Charles Forbus Oral History Interview
Interviewer(s): Julius Sztuk
Interviewee(s): Charles Forbus

Julius Sztuk: Today is August 3rd, 2019. My name is Jay Sztuk, RPCV Fiji 1974 through 1976. Today I'm going to interview Charles Forbus, who was a Peace Corps volunteer on six different occasions. First Nepal from February 1977 [1997], working in youth development. Ukraine, February 2002, community development. Honduras, January 2011, community development. Madagascar, February 2013, food security. Georgia, May 2014, community development. And in Armenia beginning in August 2015, also in community development. Charlie, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed today.

Charles Forbus: Sure.

Julius Sztuk: Let's start off by telling us a little bit about your background, where you grew up, and how you got interested in joining the Peace Corps.

Charles Forbus: Well, I grew up in Dallas, Texas, and I joined the Air Force when I was 17, right out of high school. And I was in the Air Force when John Kennedy and Richard Nixon had their debates. And I really, of course, everyone liked John Kennedy and he was my first president that I voted for, I just turned 21. So that'll tell you how old I am. That was in 1960. And after he was elected, he started the Peace Corps. And I had just gotten out of the Air Force. I got out in December of 1960. And so I thought, that's a great idea. However, I was on my way to having three kids, so I got started early with children. So I had to wait till they were grown until I could retire, which I did. I went, after I got out of the Air Force, I went to work for U.S. Steel, and then I went to work for Southwestern Bell, AT&T, and I got an early retirement in 1992. I went back and I did some traveling. My wife had died in the meantime, and so I was kind of footloose. And I remembered after I did some college courses, I decided it was time to fulfill my dream of being a Peace Corps volunteer.

Julius Sztuk: So for all that time, over 30 years, 37 years, you.

Charles Forbus: Still had it on my mind.

Julius Sztuk: Still on your mind. That's amazing. So then how old were you when you applied in '97? You would have been?

Charles Forbus: In '97, I was 57.

Julius Sztuk: 57, OK.

Charles Forbus: So it's easy for me to remember my years because they coincide with the year. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah, so I was 57, went to Nepal.

Julius Sztuk: What did your family think about you joining up? What did your kids think?

Charles Forbus: Well, I think the first one, Nepal, was kind of a shocker to them. But I'd been, since like I said, I retired in '92, so I'd been kind of floating around. So they were kind of used to me being on the move. They didn't, uh, they weren't really excited about me being gone for two years, which I wasn't, because my daughter, like I said, my wife had died and my daughter had some emotional problems, so I had to early term [terminate] in Nepal.

Julius Sztuk: How long were you there before you?

Charles Forbus: I was there about three months.

Julius Sztuk: Oh.

Charles Forbus: She was, yeah, she was really in, um, after I left, she had no one to rely on.

Julius Sztuk: So was that all training or did you actually start your job?

Charles Forbus: It was all training. I finished up right before swearing in. I said, I got to go home.

Julius Sztuk: Oh, that's too bad.

Charles Forbus: And I was so reluctant. I wrote a nice letter about telling them it wasn't because of Peace Corps, it was because of family matters.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah, well, that happens.

Charles Forbus: Yeah. And it was one of those things and I've thought about this. Anyway, it was very distressful that I had to leave but.

Julius Sztuk: Was that your first time overseas or your first time in Asia?

Charles Forbus: No, I was in the Air Force.

Julius Sztuk: Oh, right.

Charles Forbus: Yeah. I had done some overseas stuff. I'd been through Europe and some other places, so.

Julius Sztuk: But going to another country in Peace Corps was a little different than going in the Air Force, isn't it?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, it was a little different. Yeah, actually, I really enjoyed the people in Nepal. They were great. The country is fantastic. It's beautiful. Very, very poor. But just incredible people. And I lived with a family, actually I lived with a Gurkha family in Nepal. And he had been, he retired from the British Army. The Gurkhas are the soldiers that guard the British embassies, as you probably know.

Julius Sztuk: Right.

Charles Forbus: And he was about I'd say five foot six and about five foot six wide. He was just solid, solid as a rock. In fact, he was the mayor of Pokhara and I was living with him. And it was my introduction to cricket, which I still don't understand totally, but it's a great. It was great. He had come to my room and he'd knock on the door and say, time for us to have a drink of Scotch and watch cricket. Great. So he was really a great guy. And then he had three little kids and his daughter would knock on my door every morning and say, your milk chai is ready. Super. Anyway, as I said, I was very reluctant to leave, but it was best for my daughter. And now she's, after a couple of years, she was doing fine so.

Julius Sztuk: Oh good. That worked out. Any memorable experiences there in Nepal, before we move on to the next country?

Charles Forbus: Well, yeah, we did. We did hike the Annapurna Trail, not all the way, but we all know when we had time off in Pokhara, we would hike up the Annapurna Trail and see some really fantastic sights. I remember, we got there in February and it was overcast. You couldn't see the Himalayas. And then in, I guess it was March, the clouds cleared and it was, it's hard to describe.

Julius Sztuk: Really.

Charles Forbus: I mean, it's like, it's like trying to talk about the Grand Canyon. You've got to go see it and you've got to go see the Himalayas too. It's totally different from being able to, actually even different from looking at a photograph, seeing it in 3D with being right there. It's just fantastic. Anyway, that's about all I got for. The food was great. I got real vegetarian.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah? Was it mostly vegetarian diet?

Charles Forbus: Mostly.

Julius Sztuk: And were you, what did your training consist of, was it Hindi language?

Charles Forbus: Yeah. Yeah. And Sanskrit. Their alphabet is Sanskrit and the language is extremely difficult. But I did pick up some of it. I was going, I was doing pretty good.

Julius Sztuk: Were you?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, I was because I was only 57 at the time. So my brain was still working pretty good then.

Julius Sztuk: And you lived with the family full time?

Charles Forbus: Yeah. Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: That's pretty, pretty good immersion there.

Charles Forbus: Yeah. Yeah, it was great. Oh, we did go to a wedding which was, uh, the Gurkha took me there and his name was Sanjay of course. But yeah, we did go to a wedding. It was very interesting.

Julius Sztuk: All right. So it must have been hard to leave. But then it was a few years later, about five years later, you decided?

