“The Class of ’43 had graduated…Senior A…walked slowly out of the auditorium and down the front steps…’I’m leaving now, to go out in the world to be shot, riddled with bullets, smashed by tanks, cut open with bayonets, or maybe I’ll be doing these things to other men. I’m going now to fight for the […]

July 15, 1949. “As a result of inter-action with the personnel in this office, I feel that I am on the way to getting the necessary background in the functions of a Government agency.” from his first bi-weekly report during a summer internship at the U.S. Economic Cooperation Administration in Washington D.C. Aug. 8, 1949. […]

From the handwritten journal Robert Gaudino kept during a National Student Assn. (NSA) summer trip: On a bus I crossed my country…I talked to some people and some talked back…with an apparent belief in the inevitability of another war…[and] of donkey rides in the Grand Canyon and cable cars in San Francisco… Uncomfortable are nights […]

The facts of work in India are ambiguity, reversals of meaning, cultural obstacles, value confusions, subtle resentments on both sides….The question, “What am I to do here?” transfers itself into “What can I do?” and finally takes on the most unsettling form of “Who am I?”

I see oversees experience in the Peace Corps as an opportunity for education…That education begins in an open conversation with strangers. Probably the hardest and most difficult response for human beings anywhere is to listen to and hear that which is different. Yet that is where we must all start.

India is quite an experience, affecting everyone who spends time there. It brings out many things in the visitor. It is hard to remain neutral there. Insight and pain go together. I expect the year of study and the months spent in that country will have important effects on your son.

We had two cabins on a high ridge: on one side a 3,500-foot drop into the Valley of Kashmir and on the other the rolling green slopes of the Gulmarg Plateau. We were somewhat isolated on that ridge except for the four squawking geese, some grazing cows, a few stray Indian tourists and some bearded […]

Our purpose is not just to have experience. It is to use it. It is to reflect upon it, to let it enhance or inhibit our sense of self. It is not learning just by absorbing many discrete details of personality and places. Rather, it is learning by direct engagement, by opinions in tension and […]

CHAPTERS

Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Final Note