Carol Crew Oral History Interview
Interviewer(s): Robert Klein
Interviewee(s): Carol Crew

Robert Klein: Today is September 22nd [sic], 2002. This is Bob Klein, and I am interviewing Carol Crew.

Carol Crew: Ok. I'm Carol Hifley Crew. Hifley when I was in the Peace Corps. I live in Seattle, Washington and I was in Chile. We were Chile XIII, with the group Chile XIII, 1964 to '66.

Robert Klein: And what was the project?

Carol Crew: The project was a cooperative, cooperatives, specifically credit union cooperatives was what most of our group was trained in. However, I was, they split some of us off into cooperative education.

Robert Klein: We'll get to that. I usually start by asking people to go back to before they join the Peace Corps. Give a little bit of your background and then maybe talk about the motivation that got you into the Peace Corps so you can go back as far as you want.

Carol Crew: Oh, well, I was born. No, I lived in Reno, Nevada, and had practically never been out of the state. I had gone to the local schools and managed to get a scholarship so I could go to the University of Nevada in Reno, which is the state university, and I was studying journalism. And so in studying journalism, we really, a lot of what one in one class we studied Time magazine from, you know, 1960 through 1964, which was the Kennedy era. And so we were I was just totally imbued. And of course, being of that age, totally enraptured with the change that Kennedy was bringing, a young feeling in the country. And I come from a very Democratic labor union, kind of a family anyway, so we have been Democrats anyway. And when he was killed, I was really shaken by that.

Robert Klein: And where were you in college then?

Carol Crew: I was in college. It was my senior year in college. And it was just shaking communities. Just a terrible thing to happen. And I don't know when, in the spring, I don't know, there must be some kind of recruiting stuff, and I went and took the Peace Corps test, and I remember my friends going, what are you doing? Are you nuts? And it just was one of those very few decisions that I've been able to make in my life. I was so sure that's what I wanted to do. It was no problem with. I was absolutely going to do it. They sent me this thing saying, I guess, would you like to go to Chile? I had to go look it up, literally. I did not know where Chile was.

Robert Klein: What was the reaction of your family when you first said, well, I think I'll join the Peace Corps?

Carol Crew: You know, it's hard to remember that I don't actually know. I think whatever the reaction was, I was oblivious to it. It didn't matter. You know, my mind was so completely made up.

Robert Klein: And at that time, there was still a fairly lengthy exam before you got an invitation. Do you recall the exam at all?

Carol Crew: Very, very little about the exam. I just remember going and doing it and didn't seem like a difficult thing, but I remember doing the exam.

Robert Klein: Let me go back to your high school years. During high school vacations or other, were you at all involved in service projects?

Carol Crew: Absolutely not. I came from a pretty poor family, pretty much without resources. We didn't even go on vacations, you know, so it wasn't a concept, you know, it wasn't.

Robert Klein: So also very little travel.

Carol Crew: Yeah. Oh, hardly any. I'd already been. I'd been to San Francisco like twice. You know, it was a total of.

Robert Klein: How about studying of a foreign language?

Carol Crew: I had been studying French, of course. I had been studying French food through high through college a couple of years in high school and through college. And so, of course, that was just enough to really make it hard to learn Spanish.

Robert Klein: Yeah. So you're now in your third, fourth year of college and completing a degree in journalism.

Carol Crew: In journalism, yeah.

Robert Klein: Other than the Peace Corps, did you have any kind of career goal?

Carol Crew: No, I was really. Yeah, my career goal was really to be a reporter, and I had actually thought I'd be a print reporter. But the internship I got when I was in college was with a television station, you know, which is basically sort of rewriting wire copy or, you know, I mean, we didn't get to do very much, but Reno was a very small town, so I don't even know if there was a second TV station at the time. It might have just been the one. And it was very, it was a lot of fun. I mean, you know, it was intriguing and it was fun and it was local. You know, local news coverage was pretty basic. You know, I don't even know if we had sound on film, it might have been just black and white. I don't know, you know, but it was interesting and it was journalism, you know, to the extent. But it wasn't right. It wasn't the kind I was going to do, which was going to be print. I was going to write for a newspaper.

Robert Klein: Yeah. But in your fourth year, you took the exam and then you got the invitation to a country you didn't know to work in a language you didn't know.

Carol Crew: A language I knew nothing about. It was very upsetting, actually. You know, it never dawned on me to write him back and say, send me someplace French. I speak French a little, you know, I don't know. It never even dawned on me. I said, Sure, I'll go there.

Robert Klein: Had any of your friends in college friends or others joined the Peace Corps?

Carol Crew: I hadn't known anyone before. I decided to join, but a really good friend of mine did decide to join. And he went to Bolivia, but like a half a year off from me. But he was in Bolivia. We saw each other when we were done. But that was really the only connection.

Robert Klein: So you finally got the telegram, which was would you report to?

Carol Crew: Notre Dame.

Robert Klein: Oh, OK.

Carol Crew: Notre Dame for training June 24th.

Robert Klein: And did they tell you it was for a co-op program?

Carol Crew: No, just they didn't. Who knows if they even knew, you know, but I suppose they did, that it was a cooperative point. I had no experience about cooperatives at all until training, that was really where they gave us all the information.

Robert Klein: Did anyone try to talk you out of it at that point?

Carol Crew: No. People would say, why are you doing this and why would you want to do that and stuff like that? And I just would go, because I want to. You want to do something good. I want to go do something good. So it wasn't, you know, in most of my life, decision making has been very difficult and people could sway me. This was not swayable and I don't know why I was so sure.

Robert Klein: Yeah. And this was June of '64 then.

Carol Crew: June of '64. Yeah.

Robert Klein: You went up to Notre Dame.

Carol Crew: Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana. They roll up the they roll up the sidewalks at 10 o'clock. Now I'm from a 24-hour town, a gambling town where everything's open all the time. It was like, well, you know, let's go to the supermarket. All supermarkets are closed. Now what? They're closed?

Robert Klein: You know, what was, how large was the group?

Carol Crew: And oh, let's see. Boy, you know, I'm not sure.

Robert Klein: Just approximately.

Carol Crew: Yeah, approximately. There were two groups training, actually. One was training for Uruguay in community development, yeah, in community development. They weren't doing credit unions. And then our group. So probably all together, we were probably close to 40, 45 people altogether. Our group was probably 20 something and theirs was a little smaller.

Robert Klein: What was your impression of your fellow trainees? I mean, now it's not just you joining the Peace Corps, there's all this crowd. Have any particular reaction you recall?

Carol Crew: No, I really liked them. I was fascinated by the fact that there were several really newlywed couples that were going, which was pretty amazing to me and that there were there was an interesting spread. There was one man who was older, I suppose he was in his sixties, but he didn't end up getting to go because physically he didn't do so well. But everybody was pretty, pretty monolithically the same age just came out of college, you know, hardly anyone was different in that way.

Robert Klein: And that was too early for Vietnam to be a concern.

Carol Crew: It was a concern. I think it was, yeah, I think it had become. It was '60. It was '64. So the people were, yeah. And I think the young men were quite aware of that.

Robert Klein: Right. Well, then talk about the training. How was it organized?

Carol Crew: The time was, well for one thing it was at Notre Dame, which was so amazing and beautiful and it was. And the other piece about being at Notre Dame was that also Notre Dame would have summer school for priests and nuns. And so we would be going through the cafeteria with all these priests and nuns, and these nuns at that time all wore the different habits. And so it became a game with us to be able to name the different orders, you know? And then, of course, the nuns would have these, the nuns and priests would have these hootenannies down by the lake and everybody was singing, you know, we shall overcome. And it was very, it was very interesting.

Robert Klein: So there was interaction with them?

Carol Crew: There was, oh yeah, a lot of interactions with them. Fascinatingly, because when we were down in South America, certainly the Maryknoll order of priests and nuns were very active. They were the activist Catholics down there, and they were very often helpful to our projects and individual ways or helpful. They helped me out with some stuff at one point. And really like a parallel Peace Corps in a certain way. They were very strongly working in development.

Robert Klein: Did language training must have been a major part of it? How is it structured?

Carol Crew: It seemed as if we were engaging. I know that we would go in the mornings to language training. We'd do first thing in the morning. We do at least an hour even before breakfast, if I remember right. We do an hour language training and it was usually the, that was audio training. It was all audio visual anyway. But this was audio training so that you'd repeat back and, you know, that kind of thing. And then the classes, I'm sure the first class after breakfast was Spanish also. And the classes were small, organized according to your abilities, and somehow I wasn't in the lowest class. I have no idea why. Well, they did give us this language test.

Robert Klein: Aptitude test.

Carol Crew: Aptitude test, and that's how they made that decision. But you know, I was actually I should have been on the minus because the French was so messing me up, you know, the different verbs and they're so close. But the teachers, most many of whom were from Chile, I can't say most, but many of them were from Chile, and that was very helpful. So many of our trainers were from Chile and they showed us, I mean, they even showed us etiquette at the table. And it was like, I can still remember how one would actually eat a cantaloupe in Chile. Chilean was like the knife and fork and very delicate. I didn't come from that kind of a background.

Robert Klein: So we were able to interact with them outside the classroom.

Carol Crew: Yes. Yes, they took part in a lot of the, they'd come to the hootenannies and we'd, uh, they didn't, of course, go to the local bar with us, which was good. They couldn't do, you know, as teachers. But yes, there were a couple of romances and you know.

Robert Klein: What was the male female mix of your group?

Carol Crew: Of our group? Oh, that's a good question. I think about 50-50.

Robert Klein: So there was a fair amount of pairing off.

Carol Crew: Yes, there was a fair amount of pairing off.

Robert Klein: Beginning of dating.

Carol Crew: Yeah. Plus there were the couples.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Was it made clear to you that language would be a real determinant of selection, that you had to get to a certain level in order to?

Carol Crew: No, although everyone felt that, I mean, we there was always the sort of grim reaper of deselection. Do you remember they used to call it the deselection?

Robert Klein: Oh yeah.

