2007.11.09: November 9, 2007: Headlines: Figures: COS - Dominican Republic: Politics: Congress: Election2008 - Dodd: Concord Monitor: Dodd's career in service began with the Peace Corps

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Dodd's career in service began with the Peace Corps

Dodd's career in service began with the Peace Corps

When Dodd was a volunteer, the training was demanding, as if he had joined the Army. Members of his group prepared in Puerto Rico, where they awoke early, ran and then studied intensive Spanish for the day. They also embarked on team-building exercises, where small groups were dropped off in the forest with a map and a compass and ordered to blaze a trail to a distant pickup point. Once in the country, Dodd and most of the other volunteers were assigned to work in villages as links between the local people and an agency of the Dominican government, called the Office of Community Development. Dodd was assigned to Dona Alicia's village, Moncion. There, he was to organize committees and hold meetings to gather consensus on what projects the locals needed. Dodd stayed with another volunteer, John Epler, as he looked for a place to live on his own. Epler introduced Dodd to Dona Alicia. From that point on, Dodd started every morning with breakfast in her home. It had a corrugated tin roof and no running water. Dona Alicia cooked over a charcoal fire. The food was always the same - something between oatmeal and porridge, Dodd recalled. It did not taste very good. Epler said Dodd was more outgoing and comfortable than the other volunteers with talking to the poor "campesinos" in the villages, even if his Spanish was less than fluent. "He was the kind of guy that didn't really have the language hold him back," Epler said. "People got tickled by his sense of humor, his kidding around."

Dodd's career in service began with the Peace Corps

Dodd's career in service began with the Peace Corps

Senator hopes to expand organization's role

By Ethan Wilenski-Lanford
Monitor staff
November 09. 2007 12:35AM

A few years ago, Chris Dodd visited the bedside of a Caribbean woman in the Bronx. She was in her 90s and lay in a coma, dying.

Dodd, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, told her stories about people they had known 40 years earlier. He even asked her to dance.

"I think we saw a little smile on her face when I suggested that a good merengue would perk her up," Dodd said.

But the woman, Dona Alicia, did not awake. Dodd was with her and her son when she died.

In 1966, she had welcomed Dodd into her previous home, in a mountain village in the Dominican Republic. During his two years volunteering there with the Peace Corps, they grew close, sharing breakfast every morning. Dodd's goal was to help the local people by building schools and teaching more efficient small-scale farming. But Dodd says he benefited from the experience as well. He came back to the United States more mature, according to his family, and with a greater understanding of the world.

Forty years later, Dodd credits the experience with making him a more effective leader. As president, Dodd would

make service central to his administration. His plans include expanding AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps's domestic cousin, from 70,000 to 1 million volunteers. He would create a rapid response volunteer corps to respond to domestic emergencies, would require high school students to serve 100 hours in their communities in order to graduate and would reate a Cabinet-level service adviser.

In today's political climate, he believes that Peace Corps volunteers could do important work, helping to spread American goodwill in the Middle East. He wants to expand the program there, to give more people the opportunity to represent America abroad, as he did as a young man.

Peace boot camp

The Peace Corps, created by President Kennedy in 1961, was designed as a challenging opportunity to serve. Dodd says it was Kennedy's call to service that spurred him to join.

When Dodd was a volunteer, the training was demanding, as if he had joined the Army. Members of his group prepared in Puerto Rico, where they awoke early, ran and then studied intensive Spanish for the day. They also embarked on team-building exercises, where small groups were dropped off in the forest with a map and a compass and ordered to blaze a trail to a distant pickup point.

Once in the country, Dodd and most of the other volunteers were assigned to work in villages as links between the local people and an agency of the Dominican government, called the Office of Community Development. Dodd was assigned to Dona Alicia's village, Moncion. There, he was to organize committees and hold meetings to gather consensus on what projects the locals needed.

Dodd stayed with another volunteer, John Epler, as he looked for a place to live on his own. Epler introduced Dodd to Dona Alicia. From that point on, Dodd started every morning with breakfast in her home. It had a corrugated tin roof and no running water. Dona Alicia cooked over a charcoal fire. The food was always the same - something between oatmeal and porridge, Dodd recalled. It did not taste very good.

Epler said Dodd was more outgoing and comfortable than the other volunteers with talking to the poor "campesinos" in the villages, even if his Spanish was less than fluent.

"He was the kind of guy that didn't really have the language hold him back," Epler said. "People got tickled by his sense of humor, his kidding around."

A farmer named Tobacco Rayes took Dodd out in the fields and taught him the Spanish names of different crops.

"He looked like Clint Eastwood. I mean, this guy, he had cheekbones that were up around here," said Dodd, pointing high on his face, near his eyes. "He was wearing a hat. Straight as an arrow."

In many ways, it was a new world for the young Dodd, who grew up in a wealthy Connecticut suburb as the son of a U.S. senator. Living among the poor villagers, Dodd said, he learned to empathize in a new way. He assembled a cadre of people willing to help out with his projects, which included a new maternity care and child health clinic. But not all of his undertakings were successful.

