John Pielemeier Oral History Interview
Interviewer(s): Evelyn Ganzglass
Interviewee(s): John Pielemeier

Evelyn Ganzglass: This is Evelyn Ganzglass. Today is March 21st, 2016, and I am interviewing John Pielemeier, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Cote d'Ivoire from 1966 to 1968. And he was in a TEFL group. So let me start the interview by just asking you, why did you join the Peace Corps?

John Pielemeier: I was a student. Thank you, Evelyn. I was a student at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. And, uh, my freshman year in the summer, I hooked onto by chance to a group that was doing lay mission travel and volunteer work in Mexico. And so we raised money, bought a pickup truck, and my dad actually provided a jeep to us, and we went to shop in Chapantongo, Hidalgo, Mexico for the summer. And we lived in the, in the church, in the top of the church where the padre and his mother, his mamacita, took care of us and fed us. And there were five guys. I was the only freshman, going from freshman and sophomore, and it was a wonderful time. And I figured, you know, this is, this is a great kind of way to get to know what's going on. You learn how to live with the locals.

And we helped build a school. Actually, we were digging big rocks out of the, out of the desert and putting, putting them in the back of the pickup truck, bringing them in. A mason would break them up and make them into the stones that would be the walls of the school. So that got me, I think, into the volunteer mode. Um. I think when I was a junior in college, I was talking with a friend and I said, I'm not sure what I'm going to do after I graduated. And he said, well, you're going to join Peace Corps. And I said, well, I think I probably am too, because it was the era of, the Kennedy era. And I found in my notes here a letter I sent to my congressman in 1961 urging him to vote for the Peace Corps legislation.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Good for you.

John Pielemeier: So I had been studying Spanish, having been in Mexico, and I contacted Peace Corps. They said, well, we'll accept you, but you're going to go to Francophone Africa, so you better get clicking on studying in French. So I believe I did a summer program, maybe a, I'm not sure where, maybe at Oberlin and then.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Before Peace Corps?

John Pielemeier: Before. And then, um, I'm not sure exactly the timing. But then I took French and I went into Peace Corps training. Maybe this is what happened. I went to Oberlin and then we went to Quebec. And when Quebec was where you learned to speak really very bad French and I love to say the Quebecois verb for tacking up a river with your sailboat is zig-zag-e. So there are a lot of non-French words you'll never hear in France or even in West Africa. Um. But the training went well. I was part of a group, a TEFL group that was going to be all over French speaking West Africa. And I was, like most of them, pretty unsure of what my life was going to be like and whether I was going to survive successfully. But I figured, you know, I could probably do it in one way or the other.

So we had, we went to Bouaké, which is the second largest city in Ivory Coast, for our training. All together for all of these countries.

Evelyn Ganzglass: All of?

John Pielemeier: Chad, Niger.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Ah.

John Pielemeier: Uh, it was then Old [Upper] Volta [now Burkina Faso], Benin, Togo, and Cote d'Ivoire. And we were all TEFL. And there were probably 50 of us. And we spent, I think, two months there and did our training. I have one story that I recall from learning the local language, which was Dyula for the Ivory Coast, which is like, it's the same as Bambara. And so we were learning that along with French. And I learned the numbers and I learned how to market, how to bargain. So I learned how to say, what's the price, [speaks Dyula] and how much is it? And then the next phrase it was always, it's too much, you must lower your price. And then I learned the numbers. But however, the numbers were based on a numeral system of five rather than ten. So it was a little hard to figure out.

So I went to the local market one day and I wanted to buy a Malian blanket, and I started negotiating with this trader and I said, [speaks Dyula]. And he kind of smiled and he gave me a price. And I didn't even bother to figure out what it was. I said, no, it's too much. You must lower your price. And so he gave me another number and I turned around and was sort of working this number out on my fingers. Came back and said, no, again, that's too much. And he said, what is your price? So I had to figure out what my price was. And I came back and I gave him a number. He kind of laughed and said, no, no, no. And he repeated his price. And I went back and repeated my price. And we all learned that after a while, if you, they don't come down, you walk away and they'll come chasing after you and maybe you'll get a bargain.

So it turns out when I walked away, he didn't come chasing after me. So I went back to class the next day and realized that his price was lower than my price. So I realized I wasn't, I had a lot more to learn in terms of Dyula and the local language.

Evelyn Ganzglass: So this is, um, the whole numeral system is based on five?

John Pielemeier: Yeah.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Is that unusual? I think it is.

John Pielemeier: I think it is, but I didn't know that at the time.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Huh.

John Pielemeier: I don't know how many African languages are like that.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Well, so you really jumped ahead. So you, a friend said you will apply for the Peace Corps and you applied and you got in and then you had no, you had no training in this country?

John Pielemeier: Yes. Well, we went to, again, we went to Oberlin, and then.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Oh, Oberlin was part of the training.

John Pielemeier: The part of the training. Then we went to, uh.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Quebec.

John Pielemeier: Quebec.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Okay.

John Pielemeier: And, um, and that was really where half of our training was, and the second half was in in Bouaké in the Ivory Coast. And I use the term Ivory Coast just to make it easier. Okay. Um.

Evelyn Ganzglass: What did, what did your parents think about all of this? Were they okay?

John Pielemeier: Well, they cried, I know my mother cried at least when I got on the plane in southern Indiana, where I grew up in this little town. And the nearest airport was 30 miles away. And I get on this little plane and flew off and they said, I don't think we're ever going to see him again. They had not been outside the country except maybe stepped a foot in Mexico or Canada. My dad was a pharmacist. My mother helped run the store, raised three kids, you know, basically cooked three pies every morning for, for the, uh, for the lunch counter and, uh, and did all the books and hiring and everything for the store. So.

Evelyn Ganzglass: So this was a big deal, going.