Carol Crew: There was always that piece, and I, as a matter of fact, had a habit of falling asleep in class because I had always been working when I was going to college and I was always in a state of exhaustion and I'd become trained like Pavlovian. Someone would start lecturing and I just go, whew, I can remember, but I'm trying to keep me awake so I wouldn't get deselected. But the, uh, it seemed to me that it was pretty equal in gender and that the sense of wanting to accomplish whatever you need to do to stay in was very strong.

Robert Klein: So there was a group feeling.

Carol Crew: Very strong group feeling about that.

Robert Klein: Did you have psychiatric interviews?

Carol Crew: Yes. Oh yes. That's one of my favorite stories.

Robert Klein: Well, tell me.

Carol Crew: Well, they did, you know, they had the psychiatric thing, the test that you took. It was probably the MMPI.

Robert Klein: Yes. Yes.

Carol Crew: And because now that I'm in the field psychology, I actually recognize, yeah, I took this before. And the one thing that I answered that must have raised flags was, it said if you had it somewhere, there must be a question said something on the order of if you had a choice, would you be a boy or girl? Would you change your gender? And I said, well, I'd rather I'd be a guy. It was clear to me the guys had it easier and had things were better for them. And I mean, that seemed obvious, right? But that raised flags about, I think about whether I was a lesbian, you know, so I had the interview with the psychiatrist. Well, how do you feel about being a girl? I said, well, I'm used to it, you know? I've been a girl for like almost twenty years. Twenty one, twenty two years now, you know, I'm OK. I mean, it was puzzling to me.

Robert Klein: You must have been nervous, though.

Carol Crew: Well, I was. I didn't, you know, I mean, I didn't. I sort of realized that was the piece because he was asking me about that. Very heterosexual. It's not a problem. I just.

Robert Klein: You have more than one interview?

Carol Crew: Well, I only recall having one. Yeah, I only recall having one.

Robert Klein: Well, we'll get to selection later. So a typical training day was the language and language.

Carol Crew: Language and language and community development, lunch. More community development.

Robert Klein: Who was doing the community development?

Carol Crew: People from the previous Chile group, I remember.

Robert Klein: Ex-volunteers then?

Carol Crew: Yeah. Oh gosh, Mike, I can't remember his last name. He, uh, there were several of the previous Chile volunteers who were doing community development, and I have a very poor memory for this. So I'm sure other people in my group would remember all this stuff. And then there were then they seemed to bring in, they did some really good stuff with breaking us up into groups, giving us case studies and asking us what we would do about it. They also did some very good stuff about group dynamics, you know, setting us into situations and then being able to feedback to us. Ok, what role did you play in that discussion? You know, people were supposed to take.

Robert Klein: All role playing or did they create situations?

Carol Crew: No, they created situations where we were supposed to be trying to, trying to come up with some development plan and then noticing the manner in which we worked and who did what. So who kind of took over and made it go, who kind of sat back and waited until they were asked, who did what?

Robert Klein: Who ran the program?

Carol Crew: Remember, it was Walter Langford was the person at Notre Dame who oversaw the program. Mike Curtin was the guy I was trying to think of, who did the community development part of it I think. And I don't have in my mind any of the people who are under Langford, but he was the, he was in a certain way part of the Catholic conspiracy. You know, in a certain way there was the choice of Notre Dame and there was a very strong sense of Notre Dame having a commitment to this program. And so at least I won't say the Catholic conspiracy, but a real strong urge.

Robert Klein: Was it built into the program design that anyone from Notre Dame would be the company you were working with you down when you went to Chile?

Carol Crew: No, I don't remember anybody from Notre Dame. I mean, I do remember the people who went down with us. One was Mel Romero as our representative. We had a couple of reps. And of course, I don't know with the Uruguay group what happened with them because they didn't even get to go to Uruguay, they ended up in Venezuela. No training for it. But we had a, I remember the reps coming and talking to us, but they weren't a standard part of our training.

Robert Klein: Yeah, but it seems to me that there was, did a clear definition of a job begin to emerge that you would build expectations? When I get there, I'm going to be doing this.

Carol Crew: I think that our little group, I did have an. Our little group got split off later. Our educational group.

Robert Klein: Still during the training program?

Carol Crew: I don't even think it was during the training program. I think we got to Chile and got told that we weren't going to be part of the credit union program. I don't remember us getting separate training in Notre Dame for education, for education about cooperatives. But those of us that were put into that were people who are either teachers or journalists or PR kind of people. So I know that, you know, Bill Long, who would have been, but he didn't go along. And Howard Nelson, who was from Idaho, who was also a journalism person.

Robert Klein: So it wasn't just women.

Carol Crew: No, no. It wasn't at all.

Robert Klein: Was there any sense that the real guys were going into the credit union program and then they were finding something for you?

Carol Crew: No, not at all. Although there was this, I did. You know, I did certainly know that I was, it was harder to place the girls out in the out, in the Campo, it just was. And we knew that. I mean, we weren't silly about that. We were aware of what a problem that was. But no, it was pretty equal. And I got so into my own particular program. I don't even actually know what the other girls did. There was a great number of people. I mean, they were only like maybe 10 of us, eight to 10 of us who went into the cooperative education. The rest were credit union people and many there were a couple of fishermen guys and they went off and did fisherman stuff. And many people, the credit unions was a ridiculous idea because the inflation rate in Chile was 300 percent a year or something. And it was, that's probably big. But I mean, it was, it did not make for credit unions being the manner in which things were going to work. However, there were other things that could be done and people tended to go off and make cooperatives around something else that worked better than credit unions or take that credit union and try to put their money someplace where it would be helpful.

Robert Klein: You know, let's say with training for a minute. Did you get much in the way of either Latin American or Chilean studies, some sense of the history?

Carol Crew: Yeah, we were very steeped in that. That was very good. The history of Chile, the customs of Chile, you know? And of course, as I said, so many of our language teachers were Chilean that they were able to incorporate a lot of that. I really felt prepared culturally in a way.

Robert Klein: Did you also get the anti-communism packet, you know? The American institutions and world communism.

Carol Crew: You know, I don't remember that. Maybe I slept through it.

Robert Klein: Yeah, that would be.

Carol Crew: One you would want to sleep through, yeah. I don't recall that.

Robert Klein: Ok. How long was training altogether?

Carol Crew: Training was, our training was a little longer because we couldn't go until the first Allende and Frei election was held. So that was in September, and we had to stay until we knew that. Now I'm not remembering whether they decided to send us to Puerto Rico during that time or whether we stayed in training. I have the sense that we stayed in training until we found out about the election at Notre Dame, at Notre Dame. So we were there through the beginning of September, which I think was a little longer than usual.

Robert Klein: Was there a mid-selection as well as a final selection?

Carol Crew: There did seem, yeah, there was a mid-selection.

Robert Klein: But don't recall, particularly.

Carol Crew: I do remember losing, that was probably when we lost, it seemed like Melvin was the name of the man who was older, and Karen, who was a very beautiful girl, and I don't know what happened there.

Robert Klein: Did anyone from staff attempt to explain the process so that it wasn't so traumatic?

Carol Crew: I think they told us what they were looking for, and we knew and with common sense knew basically, well, you know, you're going to have to be able to fit in down there. They still made a couple of mistakes. I mean, we could have told them.

Robert Klein: Did you do peer evaluations?

Carol Crew: I think we did, but I am sure that I can't imagine that anybody would have said anything that would have sent anybody out. I think we did.

Robert Klein: Sometimes they did it in terms of, would you choose the three people you'd like to be assigned with?

Carol Crew: Ah yeah.

Robert Klein: And out of that, they can extract something.

Carol Crew: Oh they might have done that. Yeah, so I don't remember it if there were any kind of peer evaluation. Everybody would have stonewalled it. You know, nobody would want to be responsible for anybody going out.

Robert Klein: So you weren't you weren't concerned about being deselected.

Carol Crew: I would every once in a while worry because of my language. I would worry that I wasn't going to meet the bar in language. I couldn't roll my Rs. I mean, there was a couple of weeks there where I was totally frantic because I couldn't roll my Rs, I mean. But you know, I look back and I don't.

Robert Klein: Could you get extra instruction if you wanted it? I mean, go into the language lab additional hours?

Carol Crew: Yeah, I think you could. But you know, you already in there so many hours. It was hard to imagine going in there anymore. It was almost, I won't say, punitive, but it was a lot of language instruction and a lot. And I thought the audiovisual method was great. I mean, at work, that was the best way to teach, and I don't know if they were leaders in that field and just making it. I don't know if I ever saw it written.

Robert Klein: Yeah. And you must have had time for socializing. It wasn't that intense?

Carol Crew: No, no, no. Not at all. There was quite a bit of time for socializing and.

Robert Klein: I assume you all went to church on Sunday.

Carol Crew: Yes, of course, because we were. I don't know if anybody went to church on Sunday, actually. There was a little some kind of snack bar at Notre Dame that people would go and play the jukebox and dance, sometimes even at lunchtime, just for fun. And uh, and we could go off to movies and stuff like that every once in a while. But there wasn't a lot of free time, but there was so much when you weren't when there wasn't free time. You know, within the dorms, there was just so much getting to know each other and spending time with each other. And yeah, and I really liked the people. I really had a great group. I can't imagine anybody saying they didn't have a great group in a certain way, but we had a great group. We really liked each other. We really I thought there were people of great experience. Well, not so much experience, but possibility, you know?

Robert Klein: So the training was extended at least through the election?

Carol Crew: At least through the election. So I think it was a couple of extra weeks.

Robert Klein: And so they just kept training you?

Carol Crew: Yeah, they just kept training us. We just kept getting language and we kept getting.

Robert Klein: Was there any suggestion you might get home leave before you went?

Carol Crew: Oh yeah, it was organized so that we'd go to Puerto Rico for a certain time and then get a week to 10 days, I think, at home to get organized.

Robert Klein: Oh, OK. So final selections held at Notre Dame.