Charles Forbus: Yeah. But after the Nepal experience, I did some consulting back with AT&T and did some traveling overseas, went to China and a few places like that. And then I decided it was time to do Peace Corps again and do it right. My daughter was fine, all my kids were doing good. So I actually applied for the Caribbean, Central or South America. And they said, how about Nepal? I mean, Ukraine. I said, sure, why not? So I always wanted to see if it was really an evil empire, as President Reagan had called it. So I went to, I went to Nepal.

Julius Sztuk: Ukraine.

Charles Forbus: Ukraine! I'll get it straight here.

Julius Sztuk: That's understandable. So you were willing to go anywhere then?

Charles Forbus: Yeah. Yeah, sure. Anything. Yeah, I was on my own and ready to go.

Julius Sztuk: Was the application process any more difficult a second time, or were they understanding about the first time?

Charles Forbus: Yeah. About a year. Just like the first time. Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: And then so you applied for Ukraine and then your kids must have thought you were going crazy again.

Charles Forbus: This time they, I had been, like I said, I'd been doing some consulting work for AT&T and so I'd been traveling a lot. So they were, uh, they weren't as reluctant as the first time.

Julius Sztuk: And now what about your peers or your friends and so forth? What did they think about you doing this?

Charles Forbus: Well, they were kind of, I'd like to do that, but they never would have. So you know, we'd get a lot of that.

Julius Sztuk: So supportive?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, yeah.

Julius Sztuk: And then did you, was your training in country for Ukraine?

Charles Forbus: Yeah. All my training has been in country. Yeah. Yeah. So we trained in a small town called Zhytomyr that's just outside of Kyiv.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah.

Charles Forbus: And it was the Russian language. And I had gotten survival skills at Russian language so, which I've forgotten most of it. But I pick up, I can remember. I hear a word, I know what it means. I was in, I was a community developer in Ukraine, and I went to work for the DPOUU, which was the Disabled People's Organization Union of Ukraine. And, great organization. There's like, at that time, they told me, and I have no reason to doubt it, that there were almost 600,000 disabled people in Ukraine. A lot of them were disabled from the Afghan war.

Julius Sztuk: OK.

Charles Forbus: There were several people there that had lost limbs and were disabled. And after the fall of the Soviet Union, all the social services had evaporated.

Julius Sztuk: So these would have been Ukrainian soldiers that had been?

Charles Forbus: No, not all, just a variety of people in every kind of disability, mental and physical disabilities, and they supported them all. Actually, we went and it was a great organization. Anyway, the guy I met was the leader of the DPOUU, the director. He and I were, had served in the different air forces at the same time.

Julius Sztuk: Oh.

Charles Forbus: And we got, we were talking one day, and my plane. I was an aircraft mechanic in the Air Force and I was a crew chief on our planes were the C-121 Super Connie Radar Picket planes. They had ray domes on the back, on the top and the bottom, and they flew up and down the West Coast from the DEW Line, which was the Distant Early Warning Line in Canada down to Mexico and further on down than that. And we flew up and down the West Coast and we were. His plane was the version of the, Russian version of the B-29, which was a bomber. And he said, we would fly up towards your territory and then we'd veer off. I said, yeah, I know, we got you on radar there, buddy. I said, I'm glad you never crossed that line. He said, yeah, I am too. Anyway, actually he was disabled too. He had lost a leg in Afghanistan.

And then I got, I was working with the people there and my counterpart, he helped us get a, uh. Everything they did was manual recordkeeping. They had file cabinets out the kazoo and everything. It took them so much time to find a record and then try to get people in some kind of support. So I managed to get them some computers for their, uh, with the help of my counterpart, mostly with his help. But we got some computers to automate and put a database in so that they could access their records faster. And then after that, we got another grant for. They had, I think it was ten or 12, I can't remember right now, but ten or 12 remote locations. The headquarters in Kyiv, and then they had remote locations around the country.

Julius Sztuk: So you lived in Kyiv?

Charles Forbus: I lived in, yeah, I was the last. Actually at the time I was the last volunteer that they let serve in Kyiv, the Russian Kyiv.

Julius Sztuk: Oh OK.

Charles Forbus: They didn't let anybody else serve in Kyiv and put them out in the country like this.

Julius Sztuk: So you were in an urban area and everybody else is out.

Charles Forbus: Oh, yeah. Right there. Beautiful city.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah.

Charles Forbus: Anyway, we got computers and internet for all these computers at the different remote locations, so we had to take them down and set them up. And then they would have a big party for me and my counterpart, and the director and I got to see the whole country.

Julius Sztuk: Oh.

Charles Forbus: It was. I got to go to the Crimea, got to see Sevastopol where the Russian navy base was. Then we went over to where they had the conference with World War II with Churchill and Stalin and FDR. What's the name of the town and the city? Anyway, I got to. I'm trying to. Can you stop it just a minute. Let me let me think. Anyway, yeah, it was in Yalta. So we got to go over to Yalta, and the director of the palace where they had held the conference let me see, took me to one of the library that the Roosevelts had sent all the books for their library. He said, we don't let everybody see this, but since you're a Peace Corps volunteer and all that. And so I got to see the library that the Roosevelts had sent. It was enormous. They had sent thousands of books over for that library, you know, quite a scene.

But the funniest thing was, there in Ukraine, almost every place you went there was a McDonald’s. So at the end of the pier in Yalta was a McDonald's. And so we were walking there and I said, you know, they've got pretty good coffee. And they said, yeah, let's go get a cup of coffee. So we went to McDonald's and got a cup of coffee. And I looked out the window. There was a park right next to the McDonald's and I saw the statue over there and I said, that's Lenin. Yeah, yeah, that's Lenin. And he's pointing right at McDonald's. And I'm thinking, he's probably thinking that's capitalism. Anyway. That was quite a little thing.

And I also got to see where the Charge of the Light Brigade, you know, they had the Crimean War and that's where that poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade, was. And whoever the British officer was that sent his 600 valiant men into the jaws of death, he was not a very bright man. I'm sitting there thinking, they're going down to this little, little funnel. And whoever's on it above them is going to be able to cut them up. And they did, so. But anyways, it was interesting. Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: So you got to see most of the country then.

Charles Forbus: Got to see a lot of it, yeah. Got to see a lot of Ukraine. It was a beautiful country. The people were great.

Julius Sztuk: Now tell me a little more about your job as community development, but you're working for this agency that takes care of handicapped people. So were you, what did you actually do for them?

Charles Forbus: I was working with them to help.

