CARE-Peace Corps in Colombia -- A Brief History

Ron Burkard

I n his January 20, 1961 inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy inspired millions when he said “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Shortly thereafter, Kennedy announced creation of the Peace Corps, appointing his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, to lead the effort. (Responding to murmurings about nepotism, Shriver later commented that if the Peace Corps did not work out it would be easier for the president to fire a relative than a politician to whom he might be indebted.)

At the beginning, the plan evidently was not to create a large bureaucracy to manage the Peace Corps, but to rely on others with relevant country and development experience for this purpose. CARE, with a presence in Colombia beginning in 1954 as well as established working relationships with the Government of Colombia and organizations such as the Cafeteros de Colombia (Coffee Growers Federation), was invited to establish and manage the program.

CARE’s experience with self-help programs in Colombia made it an obvious choice for this role. CARE also agreed to donate approximately $100,000 worth of tools and equipment to support the Peace Corps community development program, provide supervisory personnel, and act as the agent of the Government of Colombia.

In 1960 CARE and the Cafeteros had completed a survey of the needs of poor farmers in coffeegrowing areas. This study, completed under the direction of CARE Assistant Executive Director Gordon Alderfer, served as the basis for the Peace Corps’s first rural community development program. Training began the summer of 1961 at Rutgers University in New Jersey under CARE’s leadership.

Sixty-one “Colombia I” volunteers arrived in Bogotá on September 8, 1961. All were male. Initial assignments were to be to rural communities in the departamentos (states) of Cundinamarca, Caldas, Valle del Cauca, Tolima and Antioquia. With the arrival of additional groups, the program expanded throughout the country.

An interesting sideline: the pending arrival of the volunteers created quite a stir, especially among CARE-Colombia’s secretaries. After careful perusal of a group photo taken at Rutgers before the group reached Bogotá, one secretary reportedly announced “éste es mio!” Sure enough, a happy, long-lasting marriage resulted!

Staff

Mert Cregger was the first director of the CAREPeace Corps program. Mert, a chiropractor from California, initially went to Colombia to invest in gold mines. He stayed on and was working for the company that made the Cinva-Ram blockmaking machine before ending up as Assistant Director of CARE-Colombia. Mert recently referred to his request to lead the CARE-Peace Corps effort as “the best career decision I ever made!”

At first, Peace Corps in Colombia had only a director, Chris Sheldon (appointed in 1961) and token staff. (Sheldon had survived the tragic sinking of his twin-masted sailing ship, Albatross, in which his wife and several others died. The 1996 film White Squall is based on this incident.)

 In addition to the Cafeteros, CARE-Peace Corps worked closely with Acción Comunal (“Community Action”), a nationwide program of the Government of Colombia whose objective was to organize rural and urban community members into juntas de Acción Comunal which would then address needs such as schools, health and sanitation, water, irrigation, agriculture, access roads, etc. Peace Corps Volunteers were assigned to specific areas, usually one or two to a location, and would then work with several nearby communities.

After awhile the Peace Corps added additional programs to the rural and urban community development programs managed by CARE. English teaching, Physical Education, Educational Television and other programs were administered directly by the Peace Corps, whose in-country staff increased accordingly.

By 1965 the CARE-managed community development programs had grown considerably, with a number of rural and urban groups and up to 250 volunteers at a time working throughout the country.

The International CARE staffers assigned to the CARE-Peace Corps program had the reputation of being among the organization’s Latin American “elite.” Hearing this, and inspired by JFK’s vision, this writer (then a 25-year-old with but two years CARE service, in Mexico) asked to be considered for CARE-Peace Corps staff. It was initially indicated that this would not be possible. CARE wanted someone older and with more experience. They were not certain the Peace Corps hierarchy would be receptive to such a greenhorn.

The next thing I knew, I received word that I was being assigned to CARE-Peace Corps-Colombia and would report to the new CARE-Peace Corps Director, Bill Rayman, one of CARE’s talented “Young Turk” directors—but only if approved by the Peace Corps.

After a series of interviews all the way up to Sargent Shriver at Peace Corps headquarters in Washington, D.C., I arrived at the busy shared CARE and CARE-Peace Corps office in Bogotá in mid- 1965. Rayman, who had replaced Mert Cregger in mid-1964, glanced up from his desk. “Who are you, kid?” When I replied, he looked shocked. “Just how old are you? Have you ever had a moustache?” He stroked his. “Yes, I just shaved it a few weeks ago.” “Grow it back,” he ordered. “You need to look older. Most of the volunteers are older than you!” Rayman himself arrived in Colombia without a moustache and had only recently grown one.

