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12/31/2011 08:09 AM

WDRT in State Journal

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” WDRT-FM (91.9) has been on the air for just over a year but has quickly become a part of the cultural fabric of this region known for its artisans, organic farmers and independent spirit.”

10/08/2011 03:02 PM

Rice Spann in the Peace Corps

Rice Spann in the Peace Corps

by John H. Sime

Rice Spann comes from the rolling farm country of Lebanon, New Jersey. Yes, there is such a world, beyond the urban and suburban New Jersey we see on television and the movies. In fact it is not that much different from around here, and Rice’s childhood was full of adventures in hayfields and on country lanes just like we enjoy.

He was an economics major at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts when he took a course on development and foreign aid.  At the same time he encountered an issue of the National Geographic for the month and year of his birth. There was an article about the return of the first Peace Corps volunteers from Africa.  Things like this got him to thinking about going through the complex process of joining the Peace Corps.

As is the case with so many returned Peace Corps volunteers he has very little good to say about the application process.  It was a lengthy encounter with both humiliation and incompetence. And if you don’t like it there’s the door. However, as soon as he finally made contact with the right person in the Peace Corps bureaucracy everything changed for the better. He finally called the man on the Honduras desk for Peace Corps and soon found himself enroute to that country as a group of water specialists.

In Miami he met a group of 15 water and well sanitation engineers, all the members of this group were male.  They were trained with  a group of about 30 aqua-culture (fish) experts who called themselves the “fish heads”.  Once in Honduras, they went through a 4 1/2 month training process.  Each day all the trainees, or “aspirantes” as they were called, had four hours of Spanish language training and  several hours each day of training in their job skill–in Rice’s case this was water sanitation. The head trainer was an outgoing volunteer who had a sort of  drill sergeant like demeanor. About five of the original fifteen water specialists dropped out largely because of his toughness. Fortunately, Rice was not one of them.   They learned about hydrology, latrine technology, and the techniques of working with concrete.

Rice lived in Lapeara, a city of 4,000 in the province of Lampira in the coffee growing mountain regions of south western Honduras. Founded in the 1530s, the downtown of Lapaera has an old Catholic church with an inscription dated 1640. This Viroqua sized city is surrounded by several “aldeas” or villages which involved much of the rural population. Rice would journey to these aldeas on a regular basis to help do water projects using a combination of local resources and labor, and outside resources and organization. He worked with a well known NGO-(non governmental organization) called Foster Parent Plan, in which money would be raised ostensibly for the support of third world children, but actually it was for the children as well as development projects such as well, water systems, and schools that the children could use.

Rice and his fellow water sanitation specialists worked on dozens of projects.  Local organizations were formed in each aldea to facilitate the process and to maintain the project in coming years.  They were very successful in this part of the plan, but less so in the hoped for later phase in which the aldeas would set up fee structures to financially sustain the projects.  Nevertheless, thousands of people benefited from the basic work that was done.

Rice left Honduras in 1994. After that he was a school teacher of 3d and 4th grade Spanish in Texas.  He has been in the Driftless area since 2005. He and his wife (Jennifer) have a farm outside of Westby.  She works for the Westby School system. They are in the house building mode at the moment.

His group has had no real reunions, except for the fact that a couple of weddings have brought some of this fellow water trainees together.

09/05/2011 07:45 AM

Labor Day Celebration in Readstown

Sept. 3-5, 2011

08/15/2011 08:14 AM

John Sime in the Peace Corps–Celebrating 50 Years of Peace Corps.

by Kaela Firebaugh

John H. Sime joined the Peace Corps in 1976.  He was sent to the West African nation of Mali as a teacher.

Born in Viroqua in 1952, and raised in Readstown, John graduated from Kickapoo High School in 1970.  He then received a BA in 1974 and MA in 1976 in Comparative Literature from UW Madison.  In addition to literature, he studied Spanish, French and German languages.  After completing his Master’s degree, John was ready for a break from academic life but was not quite ready to return to Readstown to take over the family business.  After looking into various work and travel options, he decided to try applying to the Peace Corps.  The Peace Corps was impressed with his linguistic abilities and suggested he apply as a teacher of English as a foreign language (TEFL).  There were several possible positions available, but John was intrigued by the possibility of going to Mali.  He had always heard of the ancient city of Timbuktu (in Mali) and read about the long and interesting history of the country.  He applied and went through medical clearance and was sent to Atlanta for four days of training before flying off to Mali with a group of twenty five other volunteers.

Once in Mali, John lived in the capital city of Bamako.  Although the city was crowded, and Mali is a poor country, there was little crime and John felt safe living in a rented house on a busy street.  John enjoyed few amenities in Bamako. There was electricity only part of the time. He had cold but not hot running water and no phone service or air conditioning.  Fortunately, there were street vendors and restaurants that supplied ready access to good, inexpensive food. 

There were many cultural challenges. Evidence of extreme poverty, disease and physical deformity greeted him every day on the streets of Bamako.  Although French colonial rule of Mali ended in 1960, the official language of the country is French.  Ninety percent of the population is Islamic. John definitely stood out as a white American and people (especially young children) on the street would stare or call out to him–calling him “toubabou” or stranger.

The first president elected in Mali after independence from the French was a socialist named Modibo Keita.  He established a one party state, nationalized most of the natural resource production, and forged close ties to the then eastern block communist countries.  During the 1970’s while John was a volunteer, Mali was ruled by a military-backed president, Moussa Traore who had overthrown Modibo Keita in a bloodless coup in 1968.  Although he instituted some changes in an attempt to improve the economy and living conditions, a devastating drought and famine from 1968 to 1974 hampered any progress.  His rule was marked by increasing social unrest and student strikes and there was even a failed coup attempt against him while John was living there.  There was little freedom of speech or press and John was told specifically not to criticize the government or culture of Mali in his teaching or writing while there.