One of his first projects was in a village even more remote than Moncion. There was no road and no electricity. It took hours to walk to the settlement. The village school had a dirt floor and a thatched roof. It was obvious to Dodd that it should be replaced, and he was eager to get to work - even if the villagers themselves were hesitant about the project.

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It only took 10 minutes to demolish the rickety building. The next step was slower. It took Dodd six or seven months to secure the finances and organize the labor necessary to rebuild. In the meantime, the village had no school, and children crowded into houses for lessons. "Here was the brilliant American coming down, and what does he suggest?" he said. " 'The first thing we do, let's tear down the only school we have.' " He chuckled. "But then, of course, it was not so funny," Dodd said. "The people in town, when I was leaving, liked to tease me about how smart I was."

That misstep stayed with Dodd. His friends who served with him in the Peace Corps said that those lessons would shape Dodd's foreign policy if he is elected president. "I know that he would be extremely sensitive, to allow another country to develop how they want to develop, as long as it's done within a free society," said a fellow volunteer, Tony Tramontano. "Their sense of self, and their sense of destiny is as important - is more important - than what we feel is what is important. Look at Iraq."


Strife at home, abroad

While the mission was a time of personal growth and experience for Dodd, it was also a time of public and political ferment.

In 1965, just a year before Dodd arrived, 30,000 American troops invaded the Dominican Republic to stamp out a leftist revolution. A military dictator had been assassinated in 1961, and Washington was concerned that the country might fall under the influence of the Soviet Union.

The Peace Corps was the only international development organization to work behind rebel lines, said Randy Adams, who volunteered with Dodd and went on to spend much of his career in Latin America.

"You wouldn't know who you'd bump into that might have had a relative that was killed by either the (Organization of American States) or the U.S. 82nd Airborne," Epler said. The OAS sent coalition forces led by the United States to the Caribbean country.

In the capital, it was not unusual to see anti-American graffiti, Tramontano said. In the villages, things were generally quieter. Dodd and Tramontano found themselves engaging in small-scale diplomacy. Dodd said many people there assumed President Johnson had a role in Kennedy's assassination, since violent political transitions were so ordinary in the Dominican Republic. Together, the volunteers explained how American democracy worked as best as they could.

"There were many times, sitting and drinking rum with a group of town leaders, and having a discussion," Tramontano said. "What other 22-, 23-year-old could have an opportunity like that?"

Elsewhere in the country, events had taken a more tragic course. A volunteer in Dodd's group died in a car accident, speeding away from gunfire between rebels and the military. And once, before Dodd arrived, Epler and others dove to the floor amid a gunfight, laughing nervously to cover up their fear.

The chaos around them may have made turmoil back home seem even more distant. Dodd was in the Dominican Republic during the race riots in Detroit and Newark in the summer of 1967 and when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated the following year. And then Robert Kennedy was shot in June 1968. A Dominican man drove all night, waking up Dodd with tears on his face to tell him the news. These events were even more difficult to accept for lonely volunteers so far from home.

Resurrecting service

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The Peace Corps has changed since the 1960s. After aggressive marketing campaigns in the 1980s, with mottos including "Peace Corps: The toughest job you'll ever love," the program's strength and volume have dwindled. When Dodd went to the Dominican Republic, he was one of 17,000 volunteers around the world, he said. Today, there are about 7,000 Peace Corps volunteers. In the late 1960s, there were hundreds of volunteers in Iran, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Today, none of those countries has a Peace Corps program. "We only have two Peace Corps programs in the Muslim world: one in Morocco and one in Jordan," Dodd said. "It's a fraction of itself." Dodd is campaigning for president while promising to double the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 and again by 2050.

A Dodd staff member said the senator would like to see volunteers in every country in the Middle East if safety concerns are met. He has introduced a bill to reduce impediments that prevent uninsured Americans from volunteering and to take other steps to improve the experience of Peace Corps volunteers. Last year, on a trip to Egypt, Dodd made a case for Peace Corps volunteers in that country, but the foreign minister was unfamiliar with the program. Since then, Dodd has continued to make a case for the expansion of the program in Egypt and elsewhere. If and when Iraq stabilizes, Dodd said that he would love to see volunteers there.


"There's nothing like having an American who brings a lot of idealism and concern about people," he said. "You're not trying to sell a policy. You're just trying to work with people. I think that's more of a reflection of who we are."




Dodd is not the first person to suggest such an idea. In his first State of the Union address after Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush pledged to give the Peace Corps a larger role in the world.

"America needs citizens to extend the compassion of our country to every part of the world," Bush said. "So we will renew the promise of the Peace Corps, double its volunteers over the next five years, and ask it to join a new effort to encourage development and education and opportunity in the Islamic world."

But Bush has done little work to expand the Peace Corps. Since he said those words, volunteers have increased by only 20 percent. Josie Duckett, a Peace Corps spokeswoman, said the administration has made no effort to re-establish programs in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Libya.

------ End of article



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