Carol Crew: Mm hmm. Yeah. Because I don't know if anybody, because they swore us in in Puerto Rico, but I'm sure final selections were made at Notre Dame. And then, you know, they weren't going to select anybody from what happened in Puerto Rico, although they should have.

Robert Klein: What do you base that comment on, later performance by some people?

Carol Crew: Oh, no, just that we were incredibly rowdy in Puerto Rico. And they were very kind not to deselect.

Robert Klein: But you had a sense when you finished at Notre Dame, that you were in, that you weren't under that selection time.

Carol Crew: I didn't feel like I was under the selection case anymore.

Robert Klein: How did you get to Puerto Rico? I mean, you went from South Bend.

Carol Crew: We went from South Bend to New York and then flew down to Puerto Rico.

Robert Klein: As a group?

Carol Crew: As a group.

Robert Klein: Oh, OK. Yeah. Tell me about Puerto Rico because I haven't talked to many people about it.

Carol Crew: Yeah, it was really an experience that was where I had culture shock because I had, you know, I've never been anywhere. So I had never been in a Caribbean, a Caribbean kind of a culture. A really Hispanic culture in a different kind of way than Chile. Chile is a very cosmopolitan, European oriented. It's not Puerto Rican Americans. Puerto Rica is really Puerto Rican. It was like going into a jungle and meeting the natives. It was so amazing to me to be there. It was hot. Hot and muggy and just so foreign. So foreign in the way it looked, so foreign in the way it felt. The Spanish the Puerto Ricans speak, you know, is at about double the speed of most Spanish that's spoken anywhere in the continental Latin America.

Robert Klein: Take me through that. You arrived. Someone met you.

Carol Crew: We arrived. We stayed at, uh. We arrived. We stayed at a couple of hotels, you know, certainly not high-class hotels initially. And we had a couple of meetings and then they divided us up into pairs or three or four, groups of two or three or four. And they sent us. They had organized for us to go out to different little towns and to either work with someone who was working in community development in that little town or had some kind of project going that we could be helpful with or at least see how they had organized it. The idea was to see how they were working in community development there. It was in cooperatives, but it was community development.

Robert Klein: And it was all Puerto Ricans you were assigned, there weren't other American counterparts.

Carol Crew: Well, in my particular situation there wasn't. It's hard for me to know what the rest.

Robert Klein: Did you go out alone or with someone?

Carol Crew: I went out with another person who was going to be in the cooperative group, which was Howard Nelson. He and I were sent to this little town called Naguabo, Puerto Rico.

Robert Klein: Did you have to go into the town, find your own place to live, or was that arranged?

Carol Crew: I think they had arranged a place for us to stay a house to stay in, you know, with a with a lady that rented out rooms kind of a place like that. He was in the same place. We might have even been in a separate.

Robert Klein: How long were you there?

Carol Crew: Three weeks.

Robert Klein: And do you have any sense of what they expected you to get out of the experience?

Carol Crew: They wanted us to have an intensive Spanish experience. They wanted us to be, you know, even though that we were with near another Peace Corps volunteer. They wanted us to be thrown into the Spanish part, and I think they wanted us. I certainly had the experience and this may be what they wanted, was of being in a, you know, a small town, a rural town, which is where most of us would have been expected to be going. And what that's like.

Robert Klein: A series of little culture shocks.

Carol Crew: Oh yeah, lots of culture shocks. You know, the cold shower, the size of the water bugs, which are like giant cockroaches. You can't tell me that's not a cockroach, it was giant however. And being the only blond person in town. Having people go la rubia, la rubia, [kissing noises], everywhere you went. It was really, that was hard. That was really hard. I just felt like, yeah, like on edge all the time, you know? No one ever touched me or made any kind of, you know, untoward approach. It was it just like I just felt like an Exhibit A at the fair or something. People just couldn't help but look at me, you know, I look different.

Robert Klein: Do you recall the family you stayed with? Were they supportive?

Carol Crew: They were supportive. The lady was a was, kind of always very busy. She wasn't very much to talk to. Of course, the kids in the family, I don't remember specifically, seemed to be a couple of kids who were, oh, this is interesting. A couple of kids who were eight to 10, six, somewhere in that age bracket and they were a lot of fun to talk to because they were more patient with us. Thought we were very funny, but it was an easier give and take than trying to be an adult with another adult. And there was a very important election going on in Puerto Rico right then. So boy, people were polarized and there was a lot of political discussion, a lot of which I couldn't follow. It was going on so fast, but they were really polarized. It might have even been, well, I don't think it was the gubernatorial election, but it was, you know, it was the representatives around the island. And they were, and there'd be that cars coming through town with all the flags and the loudspeakers and stuff. It was very active, very active politics.

Robert Klein: Food, that there must have been a change?

Carol Crew: Beans and rice and beans and rice. And once in a while a little chicken. But yeah, not a lot of chicken.

Robert Klein: So you were there for the three weeks.

Carol Crew: I was there for the three weeks. It was a very difficult three weeks for me because I just felt so out of place and so just shocked. I was just in culture shock. I didn't do a very good job.

Robert Klein: Exposed.

Carol Crew: People were, yeah, I didn't do a very good job of getting to know people. My counterpart, Howard, was just like he just sunk right into it, had this little dictionary with him all the time, como se dice, whatever. He was amazing. He ended up marrying a Chilean woman, and it's just really he just sunk himself right into the culture. It was quite amazing.

Robert Klein: Did it get to the point when you were that you were a little concerned about going to Chile? I mean, if you weren't making it in Puerto Rico?

Carol Crew: So that's interesting. I don't remember being worried about going to Chile, I just wanted to get out of Puerto Rico. I just did not like it and the other piece was our group. For whatever reason, we're the only ones in Puerto Rico who weren't getting the Outward Bound training, which I really wanted to get, the Outward Bound training. I thought that was I really liked the idea of getting that training, even though at that point I didn't understand it as much. But I think it would have been quite helpful to me as a human being at the time. I just kind of hungered for that, and we were just out in this little town sort of.

Robert Klein: Oh, I thought you would go in. Yeah. And you knew what kind of training it was.

Carol Crew: Yeah, although, of course, were like the stories were overblown about rappelling down cliffs and stuff like that. But we all wanted to do it. We thought it was a part of the whole training.

Robert Klein: Camp Crozier or Radley?

Carol Crew: That sounds really familiar. Yeah. I think it must have been that, it's very familiar.

Robert Klein: Those were the first two volunteers who died. They died in a plane crash. And I think they may have been in Colombia.

Carol Crew: Uh-huh. And they named the training for them? Oh, that's great. Now, I didn't remember that specifically.

Robert Klein: So excruciatingly, the three weeks came to an end.

Carol Crew: Yes, finally. Came to an end and we ended up in, all of us, uh, going back to, uh, what's the main city in Puerto Rico?

Robert Klein: San Juan.

Carol Crew: San Juan, going back to San Juan and somebody I have no idea how this happened. Most of us were still housed in the Normandy or some other little tacky hotels, but somebody had managed to get a bunch of rooms that, they had talked the, I think it was the Hilton or San Juan Sheraton. Somehow, someone and gone and went, we are poor volunteers, it's our last chance to have a life. Please let us in. And they let us in, a bunch of us, not me. I don't remember, I don't actually remember where I was staying, but they had the best surf in town and I body surfed and I used to sprain my back so that's one of the things I remember that I was in excruciating pain when we did the swearing in ceremony, which was held at the Sheraton I think. And I was very moved by it, but I don't think I was as inebriated as many people were.

Robert Klein: That was the rowdy time I gather.

Carol Crew: That was really a rowdy time.

Robert Klein: After everyone came back from the village experience.

Carol Crew: Yes, this was a very rowdy time and it was a very rowdy time.

Robert Klein: How long, a couple of days?

Carol Crew: A couple of days, yeah, but even probably just. Yeah, probably is two nights like the day we all got in one night and then the next night was the swearing in ceremony.

Robert Klein: Do you recall trying to pump others about their experience if yours had been so difficult?

Carol Crew: Oh yeah. I mean, I was hearing everybody was talking about what they had done, and yeah, it was quite different. I mean, I think that Howard and I got sent off to quite a small, much smaller town, without quite the whoever was our connecting person. It wasn't a very, uh, didn't do a very good job I don't think. Or I don't remember us really getting to do much in the way of learning about how they ran whatever program there. It was more of an experience of being in the culture and getting through the three weeks. But other people seem to have had more structured kinds of experiences that were in which they felt more like they'd seen some community development projects.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Had the elections been held in Chile by then?

Carol Crew: Yes. Yes, they had. So we knew that we were going.

Robert Klein: And what was the impact of the elections on whether you went or not?

Carol Crew: Oh, Frei was the Christian Democrat. And if we went down, of course he would send us. He would accept us. But if Allende was elected, he was backed by a coalition, including communists and socialists, and they would not have invited us down.

Robert Klein: Oh, OK. So you were aware of that.

Carol Crew: We were aware that they did not want us if they, the coalition could not in good conscience invite the Peace Corps down. So we knew that if Frei won, we were in. And if he lost, we were out.

Robert Klein: So you sobered up.

Carol Crew: Yeah, we sobered up, we went home, got ourselves home.

Robert Klein: How long were you home?

Carol Crew: I'm pretty sure it was a week might have been 10 days. I don't know exactly. I do remember, I just remember that I had a lot to get together and uh, you know, we had to get our trunks ready to go and we had ordered sleeping bags, like as a group gotten together and ordered sleeping bags, and they were sent to our houses. So our sleeping bags that arrived. And it was, you know, I had never traveled. I mean, I realized later in my life, I didn't know then how green I was. You just don't know, you know, you don't even know what you don't know. And so I don't know. I just went home and put my clothes in the trunk and packed a little suitcase and went off. I had no sense. They'd done a good job of giving me a list of what you got to take with you. Take extra tampons and all that kind of stuff. Because who knows how long before you figure out how to do that, you know? But um, I just remember being very, very excited and couldn't wait to go get down there. You know, I didn't have the sense to be scared, I guess.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Well, a lot of enthusiasm in what you were doing. Were you hosted and wined and dined for the week you were home? I mean, the local paper, the friends of the family?

