On Oct. 14, 1960, John F. Kennedy campaigned at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and, in a speech before thousands of college students, asked who among them would be willing to go live and work in the developing world, as part of service to their country.
In the 60 years that followed, tens of thousands of people said they would. Among them were Liz and Chris Cassell, of Quechee. On a trip across the country in 2000, six months after he returned from his own Peace Corps stint, Chris Cassell stopped at the same spot Kennedy stood when he put in motion what would become the Peace Corps. The organization officially began when President Kennedy signed an executive order on March 1, 1961, and appointed Sargent Shriver as its first director.
“You realize wherever you travel in the world, there are still mothers, there are still brothers, there’s still compassion,” said Chris Cassell, who served in Armenia from 1997-99. “You’ll be amazed at how it opens the world.”
While the Peace Corps may have the image of young folks doing a tour after college, that’s not always the case. Some join when they’re looking to switch careers; others join after they’ve retired. The organization works with partners in more than 60 countries on a variety of projects in education, health care, community development and environmental causes.
Liz and Chris Cassell — who met after their time in the Peace Corps — both joined around age 30 after entering the workforce. Liz Cassell had met a group of Peace Corps members on a trip to Nepal, and it got her thinking that there was more to life than the grind of a 9-to-5 job. She also remembered her father traveling internationally for business, returning each time with a doll from a different country.
“I had this image that there is a larger world and that it’s fascinating,” said Liz Cassell, who served in Ukraine from 1996-98.
Chris Cassell was paired with Armenian journalist Vachik Grigorian, and the two worked together to establish an independent press in rural communities, which did not exist during Armenia’s decades as part of the Soviet Union. He also worked to help people, particularly women, create business plans. In the Ukraine, also formerly part of the USSR, Liz Cassell worked with an urban park on environmental awareness, education and energy conservation tasks.
“A lot of people older than 30 did not want you there,” she recalled, citing older people’s wariness of the West after decades under communism.
Even though she was living in a city, there was still a bit of roughing it. Her water was turned on for only a few hours a day.
“You have to have patience, you have to have persistence and a longer vision of what your purpose is,” she said.
A couple years after their service concluded, Liz and Chris met at a lecture in Mendon, Vt., in 2000. On one of their first dates, they were sharing photographs from their time in the Peace Corps when they realized they had the same set of Soviet teacups — red with white polka dots — in Ukraine and Armenia.
“It’s a pretty powerful thing to have in common, both drawn to service,” Chris Cassell said. “That was a major part of our life. It really sped up our relationship. It was like we had known each other for a long time.”
When they married stateside in 2001, Chris’s journalist partner in Armenia was one of his two best men, and a friend of Liz’s traveled from Ukraine to attend.
The Cassells’ service didn’t end there. The couple moved to Oregon, where Chris worked as a Peace Corps recruiter and pursued a master’s degree, while Liz worked at Oregon State University. Later, they spent six years based in Saudi Arabia — Chris as a kindergarten teacher and Liz in renewable energy — and traveling when their children were young, worlds away from the careers they had pre-Peace Corps.
Chris Cassell is a fourth grade teacher at Samuel Morey Elementary School in Fairlee, and Liz Cassell works as an arts and science administrator at Dartmouth College. They returned to the Upper Valley in 2016 to be closer to family.
“Seeing potential in people, I think that’s what Peace Corps allows you to do,” Liz said.
“It’s about making the world a smaller place, a friendlier place, a more connected place,” Chris added.
Larry Daloz estimates that he trekked more than 2,000 miles through Nepal in his 20s from 1963-65, going from village to village to talk to leaders about how to plan infrastructure projects, including meetinghouses and roads, using grant funding. He was part of the second group of Peace Corps volunteers to go to Nepal.
He’d always wanted to work abroad, and when Kennedy started the Peace Corps, Daloz knew it was for him. He saw it as a chance to pay his good fortune in life forward and have an adventure.
“We were in so many villages … that so many Westerners had never seen,” said Daloz, who now lives at Kendal at Hanover. “One of the things that is the most powerful for me now is having been able to speak the language.”
There were no cars, trucks, wagons or even bicycles. Everyone either walked or rode a horse because of the terrain. He’d communicate with friends and family over aeromail, and it would take month for a letter to reach the U.S. When he wasn’t trekking, Daloz lived in a thatched-roof hut with a fellow volunteer, which is where they learned from a shortwave radio that Kennedy had been assassinated. It felt like losing a friend.
After his time in the Peace Corps, Daloz got a doctorate from Harvard and spent two years in Papua New Guinea.