In 1965 CARE-Peace Corps regional offices were in Cali (Jim Puccetti, who had been a Colombia I volunteer), Medellín (Millard Burr), Bucaramanga (Lloyd Gaspar), Barranquilla (Dave Youmans, whom I was replacing), with the main office in Bogotá staffed by Tony Duran and David Wilson, in addition to Bill Rayman.

At that time, 225–250 CARE-Peace Corps volunteers were spread around the country, with some groups completing their service, others in the middle of their two-year terms of service, and new volunteers arriving on a regular basis.

CARE-Peace Corps, Peace Corps and CARE offices existed in the same cities, usually in the same buildings. There were also Peace Corps doctors in each region. The community development programs and CARE’s management were considered superior by us (of course!) and by many of the volunteers assigned to other programs. Requests to transfer to CARE-Peace Corps management from other programs were common, resulting in some friction and bad feelings on the part of the Peace Corps staff. (Between Bill Rayman and Chris Sheldon, however, there was mutual respect and appreciation.)

The End

We were perhaps a bit arrogant, which didn’t help. As mentioned previously, from the beginning of the Peace Corps, the plan had been to have organizations like CARE run the programs since the Peace Corps had no staff to do so. By 1965 the  Peace Corps was up and running with its own staff, so CARE’s continued presence did not make a lot of sense.

In April of 1966, the rural and urban Community Development volunteers went from CARE-Peace Corps to direct Peace Corps supervision. The CARE-Peace Corps international staff moved on: Director Bill Rayman (with his new wife, former Colombia XIII PCV Abby Wasserman) was assigned to Turkey; Tony Duran left CARE and became Peace Corps Director in Honduras; David Wilson went to Costa Rica, Millard Burr to Egypt, Jim Puccetti to the Philippines, and Lloyd Gaspar to Calcutta, India. I was the only one to remain in Colombia, shifting over to CARE-Colombia and moving for five months to Popayán, where I supervised CARE’s Cauca and Nariño programs, then to Bogotá as Assistant Director of CARE-Colombia.

During the nearly five years of the formal CARE-Peace Corps agreement, at least 2,000 Volunteers, male and female, were supervised by CARE. (I don’t remember how many groups were managed by CARE after Colombia I. If anyone reading this does, please let me know.) Quite a few former CARE-Peace Corps Volunteers took up careers in international development with CARE and other NGOs, including several men from Colombia I.

While one of the shortest of my 17 assignments during a fulfilling 33 years with CARE, the CAREPeace Corps experience had a profound impact on my future career. The basic community development approaches CARE-Peace Corps used in Colombia proved useful in the many countries I worked in subsequently. A number of enduring friendships date all the way back to experiences shared in Colombia in the mid-1960s. How fortunate to have the opportunity to get to know Colombia intimately from the Guajira to Córdoba, villages up and down the Rio Magdalena and in the Sierra Nevada, urban barrios in Cartagena, Barranquilla, and Santa Marta.

An interesting sideline: The Peace Corps’s May 1961 Background Paper indicated that Colombia’s population was 12 million. By 2009 it had increased to 45 million!

Viva Colombia!

Sources

CARE, December 1960, “Colombia Community Development—A Survey Report”

Peace Corps, May 1961 Press Release: “Background Paper—Peace Corps Project in Colombia”

Acción Comunal en Colombia—Un Estudio Realizado por CARE y la Federación Nacional de Cafeteros, 1962

January 17, 1966 letter to Warren Wiggins, Deputy Director of the Peace Corps from CARE’s Executive Director Frank Goffio, ending the Peace Corps/CARE relationship

William Rayman, “Final Report—CARE/Peace Corps Colombia Community Development Program September 1961–April 1966”

Wallace J. Campbell, The History of CARE, 1989 (Contains an interesting chapter on the CARE and the Peace Corps. In addition to Colombia, CARE managed programs for the Peace Corps in Guatemala, Turkey and Sierra Leone. Fifty years later, Peace Corps Volunteers are often assigned to CARE programs around the world.)

Ron Burkard, “Viva la Piña—A Community Development Story,” Friends of Colombia Newsletter, April 2007