Carol Crew: Well, all of my friends, I certainly visited all of my friends who were, you know, still hadn't gone someplace from gone to graduate school somewhere or something?

Robert Klein: What was the town in Nevada?

Carol Crew: Reno. Yeah, all my friends, I went out with everybody in and we had a great time and we'd go down to the clubs, you know, because down there you go down to the clubs and watch different entertainment stuff. We weren't much for gambling. And if you live there, you're probably not much for gambling. And really, it was a wonderful time. I had a great time in that period of time. I think what was missing was any sense of organization around the packing, but my family did finally get that trunk off to me. So I did get it somewhere around Christmas and we left around the middle of October.

Robert Klein: What did you do meet in New York?

Carol Crew: We once again met in New York and then flew down.

Robert Klein: By charter was it or just how big was the group at this point? It was the credit union plus future co-op ed people.

Carol Crew: Right, so it was all the whole group. I really should know this. It's probably in the range of about 30 something.

I don't remember anybody else on the plane, but that could be just selective memory. I remember us, but it seemed to me it was just a regular airline. We just had booked most of it.

Robert Klein: To Chile?

Carol Crew: To Chile, stopped in Panama. It was one of those times when, you know, people jumped off the plane said, oh, we're going to go change our money to escudos, we'll get a much better deal here. I had no clue. Plus, I had no money. So it was like, what was I going to change? I had no, you know, I was going to get a salary down there. I was so green.

Robert Klein: Arrived in Santiago?

Carol Crew: Arrived in Santiago, LAN Chile Airlines.

Robert Klein: Was there any kind of official government reception or I mean, it seems to me it was a little touch and go for a while?

Carol Crew: Well, no, they were fine. I mean, then it was, you know, I think it was had been a Christian democratic government before, and it was just, you know, Frei. It just went on. So it wasn't as if that other somebody who was adverse to us was in. And of course, the Peace Corps was pretty well organized. If we were like the eighth group in, they were very well organized. I remember some meetings at a hotel during which they told us where we were going to be stationed and introducing us to the Peace Corps staff, one of whom ironically I had. When I was home on my little break, I saw a friend of mine who was going out with a young man who was from Chile. And he said, oh, my cousin Sergio works for the Peace Corps down there. You must say hello to him. So of course I found Sergio. I said hello. And then I was just enveloped in this huge whole family because I had, you know, spent half an hour talking to the son of this family who was studying in the United States. It was just, of course, the thing about South America is that incredible hospitality. I mean, it's yeah, it was just the most amazing force of energy that the welcoming in.

Robert Klein: And this is when you were still in Santiago?

Carol Crew: Oh, it was the first day I was there. You know, they were, oh, you've got to come to visit the family down in, where were they? Uh, down near the ocean. I'm not sure. I can't remember exactly which town they were in, but you have to come and visit his family. And it would happen to be the weekend of my birthday. So it was, you know, August 24th, October 24th, that first weekend there, and it was the birthday of this young man's sister. So now I've got to get a present, you know, and I just, you know, I didn't know how to shop. I didn't know what it was like. I went looking, I went looking. I really I couldn't. I couldn't buy anything. I couldn't figure out. I didn't know her. I didn't know what young woman, she was probably turning sixteen or something like that. What would you want? So I ended up taking a gift that had been given to me as a going away gift, which was a Kennedy half dollar keyring. And I gave that to her. And if I had given her all the gold in Fort Knox, it could not have been a better present. Oh, they were thrilled. It was this great present, you know? Oh good, of course I never was able to get one for myself subsequently. But it was, the family just took care of me all weekend. They wanted me to teach them how to do the twist.

Robert Klein: So your initial moving into the society sounds like it was wonderful.

Carol Crew: Yeah, my initial weekend there, I'm off to this Chilean family. They just took me in. They were so sweet.

Robert Klein: I assume many of them were bilingual.

Carol Crew: No, Sergio was the one who spoke English. People did know some English. I mean, we could make ourselves, which was good because my Spanish was pretty poor, it was pretty freaked. You know how your brain isn't working at first. But yeah, they spoke a little English, not that much. Nobody was really fluent.

Robert Klein: So now you were faced with using Spanish.

Carol Crew: Yeah, really faced with it. I was really listening and really paying attention to how I don't know just all of how people say things, you know.

Robert Klein: Right. And while you were in Santiago, you then got the word that you and several others were going?

Carol Crew: To be stationed in Santiago doing cooperative education, which was with a specific Chilean organization that did cooperative education. So we were to work with that, ICEIT, I think it was. And we were to work with them. And that was pretty distressing for the guys especially, because they really wanted to go out into the Campo. That was where the most of the credit union people, certainly the fishing people. The fishing guys went up to Antofagasta and Iquique or something in the northern part where there were some fishing co-ops or where they organized them, one or the other. But most of the group, some of that group was in Santiago, where there were a lot of credit co-ops. So some of that group stayed and then others were sent down to different credit union co-ops throughout the country. And that was more the adventure that we had been prepared for that community development slash credit union. That was our vision of what it was going to be.

Robert Klein: Whose decision was it that you go into this credit, the co-op ed?

Carol Crew: That Peace Corps, whoever they are. Yeah, I mean, I would imagine that the reps in the country had tried to decide how to place people, and they had a couple of sponsoring organizations. One was the credit union cooperatives and then the other was this education group.

Robert Klein: Had other volunteers done this co-op ed, or were you the first to branch off?

Carol Crew: I think we were the first to be doing that. I don't think there, because I don't, I'm sure there were no other co-op. There were no other Peace Corps volunteers there showing us how to do this or working with that agency.

Robert Klein: So what was the arrangement then, as far as living, your living allowance and so forth?

Carol Crew: The living allowance was the same for everybody, although was a lot more expensive to live in Santiago, of course, being a city. And we were supposed to find places to live, although the Peace Corps kind of helped us with this, but we kind of had to go and talk to people and interview people. And usually it was kind of like trying to find a room in somebody's house or something like that. That was the ideal. And I found this. My first living situation was actually with a widow and her son, and she had a room that she wanted to rent. But it was in kind of a pretty modern-looking high-rise building on the fourth floor and the apartment overlooked La Moneda, which is the presidential, the old presidential palace. It was the seat of government. And the one that got bombed when Allende took over. And then there was the plaza, uh, Plaza de Armas I guess. It was right in front and the changing of the guard every morning there and stuff. It was very cool to be there, you know, and I was just renting a room and but this lady was pretty, a pretty middle class lady. And it wasn't the best. I mean, it really wasn't the best situation for me, either, because I wasn't, I was really renting a room. I mean, she wasn't really that familial with me and she had a maid, you know? And I don't know, it was kind of a strange situation, but it was OK. And then the Peace Corps decided that it was too elegant. It was too nice a place.

Robert Klein: Did it include meals?

Carol Crew: It did.

Robert Klein: So you were dining with her?

Carol Crew: Yeah. So it was, well, I kind of had to eat the kitchen. I ate with the little boy sometimes when she wasn't around and that he and I formed a little bit, a little bit of a relationship. But I really was as if I was kind of a second-class citizen, which was OK, you know, I didn't. It was very hard for me to figure out, to figure that relationship out. I'd never been in any circumstance in which there was kind of a class leveling. There's more of a European idea of class in in Chile.

Robert Klein: But hadn't Peace Corps advised you that, I mean, Santiago must be divided into neighborhoods of middle class, upper class, lower class? Did you have any sense that, you know, there were places that was OK to live or might be hazardous?

Carol Crew: No. Well, I guess they did say, well, you know, we're not going to put you out in, you know, in this area because this is kind of a tough area or something like that. But we just kind of, we're up to finding our own place. I remember one of my friends was in a pension just kind of in town, you know, just in a pension.

Robert Klein: But at this time now you have reported to work at?

Carol Crew: In Instituto Cooperativa, the education cooperative. So this little organization. Yes, they had an office in downtown Santiago and we would go to that office and they did not really know what to do with us. And we kind of it was up to each of us to figure that out in some way. What, how can we do this cooperative education? I had the experience, though, of having done that internship in this television station, and it turned out that one of the very large cooperatives, it was a department store called Co-op in Part, had purchased some television time and canal, Channel 13, the University of Chile television station. University of Chile or Católica, how could I forget that? I don't know, one of the two universities. And they had purchased some time, a half an hour slot, and they wanted us to fill that, you know, and I got tapped for that just because I had set foot in a television station beforehand. And of course, we're supposed to be able to write, you know, of course.

Robert Klein: Now who was calling the shots on at this point on assignment, the Chilean officials? Or was it some Peace Corps?

Carol Crew: At this point, it was the man who was the head of this ICEIT, the cooperative organization.

Robert Klein: And he was Chilean?

Carol Crew: Yes, he was Chilean. Isidore Hill. And he and I guess whoever worked underneath him were the people who decided what to do with us. You know, how we could be useful. So I got this sort of mandate to do this television program. And I was like, whoo! It was very fascinating.

Robert Klein: So it was the assignment was just you.

Carol Crew: Yeah.

Robert Klein: And for work, did you report to the TV station or did you go through the office? And then there, I mean?

Carol Crew: They kind of just said, go talk to the people at, you know, Canal Trece and tell them that, you know, you're going to be doing this. So that was, there must have I must have a meeting at which I told them, well, I'm the person assigned to do this. And how do I, who do I work with and stuff? And I was assigned to work with the director, a television director who was in charge of, I guess, the maybe public service television, what we would think of as public service television. And initially, what I did was go to the library and find every film I could find on cooperatives. I mean, the cooperative movement's very big down there already. All of their rural electricity is done through cooperatives, huge use of cooperatives as an organizing element and as a way of organizing people in small in rural areas to be able to get electricity or irrigation or water or whatever. I mean, the government was using cooperatives enormously, and I think it was really directly from the Frei administration. Let's try to use cooperatives as much as we can to organize people. And so this was a good idea in a certain way to do cooperative education as well. Of course, how many people in 1964 in Chile had television sets even? Really only really wealthy people. Certainly none of the poor little cooperative people, people in the cooperatives didn't have TV.