John Pielemeier: It was a big deal. Oh, going to, having gone to Georgetown was the first step in moving far away from Indiana.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Should never have gone east, right? That's what did it.

John Pielemeier: Yeah.

Evelyn Ganzglass: I guess so. All right. So you got to, you got to in-country. And then where were you assigned?

John Pielemeier: Well, I, I looked at some. My mother saved all of my letters, so I've been reviewing some of those. And I apparently said I wanted to be in a city, but I didn't get a city. I got a tertiary city called Katiola, which is only about, at that time it was 2 hours north of Bouaké. Bouaké was in the middle of the country. And there was a railroad that went straight north south. And so if you went on that railroad for an hour or if you went on the highway, so called highway for 2 hours, you would get to Katiola, which was probably had about 25,000 people. And it had a new secondary school. So many of the people in our TEFL group were assigned to what we call College Moderne. And this is an effort to broaden the educational system in the Ivory Coast from the French lycees, which were the only secondary schools originally in all of these colonies.

And the second, the College Moderne, would broaden not only the, uh, the number of kids who could go to secondary school, but in this case they broaden the curricula. And they were internaut schools, they were, kids would live on the campuses and they had special programs. In this case, there was an agriculture program where they would do, they would learn how to farm and use tractors and that sort of thing as part of their education. The other important thing about the College Moderne system, which was really nicely done, I'm sure the World Bank or somebody helped finance it, was that they mixed all the ethnic groups from all over the country so that they tried to make them Ivorian citizens rather than people from the north or people from the south or the east or the west.

So all of these kids who came in, who were like sixth graders, were from everywhere and they didn't really know each other and they were all getting to know each other. They had to basically communicate in French, and all of the schools had English teachers because they wanted them to learn some English. And so probably 20 of my group taught in 20 new College Moderne, and it turned out to be a nice, a nice setting. Um.

I was assigned to, in theory I was supposed to live on the compound, the school compound, which is outside the city, and the housing wasn't quite ready. And I found a note from my Peace Corps director to my school director and to the local préfet, sous préfet, saying that I hope by now you found housing for Mr. Pielemeier because he's, we have a strict rule about a male volunteer living with female volunteers, which I must have done for a few weeks or maybe a month. Eventually the housing was finished enough that I moved in, but it was outside the city, the town, so I wasn't too happy about that. I did have a Mobylette that allowed me to get in and out of the town.

Evelyn Ganzglass: A Mobylette is? What is a Mobylette?

John Pielemeier: It's a little scooter.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Oh, a scooter.

John Pielemeier: Yeah, which people don't have any more, of course. Anyway, um, so I was assigned to teach English and I actually had my program. I was taught every hour, every day, five days a week, and I taught English and then I taught phys ed and I taught music. Phys ed and music in French, which was also a challenge.

Evelyn Ganzglass: I bet. And English was a very basic level or had they had any?

John Pielemeier: This is a new school. So they were all first year students, first year of English, and the second year they did first, I did first and second years. Um. And it was an intriguing situation. The, uh, in those days there were very few Ivorians who had the education to teach secondary school. So most of the teachers were French, many of them were old ex-colons, what we in other times would call crocodiles. Um. And many of them were, you know, had never, even though these countries were independent, had not lost their, their feelings about who was in charge.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Mm hmm.

John Pielemeier: So my principal was a guy who was a very smart-ass guy. He left his wife behind several posts back. He'd been in Africa most of his life. He, I'm sure, took well advantage of the female African staff around the school. And he also accused me of being a CIA agent right off the bat, just for, just for fun.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Mm hmm.

John Pielemeier: Just to put me down. So every time I'd go get my mail from his office, he would say, here's your mail from your bosses in Washington. And anyway, I tried real hard to be straight, straight arrow, and teach my classes. And the other teachers were mostly either older French people who were working in Africa or what's called French militaire. And French militaire were people doing their military service in lieu of being in the army. And they could teach in Africa for two years and fulfill their military service, which was a great idea. I wish we had that in the United States.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Well, ours was alternate military service as well, right?

John Pielemeier: Right. So, um. There were a couple of these militaire on the compound. Eventually there were other people who I got to know. There was only one Ivorian on the compound. And there were, two of the, two of the people I got to know best were two Marxists who came to teach at the school. They were very explicitly French Marxists, and they made it very well known. And he was Italian. I guess she was French. And later on, I'll tell you why they were more important to me. Um.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Well, it's interesting that the school was so heavily French and not Cote d'Ivoirian. And so your Peace Corps experience was French colonialists.

John Pielemeier: Well, then the second year I moved into town, and so it wasn't so much. But there were French colonialists all over this town. They were technical aides to the government in almost all the sectors, in agriculture and health. Again, this is a small Ivorian town, there were very few educated Ivorians, and those that were educated wanted to be in the bigger cities. They didn't want to go up in these countryside schools and towns. Um. I remember that the primary school teachers were all Ivorian, and one of my first people that I was invited out to dinner for was with a woman who was the Ivorian principal of the primary school system. And there were two other health officers, health volunteers in town. And so she invited us all over to her house. And, uh, I guess I have to say this.

The, uh, I remember going to her house and she served a dish and had a lot of hot sauce available. And I started putting the hot sauce on my, on my food. And she said, be careful. You put too much on there and you won't be, it'll be too hot. It'll burn your burn your lips. You won't be any good for making love. And I thought, well, that's really interesting, and it's come right out in the first dinner party. So anyway, um. I got into the rhythm of teaching and I think I was pretty good at it. I enjoyed it. And as all Peace Corps volunteers did, we sort of looked towards our secondary projects and what we're going to do during the summer if you're a teacher.

