About the Peace Corps Memorial MonumentThere is a little known Peace Corps memorial located at the old Hilo County Hospital site near Rainbow Falls to remind us of the origins of the organization. Proposed by John F. Kennedy before he was elected president of the United States, "Kennedy's Kiddie Korps" in a matter of weeks had garnered 30,000 applicants.
Upon learning of Kennedy's assassination Nov. 22, 1963, members of these training units donated a dollar apiece from their $ 10.50 weekly salary to pay for a bronze plaque bearing the words, "
And So, My Fellow Americans, Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You, Ask What You Can Do For Your Country," from his inaugural address.
This memorial was completed with the help of the Hilo Center staff who donated funds to defray the cost of the memorial's base and on Christmas Day, 1963, the memorial was dedicated to the memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, founder of the Peace Corps.
About the Peace Corps
Training Center
Hilo, Hawaii - June 15, 1962 to Sept. 31, 1971
The Peace Corps traces its roots and mission to 1960, when then Senator John
F. Kennedy challenged students at the University of Michigan
to serve their country in the cause of peace by living and working in
developing countries. From that inspiration grew an agency of the federal
government devoted to world peace and friendship. Peace
Corps was officially established: March 1, 1961. Since that time, more than 195,000 Peace Corps Volunteers have
served in 139 host countries to work on issues ranging from AIDS education to
information technology and environmental preservation.
In the Fall of 1962, the Big Island of Hawaii was selected as
a Peace Corps training center. The program partnered with Hilo College,
Center for Cross-Cultural Training and Research (CCCTR) for 10 years. Approximately, 1300 volunteers were annually trained
in Hawaii,
totaling more than 12,000 during the 9 year history. There were several
training sites. Near the northernmost point of the Big Island of Hawaii, there
is a special place called Waipio Valley. Once the home of 50,000 Hawaiians and later
of President John F. Kennedy’s first Peace Corps training camp, today it is a
remote and little-visited place which time has forgotten – and nature has
reclaimed. Pepeekeo (10 miles North of Hilo), Honomu, Ninole, and Waiakea-Uka and Hoolehua, Molokai were also training sites. Dr. Paul Miwa was first
Chancellor of Hilo College. By 1970 UH Hilo
was created (UHHC).
The first Peace Corps Training Camp Director was John “Jake”
Stalker, who served as Training Director from 1964-1967. The second Director
was Phillip Olsen who served as Director from 1967-1972. By 1972, the
Peace Corps had initiated a transition to in-country training. The Big Island
was a major Peace Corps training site from June 15, 1962 to January 14, 1972.
The Peace Corps training library and documentation has been
archived in the UH Hilo
library. In 1996, the collection was transferred to UH Mānoa Hamilton Library:
Hawaiian Collection.
A Brief History of the Hawaii
Training Site (An excerpt from Maretzki, 1965)
Our training takes place on the island
of Hawaii at two training sites, the
town of Hilo and Waipio Valley
fifty-five miles away. Hilo
is a county seat, the largest town on the island, with a population of 25,000.
After the county opened a new hospital in 1961, the old buildings had been left
vacant. The Hawaii County Government agreed to allow use of these facilities
for Peace Corps training and has provided excellent support for our operation.
The buildings have none of the luxury and comfort of modern university
dormitories and classrooms. The largest classroom is in the former men's ward,
trainees are housed in the old nurses cottage, and meals are taken in the
basement which once served as a morgue. The tropical surroundings of Hilo, the houses nestled against the hills overlooking the
wide Hilo Bay
are reminiscent of towns in Southeast Asia
such as Jesselton. In Hilo, too, the pace of
life is different from that in Honolulu
or in many mainland towns. It takes its quiet character from the surrounding
sugar plantation areas for which Hilo is the
primary link to outside suppliers and markets, and from the relaxed port town
and government functions for all of the "Big Island."
For most trainees arriving from the mainland, this setting presents enough of a
contrast to their home towns to provide a general learning environment which
takes on some significance in preparation for the even greater contrasts
confronting the volunteer upon arrival abroad.
