Since Peace Corps: I discovered this website -- which is fantastic -- quite by accident as I was doing web research for part of a book I am helping to write on the World bank's experience with rural development in Northeast Brazil since the 1970s and couldn't resist adding my name to the list (which contains a number of volunteers in "cohorts" with which I overlapped in Goias. I should clarify that my ex-wife (Claudia Van der Heuvel), who was also with me in Goias, and I were part of a group of students at Harvard/Radcliffe that did not have regular Peace Corps training, but instead did extra-curricular Portuguese language classes (with Brazilian colleagues at Harvard. one of whom, Marcos Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, was a classmate and later became a federal deputy from Sao Paulo and is currently the deputy director of the Getulio Vargas Foundation there) and some other Brazil-related course work during our senior year (1967-68). Hence the Cambridge, Massachusetts location for the training site. The rest of our small group went to Pará, Pernambuco and Rio Grande do Norte. And we all had a great time! Recently, I have had a chance to meet up on various occasions with Terry Vogt, who worked in Rio Grande do Norte, now lives in San Francisco, and was also a member of our small group of Brazil PCVs from the Harvard/Radcliffe Class of 1968. I have been working on Brazil, one way or another ever since, including teaching as a Visiting Professor at two Brazilian Federal Universities - Rio de Janeiro (1974-76) and Pernambuco (1976-80), while working on my doctoral dissertation (also on Brazil) for the University of California, Berkeley, then coordinating a technical cooperation project on rural development in Northeast Brazil (based in Recife) for the Organization of American States (1980-83) before returning to the US (with my Brazilian second wife, Lucia Helena de Oliveira Redwood, and one and a half year old son, Andre de Oliveira Redwood, who was born in Recife, and is now doing a doctorate himself - in Music Theory at Yale) for a job at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington (1983-88), moving to the World Bank in August 1988 where I have been ever since, including a six month stay in Brasilia in 1996 to work on natural resource management projects in Mato Grosso and Rondônia. I have been in my present position since January 1999 and am responsible for managing a large portfolio of projects (and analytical work) for agriculture and rural development, environment and social development/inclusion for all of Latin America and the Caribbean, but our largest (in terms of the activities we are supporting) and favorite client is -- you guessed it -- Brazil, where I have been able to travel on average 4-6 times a year over the past decade, and where I hope to retire (somewhere near the ocean between Florianopolis and Sao Luiz, focusing mainly on Bahia, where I have just come back from a wonderful Carnaval in Salvador, at this point. My wife, who is originally from São Paulo, is lobbying for a coastal location somewhat further south (i.e., much nearer São Paulo). The Training Group: Soon after graduating (June 1968), our small group went to Brazil and to our respective states where we had a combination of on-the-job training in our Peace Corps sites and "probation" for the first three months or so. Goiás? was one of the states - I believe Espírito Santo was another -- where the state Peace Corps Director when we arrived had been associated with the Experiment in International Living in Vermont. As a result we spent our first week living with a family in Goiania, before going to Quirinópolis, in southern Goias (between Rio Verde and Itumbiara) where we overlapped with the Volunteers we were replacing there. So, in fact, we never had any formal Peace Corps training at all, although Claudia and I did later spend a week or two (I can't remember how long it was now) with a group of incoming Volunteers (all married couples) to -- and in -- the Distrito Federal, I believe in 1969, as they were also going to be working on housing cooperatives.
Interestingly, but probably not surprisingly, after the draft lottery, a number of those Volunteers who got low numbers (i.e., knew they were not going to be drafted) left shortly thereafter, while others stayed.
Claudia and I were accepted by the Peace Corps to spend a third year as Volunteers in Sergipe. However, I was not able to extend my deferment (having gotten a very high number in the draft lottery) and had to go back to the US in July 1970, where I promptly failed my draft physical due to (carefully documented, thanks to the Peace Corps doctor in Goiás) back problems incurred -- and this is a true story -- while changing a tire on a Peace Corps jeep, which I was using to help move a single female volunteer from one town in Goiás to another, together with a hearing problem (apparently I was unable to hear very high pitched sounds, like bullets flying by), of which I had previously been totally unaware. As a result, I ended up going to graduate school (Department of City and Regional Planning at Berkeley, where I did both a Masters and Ph. D) in September 1970, and the rest is history. |