Robert Klein: Yeah, but you were writing for them.

Carol Crew: Well, the way it happened at first was that I would just bring in these half hour films and they would just run them. And then I caught, I sent home. It's hard for me to believe this, but I don't think I had a camera or if I did, it was like a Brownie. So I decided, well, I could, uh, shoot stills, do interview kind of stuff. So I sent home. They were supposed to send me a camera. They sent me the wrong kind of camera. But yeah, that's what I had to work with. And I started going around. I started contacting fellow volunteers saying, can I come do a little story about your cooperative that you work with? Because that was the easiest way for me to make that entree and to understand, have some explaining to me had to explain to me kind of in English how it works, so that I was sure I understood it because my Spanish was so still really. And so I would go to these cooperatives and I would shoot pictures of whatever it was that was going on. The credit union co-ops were really boring. What goes on, you know? Nothing goes on. So that was kind of, I don't remember how I took pictures of that. But so I'd do probably about a, I don't know, five or ten minute segment of still photos, and I would go out and shoot these pictures.

And there was a wonderful man at USIA who would process and print my film for me, who was the nicest person. Yeah, and he would, he would get my film, process it up, and then we'd look at it and then he'd print them up for me. We'd mount them up on boards and I'd write a script, and then usually I'd find someone from that cooperative who would come and be interviewed. So then somebody was appointed from the station. Some talent person was appointed to do the interview. And really, the television director, Mario Baeza, was the one who really organized so much of that for me. I couldn't have, you know, but I mean, really working in the States, it would have been the same thing. You know, he'd be the person. I'd be the producer, but he, I'd get the materials together, but he's the one had to get it on the air and the station would provide the talent usually, you know.

Robert Klein: You had a clear job to do.

Carol Crew: I had a clear job to do. I had a clear job. Well, I made a clear job to do, you know? I mean, I decided to produce it myself.

Robert Klein: Was there no Chilean who could do what you were doing?

Carol Crew: Oh, I'm sure there were many who could have done it better. Yeah, I'm sure many Chileans could have done it better. Of course, they spoke the language better. They'd have had more entree, you know? Yeah, I think they could have done certainly done it better. But they weren't free, I guess. You know what I mean? I was a volunteer. I was available to do it. Nobody had to pay my wages to produce this show. It was called La Revolución Silencio, the quiet revolution, which of course, now I realize was probably totally the wrong kind of name to give it. That was from my, you know, it should have been Up, Up, and Away with Cooperatives, something much more cheerful. But I was in my, you know, silent revolution era. So yeah, it got called. And uh, we did. I think that, you know, as my Spanish got better, I would write a script and then of course, somebody there would translate it into much better Spanish than I was able to do at that time. You can imagine my verbs were not that good yet.

Robert Klein: And you were doing the initial draft.

Carol Crew: I would do the initial draft and the initial draft was certainly cued to the photographs. So whatever they put it, had to go with that. So then someone would write it in really good Spanish and then it would just get put on the air live. I'm sure it was done live. Yeah, most things were done live.

Robert Klein: In the meantime, you've changed your living accommodations.

Carol Crew: Yeah, I don't know how many months I spent with that first living place, but the Peace Corps contacted me and said, this is a little too nice where you're staying and you have to find something less nice. And so they I mean, I don't remember how I found the next living place, which was another room. I mean, as you know, it's usually the maid's room. It was the maid's room in an apartment with a woman who lived by herself, who was kind of, interestingly, a career woman. I don't remember what she worked in, but she was friendly and, but it was not as good a part of town, you know, so that made them feel more secure.

Robert Klein: Was there any political implication that you were in a building overlooking the presidential palace?

Carol Crew: Oh, you know, I never thought about that. I actually absolutely was so, you know, not even thinking in a political sense in that way. I don't think it was that so much. It's just that it was a little too nice for the image that the Peace Corps was trying to obtain.

Robert Klein: And that's the way you understood it.

Carol Crew: Yeah, that's how I understood it.

Robert Klein: You had no argument with that.

Carol Crew: No, I said, OK, I'm you know, that's fine with me. You know, I'll move. So I found another place and it was kind of a like a half basement kind of an apartment. Yeah, which was where I lived through a rather severe earthquake they had there. And I was, I guess, really lucky to be in the basement. I'm not even sure. But boy, there was there was a really severe earthquake while we were down there. And but ironically, the only people I think who were injured in it were people who got so scared they jumped out the window. Chileans are horrified and terribly terrified, at least at that time. They just were terrified of earthquakes because of course, there's so much more destruction. The buildings aren't built as well and they're old. They're just terrified of earthquakes. And this was a really, really. I remember some of the little ornamental knobs on the top of La Moneda were hanging off like this? It was quite destructive.

Robert Klein: When was that? In your second year?

Carol Crew: I'm trying to think, no, it probably would have still been within the first year. So probably '65. Like, like February, I would think it was in February of '65.

Robert Klein: Did Peace Corps immediately arrange communication back to your families?

Carol Crew: Oh, what a question. I have no idea. I don't know because you know, we really had no, no communication. The only communication we had were ham operators and someone knew a ham operator.

Robert Klein: There was no telephone service?

Carol Crew: Well, if there was, I couldn't afford to call home. I don't remember people calling home. I really don't know. It's pretty strange because I'm sure there was that capability in '64. But we just didn't do it, you know. It's kind of interesting to think where was the communication system at that time? But I know that the one time the one time I did talk to my family was through a ham operator. Might have been twice. And we went over to this person's house and they made contact with somebody in the States. I remember it was a guy in Texas and he patched us through so we could talk to our families. It was great.

Robert Klein: Was it soon after the earthquake or not?

Carol Crew: No, I don't think it's totally unrelated to the earthquake, and I have no idea. Isn't that interesting? Since nobody was injured in it of our Peace Corps group, you know, I guess we just thought, OK, that's done. We have no idea if people back home are going, oh my god, are they alive? Which I suppose they could have contacted the Peace Corps, you know, national Peace Corps, you know, are they OK? And I think that other Peace Corps volunteers were more attuned to the idea that they could make contact somehow with United States? I wasn't. I would just write letters.

Robert Klein: The earthquake, but during your first year, you settled into working at the TV station?

Carol Crew: Yeah. Oh, and then there was a wonderful piece of luck. The Peace Corps camera was stolen. The 16-millimeter camera. And so I by default, got the film from the Peace Corps, all this film they had, because they couldn't afford to buy a new camera right now. So they had this whole bunch of film and they gave me the film. And now my show had movement and we could go out and shoot film, silent film with voiceover, but much better than still pictures.

Robert Klein: Black and white or color?

Carol Crew: Black and white. It was really a boon. A great technological breakthrough. And it was great and we did more. So then because we had the film, I would, I found some more interesting, more interesting credit union, some more interesting cooperatives to do. And then either Mario Baeza, who was the director, would travel down with me and shoot the film or he'd send someone, oh Flava was his last name. I've been trying to think of that for days, actually. Another cameraman who would come down with me. But we just take the bus down, stay at some local pension, go interview the people, try to shoot video of whatever it was. I remember one was, uh, one was down in Temuco and it was a cooperative that where the individual farmers would get together to be able to buy animals altogether. And one of the things that we were illustrating was that there was this very oppressive policy at the time in which wealthier people would go to these ranchers and they would buy a lamb. But the rancher would keep the lamb feed it, et cetera, and would deliver a full-grown cow at the price of a lamb. Sorry, a full-grown sheep at the price of lamb. It was very, very impressive kind of a system. And I remember us illustrating that and trying to explain that, you know, that the cooperative idea was for them to be able to not have to purchase, have somebody come and give them not only have that only means of being a part of the system. That now they could buy all together, they didn't have to sell their lambs, they could sell them full grown and get the full cost.

Robert Klein: How did you develop leads?

Carol Crew: Oh, I actually would talk to other volunteers and find out about what kinds of projects they were working on. It really was. And you know, it's interesting to me. The cooperative education organization was not the source of my leads about these different, credit unions, which is, there's different cooperatives, which I now find very strange. You know, they really should have been, that should have been the way that I connected with the different cooperatives. But I think, you know, once they gave me the project, I just went with it and it just hardly dawned on me to go back and say. I don't even know if they noticed.

Robert Klein: You weren't looking at bigger circles, you know, had a very specific.

Carol Crew: I was very specific and I didn't, you know, I didn't try. It's kind of part of personally where I was at, that I just didn't really think to network out and try to make it bigger in any way. You know, I just was nose to the ground saying, oh, I've got another show next week I've got to write.

Robert Klein: Coming on to the end of the first year, was there a gathering of the group and a sort of conference and medical work?

Carol Crew: Yes, there was. That was a wonderful conference. We were so glad to see each other.

Robert Klein: Were you sober?

Carol Crew: Yeah. Oh yeah. We were a lot more sober and people were. It was, though, like seeing your family after not having seen them for all that time. It was our family. And I just remember it being a really wonderful to see everybody hearing all these stories from people because it was some people, we saw them when we got there, we saw them at that middle conference and we saw them at the end maybe, maybe, probably not. I don't even remember there being. There must have been, but I don't remember there being a final get together of the group at the end of it.

Robert Klein: You were in touch with more of the group because of the work you would do.

Carol Crew: Yeah, I really was. And then because when people came in to Santiago. My third place I lived, I lived with another volunteer. We got an apartment. Now I don't know why that was OK, but it was OK. And the apartment was pretty centrally located in Santiago. And people would come into town and they'd take a bath at our house and, you know, and so we saw many of the volunteers as they came in.

Robert Klein: Right. At the end of the first year, the conference, did you have any sense of oh, looking ahead, looking back, I mean, what was your feeling contemplating a second year?

