REPORT ON THE PEACE CORPS

SHADING their eyes against the sun, two men talked in the empty schoolyard in the crossroads village of San Manuel, Chile, 60 miles south of Santiago. In the distance loomed the snowcapped Andes; near by, a quacking duck led five grey ducklings in and out of an irrigation ditch. "We had a community meeting last night." said Sandoval Cordoba, the school's headmaster. "It went better than last time. Six men are going to build the chicken house. Five others are interested in the brooder." Replied Emory Tomor, 24, of Reseda, Calif., a member of the U.S. Peace Corps: "I'm very happy it went well."

A high school French and German instructor back home in California, Tomor now spends his weekdays teaching carpentry to 50 boys at the Institute De Educacion in Malloco. Chile. On weekends, he boards a wheezing bus and rides 30 miles to San Manuel, where 70 peasant families work a landowner's 12,000-acre hacienda, in their off-hours tend their own tiny holdings. Tomor is trying to help the campesinos raise poultry. He has shown them how to build a chicken house of wire, wood and burlap and a brooder of wood slats, wire and an old barrel. Formerly, only one of every two San Manuel chicks survived; 49 of 50 chicks that Tomor is raising in a brooder have thrived. Now Tomor hopes to crossbreed good-laying Leghorns with the Rhode Island Reds that lay the brown eggs preferred by Chilean wives. Says Schoolmaster Sandoval Cordoba: "Do you believe what he has done in three weekends? It is the best thing that ever happened here. For the first time the people are beginning to work together as a community."

Missing Link. California's Tomor is one of 484 Peace Corpsmen now on station in underdeveloped nations around the world. Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver, who is President Kennedy's brother-in-law, explains his organization's mission in broad terms: "The process of education in a new society is long and slow. There are important jobs to be filled before that process can produce enough trained people. The missing link in these newly developing nations is often for middle-manpower--men and women to do jobs until local people can be trained to take on this work themselves."

To fill that need, Peace Corps contingents so far have been sent to the new African nations of Ghana, Nigeria and Tanganyika, to the older but still struggling South American countries of Colombia and Chile, to Pakistan and neighboring India. The largest group (128) is in the Philippines, the smallest (15) on the tiny, pear-shaped West Indian island of St. Lucia.

In each case, the corpsmen were invited by the host country--which also specified the skills it needed in the volunteers. Primarily, the demand was for teachers. All the corps members in the Philippines will teach mathematics, science and English in elementary schools. All 50 volunteers in Ghana are teaching in secondary schools. Of the 66 corps members in Nigeria, 36 are secondary-school teachers, and the rest will help staff the new University of Nigeria.

Farm and engineering experts are also needed. Most of the 25 men sent to India will help set up an agricultural college at Ludhiana and teach practical farming at the village level. Seven members of the St. Lucia group are showing the island farmers how to plant crops, care for farm animals, thin forests, practice soil conservation. The 35-member Tanganyikan team consists mainly of surveyors and engineers to work on a threeyear, $67 million road-building program. In India, Chile, Colombia. St. Lucia and Pakistan. other corpsmen are working with villagers on sanitation, health education, town planning and home economics.

Into the Fire. For some corpsmen. the mission is hazardous. Five geologists in the Tanganyikan group are making a mineral survey in rugged country where natives recently murdered a British geologist because they thought that he was conjuring up evil spirits by chipping rock samples and heating them over a fire. On St. Lucia, Bill Hundley, 23, carries a kit containing an antidote against the deadly bite of the fer-de-lance snake when he goes out in the high grass to lay drainage ditches for banana plantations. On Catanduanes Island, 240 miles southeast of Manila, four men and four women teach in a dangerous coastal area that is buffeted with typhoons on an average of twice a year.

Disease is a constant problem for the corps. East Pakistan has a prevalence of bovine tuberculosis. Malaria is Ghana's biggest killer; volunteers sleep under tightly-drawn nets and gulp antimalaria pills. In the Colombia town of Minca. Corpsmen Gerald McMahon, 24, of Daly City, Calif., and Lyle Smith, 20, of Grain Valley. Mo., must bathe and dip their only available drinking water from the river in an area rife with disease. On St. Lucia, two Peace Corps girls doing health education work had hardly arrived before they were sent off to help in a typhoid epidemic. In India, almost every volunteer has suffered dysentery. In Chile, members of the group have lost an average of 15 Ibs. on a skimpy diet.

Urdu, Twi & Tagalog. There are. of course, other discomforts. Many corpsmen are assigned to villages that have no plumbing, no electricity, no telephones, no entertainment. In Nigeria, where native teachers receive a transportation allowance from the government toward the purchase of automobiles, the corpsmen get no allowance and must walk. In a frigid mountain village in South Chile, two Peace Corpsmen and two corps women each wear four sweaters under their coats to keep warm; they have long since stoked their fires with copies of a manual, issued by Washington, on "The Preservation of Personal Health in Warm Climates." In the Philippine village of Milaor. Peace Corps women are protected from native peeping-Tomism; the town's mayor has issued an order requiring any man approaching the girls' quarters after 10 p.m. to carry a flashlight or lighted candle.

