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> In North Borneo, June Jensby, 19, a Webber, Kans., 4-H girl, found that every long house in her bailiwick had a rusty Singer sewing machine, purchased years ago as a status symbol. But nobody knew how to work them. She scored a considerable local success by oiling the machines and giving sewing lessons. Since then, she has enlarged her curriculum to include lessons in playing volleyball, building latrines and making jam from bananas and brewing soup from cucumbers and eggs.
> In Punjab, India, Peace Corpsmen arrived to find that the U.S. foreign aid program had purchased an electric wheat-grinding machine months ago for the natives' use. Unfortunately, it had sat idle ever since. Reason: the electric cord had a flat-pronged American-style plug instead of the round-pronged plug needed in India. The Peace Corpsman merely chopped off the American plug, grafted on an Indian plug, and put the machine to work to the great gratification of the whole community.
> In Montalvania, Brazil, David Knoll, 20, of Chatham Center, N.Y., lives in a hovel about the size of a U.S. bath room. Yet he has changed the whole economy of the village by persuading the peasants to pool their oxen in a farm cooperative. To Knoll, the experience has been inspiring. "After I leave the corps, I want to do more with direct contact between people and the U.S. We've got to get down into the soil with these people. White shirts and cocktail parties aren't going to swerve them away from Communism."
— In St. Lucia, a dreamy little Caribbean isle where only 14 volunteers are stationed, the local paper paid the Peace Corps its highest compliment. Said the Voice of St. Lucia: "When the Peace Corps first landed in St. Lucia, there was skepticism behind the welcoming speeches. 'Here they come,' said one socially prominent St. Lucian woman, 'straight from school to people who manage very nicely earning nothing—to teach them about refrigeration and The Star-Spangled Banner.' But today, America's Peace Corpsmen in St. Lucia have assimilated themselves into the St. Lucian society with an enthusiasm that would have made the first missionaries quake in horror. They are on first-name terms with thousands."
Corpsmen have piled up hundreds of these tiny triumphs—ranging from teaching the twist in Nyasaland to growing lettuce in Brazil to building badminton courts in Borneo. They have been treed by African buffaloes, serenaded by Filipino gigolos, adopted as sons by Southeast Asian aborigines, frightened by playful natives tossing pythons in their laps.