So I eventually got the idea that I was going to start a club de développement, a development club for the Ivory Coast. And I talked with the kids about it and they all, many of them said, yeah, this is a good idea. So the idea is when you go home for the summer, and they would go scatter all around the country and they'd go back to their sometimes very small villages, what they would do would sit around and do nothing because their parents would not let them work in the fields any longer because they were being educated and they would let their pinky fingernail grow during the summer. And so they'd normally come back to school with about two more inches on their pinky finger just to show that they had not been doing manual labor.

So the idea was, and I talked to one of the health volunteers and said, why don't we train them to do something during the summer? So we decided, and they started to form the club. We got the club involved and said, what would you like to do when you go back to your villages? And they basically agreed they could teach literacy and they could do health education. So the health volunteer helped with the training for health education. And I got materials and trained them on literacy. And, you know, we would meet every week and we'd work on this diligently and the kids would come in and dedicated. And remember, they're only ninth grade, so they're what, 15? Maybe 14 or 15 or 16 years old.

So the idea was that during the summer I would go visit them in their villages and I would bring extra crayon. I would bring chalk. We gave them chalk. We gave them carnets, booklets. We gave them some teaching materials. We gave them some health materials. Our Peace Corps doctor provided little microscopes, basic microscopes, and some little health booklets in French.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Good.

John Pielemeier: And so we gave them stuff that could be useful, but we didn't accompany them when they went home. They were on their own. And, you know, they were still very young. And age means a lot in these African villages. And so I had lined up meetings and I would go travel around the country and meet with them and give them support in the village. Also resupply them, see how they were doing, talk to them about their problems. And that would be the summer project.

So the school year went fine. I had decided I was going to take a vacation and I'd saved my money somehow and wanted to fly to East Africa. But before I did that, I went around the country mostly by train or by what they call mamoncillo, which is these mammy wagons, to places and we'd lined up dates I was going to visit these people. Well, once you get out in the village, you don't really know much about what the calendar is anymore. So I was looking at my notes and I think I visited five villages during the summer. And one of them that I went to, the guy didn't make the stop. I walked the five kilometers to the village. He wasn't there. And I walked back. Three or four of them, the person was there. These were all boys. And one of them it was sort of a defining moment.

I remember getting off the train on a place that was completely empty. There was no, just a sign for the train stop. And it was totally what we call in the bush. And so I got off and the kid wasn't there. And I sit around and I said, well, what am I going to do? And there was one path that went off into the forest. And I said, well, I can either wait here for the next train, just assume this is not going to happen, or I can start walking down the trail. So I decided I'd start walking down the trail and there's nobody on the trail. And it got more and more into the forest. And then the path divided. And I had to figure out, well, which fork do I take? Sort of like Robert Frost.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Yeah.

John Pielemeier: And I sort of, which one looks the most traveled, you know? So I took that fork and then I came to another fork. And by now I'm two or three miles into the forest and I haven't seen a soul. And so then I take whatever fork looks, again, like it's most heavily trodden. And I go further and I maybe go another mile and then I turn a corner, and a woman comes around the other way towards me and she sees me and screams bloody murder. And I'm sure I was the first white man she'd ever seen. But I also figured I was probably on the right trail. So she went running back to her village. And then guess who appears but my student, who comes running out. Oh, he's full of apologies and so forth. And, you know, he's really in trouble with his chief and with his parents for having not met me.

So I ended up going to the village and helping out with him and doing what I was supposed to do and meeting with the chief and the others and visiting a class or two and then coming back. And of course, they gave me a chicken to carry back, which as far as, I got far enough away I just let the chicken go because I didn't want to take that on the train. But when I, when I talked to young people about sort of what Peace Corps sometimes leads towards maturity or self-determination, that's the example I often give, is that, you know, sometimes you just strike out without knowing where you're going or what you're going to find. And the road splits and the road splits and splits again. And, you know, you just gotta press on and assume that you're going to get out of this one way or the other.

Evelyn Ganzglass: And so did these projects work out?

John Pielemeier: I find I have a report that I wrote at the end of the summer, I guess when I got back to school, and talked to all these students who were coming back. And, uh, something like 23 students had worked all summer. [recorder is moved] Um, how are we doing?

Evelyn Ganzglass: [inaudible]

John Pielemeier: Um. Maybe five of them, the classes didn't work for various reasons. I wrote a six page report which I, in French, which I sent to the. I did the six page report in English, which I sent to Peace Corps, and maybe a four page report in French, which I sent to the Ministry of Education in the Cote d'Ivoire. And said, you know, hopefully this is something that you might want to do as a matter of course in other schools. Um. And there were advantages and disadvantages. I think the education, the literacy programs, went better than health education for a variety of reasons, mostly related to the training and the equipment that the volunteers had. And the fact that the volunteers couldn't follow up if they did find a problem, a health problem. But in literacy, they could try to work things out.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Mm hmm.

John Pielemeier: But the real problem is at the end of the summer, who takes over the training, the literacy course?

Evelyn Ganzglass: Ah, that's right.

John Pielemeier: So anyway, I think it went well. And if I had been there for a second summer, I would have done the same thing.

Evelyn Ganzglass: But it was good for the students themselves?

John Pielemeier: Yes. And they, I mean, hopefully that's the big, that's the big positive is that they come back with the idea that they can do something for their villages as they go through school and afterwards they don't leave those villages behind.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Did you get any feedback that they, in fact, felt that?

John Pielemeier: Yes. I do. I have, they all wrote reports, which I still have copies of.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Oh, lovely. It was a great idea that you, you came up with that.

John Pielemeier: Yeah, it seemed to fit and they liked it.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Before we leave and you went to a city, you said, afterwards, a bigger place?

John Pielemeier: No, I stayed there, but.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Oh, you stayed there? You just had a different job, is that in kind of the second year?

