2010.10.09: October 9, 2010: Virginia DeLancey served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nigeria from 1962 to 1964
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2010.10.09: October 9, 2010: Virginia DeLancey served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nigeria from 1962 to 1964
Virginia DeLancey served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nigeria from 1962 to 1964
They wound up in Buguma, a town in the Niger Delta that was a 21/2-hour motorized canoe ride away from the nearest sizable city. She was assigned a teaching job in a private business school and ended up instructing students in everything from English to sewing to "netball," an English version of basketball.
Virginia DeLancey served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nigeria from 1962 to 1964
Pioneers in the Peace Corps
50 years after Kennedy proposed the Peace Corps, some of the earliest volunteers look back with pride
[Excerpt]
Virginia DeLancey, 70 Nigeria, 1962-64
Growing up in Cleveland, Virginia DeLancey was as sheltered as could be. When her friends scattered during college vacation breaks, her parents ordered her home, not wanting her to be out in the world unsupervised.
Soon after graduation, though, she and her new husband broke away by joining the Peace Corps. They were assigned to Nigeria, a country they knew little about.
They wound up in Buguma, a town in the Niger Delta that was a 21/2-hour motorized canoe ride away from the nearest sizable city. She was assigned a teaching job in a private business school and ended up instructing students in everything from English to sewing to "netball," an English version of basketball.
The school was, to be polite, minimalist: Its walls and roof were made of corrugated metal, and when rain poured from the sky, the noise was deafening.
"We ended up doing a whole lot of shouting while we were teaching," she said.
The school also had a library that consisted of a single bookcase holding a volume of Shakespeare and a few books supplied by the Russian Embassy. She managed to wheedle donations from American bibliophiles, and by the time her service ended, the books took up an entire room. The students named it the DeLancey Library.
DeLancey went on to get a doctorate in economics, and spent years teaching and doing research in Cameroon, Egypt and Somalia. Now living in Morton Grove, she still does occasional consulting on international development.
"I never would have dreamed it," she said of her decades of globe hopping. "(The Peace Corps) causes a lot of changes in your life. Changes you never expected."
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Headlines: October, 2010; Peace Corps Nigeria; Directory of Nigeria RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Nigeria RPCVs; 50th Anniversary of the Peace Corps
When this story was posted in December 2010, this was on the front page of PCOL:
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Story Source: Chicago Tribune
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