The US Peace Corps was founded by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to promote world peace and international friendship by sending trained volunteers overseas to work in developing countries. Still going more than 40 years later, the agency is arguably one of JFK's finest legacies.
I was 15 the year that Kennedy announced the formation of the Peace Corps, just the right age for the idealism and promise of foreign adventure that marked the president's speech. And so, seven years later, upon finishing university in 1968, I signed up for a rural community development project in Costa Rica.
After a three-month training programme on the island of Puerto Rica, I was sent to Upala, a small sleepy Costa Rican village of 500, which sits on the banks of the Rio Zapote, surrounded by thick rain forest, just a three-hour mule ride from the Nicaraguan border.
Evocative of Ireland
Cut off by heavy jungle and several rivers from the central plateau which holds most of Costa Rica's population, Upala was the municipal centre of a canton of 16,000 inhabitants, most of them scattered across an expansive terrain that includes several dormant volcanoes, hill country surprisingly evocative of Ireland, and acres of good grazing land to the west of its rain forests.
Like many Peace Corps volunteers, I was a young Bachelor of Arts generalist rather than a Bachelor of Science specialist in something useful. However, I did undertake a crash course in cultivating cacao, or chocolate beana, once I was in the country, keeping a sharp eye out for the poisonous snakes that sometimes draped themselves from cacao tree branches.
I also learned to ride horseback, rope cattle, wield a machete, all through the medium of Spanish, as it were. And while I took up cigarettes to keep the mosquitoes at bay, I never quite mastered Flor de Cana, a Nicaraguan rum, which translates as flower of the sugar cane, and which, as my mother might say, was far too sweet to be wholesome. In any event, most of these accomplishments, while undeniably self-fulfilling, were of little practical aid to my wonderfully welcoming Costa Rican hosts, the majority of them campsesinos determinedly eking out a subsistence living by growing rice and beans, albeit via slash-and-burn farming practices.
Of more use to my hosts, perhaps, were my services as the starting first baseman for the Upala Centro baseball team. Beísbol, as it's called there, had been bequeathed to the region by the US Marines, who had introduced the game in nearby Nicaragua after being dispatched there in 1927 to back a conservative government against an armed uprising by liberal troops and the revolutionary Augusto Sandino. Yes, the same Sandino from whom the Sandinistas, who overthrew the Nicaraguan dictator Samoza in 1974, took their name.
Vietnam War
Of course I was only learning all this at the time. American history to be sure, but not what we'd been taught back in high school. As it happened, America in 1968 was again at war, this time in Vietnam - which was part of the reason, along with that stirring speech by JFK, I had enlisted in the Peace Corps. As a university graduate, I had that option - unlike the hundreds of thousands of working-class and minority youths who could not exercise such means of avoiding conscription.
Returning to Boston in 1970, I saw for the first time the "America - Love It or Leave It" bumper stickers, aimed at the growing numbers now opposing that war. That kind of jingoism dwindled, however, after many Vietnam veterans returned home to add their voices to the opposition.
I eventually did leave America, in 1974, for Ireland. But whatever about a lifetime's opposition to much US foreign policy, I love my native land immensely. And I especially treasure what the US Peace Corps gave me: the chance to experience another country, another culture, another people, never mind the chance to witness directly the huge disparities of wealth and living standards between the US and its near neighbours.
Which brings me, I suppose, to another country, another culture, another people, namely Iraq. An oil-rich, but increasingly impoverished country, and ruled by another despicable dictator, without a doubt. But a country whose innocent peoples will be asked to pay for his wrong-doings if push comes to shove, with smart-bomb and uranium-depleted-shells reigning down from on high.
Being "anti-American"
As George Santayana once observed, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfil it. And there certainly seems an air of déjà vu to this prospective war - right down to the charge that one is somehow being "anti-American" in opposing it. I know it is not easy for many living here in Ireland to voice their opposition, given the special and historic relationship between Ireland and the US. Nor have the atrocities of September 11th, and the heroics of many Irish-American NYC police and fire-fighters, made it easier to stand up and say no to this war, despite the twists and turns of President Bush, who appears to have suddenly mistaken Saddam Hussein for Osama bin Laden.
Nonetheless, there is a great Irish-American tradition that can be honoured by opposing the war - namely the work done on behalf of peace and friendship between different peoples by people such as Eugene McCarthy, Paul McDwyer, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, George Mitchell and George McGovern, to name but a few. Or by John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his Peace Corps.