Peace Corps Country Director For Korea
In January, 1966, O'Donnell saw a newspaper story about a local man serving as a Peace Corps administrator in Guatemala. "This was the first time I learned that people could actually get paid to be in the Peace Corps," O'Donnell says. "That it wasn't just volunteers. So I wrote this cold letter about my experience in business. I was so naïve." O'Donnell had lost his first wife following the birth of their sixth child and battled alcoholism and was looking for a chance to do something different. "I was at a point in my life when I wished to be more mission- than profit-oriented," O'Donnell says.
O'Donnell accepted an assignment from the Peace Corps to be Country Director for South Korea and to start the program. O'Donnell's assignment was to establish educational programs in English, math, science, and physical education. "You went in and you sank or swam," says O'Donnell. O'Donnell found that managing Peace Corps Volunteers was different than working in private industry. "By and large, people who applied to the Peace Corps had energy and ability, and my biggest job was to point them in the right direction and then get the hell out of the way," O'Donnell says.
By 1969 the US was at the height of the Vietnam War and there were 300 volunteers in South Korea "and they were pissed at our government for the war, and they really wanted to make a statement, so they decided it would be best to march on the U.S. embassy in South Korea. I sat down with them and said, 'Listen, what you should do is put together a delegation, and go to the various pockets of volunteers to have them sign petitions, then select a few of them to go to Congress and tell them what they're thinking over here.' I told them that I'd pick up the tab. I'd rather have them doing that than demonstrating on the streets of Seoul. That would have been a mess." O’Donnell’s leadership of the Peace Corps in Korea was recognized by President Park Chung Hee, who awarded O’Donnell the Order of Civil Merit as O'Donnell completed four years as Country Director.
Read more about this topic: Kevin O'Donnell
Famous quotes containing the words peace, corps, country and/or director:
“It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Tjaden: How do they start a war?
Albert: Well, one country offends another.
Tjaden: How could one country offend another? You mean there’s a mountain over in Germany gets mad at a field in France?”
—Maxwell Anderson (1888–1959)
“Your audience gives you everything you need. They tell you. There is no director who can direct you like an audience.”
—Fanny Brice (1891–1951)