John Pielemeier: No. Well, no, I first I went to, I took my travel. I took my leave and flew out to Nairobi and had adventures there. I just went by myself since nobody else wanted to go there. And I hitchhiked around East Africa for about, I suppose, three weeks and went from sleeping on a park bench in Nairobi when after I flew in to then going to the Peace Corps office there and checking in. And then I went down to Mombasa and I went down to the Tanzania, what was then Tanganyika, border.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Mm hmm.

John Pielemeier: And I was going to go to an island there. And they said, well, that's off limits to Americans. You can't go there. So I had to turn around and hitchhike back. Went up to the northern part of Kenya, not far from Somalia actually. And then I got back to Nairobi, then went west hitchhiking into western Kenya, then down to the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. I had many adventures. One of them was I lost my, I left my camera in one of these little cars. Typically, you either had a big car filled with two Europeans or you had a small Volkswagen filled with six Asians. And we were leaving there and it was one of those cars with Asians that I left my camera in. And when I got back to Nairobi, on the way back, I went to the Peace Corps office and they said, somebody brought your camera back for you.

Evelyn Ganzglass: How wonderful.

John Pielemeier: Yeah.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Excellent. So you did all of that by yourself as well?

John Pielemeier: Yeah. So, um, driving, hitchhiking west into Kenya, the sort of the big areas where the larger farms or plantations might be, with a white family. The man would come up behind some three Kenyan military trucks with soldiers in the back, sort of like a big pickup truck. And he started passing them. And each one he would pass and then swerve and then swerve out right in front of it, kicking up the gravel. And so I asked him why he was doing this. He says, I want to break their windscreens. And it's just an indication of the enmity of these former Kenyan, the white Kenyans who had basically been thrown out of power and were still really angry about it.

Evelyn Ganzglass: And contrast that to the French in Cote d'Ivoire.

John Pielemeier: Well, they were pretty much the same. They didn't have land, though. They were more civil service oriented. Not nearly as much land. The land was mostly in East Africa.

Evelyn Ganzglass: How long did the French stay in those positions, do you know?

John Pielemeier: They stayed until, um. The original president was sort of Houphouet-Boigny, who was very well known. He stayed for, I think, ten or 12 years before he died. He was, the French tried to set up sort of mini French African leaders who were sort of, who would follow along with the policies that the French had instituted. And they did this in, successfully in about three quarters of the French francophone countries of West Africa. And Houphouet-Boigny was one of these. His successor, Bedie, was similar. And then there was, Bedie was sort of kicked out of power and there became a military coup. And when that happened, the French became the enemy.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Mm hmm.

John Pielemeier: And they were mostly fled and their properties were taken over. That's gone back and forth since then.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Talk a little bit about the, the town you were in.

John Pielemeier: The town was about 20,000. It had a poor market. There wasn't much to buy, but there was a typical African market every day. They made pottery in the town, it's what it was known for, but it was also pretty crummy pottery.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Mm hmm.

John Pielemeier: There wasn't, some tourists would stop there. They'd get off the train and they'd buy pottery. But nobody really trained these people in how to make better pottery. It was a, it was probably 50 percent Muslim and 50 percent either Christian or animist. Um. So it was a real mixed town. It wasn't one ethnic group or the other.

Evelyn Ganzglass: And people got along?

John Pielemeier: There was no enmity that, I mean, there was no stuff going on that I was aware of. In those days, the federal government, the government of the country, was pretty much in control. And everybody still, just like when the French were there, they kind of obeyed the orders. Um. I didn't really, I don't think there was much religious. People were able to worship as they wanted. I think all of the, uh, the Ivorian leaders who came up. There was a suprefet in the town, and he was from the south. Almost all the people who were put into these positions of political leadership were from the Baoule tribe, which was the president's tribe. Um. Some of my colleagues were further north in the areas that were totally Muslim. And, and there may have been a few Muslims who were suprefets, but probably not very many.

Evelyn Ganzglass: And did you have electricity?

John Pielemeier: Uh, we did on, periodically. It would go off quite a bit. When I moved into town the second year, um, it went off more and more. Um. I was not in a, I wasn't living in a hut. I had a bathroom. I had to learn French. I had a Malian tutor that I hired who was, Peace Corps gave us some money to hire somebody. And he was very good, but he got thrown into jail because he didn't pay his hotel bill.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Hmm.

John Pielemeier: So I had to look for somebody else. And I found a French militaire at another secondary school in the town who said he would teach me. And it turned out that's when I really learned French, because he was, he. It turned out later he didn't like Americans very much. And he loved to critique everything I said. And he really worked on me. And I knew, he was on my. I formed a basketball team. We had a Katiola basketball team and we were playing in other towns and he was on it. Some other people were on it. But at one point there was a party at one of the militaire's house when I was still on campus. I wasn't invited. And I had, I was sleeping on my bed underneath the, right near a window that had sort of, you put the window up with a sort of a stick to hold it up so whatever little breeze you might find. This is what they call the savannah. You get a little bit of that to keep you cool. We had no air conditioning or anything like that.

So the party was ending and this guy who was my tutor came out from the neighbor's house and was pretty drunk and he started yelling. He said, John, John, tu ha du whiskey? Do you have whiskey? And I lay there quietly, didn't answer, but he kept it up. So he said, John, John, tu ha du whiskey, tu ha du whiskey? So I finally I said, oui, mais je n'en ai pas pour toi. I said, yes, but I don't have any for you. Well, that was the wrong answer, because a few minutes later a big stone came hurtling through my window. And luckily my bed was not under the window. And went crashing down on my floor and broke. And I did not respond and he walked away and all but.

Evelyn Ganzglass: And this was the guy who was teaching?

John Pielemeier: The guy who was, who was tutoring me.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Whom you were paying?

