollars in your pocket, starting a business doesn't seem too intimidating.

Which home-improvement TV host served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Panama straight after college?

Bob Vila. He spent his service building houses in Panamanian communities, then ran his own remodelling business before television found him for This Old House.

Which political talk-show host served with the Peace Corps in Swaziland from 1968 to 1970 as a trade development adviser?

Chris Matthews. He came home with $200 left from his Peace Corps allowance and knocked on doors on Capitol Hill until a senator hired him, the start of 15 years in politics before Hardball.

Which future Connecticut senator served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic from 1966 to 1968?

Christopher Dodd. He came home fluent in Spanish, and decades later Democrats were still sending him out to campaign among Hispanic voters.

Who in 1978 became the first former Peace Corps volunteer elected to the US Senate?

Paul Tsongas. A volunteer in Ethiopia from 1962 to 1964, he took the Massachusetts seat by unseating a Republican incumbent, and in 1992 ran for president against Bill Clinton.

Which Peace Corps director from 1993 to 1995 went on to run UNICEF?

Carol Bellamy. She had gone to Guatemala as a health volunteer in 1963; thirty years on she came back to the agency as its boss, the first former volunteer ever to run it.

Which anti-poverty programme did Lyndon Johnson launch in 1964 as the domestic version of the Peace Corps?

VISTA. Its volunteers sign on for a year at a poverty-level stipend, and the first worked among Appalachia's rural poor and California's migrant workers rather than abroad; it is now part of AmeriCorps.

The 1968 song Who Needs the Peace Corps?, a jab at the hippie scene, was written by which musician?

Frank Zappa. The song sits on the Mothers of Invention album We're Only in It for the Money, whose cover spoofed the Beatles' Sgt Pepper sleeve just as its songs mocked the flower children.

Which 1980s film opens in the summer of 1963 with its heroine saying she couldn't wait to join the Peace Corps?

Dirty Dancing. Frances 'Baby' Houseman says it in the opening voice-over; the line is there to fix the mood of 1963, an idealistic summer just before the Beatles arrived.

The Peace Corps' founding director went on to run which War on Poverty agency for Lyndon Johnson?

The Office of Economic Opportunity. He was handed the poverty job in 1964 without being relieved of the Peace Corps, so for more than a year he ran both agencies at once.

Which future White House press secretary was the Peace Corps' deputy director at the age of 28?

Bill Moyers. He left the vice president's staff to help set the agency up; in late 1963 his old boss, now president, pulled him back to the White House and later made him press secretary.

The Peace Corps' 'Third Goal' asks returned volunteers to do what?

Tell Americans about their host country. To that end the agency set up World Wise Schools in 1989, linking American classrooms with volunteers so that pupils can hear about life where they serve.

Peace Corps volunteers in 1970s Ethiopia joined the World Health Organization's drive to wipe out which disease?

Smallpox. Volunteers spent the early 1970s trekking to Ethiopia's remotest villages to track down outbreaks, and in 1977 the last natural case anywhere in the world was recorded.

A 1963 executive order lets returned Peace Corps volunteers be hired for what without the usual open competition?

Federal government jobs. Signing the order, Kennedy wrote that the experience of people who had served under the 'trying conditions' volunteers face 'should not be lost to the Federal service'.

Which Latin American country received its first Peace Corps volunteers only in the 2000s?

Mexico. Its national science and technology council asked for them, so the first volunteers, who arrived in 2004, went to help its research centres pass on technical know-how rather than to the agency's usual postings.

Donna Shalala, later Bill Clinton's health secretary, served as an early Peace Corps volunteer in which Middle Eastern country?

Iran. She lived in a mud-built farming village in the south, helping to put up an agricultural college, and said decades later that her affection for the country had never left her.

Which mosquito-borne disease is the target of the Africa-wide Peace Corps initiative launched in 2011?

Malaria. The 'Stomping Out Malaria in Africa' campaign began with volunteers in Senegal and by 2013 had spread to 24 countries, with outside experts beamed in over Skype to train them.

Which First Lady launched Let Girls Learn, the schooling initiative that Peace Corps volunteers carried into their host communities?

Michelle Obama. She launched it in 2015 for the 62 million girls then out of school, and the Peace Corps sent extra volunteers to countries such as Liberia to run its village projects.

After which disaster did the Peace Corps deploy volunteers inside the United States for the first time?

Hurricane Katrina. In 2005 some 272 former volunteers were called back to work alongside FEMA on the Gulf Coast, one of the largest teams the agency's Crisis Corps ever fielded.

In which animated sitcom does a son flee school hazing by joining the Peace Corps in South America?

Family Guy. In a 2005 episode the Griffins' son runs off to escape his school's freshman hazing, unwittingly marries a village chief's daughter, and learns that his problems have simply followed him.

Besides being at least 18, what must every Peace Corps volunteer be?

A US citizen, though the rule also admits non-citizen US nationals. Little else is fixed: there is no upper age limit, couples can serve together, and some postings accept work experience in place of a degree.

The documentary Death of Two Sons pairs Peace Corps volunteer Jesse Thyne with which police-shooting victim?

Amadou Diallo. Thyne had lodged with Diallo's family in Guinea before dying in a car crash there; the film sets that death beside the killing of their unarmed son, at whom New York police fired 41 shots.