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Oral history
Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection
RPCV-ACC-2019-059
Philip Lilienthal served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia from 1965 to 1967 as a legal advisor, then as Peace Corps staff from 1969 to 1974 in several different positions. He served alongside his wife in Ethiopia and worked as a legal advisor for government agencies. He also started a youth summer camp in response to a request by the emperor's granddaughter, who was interested in breaking down ethnic barriers. This experience and his work running a summer camp in the U.S. later led him to create Global Camps Africa, which operates in South Africa. From 1969 to 1972, Lilienthal worked at Peace Corps headquarters in the General Counsel's office as an Attorney-Advisor, where among other issues, he dealt with free speech related to volunteer protests against the Vietnam War, and the proposed consolidation of Peace Corps into the umbrella volunteer ACTION agency. Next Lilienthal served as Peace Corps Regional Director for Mindanao, Philippines, from 1972 to 1973, then Deputy Peace Corps Director for Thailand from 1973 to 1974. In these posts, he gained a perspective of the other side of the conflict between the central office and the field. In 2013, Lilienthal was awarded the National Peace Corps Association's Sargent Shriver Award for Distinguished Humanitarian Service for his contributions to humanitarian causes at home and abroad. Interviewed by Evelyn Ganzglass, January 7, 2019. 2 digital audio files (web streaming files combined into 1 file).
Oral history
Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection
RPCV-ACC-2019-058
Natalie Gee Hall served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand from 1967 to 1969 as an English teacher. She met and married her husband during training in Hawaii. Due to Peace Corps policy, they were forced to resign from training with their first group, Thai 18, because they had been accepted initially as single volunteers. They were required to reapply as a married couple. After being accepted again, they trained in DeKalb, Illinois, with the Thai 19 group that received part of its training during the summer of their junior year in college and part after they graduated. Hall discusses the negatively competitive "de-selection" process that asked trainees to rate each other's likelihood to succeed. Once the Halls arrived in Narathiwat, Thailand, Natalie taught English in the girls' high school and her husband taught in the boys' high school. Together, they also taught English to adults using a language curriculum developed in Thailand. Hall discusses the on-going insurgency in southern Thailand as well as the presence of Air America U.S. contractors conducting secret supply runs to Vietnam, and local support for the U.S. fighting the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. She ends by talking about her advocacy work for Peace Corps funding and changes in Peace Corps health care and disability policy. Interviewed and recorded by Evelyn Ganzglass, January 16, 2019. 2 digital audio files (web streaming files combined into 1 file).
Oral history
Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection
RPCV-ACC-2019-022
Patrick Corrigan served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand from August 1989 to November 1992. For the first two years he taught English in a middle school in Karung, a town in the Banrai district of the Uthai Thani province in central Thailand. In the third year he lived in Bangkok and traveled throughout Thailand as an assistant to the director of the Thai affiliate of the World Wildlife Fund. Corrigan talks about teaching Thai teachers more active instruction methods and teaching children (who couldn't afford to take the bus to the main school) in a small satellite school that he and other teachers built. He discusses building a pig farm for his school and other entrepreneurial projects, such as the production of shampoo and t-shirts. Corrigan also talks about his post-Peace Corps work in Thailand with a conservation and community development project that helped the Karen indigenous people stay on their ancestral lands. Interviewed and recorded by Evelyn Ganzglass, September 11, 2018. 2 digital audio files (web streaming files combined into 1 file).
Oral history
Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection
RPCV-ACC-2016-012
James V. ("Jim") Zurer served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand (Group 12) from January 1966 to December 1967. Jim recounts his experience as a community organizer in the Nikhom Self-Help Land Settlement in Sugneigolok, Amphor Waeng district, in the province of Narathiwat. Jim and his wife, Diana, and another volunteer worked with a small team of Thai government workers to help resettle poor ethnic Thai families, who were given free land and loans to become agriculturists and bolster the Thai ethnic presence in this largely Muslim Malay highland jungle region right near the border with Malaysia. Although his experience was transformational for him, he does not think he contributed much to the betterment of the lives of the communities with which he worked. In subsequent years, many of the ethnic Thais who resettled in this region sold their land to the Muslim/Malay population and used the profit of their sales to move back to the regions from which they came. Both he and his wife talk about the training they got to prepare for the unstructured nature of their jobs in Thailand. 1 digital audio file. Interviewed and recorded by Evelyn Ganzglass on November 14, 2015.
Oral history
Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection
RPCV-ACC-2016-011
Diana Zurer served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand from January 1966 to December 1967. She served in the Nikhom Self-Help Land Settlement in southern Thailand across the river from the border with Malaysia. Diana speaks of the frustrations of being one of six female volunteers (all married to other volunteers) in a largely male oriented program. She discusses midwifery training she received and the influence she had in getting village women to seek better prenatal care in a hospital in a larger, more distant town. She also talks about how the difficulties and time-consuming nature of "keeping house" in the settlement kept her, at least initially, from having much time to carry out her development activities. She tells a wonderful story of her parents visiting her and her husband in the settlement and staying in the Queen Mother's fancy house in this town. In addition, she talks favorably about the training her group received at the University of Missouri, including a field assignment in Centralia, Missouri, home of the John Birch Society. 1 digital audio file. Interviewed and recorded by Evelyn Ganzglass, November 14, 2015.
Oral history
Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection
RPCV-ACC-2020-023
William Shaw served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand from January 1966 to March 1968. He did construction work as part of a community development program, first in Satun province near the Malaysian border, and then for the last 9 months, in the Nakhon Phanom province in the northeast on the Mekong River near the Laos border. He was reassigned there because a lot of money was pouring into the region during the Vietnam War since it was near the Ho Chi Minh Trail where active bombing was being conducted. After his service, Shaw became a Peace Corps trainer in Hawaii, where he met his Thai wife who was a Peace Corps language instructor. Because of his excellent Thai language skills, he also served as a State Department escort interpreter for Thai officials visiting the U.S. After retirement from a 25 year career in the information technology business, Shaw and his wife lived in Songkhla, his wife's hometown in southern Thailand, for 15 years while he taught English and business classes. To this day he maintains his close ties with the remaining members of his Thailand 12 group. Interviewed and recorded by Evelyn Ganzglass, September 10, 2019. 2 digital audio files (web streaming files combined into 1 file).