And Away They Go!

"It's just like a wedding, isn't it?" giggled a pretty girl. And so it was: a long line of young men and women stood among the rosebushes in the White House garden, eventually meandered through the French doors leading to President Kennedy's office. The girls were bright in their flowered summer dresses, the men were turned out in their Sunday best, and everyone was smiling and chatting amiably --sometimes in Swahili and Twi. Inside, the President and his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, looked for all the world like fathers of the bride as they greeted each of the young guests. The occasion was a farewell party for 80 young volunteers (average age: 25) bound for teaching and road-building jobs in Ghana and Tanganyika. They had just completed two months of intensive training (TIME, Aug. 11), and they were the first members of the Peace Corps to go out into the world.

Underlying the gaiety was a note of anxiety. Kennedy and Shriver were painfully aware of the criticism, both at home and abroad, that already surrounded the youthful missionaries of democracy. Communist propagandists had been hard at work for months, denigrating the Peace Corps. Some home-grown critics were just as harsh. "The thing is so disproportionate as to be nonsensical," editorialized the Wall Street Journal. "What person, except perhaps the very young themselves, can really believe that an Africa aflame with violence will have its fires quenched because some Harvard boy or Vassar girl lives in a mud hut and speaks Swahili?"

In such a climate, the first Peace Corpsmen are very much on trial. "You will make or break the Peace Corps," Sarge Shriver told the pioneers in a final briefing. "The payoff will come out there where you're working. You'll be watched like no Americans abroad have ever been watched before in history. In some places Peace Corpsmen will be the first Americans who have arrived without guns on their shoulders. The President is counting on you. It's up to you to prove that the concepts and ideals of the American Revolution are still alive." Then, in a peroration more notable for its locker-room emotion than for its accurate understand ing of world opinion, he concluded: "Foreigners think we're fat, dumb and happy over here. They don't think we've got the stuff to make personal sacrifices for our way of life. You must show them. And if you don't, if any one of you does not measure up, you'll be yanked out of the ball game."

The next day the vanguard headed out to their new assignments. Fifty (including 21 young women) went directly to Ghana, to teach in secondary schools. The other 30 (all men) flew to Puerto Rico for 26 days of field training before proceeding to Tanganyika, where they will build roads for the next two years. Available soon to each corpsman is a special guidebook, "Working Effectively Overseas." Crammed with information on the problems and pitfalls--trivial as well as serious--of working in primitive countries, the booklet was drawn from the painful experience of other Americans in the field. Items:

P: In El Salvador, an American fiscal expert made the mistake of wearing white shoes to the office. He was practically ostracized, until a friend tipped him off that white shoes are taboo in the country. Thereupon he bought a pair of brown shoes and "noticed the immediate im provement in reception of myself and my technical advice."

P: In Laos, men will not wash women's clothes. When her houseboy refused to launder her panties, an American woman slapped his face. "This was the culmination of several instances where the wom an would not consider the customs of the people," wrote her chief. "I returned her to the States. This pleased many people, not because they disliked the woman, but because they wanted the right to have their own way of life recognized." In a similar vein, the corpsmen learned the proper way for a woman to offer cigarettes to a Buddhist priest: put the pack on a rock, since the priests cannot receive anything directly from female hands. P: It is not always necessary to observe local customs, but it is always advisable to find a graceful way of refusing. "The people in this area were polygamous. They wanted us to marry a few more wives. We didn't want to insult them, and cast about for an appropriate reason for refusing. We finally explained to them that our religion forbids us to marry more than one wife, and that it would hurt our wives at home to break this rule." For the guidance of Peace Corpsmen, the manual observes wryly: "The American need not take concubines."

The Peace Corpsmen seemed to have taken the manual's lesson to heart. Ar riving in Accra last week, the 50 young teachers found the city in deep mourning over the death of Nana Kwabena Kena II, Ghana's high commissioner to India. Kena's body had arrived just before the Peace Corpsmen landed. The officials who welcomed them were in a somber mood, but the young teachers moved them deeply by singing, in Twi, the anthem Yen Ara Asase Ni (Land of Our Birth). Said U.S. Ambassador Francis Russell: "I know that they will establish deep and lasting friendship while they are here, and that they are establishing a pattern that will do great good in many ways for many people." To this sentiment, most Americans would add a hopeful amen.

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