Julius Sztuk: Develop facilities or?

Charles Forbus: To help develop their ability to serve their people, their disabled counterpart or compadres. Yeah, their comrades.

Julius Sztuk: Help get them better organized?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, helping them get organized and helping them make better, faster ways to get information and get their people served and things. So it was my second. My first site was with an ecological organization. But the guy that, the country director, Karl Beck, said, this guy is a con man, at the ecological society.

Julius Sztuk: The head of the agency?

Charles Forbus: And I said, I agree. I was there about two days and I said, I agree with you. He said, let's go. Let's go find you something else to do. So that's when they got me to the job with DPOUU. Karl Beck was a great guy.

Julius Sztuk: And were you the only volunteer in that organization?

Charles Forbus: Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: The only Peace Corps volunteer assigned to it.

Charles Forbus: Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: So all of your coworkers were Ukrainian?

Charles Forbus: All my coworkers were Russians or Ukrainians, yeah.

Julius Sztuk: And you probably had to speak Russian. Did you get pretty fluent?

Charles Forbus: Ah, it was survival. I knew how to order food and I knew how to get a taxi.

Julius Sztuk: But they knew English?

Charles Forbus: Oh, yeah, they knew English. Yeah, they were good. Yuri was my counterpart, Yuri Oblaginin. And he told me he learned how to. I said, how did you learn? His English was excellent. Then how did you learn to speak so well? And he said, well, I listened to Beatles records.

Julius Sztuk: Ah.

Charles Forbus: And I would ask my friends who spoke English and said, what is that? What does that mean? And they'd tell me, or my friends would tell me what they. And he said, I don't think so. He said, I'd investigate it and found out that they were wrong. And so he learned how to speak by listening to the Beatles.

Julius Sztuk: No kidding. Yeah.

Charles Forbus: Right. Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: All right. So what were your, what was your living situation like? Now you were in the city, so did you have pretty good living quarters?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, I had an apartment. I lived with, in Zhytomyr I lived with a family. And then in Kyiv, I had an apartment. I lived in one of the old Soviet Union apartments. I'll say this for Khrushchev, he built a lot of apartments.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah.

Charles Forbus: And from what I heard, no one was homeless during the Soviet Union. Everybody had a job, so they say, whether they worked or not was another matter. But everybody had a job and everybody had a place to live and everybody had health care. So. Of course, after the fall, none of that existed anymore.

Julius Sztuk: Did you make friends in the community there?

Charles Forbus: Oh, yeah.

Julius Sztuk: Was your social circle mainly the people at work or did you also make friends with your neighbors?

Charles Forbus: No, I had, yeah, I had friends with my neighbors. I had a, I had met a schoolteacher. And she had three jobs. She was, actually she had been a, she had a PhD in, uh, not geography, but, uh. Oil. She was an oil developer. So she worked for a university and a high school and the Air Force Academy. So I would, she would get me to come out and talk about various things, about the Peace Corps and other things that I had knowledge of.

Julius Sztuk: She'd have you come into her classroom?

Charles Forbus: Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: And what age were the students? Were they high school?

Charles Forbus: In the high school, they were high school students. At the geophysical university, they were graduate students. And then at the Air Force Academy, they were college students. It was. Actually the one I remember, the one speech or session I made at the Air Force Academy was about the trash, the way there's an incinerator that will burn trash, that will burn trash for a whole city I think. They use it in Brazil. And it would leave, um, it would generate electricity. So I had done a little research on it when I was in the States. And so I discussed that with the people at the Air Force unit, at the Air Force universe. They were very interested in it. It was a recycling type of facility that it never went anywhere, but they were interested in it anyway. They like to hear about stuff like that.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah.

Charles Forbus: Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: So these were educated and worldly people. Do you think you had some, um, that you affected their perceptions of America?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, I think so. They, uh. I was always getting invited to places. And actually I met the exclusion zone director of Chernobyl, and just happened to bump into him with a friend of mine. And they were always glad to have me come over and they were just great with me and we all got along great. They were always wanting to know about the United States and how we thought and everything. So, yeah, I think. I think I left, I hope I left a good impression.

Julius Sztuk: And did you have any kind of preconceived notions about the Ukrainian or Russian people before you went there that might have changed after getting to know them?

Charles Forbus: Well, I realized that it didn't take me long to figure it out, that the people are people, you know, Well, the interesting thing was, on each floor we stayed. Our initial location was at the Zhytomyr Hotel, which was the class hotel. However, we didn't have hot water. This was in February, so it was pretty cold. And on each floor they had an operator station. I'd plug in. And I'm thinking, if they want to listen to what you're doing, all they have to do is plug into your room, you know? There's no privacy if you're worried about that. I was never worried about it.

Julius Sztuk: So they could be spying on you.

Charles Forbus: I didn't care. But, yeah, I could see that they were spied on, you know? And, you know, we heard about, you know, they didn't have much freedom and everything. And I talked to some people. This one, the mother of the lady I stayed with in Zhytomyr had been one of the slaves during the Nazis. Now they made reparations. The Germans made reparations to the people that they had enslaved in Poland and in Ukraine. And she had gotten $10,000 from Germany. And she said, that's more than I ever got from the Soviet Union. She was a.

Julius Sztuk: You stayed with her during training, when you were in training?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, during training.

Julius Sztuk: In Ukraine again, did you live with a family during your entire training?

Charles Forbus: No, no. I had my own apartment in Kyiv. I had my own.

Julius Sztuk: But I mean during training?

Charles Forbus: During training, I stayed with, I stayed with my friend Tamara. She was there.

Julius Sztuk: So was each volunteer assigned to a family to stay with?

Charles Forbus: Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: So you didn't stay in a barracks or anything like that?

Charles Forbus: No, no, no.

Julius Sztuk: OK.

Charles Forbus: Well, the only time we stayed together as a group was at the Zhytomyr Hotel. We were glad to get out of there. It was, well, actually, and I was lucky. The lady I'd stayed with, Tamara, she had a kalocka. A kalocka is a gas water heater. And when you turn the hot water on the water kicks on the kalocka and it heats the water up. So I got to take hot showers. So it was like, oh, what a change.

Julius Sztuk: So OK, so it's like an instantaneous.

Charles Forbus: It was like, ooh, I'm in heaven. So, you know, it didn't take you long to appreciate the amenities that you had in the States that you didn't, that you had lost. Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: Now did you stay in Ukraine for the entire two years?

