Epilogue

Since 1963, Peace Corps Volunteers together with local Gabonese workers, built over 600 classrooms, hundreds of teacher houses and thousands of school desks throughout Gabon. There have been many other development projects during this almost 40-year span including teaching, forestry management, fisheries and health care.

The most dismaying incident remains the unsolved murder of PCV Karen Phillips of Philadelphia who was raped and murdered in Oyem, in December 1998.

Presently, there are no Americans serving as Peace Corps Volunteers throughout Gabon. The June 2004 PC group was cancelled with no future volunteers scheduled to serve in Gabon.

On July 8, 2005, Peace Corps Director Gaddi H. Vasquez announced that the Peace Corps will officially suspend its program in the African nation of Gabon effective August 31. The decision comes after a 2-year review of operations that showed significantly higher costs to support the volunteers in Gabon relative to other Peace Corps programs in Africa. "The Peace Corps regrets the necessity to suspend the program in Gabon after a 31-year partnership with its citizens. More than 1,460 Americans have respectfully and honorably assisted the people of Gabon as Peace Corps volunteers through a long history, dating back to 1963 when the first group arrived to build schools in rural areas," said Director Vasquez. Factors contributing to the program suspension include the high cost of the Gabon program, weighing in at over three times as much as the average Peace Corps program in Africa, and a scarcity in finding host country counterparts to work with the volunteers and ensure their transition into the community. In addition, a 2003 Inspector General report documented safety and security costs of $1 million that would be necessary to keep the program operating successfully. The Peace Corps will continue to assess the situation in Gabon and will look at the possibility of re-entry in the future.

Gabon 1 was the first Peace Corps group to conduct a joint Peace Corps/USAID project. It worked.

The most notable project was our first (1963), a primary school built in Okala. 45 years later, the school remains standing and is being used and is known as Ecole Leon Mba. Three professional builders helped us to complete the school within two months. It was an excellent demonstration of US efficiency and quality construction.

Placing teams of PCVs in the field, receiving USAID project funding and providing Volunteers with concrete-to-measure goals and objectives has not regularly been the Peace Corps model.

"Our project was one of the most expensive being run by the peace corps at the time, or so we later found out. In the fall of 1964 we ran out of money to pay the workers. The official solution out of washington was we should continue as we were with volunteer help. So we did. At Alene we had 10 to 12 guys who pretty much stayed on. Like at most sites we "paid" them with construction materials that we weren't going to be using or food from the ration boxes that no one liked. It made it a real challenge to finish off the sites by year end and in some of the locations it got pretty bad. their workers came from other locations and needed the money to live while working for us. So they had to go home. And in other towns there was other work to be done and if we weren't paying them, all of $1/day as I recall, then they did other things.

Alene, Oct 10, 1964. Gabon one is gone. Rod Oakley has been sent to another site to help out for a month and Dick Schuster has taken ill and returned to Libreville for medical reasons. So I am alone. its raining, I have a cold. I have been working every morning on the houses trying to get them up and done, and then working afternoons painting the windows in the school with a stain made from diesel fuel and paint pigments. Seems like we had to do most of the painting since there wasn't any paint in Gabon before we came, and the Gabonese would spill it everywhere. We had just poured a house floor that morning, and after painting for 3 hours I went back to see how it was doing.

AGGGGHHHH! A village dog had wondered through leaving footprints everywhere. Then two trucks with supplies arrived. So first I had to help unload the trucks so the guys could get back on the road before dark. You never wanted to drive at night if you could avoid it. then I went back and refinished the floors. By that time I was really dragging.

But just when things seem about as bad as it could be a little scout pulls up with some mail, magazines that my folks sent me each month, and a letter or two. All of a sudden things seemed to be OK again.

So all of us had to bust our butts in Oct-Dec to get the sites done. The local staff moved up a year end conference in Libreville to November, in part to give us all a break and a rest, before sending us back out for the year end push. There was talk of closing down the project, or extending it by 4 months since there was no way we could keep on schedule without paying the workers.

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Upon return from Gabon, I returned to the University of Minnesota with the intent of entering the Foreign Service upon completion of college. Instead, I entered the Federal Government in the Management Intern Program as a Planning Office in the Office of Emergency Planning, Executive Office of the President in 1966.

One of my fellow interns in the Executive Office of the President was Paul Wolfowitz, former Deputy Director of DOD and presently head of the World Bank. He left the government to return to school due to his draft board's intent on sending him to Vietnam only to return as the chief architect of the present war/occupation in Iraq.