John Pielemeier: Who I was paying. So, uh, I guess we continued the classes. I guess, I can't remember. But anyway, there was kind of a love hate relationship.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Why was he so anti-American?

John Pielemeier: A lot of French were in those days. This was their territory. What were Americans doing there anyway? I couldn't speak very good French. You know, teaching. There must be some nefarious reason we were there.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Wow. So, um, the second year you moved into town, you said?

John Pielemeier: Yes. I wanted to move into town so I could be more with the local population. And I did that. There was a new volunteer coming in who was going to be an agricultural volunteer guy, and so he was going to move in to me. And I found a house and found a, what they called a boy, to help clean and do a little cooking. And then I would drive up on my Mobylette to the school. And that went fine for the first semester and.

Evelyn Ganzglass: And I'm sorry, how far was that?

John Pielemeier: Probably three or four kilometers.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Oh, close.

John Pielemeier: A couple of miles.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Yeah.

John Pielemeier: The only downside is the students weren't coming to my house after school as much or during the lunchtime break to read my books because it was further away. We had done a lot of that. So, um, we were doing fine. We had the basketball team going and then we're coming up to Christmas break and we had a Peace Corps basketball team. I was going to be the shooting guard and we were going to have a tournament in Abidjan, in the capital. So I was excited about that. But before all that happened, school let out. The two health volunteers had already taken their break and they were going off somewhere else. They'd left the town called Katiola and there was a wedding.

And I remember going to the wedding and not the next, not that night, but the next night I woke up with funny feelings in my legs, in my back. And this prickly sensation is going up and down my legs. And I had a sense that this was not good. And so, um. To, made all the difference in the world. I got up, put my clothes on in the middle of the night, went out, and was hoping to find a, catch a ride on the road down to the second, Bouake, the second biggest city. And then maybe I could go down to Abidjan where there is a Peace Corps doctor. So I. I couldn't find anybody on the road. And then I thought, well, the girls may have left their vehicle and maybe they left the keys somewhere. And I had a key to their house, but I couldn't find the keys. So I came back out on the road and eventually somebody came along and I got in and hitchhiked down to Bouake from where I found the phone and I called the Peace Corps doctor.

It was Christmas morning. I interrupted his Christmas morning and said, I've got this problem. Not sure what it is, but I'm on my way in a bush taxi down to, like eight more hours down to Abidjan. He said, well, go to the Peace Corps hostel, check in, and I'll come by and see you when I can. So I did and he did. And I was, clearly wasn't feeling good and wasn't sure what was going on. So he came and said, well, you're dehydrated and probably tired and drink a lot of water and get a lot of sleep and we'll see how you are in the morning. So the next morning I felt a little better and I get up and two of my buddies were there for Peace Corps training and they were all congregating in Abidjan. And we went off to a really good French restaurant for lunch, which we hadn't done for a long time.

And I remember coming out of the restaurant and there was a rope about chest high that was because of some construction going on. And I stooped down to get under the rope and I couldn't push back up. And so I sort of crumpled to the ground and my two guy friends grabbed me and pulled me up and hailed a taxi and took me down to the Peace Corps office. And Peace Corps doctor was there, and he did some. I told him how I felt with these tickling sensations up and down my legs, and he called, made some calls and then they took me over to a French clinic, private clinic, and put me in a bed there. And he was with me for a little while. And then I spent the night there and I had, I needed to go to the bathroom quite a bit, to urinate quite a bit. And every time I got up and would try to get to the bathroom, I found myself leaning more and more against the wall because my left leg was losing all of its strength.

And so at some point I went back and I went to sleep and I woke up the next morning and I lost all of my motor function in my legs and part of the motor function in my shoulders. And he came in the next day and they tried to do a lumbar puncture, which would have, the white blood cells would have been a certain way that would have indicated it was a thing called Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is what the doctor, the Peace Corps doctor, thought it was. And he was right. He was very good. He's still somebody I keep in touch with. Um. So anyway, they failed in the lumbar puncture because I have a crooked spine and they didn't know that and I didn't know to tell them. And they kept sticking the needle in my back and my spine, which was pretty painful.

Anyway, the Peace Corps doctor arranged to have me medevaced because they didn't know how far the Guillain-Barre would move. It's an ascending, they call it an ascending paralysis. So it hits your internal organs like your heart or your liver or your lungs. It could kill you. So he arranged to have me flown Medivac to the Air Force hospital in Spain, where somehow, I don't know quite how that happened, but I was probably on a gurney and got on one of these planes and got off and they took me into the hospital and put me in a bed. And at some point I asked to get anything they could show me about Guillain-Barre and they gave me a medical text. I'm reading through there. And it said something like mortality rate 75 percent.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Wow.

John Pielemeier: I said, doctor, doctor! And it turns out it wasn't nearly that much, it wasn't that high. But the paralysis had stopped and so it had jumped my internal organs. So I wasn't going to die from this.

Evelyn Ganzglass: And is this temporary?

John Pielemeier: Well, no, um. So after I'd been there about a week in Spain, I was hoping to go right back, because I wanted to get back to the basketball tournament, but I also wanted to get back to my school. And they said, well, no, this is going to take six months to a year for you. You're going to have to wait until all this happens, gets out of your system. Then you have to basically learn to walk again. So I was from there evacuated to Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, where I was put on a gurney and taken into the hospital at Andrews and put in a corridor. And I've been a bunch of hours on this plane without any food, this military plane. And I was tired and cold and hungry and nobody came around for an hour, an hour and a half.