Charles Forbus: Yep.

Julius Sztuk: You completed your service there?

Charles Forbus: Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: And did you extend?

Charles Forbus: No, no.

Julius Sztuk: Did you think about extending?

Charles Forbus: My time was up. I said, it's time to go home. My kids were waiting for me.

Julius Sztuk: But you must have made some lasting friendships.

Charles Forbus: Oh, I still have friends over there. Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: Still in touch with them?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, Yuri and Tamara and a couple of other people.

Julius Sztuk: And have you been back to visit since?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, been back a couple of times.

Julius Sztuk: So you completed two years there. And how did it feel when you left? Well, let me ask you. Do you feel like you had a lasting impact?

Charles Forbus: You know, I never. I never know. You know, they may have sold the computers the day I left, I don't know. But I think so. I think I feel good about it.

Julius Sztuk: At least on a personal level. Maybe with your personal connections with people.

Charles Forbus: Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: Made a good impression then.

Charles Forbus: Yeah. And right before I left, we set up. I got three grants for them and one of them was, the last one was for a computer training center to train some of the disabled people on how to do Microsoft Word and Office and things like that. So they were. I think they were, I think it had a little impact on them. You know, I don't think it changed the world over there, but it may have had a little impact on them, you know. At least I think I left them with a positive impression of Americans.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah, that's the important thing. Was it a pretty big program over there? How many, do you know how many volunteers there were?

Charles Forbus: There was, uh, I think at one time there was like 200 and, over 250 volunteers in country. So it's fairly good, fairly good sized. And USAID was over there. They were active. I got a couple of second, actually secondary jobs too. One of them was working with my friend at the university and the other one was I worked with USAID. I would go over and teach there. Most of their staff was Ukrainian.

Julius Sztuk: OK.

Charles Forbus: So they wanted to learn business English. And so I would go over on Thursdays and we'd have a couple of hour classes on business English.

Julius Sztuk: OK.

Charles Forbus: I retired, like I said, I retired from AT&T. I was a national account manager with AT&T, so I could explain things to them a little about business and how to write your letters and things like that. So they were very interested. Very smart people, very, very quick. And they all spoke English. Not perfect, but I left them with a Texas accent. So it was, that was my goal.

Julius Sztuk: Good. OK. So then you finished there in, it would have been 2004 sometime?

Charles Forbus: Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah. And you came back home.

Charles Forbus: Came back home, moved to Huntsville, Texas, built a house in a golfing community. Then got elected to city council there in 2000 and. Let's see, I was there two and a half years on city council, so I think it was 2008. Also, I started teaching ESL at the local library and did that for about. When I go back, I'll probably do it and still do it. So I've been doing it since I moved there.

Julius Sztuk: So volunteering is kind of part of your makeup?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, you know, it gives me something to do. Keeps me off the street.

Julius Sztuk: Do you think that the Peace Corps experience has something to do with that continued volunteering?

Charles Forbus: I'm sure it does. Yeah. You know, I taught. You know, I didn't just do my primary job in any of my countries. I always had a secondary position teaching English to somebody Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: And what made you decide that you needed a third Peace Corps experience?

Charles Forbus: Well, I was ready to go back right away. But my kids taught me out of it, so.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah.

Charles Forbus: So I finally in 2010, I got unelected to city council and so I said, well, since I'm not going to have to do this anymore, which was kind of it's like, you know, I liked doing it. But whenever I lost the election, I went over with some buddies, like actually four of us on city council when they, the clean sweep. They got rid of all four of us at-large candidates and we all went over to the Stardust Ballroom and had a beer. And I said, now I'm feeling pretty good. So I got rid of, you know, I hated to lose, but it was, you know, it was time to go. And that's when I decided to go to Honduras.

Julius Sztuk: OK.

Charles Forbus: I finally got to one of my, uh, I always put in for the Caribbean, Central America, or South America. And I got Honduras.

Julius Sztuk: You finally got it.

Charles Forbus: I got it, I got one. Yeah, yeah. It was great. I worked in the mountains with, I call them kahalurales. It's a little, the little small villages would all get together and come up with a product of some kind to sell to make money for their organization in the city, the little towns.

Julius Sztuk: It was kind of a co-op?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, it's kind of co-op, yeah. And I was working with Funder. Funder was an NGO that supported, uh, it was out of Spain.

Julius Sztuk: F-U-N-D?

Charles Forbus: F-U-N-D-E-R. And they were supporting the farmers and small villages. A lot of these small villages were like cooperative farmers. And they were working with peppers, the peppers they use in hot sauces from Louisiana. And were trying to get them to be exported. Quality wise, the quality wasn't quite as good as they needed in the Louisiana hot sauce.

Julius Sztuk: OK.

Charles Forbus: You know what, the hot sauce I'm talking about? The rich sauce.

Julius Sztuk: The Tabasco sauce?

Charles Forbus: Tabasco, tabasco peppers. They were also trying to improve the quality of the cocoa that they had down there. And they were trying to get it to the quality that they could get, sell it to the Swiss. So but. There's also. That was something they were working on, but they were also working with the different villages that were selling mostly tamales. And so I was doing a SWOT analysis with these small organizations. And we were also doing the four P's, product, price, place, and promotion, for them. And they, the women were, the interesting thing was the women were more driven to make a success than the guys were, than men were. And two or three of these kahalurales decided that since we were talking, what could you do with your, with what you have? How could you expand your product line? And they decided, well, maybe we could use the same material and make tamales, or yeah, tamales. No, they were making tamales. To make tacos and sell the tacos on the outside or in our little of influence around their village.

Julius Sztuk: So they would be like.

Charles Forbus: So they expanded their product line. So I was pretty happy about that. I was kind of like, that was a nice success.

Julius Sztuk: They would do like food carts, street sellers?

Charles Forbus: Actually they would take them in trucks and they'd go down to the different markets in those little areas. And they'd set up and sell them there. Or they would take them to the little cafes that they supported too. There were small cafes, little fronts of houses that were where people would go in and buy their tamales. They were good, too. They always fed me. Well, really the cool thing was we were way up in the mountains. And the four-wheel drives would not go all the way up. We had to stop and they'd come down and pick us up on horses. So I got to ride horses up into the mountains.

Julius Sztuk: Were you an experienced rider?