“It totally changed my life,” Daloz said about the Peace Corps. He went on to a career in education, was the founding dean of the Community College of Vermont and became part of the country’s Back to the Land movement.
Barbara Nelson, also a Kendal at Hanover resident, went to Isfahan, Iran, in her early 20s with her husband to teach English at a university. They had a complete immersion in Farsi before they went. At the time, the Peace Corps would not send unmarried women to Iran.
It was when the Vietnam War was heating up and her husband was worried about getting drafted. They did not want to move to Canada, so they decided on the Peace Corps.
“It was a good thing to do, although at the time it was kind of considered an upper middle class sellout by the more radical community,” she said.
While the Shah of Iran embraced Western culture, many Iranians did not, and if Nelson’s blonde hair was showing when she went to the market, sometimes she’d get accosted by young men on bicycles, who would force her against a wall and yell at her.
“What it was was they really believed all Western women were immoral,” she recalled. She learned to swear in Farsi, which would cause them to laugh and eventually back off.
“Iran was actually, for a woman, a pretty difficult place to be,” she said. “The people were very nice and wonderful as you got to know them individually, that was all fine. It was more dealing with public life that was problematic.”
Nelson said she’s not sure whether it changed her life, but she is glad she did it, even though it was hard. She learned to barter and bargain for goods, building relationships with merchants that don’t happen in the United States. But throughout her life, she’s formed connections and friendships with other volunteers.
“I do find something being different with them,” said Nelson, who worked at Harvard’s school of education after returning from the Peace Corps. “There’s a shared kind of culture, of warmth and flexibility and welcoming to other people.”
Rob and Jan Chapman, then in their 20s, arrived in Nigeria in 1964 with their 6-week- and 2-year-old sons. Rob Chapman had just finished an internship at the University of Vermont and was hired as a doctor for Peace Corps volunteers. He was preparing to enter the Air Force as a flight surgeon when a member of the U.S. Public Health Service invited him to join them.
Jan Chapman was hesitant at first and the couple agreed if it didn’t work out for their young family, they’d return to the U.S. Nigeria was newly independent and it was an exciting time.
“It was really a privilege to be there,” Jan Chapman said. “I learned so much and I had so much fun.”
Rob Chapman treated volunteers for digestive problems, malaria and what they called “Honda burns” — which people would get on their legs after riding on the back of Honda bike. He also discovered another need: their mental health. Chapman had originally considered doing his residency in general medicine and his Peace Corps experience influenced his decision to switch to psychiatry. The couple, who live at Kendal, are longtime Upper Valley residents, and Rob Chapman still teaches at the Geisel School of Medicine.
“I’m really a supporter of two years of service of some kind,” Rob Chapman said. “The Peace Corps side really affected the rest of my life. It was a way for us to do something that was meaningful and to do something in a culture that was outside our own with a bunch of other Americans. What a unique experience.”
The Chapmans’ home also became a gathering spot for volunteers throughout Nigeria, where they’d go for a bit of rest and relaxation. Rob Chapman would travel throughout the country visiting volunteers and sometimes Jan would accompany him. To this day, the couple still keeps in touch with people they served with.
Mike Kiess, of Thetford, was in his mid-30s when he joined the Peace Corps staff. He’d just finished getting an MBA and wanted to return to public service after time in the U.S. Navy when he was younger. He ended up working in Bangladesh from 2002 to 2006, reestablishing a volunteer program before it was shut down due to violence against volunteers. He then moved on to Cambodia for two years where he helped start a new Peace Corps program.
“Everyone was learning all together,” he said. “All the new staff, all the volunteers and we had this kind of transparent understanding that we were creating a culture of an organization.”
Shutting down the Bangladesh program had been difficult, and the staff took a Peace Corps sign that hung on their headquarters to bring to Cambodia.
“Their work would continue to live on in another program,” Kiess said, adding that if the program restarts in Bangladesh the sign will be returned. “That hope still exists.”
After his time in the Peace Corps ended, Kiess and his wife, Erika Hoffman-Kiess, remained in Cambodia, where Kiess worked for nongovernmental organizations. The Peace Corps, he said, impacted his life in every possible way.
“The most important thing I think is realizing the way that you can bridge any gap,” Kiess said. “We have a lot of decisiveness in our current American society, it seems to me, and you might think people are so opposite in their values or their belief structures that there’s no way they can understand each other or collaborate or respect each other.”
The Peace Corps taught Kiess, now a workforce housing coordinator at the Upper Valley nonprofit Vital Communities, that that isn’t the case.
“Our overlapping interests are predominant and the interests we have that are in conflict with each other, we can usually find ways to work around those,” he said. “Just by being around each other, you can build the bridges that lead to shared understanding.”
Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.
