RPCV Eric Lax talks about his work in the Peace Corps in Micronesia and Turkey
Through the Peace Corps, a strange way to do it. I was working -- I had been a Peace Corps volunteer for two years in Micronesia, and then I was something called a Peace Corps fellow here in Washington, with the notion that you spend a year here and then you went overseas to run a program. And Robert Rice, who was a writer on "The New Yorker" for 25 years, his father was Elmer Rice, the playwright. I was sent to Turkey to look at the Peace Corps program there. And at the time, the evaluators who did this really wrote what amounted to "New Yorker" articles about what was going on with the program. It was about the people and events, and it really read like a narrative.
And I was assigned to him. He got stuck with this Peace Corps fellow. We went to Turkey and we spent six weeks. And he called me up after I turned in my portion of the report, and he said, gosh, he said, you know, you have a flare for this. He said, my father taught me some things, and if you`d like, I`d be happy to teach you some things.
Well, you know, that was, to me, kind of along the lines of the burning bush talking to a pedestrian. And I said, OK. I guess I could spare the time, thank you very much. So that was 1970.