To prepare them for such vicissitudes, the Peace Corpsmen were given vigorous training before being sent overseas. Each group studied at a U.S. college or university, crammed up on culture and customs, spent up to 120 hours attaining proficiency in such local languages as Urdu for Pakistan and India, Twi for Ghana, Tagalog for the Philippines. They were briefed on taboos: the circle made by thumb and forefinger, an all's well sign in the U.S. is considered obscene in South America. The corpsmen were taught local games and dances, including, for the Africa-bound, lessons on how to play cricket. To help them reply to anti-American propaganda, the corpsmen were given brush-up courses in U.S. history.

Eventually 112 trainees were weeded out as unstable or otherwise unsuited for overseas duty. Many of the survivors topped off their training with a 26-day physical culture course at a former forestry station in Puerto Rico; it has been rechristened Camp Hammarskjold by the corps. Regardless of their age (the Peace Corps members average 25 years, range from Julian Pineda, 18, serving in India, to Miss Jeanne Dumas, 62, who is in Pakistan), they slid down sheer slopes by rope, learned to stay afloat with their hands tied behind them, jogged on three-mile runs, bivouacked overnight in a rain forest. Recalls one Tanganyika graduate of Camp Hammarskjold: "We had some Puerto Ricans convinced we were training for the next assault on Cuba."

The Incidents. But for all the preparations, unpleasant incidents inevitably occur. Nothing so far has matched the case of Margery Michelmore and her famed postcard (TIME, Oct. 27). But in East Pakistan, there was a near repetition of the incident. A Pakistani filched a half-written letter from a Peace Corps girl's room, threatened to raise trouble because she had criticized living conditions--and backed away only when it was explained what she had meant by saying that some Americans in Pakistan were "living the life of Riley."

On lesser mix-up levels, volunteers arrived in Nigeria to discover that some of them were expected to teach West African history; they had had little instruction in it themselves. In the Philippines, volunteers who had sweated through four hours a day of Tagalog learned that they would be living mainly in areas where other of the republic's 87 dialects are used. They had to start language training over again. In Nigeria, a few Peace Corps members began wearing native robes--a show of togetherness that other Americans feared natives would resent as patronizing.

In the Peace Corps' first months in the field, such tensions have been surprisingly few--and the corpsmen have made many friends with their outgoing informality. Arriving in Peshawar, they sang the Pakistani national anthem with such verve that they were besieged with invitations into local homes. In Mount Kilimanjaro's shadow, the Tanganyikan volunteers staged a baseball game. Despite a driving rain, a thousand natives turned out to watch and cheer. In Pakistan, a group went to a village one night, presented a program of American folk songs. It was a memorable evening. Said the village headman: "This was the first time in five years that the whole village got together for fun." On St. Lucia, natives asked the Americans to teach them the Twist. The volunteers turned out not to know how to Twist, ended up by learning instead an island dance called the Sangantine.

Away from the Jockey Club. During their working hours, the corpsmen put in plenty of overtime. In Ghana, Dorothy Dee Vellenga, 24, of New Concord. Ohio, teaches biology and chemistry all day in an Accra school, stays on after class to tutor a boy who has the makings of a doctor but who needs special instructions in advanced biology. On St. Lucia, a native youth begged to be taught reading and writing; from that request came a program under which the corpsmen now have 75 people enrolled in nighttime literacy classes. In Colombia's coffee-growing community of Chitaraque, Davey Downing. 21, of Los Gatos, Calif., and Kent Oldenburg, 23, of Salem, Ore., first launched a course in midwifery, next built the town's first latrine, after that started a sanitation course. Then, accompanied by the town's mayor and priest, they traveled to the state capital of Boyaca, asked the governor to order the completion of a long-unfinished bridge for the town. The governor agreed--and the bridge was dedicated fortnight ago.

The response to such efforts has been gratifying. At Tafo, Ghana, the Africans talked of making Barnett Chessin, 23, of Paterson, N.J., a subchief for his good works. In Pakistan, volunteers are greeted on the streets with three hugs, traditional sign of friendship. In the Philippines, there have been so many fiestas that Mike Rosenthal, 23, of Meriden, Conn., now groans: "I don't even know how many lechons [roast suckling pigs] I've eaten since I came." Says Monsignor Joaquin Salcedo, champion of Colombia's campesinos: "The great problem of Americans abroad is that they always live in small, jockey-club circles. These young people are doing what no other American has done. They are putting themselves on the level of the real people of the country. No one is more loved than the man who works shoulder to shoulder with you."

Such feeling is reward enough for most Peace Corps members (they get monthly living allowances ranging from $70 in the Philippines to $182 in Tanganyika, plus $75 that is held in escrow in Washington). But there is an even greater value -- a sense of participating in world events. Ex plains Robert Morris, 24, of Van Nuys, Calif., a Peace Corpsman in Pakistan: "Before, you had to be in a higher echelon in order to do anything in foreign policy. The Peace Corps is a chance for people like me to help."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.