Charles Forbus: Oh, yeah, I'm good on a horse. It was kind of, it was cool. And we also worked with an HIV AIDS NGO in Puerto Cortes that was supporting the local HIV community. And there were. There were some really sad cases there, but they had a sewing factory and they were sewing, uh, gym equipment, gym, gym suits.

Julius Sztuk: Athletic clothes?

Charles Forbus: Athletic clothes for different high schools around.

Julius Sztuk: OK.

Charles Forbus: But they weren't making any money. They had priced themselves so low they couldn't, they weren't making any money. So I did the SWOT thing and the four P's with them, and they decided, well, we're going to, we need to raise our prices a little bit. Also their equipment was starting to run down. So I ran into an American from North Carolina who had a sewing factory in Puerto Cortes, and he sent his mechanic over and overhauled a couple of their machines for us so they were running better. They couldn't afford to get them fixed and he did it for nothing. So, yeah, that worked out good. I had a good time there. But we only lasted, we lasted a little over a year.

Julius Sztuk: Oh, you didn't complete two years?

Charles Forbus: Oh, yeah, I did all I could because they took Peace Corps out. One of the girls, one of the ladies in Peace Corps, was on a bus and they robbed, some guys robbed it. It's a very dangerous country. Honduras is very dangerous. That's why they're coming up here.

Julius Sztuk: Right.

Charles Forbus: And they had a Old West shootout on the bus and she got shot in the leg. And after all, there were so many people getting robbed. There were Peace Corps volunteers getting robbed going from the little hotel that they put us up with in Tegucigalpa, the headquarters of Peace Corps. There were people getting assaulted just going up to the headquarters there from the hotels. So when that girl got shot, that was the straw that broke the camel's back and they pulled us all out. They closed it down and got us all over to a hotel on the coast. I can't remember the name of the town, but we were there. We closed out service and they put us on busses and flew us out of Tegucigalpa.

Julius Sztuk: Wow, that's too bad.

Charles Forbus: And I really, I was sorry because I thought everything was going really good. And I was, I felt very safe. I was in this little town on the coast. And I never had any, any kind of problems. But anyway, I was lucky that way.

Julius Sztuk: When you got to Honduras, they must have trained you in Spanish.

Charles Forbus: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Julius Sztuk: You had training there?

Charles Forbus: I had to take Spanish courses before. I was pretty good at Spanish.

Julius Sztuk: Better than Russian?

Charles Forbus: Than I was in Russian, yeah.

Julius Sztuk: But you went through the entire training. What was your training there in Honduras, three months?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, three months. I lived with the lady there. She was the widow of a doctor and she had a big house. And her, she had two kids. Two of her kids still lived with her and her mother lived with her. So it was a real nice setup. And then, uh.

Julius Sztuk: So here again, during training they housed you with a local family?

Charles Forbus: Yeah. And then that was the first. I think that was the first month. And then the second month was up in the mountains at a town that made Flor de Caña rum. And you could smell the factory was there in the city. And it was a cool town. So and we were there for about four weeks. Then they moved us back to the original town that we were in. So we finished up there at the original city.

Julius Sztuk: What town did you live in while you were there?

Charles Forbus: A little town called Omoa. O-M-O-A. It was on the Caribbean.

Julius Sztuk: And that's a small town?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, probably 1,500 or 2,000. Small town.

Julius Sztuk: And what was your living quarters like?

Charles Forbus: I had a house. I lived with a family there for a while. And then I got a little house. It was a great family. She had run for mayor. Her name was, actually they were of Italian descent. There were a lot of Italian descendants in Honduras. And her name was Sylvia Sosa. And her daughter is, her name is Sylvia Sosa too. And she's a television commentator. She just got that job here in the last couple of years. And her dad's name was Paulo. And Paulo was a great guy. He died, but I built a house on my spare time in his front yard for, uh, built a place for a business, that he would lease out to a businessperson.

Julius Sztuk: So you helped him out?

Charles Forbus: I helped him out, yeah, because I got a background in, I can do a lot of different things. Carpentry is one of them. So yeah. So he and I built a house and, yeah, it took us about a month. I was there living with him for a month. And then I moved into the house and then, like I said, they shut us down, brought us home.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah, that's too bad. I'll ask you the same question here as about Ukraine. Do you think that you had some impact on their impression of Americans?

Charles Forbus: Oh yeah, I think, they're still.

Julius Sztuk: Were they pretty favorable to begin with?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, actually, they were. The impression in Honduras was, where I was, was positive. And because we'd been down there, you know, the Contras and all that Sandinistas stuff. But yeah, they were positive. And we still stay in touch, so yeah. He liked my carpentry work, so a good impression.

Julius Sztuk: OK.

Charles Forbus: And there were some guys, had a guy from Iran. There was a guy from Canada who had a tiki bar. Like I said, we were on the Caribbean. And I would go down there and have a drink every now and then with the other expats. A lot of expats hung out there and they were always sitting around talking about, man, this guy, these people are so blah, blah, blah, this is a terrible place, and all this kind of stuff. And I said, when are you guys going home? I ain't going home. So you like it a little bit better? Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We like it here.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah. They just liked to criticize.

Charles Forbus: Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: So you've made lasting relationships in all these places?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, yeah.

Julius Sztuk: Do you still keep in touch?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, yeah.

Julius Sztuk: Well, it's kind of, it must have been hard to leave in the middle of your service.

Charles Forbus: I really, yeah, I really. I never felt threatened. And I know there were people who were threatened, so.

Julius Sztuk: So that would have been some time in 2012 that you left there?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, I left there the first part of 2012, I think was end of January, 1st of February, or something like that.

Julius Sztuk: Came back home to Texas?

Charles Forbus: Came back to Texas. That's when I went to Madagascar in, uh.

Julius Sztuk: OK, so it was only about a year later you went to Madagascar?

Charles Forbus: Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: OK. So you're ready for another?

Charles Forbus: Ready for another one. It was half, you know, I only had a half tour in Honduras. I was ready for another one. Then I went to Madagascar. I wasn't there very long. I, uh, I didn't get through PST [pre- service training]. I learned Malagasy, which is their language. And then I was living with a family. It was probably the most austere place I've ever lived. There was no running water, there was no electricity. But the people were fantastic. The family I lived with, they were really, really great. And I went out with a farmer. We were, like I said, it was food security there. So I went out with a farmer one day and I tripped and fell and busted my knee. And it's a rough country. You can't, if you can't walk, you can't get around.