Carol Crew: Well, my own project, of course, was rolling along, so I was feeling fine about my work. There were many people in the group who were pretty unhappy. A lot of the guys who had been stationed in the Santiago area were very unhappy and either before or right at that point, they what they took it upon themselves to find another project and.

Robert Klein: Tape three.

Carol Crew: So I was saying that several of the other volunteers had decided that they wanted to be out in the Campo. They wanted to go, to leave Santiago, and so they got their own projects and went or went down south or somehow managed to get a different project.

Robert Klein: But you had no sense of that.

Carol Crew: I didn't need to. I really was so busy doing it, and it seemed to be getting better and better, you know? I mean, I felt like I was getting better, certainly at writing the scripts. And we were now, you know, we had the film and we were able to film and it was really felt like we were turning out some better programing.

Robert Klein: Was your language improving?

Carol Crew: My language was improving a lot.

Robert Klein: In doing this work? To whom were you accountable? I mean, where do you get the feedback as to whether it was of any value, whether anyone was looking, you know, that sort of thing?

Carol Crew: You know, that is interesting because really, it should have been our rep at that point should have been the person who would have given me a sense of, I don't know, who would have looked at the project and said, well, I guess that's OK. Or the Institute of Cooperative Education.

Robert Klein: Right. Or your immediate boss at the TV station?

Carol Crew: Right, and that was where I got my feedback was from the director and from the person who was probably in charge of that programing. And mostly what I heard was pretty much nothing. The director was pleased with it. I mean, he was happy to be doing it, and he and he wasn't saying to me, you should do this differently or, you know, we were just working along as partners on the program. So, you know, I didn't get I mean, certainly there was nobody doing any polling to see if anybody was watching it. I had one experience that gave me the sense that some people got to watch it. And that was I did a show about a maids cooperative, cooperativo empleiades. And this cooperative actually was a cooperative that would that formed like a haven house for maids who had been dismissed. And the usual process was they'd get these young girls, 14, 15, 16, come in from the Campo. They'd never been Santiago. They work. They had one Sunday half day off to go to church. I mean, that was the total of the life. They were really indentured servants. I mean, they came and they lived there, and that was it. And usually somewhere along the area, they became pregnant, either by some male person in the household or by the few people they might meet out on the streets. But they became pregnant when they became pregnant, they got fired and then they had no support system. So some of those maids had gotten together and gotten themselves into better situations, and they'd formed this little co-operative to be like somewhere where you could come and they'd give you a room and they'd try to contact your family if you could go back to your family. Sometimes the families wouldn't take you back if you'd gotten pregnant, you know, and very often the other side piece of that was that their kids, they couldn't work. They couldn't have their kids with them where they worked, usually. So the kids became street kids. Very often this was where the street kids came from, even though the mom would try to take care of them or they try to keep with them. Eventually, as the kids got a little older, they'd just be on their own. So it was a double problem.

And so I did this show about this and I didn't want to use any real maid and I could invite anybody who was going to do this. So my roommate, who is from whose background is Nicaraguan, who looks quite Chilean, was the actress. And we did this very dramatic piece about being turned away from the church and people whistling at her. And I don't know, it was very dramatic. You know, it was very silent film-ish, you know, and it showed, as it turns out, my time slot, which was around 6:00 p.m. in the evening, was exactly when the maids might have a break because dinner didn't happen to like 8:00 or 9:00, the kids were probably all taken care of by then. Well, it seemed like a goodly number of maids saw this show and told their employers that they thought that this show had been on and that they were being misused and abused. And of course, those wealthy people called up the TV station and raised holy hell. They were really angry. It was like, wow, you know. My director says, I think this would be a good time to go out of town and we did. We went out for two weeks. We went someplace else. You know, he could stay in, but I had to get out of town until it, like cooled down. And I'm sure the Peace Corps was brought into it.

Robert Klein: Do you recall them specifically saying to you, well, maybe you should be a little more careful?

Carol Crew: No, they did not caution me in that way. They did help to smooth it over, but they really didn't. They really didn't say, Jesus, watch what you do, you know? And even if they did, you know, how do you know when you're doing something? It didn't seem that revolutionary to me.

Robert Klein: What was this in the first or second year?

Carol Crew: This was in the second year. So this was like, you know, we're getting much better in our programing by then.

Robert Klein: From the left wing, from the radical politicians. Were there criticisms in the paper of the Peace Corps accusations of being CIA?

Carol Crew: Or, you know, I don't remember seeing those kinds of stories in the paper, but there are certainly it was common to have people say that to us. It was common to have when you were met with people, students or people of our own age, have people you know and have people say, oh, you know, well, who knows if you're CIA. And you know, we totally trusted each other, had no belief at all that our group had any CIA people and it might have been foolish. I have no idea.

Robert Klein: Well, I mean, how do you prove your innocence?

Carol Crew: Sure. And, you know, watching other people doing their part? I don't know. We were. I just felt that, you know, of course, anybody who was CIA would certainly have looked just as, as, you know, dedicated as I did. But in my heart, I truly couldn't believe that about any of my fellow Chile XIII group, right? And we were down there, you know, when Johnson sent troops into the Dominican Republic. So that would be '65, I think that was when that happened. And boy, they did not like that in Chile. And you know, Chileans, the students especially are very active, very political. When we got down to that country after that election, you know, a month or so after the election, the entire country was painted by Andean Frei. I mean, everywhere you looked, everywhere you look, there was still the vestiges of that campaign. It was really hot.

And many more people are involved and even poor people will be discussing, you know, it's not like they go, oh, well, it doesn't matter to me. I'm poor. Everyone was involved in politics. So you know, when that happened, they were burning the American flag out in the park. You know, it was very shocking to me.

Robert Klein: At any point, did you feel threatened?

Carol Crew: Only that one day when they were burning the American flag out in the park. We like stayed in the local little restaurant where we spent a lot of time. We just stayed there.

Robert Klein: Did anyone ever confront you, any Chilean person, confront you?

Carol Crew: Not, not directly. No. I mean, we'd get into wild discussions with people sometimes and, you know.

Robert Klein: More barroom discussions.

Carol Crew: Yeah, more that kind of stuff. No one ever was threatening in any way.

Robert Klein: On that score through the first year, did you work a five day a week and then have weekends free?

Carol Crew: Yeah, we were listed. It was like that if I was a little bit different because if I was trying to write a script, sometimes I just had to stay at it till I got it done. And it was hard writing in Spanish and it didn't ever really get good, you know? But most people basically would work, you know, would work. And then on the weekends, they were often would go visit or go do stuff.

Robert Klein: Was there any pressure from the Peace Corps office to be, you know, the 24-hour volunteer and to be doing other things?

Carol Crew: No.

Robert Klein: So you were pretty much free, you did your job.

Carol Crew: And I did my job and I cut every, you know, to tell you the truth. I mean, I do not remember anybody paying any attention to my project, except for me really. Well, nobody. And the one time that that thing happened with the empleiades, but that was it. You know, I mean, I don't remember a Peace Corps rep coming and talking to me about it. I don't remember anybody reviewing it. I just don't remember any interest at all, which was fine with me. And even at the cooperative education organization was the more likely, you know, they were the ones you would think would be saying, how's it going? You know, and would have been upset about the empleiades. I think that's why I left town was I don't want to talk to them till they cooled down, you know, because they were probably getting the heat.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Carol Crew: And but they didn't really ever give me a hard time about it, but they didn't say much of anything. They were kind of happy that I wasn't coming back to them and saying, you're not doing a good job here of overseeing me or, you know, I mean, they were just glad to have one less person who was saying, I'm not happy. Because the other volunteers often I think there were individuals felt just like, this is useless what I'm doing here. And that's why several of our groups, of course, did go down and find another project at about the midpoint.

Robert Klein: Did, if any, did many go home before the end of the service?

Carol Crew: Not many. Yeah, there were a couple of guys that I could have told you weren't going to make it, psychologically. They weren't going to be able to be flexible enough to fit into another culture. It was that flexibility. They were far too. Oh, yeah. The one guy lasted actually about a year, but the one fellow went home like within the first couple of weeks, had an encounter with somebody way down. They should never have sent this guy to the Campo. I mean, he just was a not flexible person. I think he had an encounter with someone with a gun in a bar, you know, and down south Chile was pretty wild west. You know, people tended to have guns and to have be pretty threatening and to, you know, get a little drunk.

Robert Klein: Did you have any regrets that you were living a very cosmopolitan life? You're working at a TV station and others were out in the frontier.

Carol Crew: Well, you know, I did in the certain sense because I'd had that kind of idea of going into the Campo and helping the poor, struggling people. But you know what? I really like my project and I like what I was doing, and I got to savor a little bit of everybody's project. And I got to kind of promote that project or certainly do something about it. And I and, you know, even I like I said, I have no idea if 10 people saw that program, but I really liked doing it and I liked the idea of promoting cooperatives in that way. So I was having a good time in that sense, and it was really wonderful to be in. Santiago was a great city. Very cosmopolitan. Very interesting. We were poor, boy were we poor.

Robert Klein: Do you do any vacation travel?

Carol Crew: I did. I went to see. I went on vacation to Chile, to Bolivia. So I went up through northern Chile and took the automotore, the little train that goes up to La Paz, and I visited my friend, who was in the Peace Corps in Bolivia. And that was fascinating, but that was really an interesting experience. And we went out to like Santa Clara. I went with him to different places in Bolivia. That was fascinating. I went to Lima.

Robert Klein: Because it was so different from Chile or?

Carol Crew: Yes, it was quite different from Chile. It was certainly, oh, Chile, Chile look like Paris or something. I mean, you know, Bolivia was far poorer and the projects out there. I shouldn't say they were poorer, but I had there was a sense that the government didn't function as well in Bolivia, certainly. I mean, the joke about Bolivia was, you know, what has thirty-three and a third revolutions per year? It's Bolivia. You know, how is Bolivia like a long-playing record? That's what it is. Thirty-three and a third revolutions per year. So that was, you know, Bolivia at the time. So it was very difficult for any development to be taking place, whereas Chile really Frei was working hard on stuff. You know, he was trying. I remember they used to say, you know, we should have let a young guy win the first time because he'd have done all this groundwork and then we could have taken, you know, credit for it, right? Because he's going to come in and take credit for it. They didn't have a sense of what would happen. I mean, they didn't feel worried about Allende in the communist sense like Americans are, you know. They were just going, oh yeah, Allende is going to come in and take credit, you know? And we were.