And so finally I waved down some nurse who was walking back and I said, am I supposed, don't you have a bed for me here somewhere? And she said, well, who are you? And I said, you know, she went off and she came back and said, no, we don't. Peace Corps had screwed, Peace Corps medical messed up. So they got on the phone with Peace Corps medical, and probably three more hours later, I get taken into an ambulance, taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital on the other side of town where they did admit me and put me in a bed. And ironically, the Naval Bethesda Medical Hospital has a tower where the officers are put. Because they didn't know what to do with me, they put me in the tower with the officers, which is pretty cool. Here's this bearded, long haired, grubby Peace Corps volunteer who's up there with a, with all the, uh.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Brass.

John Pielemeier: With the all the brass, you know. Within a couple of days, they figured it out and put me down on the grunt ward with everybody else but.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Were you're still paralyzed at that point?

John Pielemeier: Oh, yeah. So I was there, and they had, they determined in Spain that the paralysis was no longer moving so I could start physical therapy. So I was there for probably six weeks. They told me I couldn't go back to Cote d'Ivoire, and after six weeks they said they were going to dismiss me. And my sister happens to be a physical therapist and she was living in Florida. And so she said, I'll take him down and he can live with me and we can start doing physical therapy. So she basically started by having me get down on my hands and knees and crawl on the floor, and we'd go to a pool and I'd practice trying to learn to walk again.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Wow.

John Pielemeier: So that was from basically just before Christmas until, uh, I'd say April or May. Meanwhile, my students didn't know what happened to me. They came back from, and even my teachers and then my principal, they came back from holiday and I wasn't there. Peace Corps got in touch with them and this French Marxist woman started, took over my classes. And so she had the students write me letters in their very halting English, and it was very moving to get them. Um. And they would say things like, uh, in fact, one of them, uh, one of the students wrote a portrait of me, which they sent to the Peace Corps newsletter called The Tambour.

And there's a whole page and a half here about describing, this is by Kwasi Quadrole Jean-Baptiste, student of [inaudible], College Moderne of Katiola. Transmitted by Madame Kremiscoli, the Marxist teacher. And it starts: Every morning coming, his blond hair waving in the wind. Our teacher comes on his bike to the school. And it goes to this whole page and a half of a pretty, pretty correct description about how I would discipline people and sometimes forget to discipline them and how, in the end, he says, it's with great impatience that we wait your return to our school because we love you like little, like little brothers, and we know you love us like a big brother.

Evelyn Ganzglass: That's nice. Very nice. So it's great that you still have that.

John Pielemeier: Yeah. And they also said, well, why did you go into sacred forest without the permission of the witch doctor? Which I had done. So I had a.

Evelyn Ganzglass: So what is the sacred forest?

John Pielemeier: Well, it's where the, where the spirits are, the traditional spirits. So there was one little.

Evelyn Ganzglass: So that's why you got paralyzed?

John Pielemeier: Yeah. From their point of view. So, um. There was one little restaurant in the town, and I didn't like to cook for myself. So I would go there and he might have chicken or field rat or whatever he might have. And so at one point he said, do you want to go to the sacred forest? And I said sure. So he took me out there and there was a grove of woods on a little hill. I can't remember exactly, but, um. He said, well, you know, the French wanted to build a road through here. And we said, no, we don't want you to do that. We want you to go around the grove of this forest. It's our sacred area. And the French said, no, we're going to come through here. So they, the way he described it, they came with their big bulldozers and their big machines, and the little people came out of the ground and they broke their machines. And so they couldn't go through the forest and tear it down and they didn't. They had to eventually go around.

So I learned the stories, a few stories about the sacred forests, and didn't think anything more of it. But apparently, either after I was paralyzed or even before, he, this guy, his name was Petit John that ran the restaurant, he let the word out that I'd been there. So that became the rationale for while I was paralyzed. And I can tell you 15 years later, when I was working for AID, a guy who was living in Abidjan said he had heard a story about a Peace Corps volunteer who had gone to the sacred forest and was paralyzed. I know that.

Evelyn Ganzglass: I know that guy.

John Pielemeier: Anyway, um, so my Peace Corps career was ended and, um. I, um.

Evelyn Ganzglass: How long did it take you to regain the ability to walk?

John Pielemeier: Well, I got back on my feet. I went through the green Peace Corps green sheet and found a job starting, I think, in April in Philadelphia, doing a 100 percent diagnostic survey of a low-income housing area that was under federal, HUD would do a federal upgrade program, which they were doing in those days. So I won't go into great detail, but that was a very, that was [inaudible] Philly and Rizzo was the police chief and it was hot. It was 1968, the year of the Democratic convention in Chicago.

Evelyn Ganzglass: And you were working for the police or who were you?

John Pielemeier: No, working for this firm Trans Century Corporation. But half of our staff were Howard University law students who were pretty hot about what was going on. And the other half were either former Peace Corps volunteers or ex-cons. So we had to find our own housing in this rundown area. And I ended up living with a former Mennonite volunteer from Vietnam and a black ex-con named Wimpy. And we had some exciting times and I learned a lot. And Wimpy wasn't totally rehabilitated, it turned out. So I learned a lot about how things go on. And then I went to the University of Chicago for grad school and did another year of physical therapy, and I was using canes or a cane. And then after that year in Chicago, I was able to throw away my cane and walk. And I was able to, I still never was able to run again or jump, but I could build up my strength enough so that I could carry babies on my back and hike down the Grand Canyon and do that sort of thing.

Evelyn Ganzglass: And what is the cause, is it a virus or what is it?

John Pielemeier: It's, it's sort of what's going on now. You hear about Guillain-Barre with the Zika virus. It's a, it's an autoimmune disease. It's a reaction by the white, the white blood cells are overreacting to some, uh, some attack on the system, on the nervous system. And they over, they overcompensate and they start destroying the nervous system.

Evelyn Ganzglass: But is it mosquito-borne?

John Pielemeier: No.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Oh, it's not. It's just.