Julius Sztuk: You can't get around.

Charles Forbus: Yeah. So I got medevaced out of there, got my knee fixed. Knocked a big, the doctor said it was about the size, a piece of cartilage on my knee was about the size of a quarter that he got out there. And I tore my meniscus and I just had constant pain with it. So it was really constant pain flying back because it was like 36 hours on a plane with my knee being, so.

Julius Sztuk: So how long were you there before that happened, a few months?

Charles Forbus: I was there a couple of months, yeah.

Julius Sztuk: Only a couple of months. Were you still in training?

Charles Forbus: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Still in PST. And like I said, I was, after that I was, I thought, well, get my knee fixed. I got my knee fixed. It's good now. I still don't have any cartilage on my kneecap, but it just makes a grounding noise.

Julius Sztuk: Oh, you're resilient. So what? What's Peace Corps thinking all this time here? Now that was your fourth.

Charles Forbus: I never had any.

Julius Sztuk: And then you decided to do it again?

Charles Forbus: I never. Yeah. The next time was a Response.

Julius Sztuk: Oh, Peace Corps Response.

Charles Forbus: I went Response in Georgia.

Julius Sztuk: Oh OK, so that was a short term.

Charles Forbus: Yeah, short term.

Julius Sztuk: How many months was that?

Charles Forbus: It was six, a little over six months. No PST.

Julius Sztuk: Pre-service training?

Charles Forbus: No PST.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah, so with Peace Corps Response, do they do some kind of orientation?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, we had a three-day orientation.

Julius Sztuk: Just three days?

Charles Forbus: So yeah, when I got there at the Peace Corps headquarters in Tbilisi, I had about a three day and then on Friday. So I got in on Monday. So I guess it was four days, and then we left on Friday and I went to Batumi.

Julius Sztuk: Batumi?

Charles Forbus: Batumi. And I worked with a organization that was focusing on motivating youth to get involved in the democratic process. So that was my job. I worked with them. I came up with leadership training and citizenship training and communications training for the organization We Sit. And we brought in different, from different parts of town, we'd bring in groups of people and train them on all the different programs that I had developed.

Julius Sztuk: OK. So you developed those from scratch?

Charles Forbus: Yep. Yep. And of course my counterpart, she and I worked together with it. It wasn't, I didn't do it by myself.

Julius Sztuk: Local counterpart?

Charles Forbus: Yeah. She was very good, very smart. Yeah. And I also worked with the disabled, or one of the, one of my. I had three counterparts. One of them was, she worked with disabled people. So I had a background. So I worked with her some too. Then I lived with a family there the whole time.

Julius Sztuk: You did?

Charles Forbus: And I'm part of their family. I've gone back to see them a couple of times.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah.

Charles Forbus: And they're always asking me, when are you coming back? We wait you, we wait you. I'll be there. I'll come back again.

Julius Sztuk: And the language there, were you were able to use some of your Russian again, did you remember anything?

Charles Forbus: No, they spoke. Yeah, I spoke a little Russian to them, but very little. And like I said, I'd forgotten most of it. Had gone through the, I'd gone through the Spanish, so I was better at Spanish. And but the lady I lived with, every morning she would fix my breakfast. One of my, I had another two counterparts, the one I worked, the real one. Then my secondary counterpart was the son of the lady that I lived with.

Julius Sztuk: OK.

Charles Forbus: And he had an English club and he also worked with democratic process in his area too. So I worked with him. And every morning she would come and she had fixed my breakfast and then she would always give me a small glass of Georgia wine. Everybody in Georgia makes great wine, so. And then she say, she's ask me how, in Georgian, how was my meal? And I'd say, what? I don't understand. And she'd say it a little bit louder. Then she'd say it a little bit louder, then she'd say a little bit louder. And finally we'd start laughing together. She knew I couldn't understand her and she couldn't get me.

Julius Sztuk: And she didn't speak English?

Charles Forbus: No.

Julius Sztuk: No? Well, that must have made it tough.

Charles Forbus: She was great. No, we got along great. She was really a hoot. She was a funny lady. But she always did that every morning. She had, a little bit louder. A little bit louder. And then we'd start laughing together. Good cook. She was great. Yeah. And yeah, that was, I had a lot of fun there. It was right on the beach, right on the Black Sea. It was a tourist city. And the guy, one of the guys I became friends with was, uh, his name was Jim Bouley. I'm still part of his family too. So he was the, uh, he set up the performers that came to town.

Julius Sztuk: Like a promoter?

Charles Forbus: No, he worked for the city. They would set up like a concert. He would set up all the concerts in. And they brought in a lot of interesting people. One of them was really cool. He brought in this one group of Black dancers from Houston, and they were, they did rap and they also did African dancing. And so I went to all of them free. He said, come on, let's go. Come on, come on, and we'll go down. So he took me down to introduce me to these guys. And they were, so I knew a friend of mine. His daughter was an, danced in the African scene, in the African American scene in Houston, and her name was Rachel Eckeroff. And I asked them if they knew Rachel. And they said, yeah, yeah, we've danced with her. So it's a small world, man. I mean, the world is just, you know, you never know. You never know.

Julius Sztuk: Wow.

Charles Forbus: It was, uh, it was very interesting. Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: So you stayed there six months?

Charles Forbus: Yep.

Julius Sztuk: And made some lasting friendships there. You're a friendly guy. And then you went to Armenia after that?

Charles Forbus: Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: Again, Peace Corps Response?

Charles Forbus: No, no. Full two years.

Julius Sztuk: OK.

Charles Forbus: Yeah. We went in August of 2015 and we came back in September of 2017.

Julius Sztuk: OK. And so tell me something about that. What was your training like there?

Charles Forbus: It was, it was really good. I lived with another family in a little town called Azataban, and they're a great family. Funny thing is, her name was Nvard, N-V-A-R-D, and my host mother in Georgia, her name was Vardo. They both mean the same thing, rose.

Julius Sztuk: Oh.

Charles Forbus: So and she was a sweet, great lady. She had two little kids. Well, she had three kids. She had a boy that was 15, and she had a little girl that was four or five. And then a little boy that was two and a half, three years old. He was a wild man. That's why I named him Tsunami.

Julius Sztuk: Oh, yeah.