It was interesting. I don't know quite why. I know that we were often in situations where we were being educated about what cooperatives were doing around the country and the ways that that was the government was using them. You know, I don't know. It's kind of one of those things of where your memory picks up little things you said. Well, why we were in that meeting, you know, the agriculture co-op cooperatives of rural agriculture. But I did a story. It was very interesting. I went out to do something about a rural co-op and right about the time I got out to do this story, the campesinos who were like, what did we call it? Like tenant farmers. You know, the large landowner living in Paris or something, you know, absentee landlord, right? These folks, he was going to make some kind of change or something, and these folks took over the farm.

And they had a leader and they wanted the farm to be divvied up. Either they wanted to be able to buy their land, some land on the farm, or they wanted to be able to plant crops. I'm not really sure what their beef was, but they had taken over this farm, and so, you know, there I am, and whoa, I've got this hot, this hot thing going here, you know, and there's all these meetings, they're having meetings of all the campesinos around and, you know, newspapers are sending reporters to come and report about this. And there was, you know, of course, now there'd be a hundred million television stations because then it was just the media would come and interview the different people. And I stayed with this family and I heard all about their attempts to change this and why their lives were so hard and how they were living in poverty, and they weren't allowed to farm a lot of the ranch. And it was ridiculous because they could have been making money for this person and for themselves, but they weren't allowed to farm it. So this was, you know, this was really the agrarian reform piece of it, and it was really fascinating. It didn't come to blows and I don't know how it was settled eventually, but it was quite.

Robert Klein: But you weren't able to report on it.

Carol Crew: Oh, I did a show about it. Yep, I interviewed everybody. We shot film and we did a show about it, you know? And it really was to illustrate this problem of the absentee landlords and the fact that people are oppressed by this. There's no reason in the world for these people not to be able to farm this land. And make the profit from it for this guy who's off in France.

Robert Klein: And you still didn't know the demographics of the TV audience?

Carol Crew: No clue.

Robert Klein: Over the assumption that if you could afford a TV set, you were not a campesino, you know.

Carol Crew: Right. And that, you know, bars didn't have them. Meeting places necessarily have a TV.

Robert Klein: You didn't have a situation where a little village had one.

Carol Crew: I doubt it. You know, now in Santiago, community organizations might have had access to a TV, but only for soccer games would be my guess. You know, they weren't watching it at six o'clock in the evening. So really, it didn't have access to the poor people, but so my audience, if I had even given this a thought, which I didn't, my audience was the more wealthy people. And the maids. At least one.

Robert Klein: At least one.

Going through the second year, how was it different than the first?

Carol Crew: I don't know. I think we did some more interesting projects. We went further TV projects. A lot of the. I was thinking my roommate was doing a project. She was doing a project really out in one of the really poor areas of town. And this was some kind of a community development I know she had made. I had a little cooperative of making jams and selling them at one point earlier on. But this was a more involved kind of a community development project. She was very good at this stuff. She's still doing it, basically. And something that she did got her in trouble with the Peace Corps and she left early. Well, she left about only about two or three months early. I mean, it was just in the spring, you know, but things began, you know, there was kind of a ripening effect. You reached a point where you were getting pretty good at what you were doing, and I know it was really hard to leave in most cases. But there also was a sense of an ending coming.

Robert Klein: I was going to ask you about that.

Carol Crew: I think things began to sort of slow down. My own Mario Baeza, who I worked with, was quite an amazing guy, had gotten a scholarship to go and study independent film production in England. And so he left about spring, April or something like that. And then I was working just with the, I'm sure, with another director who I don't remember who it could have been. In the last few months it was Leida, who was the photographer. And it didn't have the same feeling. So it wasn't, you know, it's like the team got broken up.

Robert Klein: But coming toward the end of the second year. Sometimes people want to say, well, to have a monument they've left behind or to have some goal they've achieved in doing the two years. Did you hope that you would be replaced or that? I don't know what.

Carol Crew: Yeah, well, that was all kind of up to the Institute of Cooperative Education. And they, although they had a nice dinner for us, nice despedida, you know, nice going off and stuff. They had shown so little interest in my project that they did not have. I did not have a sense anyone would come and take over that co-op and part who had originally given the money or the time. You know, the television time, maybe wasn't going to renew it, but there wasn't any sense of ongoing this for my project.

Robert Klein: And did you feel badly that it wasn't going to continue or that another volunteer wasn't going to take it over?

Carol Crew: I didn't, actually, because I felt like it was kind of a piece of itself. You know that it that it fell into that time period. I did it while I could, and if they wanted to continue doing something about cooperatives, you know, they would probably work that out with the television station, you know, and have them produce it because I'd broken the ice in getting it going.

Robert Klein: Had most of your socializing been with fellow volunteers or did you begin to have Chilean friends where you know, you could joke you could play with words, you know, give inside personal comments and opinions?

Carol Crew: Yeah, mostly it was with the people I worked with at the TV station, you know, and they would invite, you know, invite us out or we would go out to dinner. Mario had a family, but he often would organize little things. We'd all go out and drink and stuff. We didn't usually spend time with his family. I mean, there was kind of a line there, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, but it was mostly that group and then other volunteers and their Chilean counterparts, we would often get together as a group. So it was kind of an interesting mixing of, you know. I spent most of my certainly most of my work time with these, the people of the TV station or with Mario or with the cameraman, you know, but it was that was more of a working relationship, you know. So the people that I knew secondary to that really were mostly Peace Corps volunteers and then their secondary Chilean friends.

Robert Klein: Yeah. As the two years comes to an end, where are you? What are you doing? What is your future?

Carol Crew: Yeah, that was strange. Well, I had decided to apply to graduate schools, which most of us had done. It was kind of like you had to have a haven to come home to.

Robert Klein: Now this was '66?

Carol Crew: '66 and I had decided I wanted to study television and film and educational television. I was interested in educational television. So I'd gotten information from the various universities that had film and TV master's degrees. And the two main ones I remember were USC and Syracuse, and USC required some kind of a big essay. I ended up at Syracuse by default. I mean, it was like, I can't do a bigger essay, I'm doing a show here, you don't have time for this. I remember taking the, uh, one of the Millers. Yeah, the graduate record exam on the Miller Analogies Test. And I took those, if you can believe this, when I was on vacation in Lima, Peru. Happened to land with when they were giving it in a place where I could take it. And there you are. You know, there I am at the peak of my Spanish ability when I was actually thinking in Spanish trying to go, this is to that as that is to that in English. I was like, this is all wrong! I'm not thinking like that right now. You know, I couldn't. I don't even have any idea what I scored on that. But Syracuse was kind enough, probably to forego it. Syracuse University master's program in TV and radio had really made a commitment to take Peace Corps volunteers in, so there were about five Peace Corps volunteers in a group of, I don't know, 25 in the program.

Robert Klein: That was the peak of that.

Carol Crew: Yeah, it was very cool because believe me, I needed help when I got back in the country. The culture shock was just like, you know, it was hard. That's very hard.

Robert Klein: Leaving Chile, were there lots of regrets or it was time to move on?

Carol Crew: Oh yeah. You know, it is interesting, I think for a lot of people that had different kinds of projects than I have. Mine was kind of like, OK, well, that's done, you know, and nobody was taking it over and it was like, goodbye, you know, I did my job. But for a lot of people, I think that had ongoing projects, it was much harder. For me, it was just like, well, this period's done, like graduating from school. It was like to me, it was sort of like, OK, I'm done here. And I didn't, you know, I remember Lyndon Johnson sent us all letters inviting us to, uh, to come on for another tour of duty to do American Samoa. They were opening a project in American Samoa, and I remember that specifically. Sent a letter to everybody saying you did a great job and would you consider doing it for longer? And we're opening this project in American Samoa. But I really was not ready to start another year.

Robert Klein: You were ready to move on.

Carol Crew: I was ready to move on, I guess.

Robert Klein: You didn't leave like feeling you had been you were being wrenched from Chile, where, you know, it was such a vital experience.

Carol Crew: No, I mean, it was a vital experience, but it didn't feel like that. It felt, it did feel finished and I felt ready to go.

Robert Klein: What was the effect of the experience on you? How would you evaluate that?

Carol Crew: Well, it's interesting. I think the effect was that for one thing, I left Reno. I mean, I might never have gotten out, you know. I mean, I left and I never really in a certain way went back, you know, to well, Syracuse looked close to Reno compared to Santiago, Chile, but it's not close, you know, and once again, we were a poor family. It's not like I could get flying home all the time and stuff. I went home. I was home for about two or three weeks. Because we traveled, of course, going home. Went to, traveled with another Peace Corps volunteer and we traveled to Argentina and Uruguay and up to Brazil and Sao Paulo and Rio. It was just wonderful. And then we flew over to Bolivia. So my friend in Bolivia, again, Lima, she went to Ecuador and went to Panama. I bought a new camera and then we went to Jamaica. And would you believe we got stuck in Jamaica for 14 days and we planned to be there maybe four or five days. There must have been some reason we went there. Maybe she knew somebody or something. But first airline strike, I don't really sure who struck. It might have been the flight attendants or the air controllers. I didn't remember who struck, but it was the first airline strike. Couldn't get back. And we're having to go renew our visa, you know, and we're running out of money here. You know, I really didn't have, you know, it was really kind of. She's got to get out of this paradise, you know? But we went there, we went to Mexico and I couldn't, I was ready to go home and I left my friend in Mexico and I went onto Los Angeles and then that day it was over.

Robert Klein: So it was about a three or four week trip or longer?

Carol Crew: Oh, all summer. We left in June and we got home in like the third week in August. So it took all summer.

