Tales from Colombia: The Deeds and Misdeeds of 41 Peace Corps Volunteers Who Answered President Kennedy's Call to Serve

Reprisal killings, terrifying bus rides, cock fights and lady matadors, rescuing imperiled missionaries, Amazon jungle adventures, death on high mountain glaciers, brutal jails, romantic weddings, Christmas in the Caribbean, a Peace Corps baby and touching gifts from simple people who have so little themselves are some of the stories related by the members of Colombia '64. This book chronicles the adventures of this group of forty-one Peace Corps Volunteers who came from across America to train at the University of Nebraska in 1964, only a year after President Kenney's assassination.

These young men and women were from every level of society, from share croppers to Harvard graduates. They were farmers, teachers, mechanics and Marines. Some had only high school educations, many had college degrees. This diverse cross section of American youth received training in agriculture/nutrition and educational television in Nebraska and Puerto Rico, then were scattered across the dense jungles, rugged mountains, deep valleys and tropical plains of Colombia, South America.

Here they worked in the big cities and in the smallest, most primitive villages. They worked with educated, well-to-do Colombians and with high mountain Amerindians who retained their native customs and dress. They served among the alegre (joyful, cheerful) predominately black population of the Caribbean coast, the mixed races of the interior valleys and the taciturn populations of the high mountains, descendants of the warriors of the once powerful Chibcha Empire. There were the costenos (coastal people) and the llaneros (plainsmen, the cowboys of Colombia). These young Americans came to know Colombia intimately and were themselves changed by the experiance.

This book tells the story of these Volunteers, much of it on their own words, the training, the two years in Colombia and how those two years of service affected their lives. Included are biographies of the forty-one Volunteers who became ranchers and teachers, college professors, engineers and bank executives, even an FBI agent and a Broadway producer.

It is the story of an evolving Peace Corps, instituted as a more effective means of providing foreign aid and as a weapon in America's arsenal to fight the Cold War. It is also the saga of a country striving to modernize while combatting civil war, communist insurgents and drug cartels, a country that seems, so often, to be on the brink of progress and prosperity. It is a country and a people these Vounteers came to love and appreciate, a country to which they will always feel a special bond.