Progressive Voice is a weekly opinion column. The views and opinions expressed in the column are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect
Waging Peace
WAGING PEACE: Guest post by Sandy Nathan By Maud Easter on January 8, 2021 at 10:00 AM
In 1966 I was among the first group of Peace Corps volunteers to serve in the Republic of Korea. We were young; we taught English, mainly to public middle and secondary schools students; we wanted to learn; and mostly we wanted to make a positive difference in the world. Although we arrived in Korea 13 years after the 1953 Korean War armistice, we found a very poor country still recovering in every way from that brutal war. We adjusted to challenging and unusual (to us) living circumstances, diet, and culture, made friends, worked hard, learned with varying degrees of competence to speak Korean and understand Korean culture, and after two years, most of us returned to the U.S. in 1968 feeling like we had gained much more than we gave.