This contrastive setting is even more striking in Waipio
valley. The valley which had a sizable settlement of Hawaiians before
Westerners arrived, is flanked by steep cliffs on three sides and opens onto
the Pacific Ocean. From the rimside starting
point of a steep trail, passable only on foot, horseback, or by jeep, the
valley offers a strikingly beautiful view of former rice paddies, now planted
in taro, and the deep green, rich vegetation of bushes and trees lining the
river and the lower valley sides. Almost entirely uninhabited since a tidal
wave in 1946 inundated the small village that existed in historical times, and
the rice paddies of its former residents, the valley is now used by taro
farmers who descend daily for work on their land from a community above the
valley. Although some farmers still maintain occasional residence in some of
the houses which survived, the major settlement of Waipio is now the Peace
Corps training site. This is a "village" of two Philippine-style
houses, two houses patterned after Rural Resettlement homes in Thailand, and a longhouse using a Borneo design. There is also a small building serving as
a store and storage building, and a cook house. The village is surrounded by
dense vegetation, broken here and there by fields and clearings where pig
sties, chicken coops, and the latrines are located. There is no electricity in
the valley and while running water, diverted from a small river, is used for
cooking, trainees bathe in the nearby larger river, following the style of
bathers in all parts of Southeast Asia. This
training site which was described in more detail elsewhere [7] is used to expose
the Peace Corps volunteer to sensory and visceral experiences to which he will
be subject in the rural and small urban communities of Southeast
Asia.
Together these two training sites offer unusually suitable environments for
learning to live and work in Southeast Asia.
Waipio, in particular, has some features that can be of immediate practical
importance in providing crops and animals for the training of agricultural
workers, or science teachers learning to use indigenous materials for
demonstrations, to mention two examples. Its more general training function is
less specific. Sleeping on the elevated wooden floors of the five houses, using
their limited space as a family in Thailand or Sarawak might, caring for pigs
and chickens, killing and butchering them for meals, fishing in the streams with
nets, and a large variety
of experiences similar
to those which volunteers will observe and
participate in abroad undefined these are the essence of the Waipio Valley program for
which the term "transition training" was suggested by those who
planned it. [8] What, exactly, this transition training in the Valley
accomplishes is still a subject for constant review and this explains the
speculative nature of this paper. It is not simply a simulation of a Southeast
Asian environment. Hawaii is not Southeast Asia, even though there are similarities in
climate, crops, and animals. One of the most essential factors for true
simulation is missing. We cannot provide the social nature of a local Southeast
Asian population and the resulting cultural environment. Replication is neither
possible nor necessary as this paper will argue. Instead, transition training
should facilitate transfer learning.
One point of view, that firsthand experience with a style of
life, not unlike that of rural populations in Southeast
Asia, might help to develop a stimulus for creativity in the
volunteer was suggested by John Stalker in the following passage: [9]
We
were also concerned with the problem of how to combat the lassitude, boredom
and constant frustration which faces a Western man working in a rural
environment in Southeast Asia. It was our
contention that the biggest problem facing the Volunteer was not only the lack
of structure in the situation to which he was going, but the lack of
well-defined jobs with which to occupy his time. Therefore, it was important in
training to equip him with tools and techniques which would enable him to make
his cultural environment more livable, and also enable him to make effective
and creative use of the immense amount of spare time he would have. To put it
another way, it was our contention that one of the biggest problems the
Volunteer had was to stop sitting on the stoop and shuffling his feet. What he
needed was confidence that he could alter a portion, at least, of his
environment, and live comfortably in a primitive environment. The classic
illustration came about during World War II with thousands of troops in the
Pacific and Asian islands. They were able to maintain morale by a constant
alteration of the environment in which they found themselves. In turn, the
Peace Corps Volunteer can and should be able to combat the general effects of
culture-shock by busying himself with the daily routine of primitive living.
The Volunteer, then, also acts as a change agent, or catalyst for change, in the
village to which he is assigned. The Transition Training program in Waipio
provides the Volunteer with the tools to accomplish this goal.
Resources
Peace Corps volunteers and local businesses share Aloha at UH Hilo Library
The Fallen Peace Corps Volunteers Memorial Monument
Maretzki, Thomas. 1965. Transition Training:
A Theoretical Approach. Human Organization. Vol 24.(2): 128-134.