Robert Klein: So now I mean, obvious change in your life. You were comfortable world traveler.

Carol Crew: Yeah.

Robert Klein: I mean, when you describe the itinerary, it's in and out of all these countries.

Carol Crew: In fact, so comfortable that I would just like hardly even would plan ahead. You know, it's like, well, we'll just go take the bus, you know.

Robert Klein: Well in the '60s, it was possible.

Carol Crew: Yes, it was. And there was a, I mean, I did have a sense of physical freedom, I could go wherever I needed to, and I could get there somehow and not worried about, not thinking about money much because.

Robert Klein: So you really felt that it in some way the Peace Corps in the years that freed you from Reno.

Carol Crew: It freed me from being from living a very, a very enclosed life, a very isolated life, which was what my, you know, because we were poor and because it lived in this very isolated city in a lot of ways, very different than the rest of the world in a certain way. And it was a wonderful thing that I left and became, you know, my eyes were open to possibilities and to my own possibilities. I mean, the experience of producing that show had given me a lot of confidence and a sense of I still wanted to do Peace Corps kind of work. I still wanted to come back and do educational TV and eventually be able to go down to South America. Because one of the problems, of course, in all South American countries, certainly in Chile, is that they can't train teachers fast enough to keep up with the population. I mean, they cannot train teachers fast enough and they don't have enough money to really disseminate them and pay for them. And people aren't being educated because of that, you know? So I always thought ETV, education on TV, was what I thought was going to save the world. And of course, it wasn't. It's computers. It's computers. When computers came, I went, that's it. Yeah, that's it. Because ETV is not interactive enough and you can't, it's too clumsy, you know? Sure, you can have a teacher up there teaching, but you can't talk to that teacher and the teacher can't talk to you.

Robert Klein: And so you went to Syracuse.

Carol Crew: I went to Syracuse, got a TV radio film degree. It was a year- long master's. And then not knowing what else do with myself, I joined, followed my other fellow Peace Corps volunteers there had joined something called Teacher Corps. I think this was also a draft dodging because now things were really hot. This was '68, '67. Things were really getting hot and Teacher Corps, I think, kept you out. You were helping the school system and it was supposed to be able to use media in the school. So you we were supposed to be able to help the New York school system, use media in the schools. And we got some training and we got some teaching credits in the summer.

Robert Klein: Where were you?

Carol Crew: In New York City.

Robert Klein: Oh, and where'd you live?

Carol Crew: I lived with a roommate from Syracuse, a woman from Syracuse who is a New Yorker. Thank God, because New York was like, New York was not Santiago. It was really big. But she knew her way around, got us an apartment and stuff, so I was living with her. But I then another strike, teacher strike, the first New York teacher strike. Well, so now I have to support myself. I end up taking a substitute teaching job in Harlem at an all-boys junior high school, which was really hell. I didn't have any experience as a teacher. I should never have been there and it taught me that lesson. You know, you really do, good intentions are not it. You have to have something to offer.

Robert Klein: Was it 139?

Carol Crew: God, it could have been. Frederick Douglass Junior High School.

Robert Klein: I'll tell you about it later.

Carol Crew: Oh, you are kidding me! So Frederick Douglass Junior High School, all boys, up the down staircase. It was just an amazing experience. But so I didn't last very long. It lasted about a half a year. And then I started working, finding different jobs in television or something associated with education and television for a couple and finally got a job with American Foundation for the Blind doing TV and radio spots. And you know, I went along through my career trying to get into educational television, but eventually ending up in in commercial television, doing on air promotion and talk shows and stuff like that. I had one more television experience was with the Philadelphia detention center. So the jail but detention center, meaning they haven't been given their sentence yet, haven't been sentenced to jail. And there was that little closed circuit TV. The experience of my life. Because even though I was prepared for that and I knew what I wanted to do is very difficult working with inmates, it's very difficult working with people in jails. And it was emotionally harder than I could stand. So, you know, after that sort of it wasn't as if my Peace Corps zeal left me, but I really was more and more interested in television. [dog barking] Let me go turn this dog off.

Robert Klein: Philadelphia. Oh yeah.

Carol Crew: So that detention center experience really well, that almost turned me into a non-do-gooder. That was tough. But so I sort of went into doing commercial television and then just my began, you know, uh, I was married then. I went and had kids and did all of that.

Robert Klein: Where did you live? For the most part?

Carol Crew: Let's see. On the East Coast for a long time.

Robert Klein: Oh, okay.

Carol Crew: I was in, uh, well, I met my husband when I was still living in New York, working for the American Foundation for the Blind. And then I went to Pittsburgh because that's where he got a job. And but I didn't know whether we were marriage material yet. So I went and worked at the University of Pittsburgh Communication Center. That was really good. That was educational TV, and that was a good gig. I mean, we were doing pretty nice stuff and it was ETV and all that stuff. And then we went to New York again, and then we went to Philadelphia. That's where I did the detention center. New York, Philadelphia, Boston. That was the live talk show. Now that was fun. That was exciting. I had a lot of fun doing that. And then and then we moved to San Francisco and I got pregnant and had kids and sort of took a ten year hiatus from any of that kind of stuff.

Robert Klein: Looking through that work career, and I assume you had a second career when the children were grown.

Carol Crew: Yeah, now I'm doing marriage and family therapy.

Robert Klein: Ok. What was the effect of having been in the Peace Corps on you or on your life?

Carol Crew: Well, you know, I think for one thing, when people see on your resume that you've been in the Peace Corps, they take you differently. They think that you are an adventuresome person and that you don't necessarily follow the regular track. I think it was wonderful in getting jobs many times because it made me a different person and a person who was both idealistic and adventuresome. And you know, and I'm not saying that I wasn't those things. I mean, I think that I was those things and that those things stayed with me. I mean, it has always given me a self-image of being a person who can go and do and get by and be creative about it. And, you know, not be afraid in a certain way and certainly not be afraid of other cultures. I think the other piece is the certainly the love for the Spanish coast, the Hispanic culture. I love the hospitality and just the sweet, sweet people. And just, you know, the sense that the family and community and relationship is so important, you know? Well, now I've become a marriage and family therapist. You know, my whole business is family and connection and interrelationship. And so in a lot of ways that that dovetails, it makes sense.

Robert Klein: So some of what you experienced of the Spanish culture, there are values there that you bring over into the therapy that you do now. Have you had an opportunity to go back to Chile?

Carol Crew: I have not. Many of the people I was in the Peace Corps with have right, but I have not ever gone back. Part of it was the whole Pinochet thing. I mean, it's like you didn't feel very welcome. You didn't feel like they'd be very happy with you coming for the first few years. And then when things began to change over and when they finally got a representative government, I was, you know, a mom with two kids and travel wasn't that easy then. But I'm sorry that I have never gone back and certainly a lot of the people I'm going to be seeing the next week, next weekend, have been back or worked there. Or, you know, many maintained really strong connections. Or married women from there.

Robert Klein: Anything else you'd like to put indicate say about the experience the Peace Corps? Would you recommend it to someone today, a young person?

Carol Crew: Absolutely. I think, you know, of course, I don't know how the Peace Corps is being run at the moment or that all of that stuff. But the experience is when you just can't buy, you can't buy that experience, you can't buy the experience for one thing of being sent to a country where you really the Peace Corps really takes care of you. I mean, they really do facilitate for you and make sure that you're taken care of as well as possible. And they make it possible for you to go and be in a culture and really be in that culture and use whatever talent, whatever energy, whatever you've got, that's really out of you. You know, because you know, most of these projects, if they're going to go, it's because you've pulled out something that you have personally that you're able to connect with and you're able to make it go because of that. That's very personal. That's not just a program, that's being willing to go and take a chance and put yourself in a situation that's definitely going to stress you out. But it's going to give you, I think, I don't know if in your travels, you've ever had anyone say, oh yeah, I'm really sorry I went. I mean, everybody I know says, I got so much out of that. I hope I gave something back.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Are there any regrets about the time, after about coming out of it? Low points?

Carol Crew: No. I think I was pretty depressed sometimes during that year in Syracuse. Just because it was hard to come back. It was hard to be in our culture. It was hard to come from such a poor culture into the wealth of our culture. It was hard to watch to see wealthy young students campaigning against the draft. You know, you get such mixed feelings about it. It's like, yeah, you're safe. You know, you can go around, you know, but somebody else is out there fighting. So some poor guy from the ghetto in the jungle there, I mean, somehow you just gave you such. It just was as if trying to fit myself back into the culture was really hard to do. And I was so sensitive to how wealthy our poor people are. I was like, yeah, I know this is hard. I know that it's hard to live where everybody's even more way, way, way, way, way wealthy, all right. And everybody's got everything. I understand the difference, but you know, the poverty in Chile, people were very poor and they had holes in the elbows of their sweaters and they weren't poor and they didn't feel poor. So that was the thing.

Robert Klein: They weren't poor in spirit.

Carol Crew: But it's helpful to know that. Well, I think also the other legacy that I brought back was the realization that we are not right, you know. We are not necessarily right and we are not necessarily seeing it in a way that's productive. Our point of view can be just, everybody's point of view cannot take into consideration the possibilities, the way that it could be. And you know, I certainly hope that the numbers of volunteers who have come back in, all of them have had that experience in some way. You know, really, we aren't always right.

Robert Klein: Mm hmm.

Carol Crew: That that will somewhere in some important juncture in our country, make a difference. That enough of us will say, well, listen a minute. Listen a minute. You know, listen to people. I just had a biography sent to me by one of the people I'm going to see this weekend who has done a lot of international development. Really she did great Peace Corps work all her life, and she's living in Oaxaca, Mexico. And she has a farm and the main thing she's doing is plant is growing seedlings to help reforest that area, which has been deforested. But just because of the need for wood and so she's reforesting Oaxaca. Isn't that amazing?

Robert Klein: That's faith in the future.

Carol Crew: And that's like, you know, she was working for Harvard and big international consulting stuff, and now she is living in Oaxaca, growing trees. I love that.

Robert Klein: I think we can stop.