Charles Forbus: Yeah. They got a big kick out of it. And then the little girl, her name was Clautev, and she was, she loved to dance. She would just dance around all the time. And so, yeah, we all got along great. Her husband made, Ciroch, he made vodka. And there were, let's see, there was Nvard and Avard, her mother in law, and Goggek, the grandfather, Ciroch, Davit, and little Goggek. That was a two and a half year old kid and then Tatev. Plus me, and one bathroom.

Julius Sztuk: Oh.

Charles Forbus: It was. So I was being, luckily I was an early riser so I'd get up real early so I got to take care of my hygienic needs before everybody else woke up.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise you got to stand in line, huh?

Charles Forbus: Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: And this was during training that you lived with this family?

Charles Forbus: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Julius Sztuk: And what town was, that was in?

Charles Forbus: Azadaban.

Julius Sztuk: Azadaban. And then language there?

Charles Forbus: Yeah.

Julius Sztuk: So you had to learn Armenian?

Charles Forbus: Armenian.

Julius Sztuk: Was it pretty intensive, three months' training?

Charles Forbus: Yeah. You know, I got, I got, I passed so I had survival language. You know, I never said I was. I could get where I was going and order food and find out where the bathroom was.

Julius Sztuk: So in all these places, it was pretty common to find people who spoke English that could help you out?

Charles Forbus: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I left Azadaban, I went to, uh. I've been living under a great star that gives me great places to go. Like I said, I was in Kyiv. I was in Pokhara and Nepal and I was in Kyiv in Ukraine and I was in this little town Omoa, right on the beach in Honduras. Madagascar was another story, but I was up in the mountains without water or electricity. But it was great. And it was super anyway. And in Georgia, I was on, like I said, in Batumi, right in a tourist town. City. And then in Armenia, I was in a town called Dilijan, D-I-L-I-J-A-N. It was called the Swiss city of Armenia.

Julius Sztuk: Oh, really?

Charles Forbus: Up in the mountains, about a little over 5,000 feet. It was really a pretty little town.

Julius Sztuk: Was it?

Charles Forbus: And they were trying to turn it into the tourist center of Armenia. Not just a tourist center, they had already moved the Ukrainian [Armenian] bank there. So it was the economic center. They had brought in the UWC, the Universal World College, which is a prep school. There's about 15 of them around the world, backed by some billionaires. It was their beautiful college, beautiful campus, brand new, brand new campus. And then they were trying to make Dilijan the tourist center of Armenia. We worked on a lot of projects, but most of my success there was on secondary projects.

Julius Sztuk: So even though this was a pretty well-developed place with a lot of resources, they still felt they had a need for Peace Corps?

Charles Forbus: They still do, yeah, economically. They are high unemployment. They need economic development for sure. They need economic development. Well-educated people, lots of potential. There in between Turkey, Azerbaijan. North of Iran and south of Georgia.

Julius Sztuk: Mm hmm.

Charles Forbus: Landlocked. No resources to speak of, but highly intelligent, well-educated people. Everybody speaks at least two languages, mostly three.

Julius Sztuk: Right.

Charles Forbus: They speak Russian, Armenian, and either English, German, or French. And some of them speak all of them. I worked with a woman that spoke all three and fluently, and she had worked with the United Nations. So they do need economic development. But it was a great, it was a great tour. In fact, I met some really great people in the Peace Corps there too.

Julius Sztuk: Were there quite a few volunteers?

Charles Forbus: We had 42 in our group, 42 every year.

Julius Sztuk: Some in that same city that you were in?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, there was. At the end, there were two besides me there. It's like 10,000 people.

Julius Sztuk: And you lived in an apartment there?

Charles Forbus: I lived with a family.

Julius Sztuk: Oh, you lived with the family? For the entire two years?

Charles Forbus: No, the whole time, that was more recently. I lived with Zoya and Goggek and they, she was great. She, you know, I gave her a little extra money. She washed my clothes. She had my breakfast ready every morning. She was a pretty funny lady. Great cook. And she was a nurse. She was also a great maker of vodka. So everybody in the neighborhood came to drink her vodka.

Julius Sztuk: So drinking vodka was a pretty common thing?

Charles Forbus: All through Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia. Vodka is part of the lifestyle.

Julius Sztuk: So you acquired a taste for vodka?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, you better get it. Now, they did make, Armenia does. Actually, this is a little interesting aside. Winston Churchill's favorite cognac, or not cognac, brandy, was Armenian brandy. And he preferred it over other brandies, and not that he wouldn't drink other brandies, but, you know, he was pretty good at drinking. But yeah, his favorite was Armenian brandy. And it's good.

Julius Sztuk: So you were in community development there as well.

Charles Forbus: That's right.

Julius Sztuk: And tell me about your job and what you did and who you worked with.

Charles Forbus: The project that I worked on was well funded. So I wasn't, it was, I had no need to develop grants or anything like that, just ideas. And they wanted more civic development information, how to go about bringing in the community to get behind projects. I had developed a plan to make sure that social impact was positive on any of the projects, and that was one of the major concerns that they had. That they would do a project that would negatively impact the poor people, because there were a lot of poor people there. We had several big plans, like we were going to put in a farmer's market to help the locals. We already got the land. We were going to build a hotel for, to promote, for the city to promote tourism. We were going to set up a tourist center with guides that, there was a lot of hiking areas up in the mountains and into the forest. We're in a national forest there.

Julius Sztuk: OK.

Charles Forbus: So we were going to set up a way, a tourist industry there to take people on tours into the mountains, and to the monasteries. Also, we were going to do renting camping equipment for the people that wanted us to camp like that. And it was going along pretty good. And then there was an oligarch who had a big influence on this project. It was the Dilijan Development Foundation, was the name of it, and there were two guys and they couldn't agree on what which way to go. But meantime, I had already developed secondary projects at the community center. I was teaching English to a bunch of high school kids after hours. And then I was also working with a guy named Albert who was a Rotary, a Rotarian.

Julius Sztuk: Rotarian?

Charles Forbus: And he was a lawyer too. He had to be a lawyer to be a Rotary Rotarian in Armenia.

Julius Sztuk: OK.

