Crisis Corps: Keeping Active with Peace Corps

Last year I completed my fourth Peace Corps and second Crisis Corps

assignment: this time in El Salvador. The last three tours have not been a full two years, but each has served as a vivid and concentrated reminder of the challenges and rewards inherent in the Peace Corps. As an early PCV in Colombia (1963-65), I have clear memories of suspected gay volunteers being "selected-out" during training. Very few of us made it to Colombia and other countries during those years. It has been quite a different atmosphere in my recent assignments with the Crisis Corps where, and probably also influenced by tenured academic job security, I have been able to be myself and to talk openly about my longstanding partnership back home.

Crisis Corps is a two-year-old Peace Corps program designed to give former volunteers an opportunity to do international relief work. It is also an opportunity to re-immerse and experience again the personal challenges and rewards - with perhaps more knowledge and maturity than the first go-around. Crisis Corps assignments vary from three-month direct recovery efforts immediately following a disaster to, in my two assignments, community risk assessments and recommendations for disaster prevention and mitigation completed with short-term in-country investigations with follow-up reports once I returned home. It was my experience that the entire emotional roller coaster ride of the typical two-year Peace Corps experience is repeated in a much compressed time period.

My latest Crisis Corps assignment in El Salvador had the additional benefit of being able to interact with on-going Peace Corps programs there and the chance to collaborate and compare notes with volunteers in the field. This included a new volunteer in El Triumfo who had worked with me back home during the previous year on a research project at Iowa State University, where I teach, to assess emergency management activity for the State of Iowa. I was also able to help with closeout advising for a forestry group soon to return to the states.

My Crisis Corps assignment was to assess disaster response activity in coastal villages on the Bahia de Jiquilisco in southern El Salvador. It became quickly apparent that the problems experienced in these coastal villages were the result of environmentally damaging developmental practices throughout the watershed, including deforestation, channelization of rivers, and a rapidly growing urban population living ever closer to environmental risks. I was asked to develop a broad picture of disaster prevention and response activity in the region. Old skills were revisited as it became apparent that the report was best written in Spanish. It was later translated into English using translation software.

A highlight of the experience was participation in a Crisis Corps sponsored conference in San Salvador that brought together Peace Corps country directors and trainers from throughout Central America and the Caribbean to discuss post Hurricane Mitch disaster management. I briefed them on my previous Crisis Corps assignment on Puka Puka atoll in the South Pacific during the summer of 1998, that involved assessing vulnerability from many social and physical perspectives, as well as introducing them to the 1999 work on ecologically-based management and mitigation activity in El Salvador. It is rewarding to hear that Peace Corps is now using some of this material for volunteer training.

I came home to Ames last July with thoughts of returning to my phased-retirement program at ISU. I was asked by our dean to be interim department chair of architecture, a post I assumed this January. When I signed on to the phased-retirement program, I was in search of new adventures such as the recent Crisis Corps assignments. I seem to have found a new adventure closer to home - at least for now - and my partner who generously tolerates my absences.•