Local Peace Corps alumni look back on its first 50 years

The Peace Corps, built on a foundation of youthful idealism, is no longer young.

This month is the 50th anniversary of the organization that has sent more than 200,000 people to 139 countries.

If Peace Corps brings to mind digging wells and planting seeds, that view is slightly outdate

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“The ag people we had were not teaching how to plant corn, they were teaching how to market corn,” said Jeff Clarke, now deputy director of the Snohomish Health District.

Clarke, 55, has been in Peace Corps twice. In the 1970s, he was in the Middle Eastern nation of Bahrain. And from 2005 to 2009, Clarke was a Peace Corps country director in Moldova in Eastern Europe.

“With the falling apart of the Soviet Union, republics pulled in Peace Corps volunteers to help with business development and community organization. That’s a change,” Clarke said. “But the basics of living with a host family, living in a community, and learning a local language, those have not changed since 1961.”

The idea of taking American friendship overseas was first posed as a challenge to college students.

It was at the University of Michigan in 1960 that John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator and presidential candidate, asked if students would be willing to spend a year or two in service to a developing country.

Kennedy signed an executive order creating the Peace Corps on March 1, 1961. Today, the big aims of fostering understanding and providing help are the same. The nature of the help has changed, said Clarke and Geoffrey Gese, another local man who served multiple times in the Peace Corps.

Gese, 56, was in Mongolia with the Peace Corps from 1998 to 2000; in the Philippines from 2002 to 2004; and in Ukraine from 2007 to 2009. The Everett man also worked as an AmeriCorps VISTA leader.

Gese said business and political education are now highly valued in many countries. In Mongolia, Gese worked as a microbusiness trainer. He also taught at a political education academy, sharing the basics of American government.

“I strongly endorse the Peace Corps,” Gese said. “People need to get out of this country to see how grateful we should be to be here.”

He still has his winter clothes from Mongolia, where it wasn’t rare to feel the chill of 40 degrees below zero.

Washington state, according to the Peace Corps’ Northwest Regional Office, has had 8,446 of its residents serve with the agency since 1961. Our state ranks third in producing Peace Corps volunteers through the years, behind California and New York.

Clarke, who grew up in Shoreline, first joined the Peace Corps in 1976 after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In Bahrain, he worked in the Ministry of Housing. He worked with a financial group as the former British protectorate transitioned to an independent country.

Today, Clarke watches closely as protests shake Bahrain and other countries in the Arab world.

With his first Peace Corps stint behind him, Clarke worked for Snohomish County as a senior planner and later as director of the Solid Waste Division of the county’s Public Works Department. He raised his family in Everett before going overseas again.

“After 25 years with Snohomish County, it’s a chance to take a look at a totally different system,” Clarke told The Herald in 2005 before leaving for Moldova.

The republic is one of the poorest countries in Europe. “Until 1991 it was part of the Soviet Union,” Clarke said. “It was badly torn up by World War II, and has gone through a succession of rule, by Russians, Ottomans, Poles, Romanians, and now independent.”

The country’s infrastructure was eroded, and Clarke said that after decades of communist rule people needed basic training in financial survival. “Young people I was working with had no idea of the profit motive, how to run a business and be held accountable,” he said. Clarke, as country leader, visited volunteers, host families, mayors and school directors.

Around the world, more than 8,600 people are now in the Peace Corps, still building bridges with toil and friendship.

Much has changed. In the 1970s, Clarke made just one phone call home from Bahrain in two years. “Now most volunteers go home once, maybe twice, and some have family come and visit,” he said.

The world is smaller, but Peace Corps service is no vacation. Volunteers get a small stipend for living expenses, paid travel to and from the country, and about $7,500 upon completion of 27 months abroad.

“You’re not spending two weeks in Rio,” Clarke said. “It’s a broadening experience. As a person, you take more away than you ever leave.”

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.