Charles Forbus: Albert was one of the best guys I ever met. He was great big. You know, we think Armenia, you think a big guy, that's him. He is a big guy. And he had his sister Narina worked, they were all three of them were lawyers, but he was the head lawyer, knew everybody in Romania. And so he was going to, and I'd been introduced to him by another Peace Corps volunteer who had left. And so I would go over to his office and we would have lunch over there, and I'd go over some English courses with him. So he was very interested and his English wasn't bad. It wasn't good, but it wasn't bad. And so he was going to a conference in Moldova. No, no, no. Uh, Belarus. And they'd asked him to make a presentation. And he said, I'm very, I'm very worried. He said, I want to do a really good job. I want to do a good job. So I said, well, let's just start working on your presentation.

So we wrote out his presentation and we worked on his English, and Narina was a refugee from Ukraine. She was Armenian, but she had lived in Ukraine. And so whenever the war started, she had been in Donetsk, which is where all the upheaval was with the Russians in eastern Ukraine. So she and her family had moved back to Armenia. So she was working with him on the Russian part and I was working with him on the English part. And so we decided, let's do a PowerPoint. And he said, I don't know anything about this. So we taught him how to do it. We built this PowerPoint, and so he was practicing. I'd go over about two or three times a week and spend an hour with him, and we were working on it and she was working with him. So he went on the conference and when he came back he was all smiles. He said, I was a hero. I am now celebrity in Belarus!

Julius Sztuk: Great, great.

Charles Forbus: Yeah. So he was, he had a great. He was really a good guy.

Julius Sztuk: You really helped him out.

Charles Forbus: Yeah, he was fun. He is a great guy. Yeah. I still stay in touch with all the people over there. And also interesting, a little aside here. At the community center, they were interested in hooking up with a university in the United States for a cross-cultural training of their people, the students there in Dilijan. I happened to know some people in Huntsville, Texas, at Sam Houston State University, and I knew the Secretary to the President and several other people who are professors there. And I'd met them, they were part of the Democratic Club, so we were the small blue dot in the middle of this big red dot.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah, OK.

Charles Forbus: Anyway, so I called Judy Tilly and asked her if she could connect us with somebody there at the university. So a funny thing happened. We connected with the education department who already had done some stuff in China at the same cross-cultural training. The dean of the School of Education, his assistant dean, was a Armenian who had migrated to the United States and worked there. So it turned out great. They still got it going.

Julius Sztuk: Great, great.

Charles Forbus: They're still going there.

Julius Sztuk: So there's some lasting impact.

Charles Forbus: Believe me, I was just. I was just the middle guy that got him in touch with. I didn't have much to do with setting up the operation.

Julius Sztuk: Still, it wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Charles Forbus: But, yeah, it turned out good. Yeah. And I think I have all the people over there. I think I've had a good impact on them. They liked me.

Julius Sztuk: It sounds like.

Charles Forbus: And they like Americans.

Julius Sztuk: Are they generally favorable towards Americans?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, very much so. Yeah. They also like the Russians, not as much as they like the Americans, but you know, they still have, they're dependent on Russians. All the business left. Like I said, there's, they have no natural resources, very little industry there. All the industry left when the Soviet Union fell. All the chemical plants in Vanadzor, which is a town about 40 kilometers from where I lived, all the plant after plant after plant's vacant. There's nothing there. They had thousands of employees in those chemical plants, and they sold those chemicals around the rest of the Soviet Union.

Julius Sztuk: OK.

Charles Forbus: It was a closed economy. You know, if you made it here, you had to buy it there, you know. And the same thing in Dilijan. They had like an electronic plant that employed 3,000 people, open, going 24 hours a day. It's gone. It's a town of 10,000 people. 3,000 jobs were gone. And they're not going, they're not coming back. That's why we were trying to make it, turn it into the tourism sector.

Julius Sztuk: So there are other industries.

Charles Forbus: And they had put some people to work in. But most of the people who had gone to work for the bank that had moved there came from the capital city, Yerevan. So it didn't really impact the local populace. It was more of an import of the people and they built the, they built apartments for the employees. So it didn't really impact the living conditions.

Julius Sztuk: Didn't help them out?

Charles Forbus: No, not that much. Anyway, we were working on trying to get it going and then.

Julius Sztuk: And that wasn't too long ago. Do you think, do you get feedback from them now? Are things still going?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, I hear from them all the time.

Julius Sztuk: The tourism industry is developing?

Charles Forbus: Eh, not.

Julius Sztuk: Not that great?

Charles Forbus: And then when I left, it was a sad day. I hate to see them, hate to say goodbye, but it was time to go. Yeah, I was glad to see my kids. I was lucky. Harvey, the hurricane that hit Houston.

Julius Sztuk: Yeah.

Charles Forbus: International airport had been closed. I flew out. I flew in on September the first. They'd just opened the airport. I was lucky.

Julius Sztuk: Wow.

Charles Forbus: It was open when I flew in, so.

Julius Sztuk: Well, you know, usually I interview people who have done one assignment and, you know, you ask about how Peace Corps has affected the rest of their life. But with you, Peace Corps has been kind of a lasting thing for the past, you know, 20, 20 some odd years, huh?

Charles Forbus: Yeah. You know, that's always, it's always in the back of my mind. Right now, I'm working with Americorps.

Julius Sztuk: Are you?

Charles Forbus: VISTA later, and my tour is up at the end of this month. So I still got that. I still like to do a little bit of volunteering.

Julius Sztuk: That's a volunteer position though?

Charles Forbus: Yeah, yeah.

Julius Sztuk: So if it hadn't been for that first experience, the first Peace Corps experience in Nepal, do you think these other volunteer experiences may not have happened or?

Charles Forbus: Well, no, like I said it, it was cut short. I think the most important thing that keeps my interest is the fact that John Kennedy had a vision about the Peace Corps and that, like I said, I'd been in the Air Force, which was, you know, I was young and I was a warrior. And then when I got older, I got to thinking, you know, maybe it's not all about being a warrior. Maybe it's about spreading a little bit of good news. And so I think John Kennedy was the catalyst that has kept me going really.

Julius Sztuk: All those years ago.

Charles Forbus: Yeah. I think so. He was a visionary.

Julius Sztuk: Well, great. Any last words before we sum it up?

Charles Forbus: I've had a great time, yeah. It's been great. I have very few regrets about my Peace Corps services, except a couple of times when I fell and hurt my knee.

Julius Sztuk: Right. Right.

Charles Forbus: But, yeah. But no, it's been good.

Julius Sztuk: Well, great. Yeah. You've had a lot of great experiences, Charlie. Well, thanks very much. And that concludes our interview.

Charles Forbus: Well, thank you.