Peace Corps Boot Camps

After 30 years at Ohio's Oberlin College. John C. Kennedy, 57, last week left his job as alumni recorder, rented his 15-acre farm, and drove off with his schoolteacher wife, Miriam, 53, to join the U.S. Peace Corps. At Pennsylvania State University, the Kennedys began a seven-week cram course with 153 other recruits from 42 states, the biggest single corps group yet launched. Their goal: two-year jobs as teachers' aides in the rural Philippines. "All our lives we've wanted to do something like this," said Quaker Kennedy. "We've talked about doing something personal for peace. This is our chance."

John Kennedy is the oldest trainee at Peace Corps boot camps, now operating on seven U.S. campuses, from Harvard to Berkeley. Most recruits are in their early 20s; the Kennedys know they may wash out before they ever reach the Philippines. But so may others much younger. If the Peace Corps fails, it will not be for lack of talent to choose from. At the rate of 100 a day, some 12,250 Americans have now volunteered. For brains, looks and verve, those chosen so far would rank high in any enterprise.

Sixty Hours, Six Days. Penn State's contingent had no need for the word of welcoming brass that the Peace Corps is to be no immature "kiddie corps.'' Arms aching with shots for everything from typhoid to TB, they began studying 60 hours a week on a six-day schedule (plus exams on Sundays) that is twice the load of ordinary Penn State students. In the Philippines, they will mainly teach elementary science, serve as models of spoken English. But to prepare, they are tackling everything from Philippine history, culture and economics to family habits and sex mores (advice from one Filipino lecturer: "No touch.")--plus first aid, nutrition, U.S. history and world politics. Said one awed Penn State professor: 'I wish we had a whole university with folks like this. They're pushing the life out of us to get started.''

So it went last week at all the other centers:

P: Farthest along are 78 Colombia-bound volunteers (all men) at New Jersey's Rutgers University. Sponsored by CARE, they have spent six 60-hour weeks studying Spanish, U.S. and Latin American culture, how to play soccer and how to ride a horse. Next month they shove off for two years of digging wells, building roads and schools in remote mountain villages.

P: Newest trainees are 18 men and women who started work late last week at Iowa State University. Directed by an organization called Heifer Project Inc. (which since 1944 has shipped more than 800,000 farm animals and chicks to 60 countries), Iowa State's farm-wise corpsmen will spend a month boning up for a tour of improving soil and livestock production on the West Indian island of Santa Lucia. One of Iowa State's volunteers is Madge Shipp, a Negro schoolteacher from Detroit whose age, 55, almost matches Penn State's Kennedys. She quit her $6,600-a-year teaching job because "I feel that people in the highly developed countries have lost their sense of purpose. The Peace Corps is a chance to get away from the materialism of everyday living."

P: At Harvard, 45 men and women (including three married couples) are training for secondary-school teaching in Eastern Nigeria. Picked from 1,400 candidates, they will spend seven weeks at Harvard, then travel next month to the cooperating University College at Ibadan for four months of orientation and practice teaching.

P: Ruggedest assignment belongs to 43 men at Texas Western College in simmering El Paso. They are surveyors, civil engineers and geologists (median age: 26), headed for road building in transportation-poor Tanganyika. Up at 5:45, they tackle Swahili, East African culture, U.S. history and world politics, study Thoreau, Marx and Lenin, after lunch head for the dusty hills to lay out imaginary roads. Then comes an hour of physical conditioning ("We don't hike up mountains. We run up them."), followed by more classes after dinner. "I never worked so hard in my life," says one weary student. "Tanganyika can't be any tougher than this." Late this month the group will go to Puerto Rico for three weeks of camp-out training, followed by seven more weeks of intensive language study at a center on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. To one of their Texas Western professors, who has taught for 20 years, "this is the smartest bunch I've ever seen." Equally admiring is the mayor of Tanganyika's biggest city, Dar es Salaam, who visited El Paso last week to inspect the troops. "I am impressed," said he, "with the zest of these young men."

P: Living and breathing Ghana night and day are 58 men and women at the University of California's Berkeley campus. Next month, after eight weeks of twelve-hour days at Berkeley, they start two-year, no-vacation jobs in Ghana, teaching English, French, math, chemistry, physics and biology in secondary schools. To prepare, they have delved into such matters as leprosy, midwifery, "how to be a woman in East Africa," and bush nutrition ("Fish heads are good, but you don't have to eat the eyes."). They have spent a required nine hours each in the night emergency ward at Berkeley's Herrick Hospital. Ghana itself may not be all that grim. The Ministry of Education, their boss, recently crashed through with $1,960-a-year salaries (in addition to the Peace Corps' $75 a month). Three highly educated Ghanaians are on hand at Berkeley to teach Twi, one of Ghana's principal languages. Alarmed at the erudition of these teachers, one recruit joked: "My God. we're being sent out to lower their standards!"

P: Soon bound for Chile and ten more weeks of training are 42 of the 50 volunteers at the University of Notre Dame. Largely planned by Notre Dame's president, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, their goal is better farming and lower infant mortality (eight of the women are nurses) in Chile's hardscrabble Central Valley. So poor are the valley's campesinos that almost any contribution is bound to be visible. Putting themselves under orders of Chile's Institute of Rural Education. Notre Dame's corpsmen (ages: 19 to 40) hope to teach hygiene, nutrition, child care, introduce simple games such as volleyball, build chicken coops where chickens now run wild. What they hope for, sums up Bob Woodruff, 23, "is the chance for personal contact instead of dollar diplomacy. This country is too fat, physically and intellectually. It's our duty to help.''

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