John Pielemeier: No. With Zika, it may be. But in those cases, most people, they would say in those days, it's your body is overreacting. It could be a cold, it could be a sinus issue. Nobody really knows. And when I was at Bethesda Naval, I found military people from all over the world who had this.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Oh, so.

John Pielemeier: They picked it up in the Philippines. They picked it up in the United States.

Evelyn Ganzglass: So it's not that you were.

John Pielemeier: We have a friend whose son picked it up in Massachusetts.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Cote d'Ivoire, and no, it just, you happened to be there when that happened.

John Pielemeier: Yeah.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Well.

John Pielemeier: So.

Evelyn Ganzglass: When you think back on your Peace Corps experience, what are, I guess you've talked about your fondest memories. What do you, what do you think your, your contribution was or what did you learn? Let me ask it both ways.

John Pielemeier: Well, as Peace Corps volunteers almost always said, we probably picked up more than we gave. You know, we, we, it was, for us it was very much a maturation process. And I met a whole bunch of friends that we're still, some of which I'm still in touch with, Peace Corps friends. Um. Ivorian friends have kind of disappeared because I left so early. And but, uh, you know, I think I was able to provide a good model. I don't know if people followed up on it with other TEFL teachers in the future. Um. I continue to get contacts with some of my students for a while, but that faded away eventually. But it was a, you basically get grassroots experience in development that you don't get from any other program. And two years is, even though I was only there for a little over a year and a half, it makes a difference. It's a lot better than the year program, which some people prefer to take.

Evelyn Ganzglass: And some people actually extended for a third year.

John Pielemeier: Some do.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Right.

John Pielemeier: But Peace Corps is basically a program where you meet somebody who's in Peace Corps or was in Peace Corps, and there's an automatic bond. It's a, it's a cohort that is very wide and. And I coach new hires at AID. I've done this now for over ten years, and many of them, half of them are former Peace Corps volunteers. And that's, I know where they're coming from. They know a little bit where I'm coming from. And when you then go to work for AID, which I did for a career, you're no longer at the grassroots level, but at least you have an idea of how things work at the grassroots level that you can use when you're dealing at higher policy levels.

Evelyn Ganzglass: So there are three goals to Peace Corps that are always talked about. To provide technical assistance where requested. You talked about that. To promote better understanding of the U.S.

John Pielemeier: We did that. We brought movies up. I remember, I see from my notes here, we had several films we would bring up and in show to the whole town and that sort of thing.

Evelyn Ganzglass: And the woman saw her first white person, maybe.

John Pielemeier: Right.

Evelyn Ganzglass: And the third is to promote better understanding of other peoples by Americans.

John Pielemeier: We've done a lot of that, my wife and I. When we were in AID, we were in both in Botswana and Liberia, both places we made, we got in touch with the Peace Corps director and we said, well, we're both here. At the point we had kids, one in Botswana and two in Liberia. And we said, well, I know people sometimes are thinking about early termination, but if they come to town, they can stay with us. We have set aside a guest room, we call it the ET room, the early termination room. And so they can relax. They can talk to either one of us about our Peace Corps experiences and about other people. And they don't have to be under any pressure. We're not reporting to the Peace Corps director. They can play with our kids, they can relax, do whatever they want. And so that worked out. And we've had, I think we've had probably in both countries, probably eight or ten people who did that for three or four weeks. And I think our success rate was about 50 percent.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Then they returned?

John Pielemeier: About 50 percent went back to their towns and villages and 50 percent terminated. But we met a lot of Peace Corps volunteers. We just went out to Hawaii where we saw one of our health volunteers we got to know in Liberia, who's now at the University of Hawaii School of Public Health, and spent two nights with her. So we have a French, a whole group of people we've gotten to know and we've continued those contacts with, when we're overseas with AID.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Well, it's interesting, you talk about Peace Corps people now. Can you reflect? Because you've really seen them over the last, I guess it's 40 years now.

John Pielemeier: Yeah.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Fifty years, getting close to 50 years. Do you think the experience that volunteer, their experience now is very different from ours in the sixties?

John Pielemeier: I think most of them have had, the ones I see are the ones who decided after doing Peace Corps they want to do an international career in international development and they're all, all positive or they wouldn't be staying in the field. And there are a whole lot of them. And so I'm impressed with their quality. When we talk about their experiences, they're just as rigorous and tough and maybe even more so than some of ours. We had a lot of freedom. We didn't have a lot of security concerns that they now have. But I think Peace Corps is doing extremely well.

One of my other sort of objectives since leaving Peace Corps is I helped start a group called FOCI, Friends of the Cote d'Ivoire. And a woman, a young woman, contacted me now probably 20 years ago, who and she was working for a consulting firm here in town. And so I keep seeing your name. And I went on, because we want to hire you to do some work. But then I see you're Peace Corps Ivory Coast, and I was too. And I want to start some returned Peace Corps group. And will you help me?

Evelyn Ganzglass: Mm hmm.

John Pielemeier: Because you're a different generation than I know. I don't know anybody in your generation. So we got together and we started FOCI, which went on for about 12 or 15 years. But then Peace Corps pulled out of the Ivory Coast again, they left and went back, left. And after several years, having been out, we couldn't, there was no volunteer to support. We couldn't support small projects. In a sense it kind of faded away. But I'm taking the lead and trying to get Peace Corps back into the Ivory Coast because now there's a good reason to do it. Peace Corps has got more money. It's a peaceful country now. Some of the other Francophone countries, Peace Corps has stopped working in Niger, stopped working in Mali, because of the security issues. So, hey, how about?

Evelyn Ganzglass: What would they be doing now, teaching English?

John Pielemeier: I think they could, they could work on PEPFAR for HIV AIDS. They could do agriculture work. They could get some money from AID for some of these programs. And I'm not sure about the teaching at this point. But, uh, they could have a, you know, a modest sized program, and I think it would be a good place for volunteers now.

