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Shriver had cause for insomnia—as one event swiftly proved. Hardly had the Peace Corps put its feet on foreign ground than there was a major flap: a corps girl named Margery Michelmore, stationed in Nigeria, dropped a home-addressed postcard that seemed critical of life in that shoeless African nation; it was picked up, put in anti-American channels, and screechingly publicized.*Shriver is convinced that the subsequent success of the Peace Corps has been such that there will be no repetition of that incident. "It won't happen again —not like that," he says. "We've got some money in the bank now."
The Tiny Triumphs. He is probably right. For the Peace Corps is no longer just an experiment. Last week the first contingent of Peace Corps veterans began to return home after completing their two-year stints. They had not changed the face of the world's political map; their numbers are too few for that. But there are 4,826 volunteers overseas now, and a buildup begins this month to increase the corps to 9,000 by next January. They will be scattered in 47 countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. In scores of small ways, through their own zeal and ingenuity, the Peace Corpsmen have made a disproportionate number of friends for the U.S. Items:
>In Ethiopia, two California schoolteachers—Beulah Bartlett, 65, and Blythe Monroe, 66—moved in on an abandoned schoolhouse, whitewashed it themselves, turned it into an excellent training school for native teachers. The spinster pair earned a special audience from His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, and Beulah said after the meeting, "Oh, we think he's just the sweetest little man in the world." Beyond Beulah and Blythe, the Peace Corps' 276 schoolteachers in Ethiopia have caused a remarkable change. Peace Corps teachers constitute half the faculty of every high school outside Addis Ababa. Since they bolstered Ethiopia's teaching force, in mid-1962, high school enrollment has nearly doubled—the greatest increase since the Ethiopian school system was started in 1908. "This," says Harris Wofford, corps representative for Ethiopia, "is what the Peace Corps was born for—to enable a country that really wants to move to move faster than it otherwise could."
> In Cumaná, Venezuela, Philip Lusardi, 27, of San Diego asked fishermen how they were doing at catching squid, which is profitable because Latin Americans consider it a delicacy, happily pay high prices for it whenever it is available. The fishermen replied that their squid catch was awful. Why? Well, squid were just too smart to be caught in wholesale numbers. Lusardi squatted in the sand, and the fishermen gathered round while he sketched diagrams of a net-and-jar technique that European fishermen use to outsmart squid. It worked in Venezuela—and Phil Lusardi is king of the beach.