While I worked on governmental recovery plans for nuclear attack and other disaster programs, I became aware of the French and Japanese economic systems of "indicative planning". It appeared that relying solely on market forces was an inefficient mechanism for furthering our national interests. I wrote and submitted to Humphrey several proposals on how the US could take advantage of indicative planning that involved participation by all including Congressional concurrence and Executive Office execution.

Humphrey quickly shot down my ideas stating, "The Republicans will accuse me of being a communist if I suggest your proposal. For better or worse, Wall Street runs our economy. We in the government are needed to provide some fairness for all Americans and to keep working to make this a safer and better world for all."

My immediate boss at the Office of Emergency Planning, Al Patti, was a former OSS officer assigned to Vietnam immediately after the Japanese departed. Patti became good friends with a number of Vietnamese military commanders including General Ho Chi Minh.

One day, Ho had a long discussion with Patti, asking Patti to help him to receive US support. Ho believed that the US was the only power able to stop the French from taking over Vietnam in the vacuum left by the departing Japanese. He also asked Patti to obtain for him a copy of the US Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights since he planned to base Vietnam on the US political model.

Patti was turned down by the Francophile-oriented US State Department. One night, Patti crept into the local US Embassy in Bangkok and "borrowed" a copy of the US Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights which he later presented to Ho. Today, these documents are the foundation of the Vietnamese governmental system.

In late 2001, I was invited to dinner at the home of Sargent and Eunice Shriver. Shriver appeared to very much enjoy reminiscing about his days as the first Peace Corps Director and also his days of beginning six other Federal agencies including the Job Corps and Legal Assistance programs. Eunice started Special Olympics and their son, Tim, now heads the program. Maria, their daughter, recently wrote a book, "What's the matter with Timmy" concerning the appreciation of the many talents of the handicapped and Eunice kindly signed the copies I had recently purchased for holiday gifts.

One of the questions I asked Shriver was what criteria he used to select initial PC, country directors. He answered, "We were all new at this and really didn't have much time or a wide number of applicants. The most important criteria was having someone in the country who could best assure the security of our kids."

Shriver then bragged about the fact that more than 140,000 Americans had served in the Peace Corps since its inception. I responded, "It should be over a million." Shriver agreed.

I returned to Gabon in June 2002. These are a few of the photos. The purpose of the trip was to revisit the villages where I had helped build schools and to establish additional contacts for beginning ecotours to Gabon.

After a 38-year absence, I had mixed feelings about returning to Gabon. I believed that the Gabon of my memories would be shattered by the changes of 38 years of Westernization/urbanization.

The first issue to be solved was obtaining a Gabon visa. I had given 30 days lead time to obtain it but only received the visa from the Embassy the day before departure. My wife and I first went to Paris to attend the Roland Garros (French Open) tennis matches and then we flew to Nice where we stayed and played tennis in Monte Carlo. We are both tennis fanatics. We returned to Paris and my wife flew home and I flew to Libreville via Air Gabon.

The evening arrival was memorable if not pleasant. Deplaning, we were "greeted" by about 100 Gabonese and French military who, it turned out, where there to assure the security of the President of the CAR. Baggage took about two hours to retrieve in a non-airconditioned baggage area. My friend from South Africa, Jenny, was anxiously waiting outside the baggage area and we left for the Hotel Inter-Continental, my base in Libreville. Photos of Libreville public buildings to the right.

The Inter-Continental proved a good base of operations. From there, I rented a relatively inexpensive Renault to visit Okala, Kango and Lambarene. However, I should have rented a four-wheel drive model since my attempt to reach Fougamou from Lambarene proved unsuccessful. The road was even worse than I remembered it, 38 years ago.

The first morning in Libreville, I drove to Okala where we Peace Corps Volunteers and local labor had constructed the first of our primary schools. I brought along a handful of 8 x 10 photos of the original school and construction workers (see photo right) to distribute to the locals. The pictures turned out to be a big hit and I was asked to autograph them.

Fortunately, I met a relative (pictured below) of Jerome M'ba (pictured 5th from left, back row) who knew that his relative had worked with us at the school. Jerome has passed away but was known throughout the area as a great Fang chief and regional leader. The primary school was still in use and was named, Ecole Leon Mba (named after the first President of Gabon, pictured below on school wall).