One other thing I'll just mention is that, it's a link to this. We came back to Washington and we went overseas again. We came back again and we've, we joined a church in the Washington area, Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ. And what we were drawn to, aside from a wonderful minister and great music, was that they had a volunteer corps that they had started 30, it's now been, it's now 30 years old. And so, uh, in the early eighties, they had a parsonage that was, uh, for an assistant minister, and they weren't going to use that anymore. So they were going to sell it and put the money in the coffers of the church. And one of the people said, well, why don't we do what the Lutherans are doing downtown? They have this volunteer corps where they're getting college grads, they're living down there, and they're spending a year doing service work with homeless and other people in Washington, D.C.

And this guy convinced the congregation to do it. So when we came and found the church, they had been doing this for seven or eight years, and I joined the board as fast as I could and have been on the board now three times. And it's now just had its 30th reunion that I organized last May. But it's basically a domestic, it's bringing on, continuing the volunteer tradition for a one year program. We recruit across the country, non-denominational. They live in, five people in this house. They get, make $8,000 a year. They work for Bread for the City, Samaritan Ministries, Pregnancy AIDS Center. They work for a group in Virginia. That one works in Virginia with a group that works with people who've just left prison. And, uh, people work with health-related organizations.

We have about eight or nine NGOs in the city who ask us to recruit for them. And every year we find five and they live together. It's called Simple Living Service, and we used to call it spiritual growth. We now call it personal growth because we had to deal with AmeriCorps at one point. But anyway, we try to bring that linkage. And so one of the volunteers that I'm mentoring right now in the present group is applying right now to Peace Corps. She's a Latina. She's doing health work for So Others Might Eat, SOME, here in the city doing health education. And she really wants to go back to Central America, where her mother is from, and do Peace Corps in either Guatemala or one of the Central American countries. And so she's asked me to write her references.

Evelyn Ganzglass: How nice. Yeah.

John Pielemeier: So we had our 30th reunion. We got the Peace Corps director to come give the keynote address.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Excellent.

John Pielemeier: For our, for our returned returnees and people who came for reunion. So we try to. And she walked in and she heard what was going on. She said, well, you've got your own little domestic Peace Corps, don't you? Yes, we do. Yes, we do. A single church. So the whole idea of continuing this volunteer idea, we work, Nancy and I work pretty hard on it.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Well, it's excellent. Is there anything else you want to? Any other thought you want to say? This is your interview.

John Pielemeier: Um. I think it's, uh, it's great that you're doing this. Um. I'm sure that, uh, I'm trying to think of anything else. I mean, I remember going through some of these letters that my mother always saved. Uh. It was pretty tough. I mean, we really didn't know much what was going on. We didn't know what was going to happen when we get out of country.

Evelyn Ganzglass: We didn't have a cell phone.

John Pielemeier: By ourselves. Didn't have much contact. I ran into a sheep on my Mobylette and wrecked my Mobylette and skinned myself up, and I'm not sure how I took care of it. Um.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Well, let me just say that you can also, or I can do it for you, upload materials. Because the Kennedy Library also does that. And one of the people that I interviewed had some materials he had written and submitted that as well. So when you go through it, you can still do that.

John Pielemeier: All right. I'll look at this.

Evelyn Ganzglass: At a later point.

John Pielemeier: Yeah.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Well, thank you so much, John.

John Pielemeier: Well, thank you for doing this.

Evelyn Ganzglass: It's a great interview.

John Pielemeier: It's really fun.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Good experience.

John Pielemeier: Yeah. By the way, it turned out that it's, uh, the Guillain- Barre. I have trouble getting around now, but it's not because of Guillain-Barre. It turns out when 20 years later, when I was about ready to. I had been at AID, I was AID director. I started feeling weak again. It was about the time they were, I was getting retired, and I came back and eventually went to Hopkins and they said, well, when did you have polio?

Evelyn Ganzglass: Oh.

John Pielemeier: So I vaguely remembered something about when I was a toddler. I had to, my parents took me to Indianapolis to a hospital, and I stayed there for a couple of weeks and my mother just said I just cried and cried and cried and cried, leaving the little kid there. So anyway, I said, what did they say when they dismissed me? And they said, well, they weren't sure it was a real case and don't let him run around too much. As a toddler, that didn't mean anything. So I thought I was a normal kid, played basketball, ran track, all of that. But when I went to Hopkins, he said, well, the weakness you're having in your nervous system now, this is probably now about 20 years ago again, is because part of the nervous, the nervous system that is being inflamed and keeping the muscles from activating is the part that's affected by polio and not by Guillain-Barré, which is another part of the nervous system. So that you are, you have post- polio syndrome rather than any sort of secondary effects from Guillain-Barré.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Wow. Well, you did well throughout your life, though.

John Pielemeier: And I'll mention one other thing.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Didn't affect you for most of your life.

John Pielemeier: There was a Peace Corps reunion, maybe it was last year? A big one.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Yes.

John Pielemeier: And they had a speaker from California who's a congressman.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Yes. Um, I forgot his name. Yes.

John Pielemeier: And he also spoke at the last Guillain-Barré group organization meeting because he had a daughter who went to Peace Corps in, somewhere in Central America.

Evelyn Ganzglass: And he talked about that when I heard him.

John Pielemeier: And contracted Guillain-Barré.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Yeah, that's right.

John Pielemeier: And then a second daughter who went to Peru and contracted Guillain-Barré. Both of his daughters ended up having the same problem I did. I never knew there was anybody else in Peace Corps history who had that. And he has had two of them in his own family.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Okay.

John Pielemeier: All right.

Evelyn Ganzglass: Well, we'll end. Thank you so much.

John Pielemeier: Thank you, Evelyn.