John worked at a teacher’s college called Ecole Normale Superièure (Advanced Normal School).  In the cold war style of the time, the school was funded and built by the Soviet Union but had an addition that was funded and built by the United States.  The Soviet part of the building was replete with busts of Lenin.  The head of the English Department at the school was British, although all official school meetings were held in French.  The style of teaching there was very different than in the U.S. in that teachers were told to “teach to the best” and literally weed out weaker students.  Anyone below the mean or in the lower half of the class received a failing grade.

Rather than only teaching English as he had expected, John was assigned to train high school teachers.  The classes he taught included African Literature, English Literature, and English Grammar and Oral Comprehension.  Classes were held each morning and then John worked in the school library in the afternoon.  He especially enjoyed getting to know his students and figuring out what topics interested them the most and would inspire them to speak up in class.  Together they read and discussed novels and had discussions on current events.  Students particularly liked to discuss feminism and African popular music.  Although students could speak French, English and several local languages, the classes were conducted in English.  John also was required to visit and critique students as they were “practice teaching.” He also advised students on writing their senior thesis and was part of a three teacher “jury” that decided the final grades for each student’s thesis.

Upon completing his two year assignment, John did some traveling in Europe and then returned home.  After attending mortuary school in Kentucky in 1979-1980, he joined and eventually took over the family business: Sime Funeral Home.  Inspired by his library work in Mali, John started a library in Readstown.  He also became involved in the Readstown Historical Society.  He continues to live and work in Readstown with his wife Jan.

Over the years, John has kept in touch with and participated in reunions with other returned volunteers from his group.  In 2003, John took a trip back to Mali to see how things have changed and to visit areas of the country he had wanted to see years earlier.  He toured parts of the northern desert by camel and visited the ancient cities of Djenne and Timbuktu.  He returned to his old school and Peace Corps office.  He even met some of the Peace Corps volunteers that were serving at that time and learned about their efforts at water sanitation and social work.

John found that Bamako the capital has developed and grown tremendously.  The drafting of a new constitution in 1991 has created a democratic multi-party state in Mali and established a much more free press and media.  Also the advent of cell phones and computers has opened up new opportunities and greatly changed the way people communicate and do business.

John continues to follow the many changes taking place politically and socially in Mali.  Although still mired in poverty, the country is currently enjoying a period of stability and growth that bodes well for the future.

07/21/2011 03:50 PM

Kaela Firebaugh in the Peace Corps

Saluting Peace Corps on its 50th Anniversary

by John H. Sime

Kaela Firebaugh joined the Peace Corps in 1987.  She was sent to the Philippines to work with farmers to create sustainable farming systems.

A native of Long Island, New York, she graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Natural Resource Management.  Her staging took place in San Francisco. Her group consisted of about 30 agriculture and forestry volunteers.   Three other such groups left with hers for the Philippines at the same time.

The staging lasted just a few days.  The training itself took place in the Philippines, on the main island of Luzon.  It lasted about three months. The training site was a small university.  During the training they stayed with host families.  The government gave these families money to feed the volunteers.  This was a means of getting the volunteers to learn about the culture from the inside.   They also had a fair amount of training in the work they were to do.  Her studies had been in resource management, but in the Peace Corps she was trained specifically in teaching the Aeta people new farming techniques.

The Aeta people are considered to be Negrito people–a group of several peoples inhabiting various locations in south Asia and Australia.  They are believed to be among the earliest inhabitants in that part of the world.  The Aeta practiced slash and burn agriculture.   The Philippine government had assigned them to dry, hilly areas.  Moreover, the intense rains of the tropic region meant that existing soil was often washed away.   The technique taught to Kaela was for nitrogen fixing trees to be planted in rows, which would help produce terraces.  Then other crops such as bananas, cassavas, and sweet potatoes could be planted on the terraces.

Kaela lived at Poon Bato, a small village near Botolan, a city in Zambeles Province on the western side of Luzon. This was very definitely in the jungle.  She lived in a bamboo hut, in fact, she in lived in one small room of a small bamboo hut occupied by her host family. Privacy was minimal.  There was no electricity and no running water.  The village was on the far side of a river which flooded ferociously several months out of the year, so the village was in effect cut off during those times.  Zambeles is a predominately Catholic area of the Philippines, unlike the Moslem south where Peace Corps volunteers are rarely sent.  It is an area which practices ritual crucifixions at Easter time, a custom Kaela witnessed.

At one point during her walks through the jungle she came across a group of American soldiers who were operating a sort of temporary radar installation. They were amazed that she would be living in such a remote place and told her that they received hard ship pay for just being there.

She worked on this project the whole time of her Peace Corps service–which is kind of unusual in Peace Corps, an organization inclined to shift volunteers around from task to task. She worked in three separate areas, and two of them became quite good at the techniques she was introducing. The third one more or less kept to the slash and burn method of agriculture. It was hard for Kaela to get used to the intense poverty of the Aeta.  Yet, they people she lived with made skillful use of all of their resources. The mother of the house cooked over a wood fire with pots sitting on rocks. She had became an artist at positioning the pots over the flame at the just the right time, in just the right position.  They refused to charge her for rent, they would take no money. However, eventually she realized that they would accept gifts of food, which she was happy to provide.

The number one item on the diet was rice.  It was very rare that they got bread, because due to the moist jungle surroundings it would get moldy easily.  A local delicacy was roasted beetles, who would be collected at certain from trees. They would then be roasted over fires like peanuts and Kaela reports that they were quite tasty–once you pulled off the legs and wings.   It was also common to catch minnows out of the river and to eat them over cooked rice.

One sad note is that in June 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, a nearby volcano which had been inactive for 500 years, suddenly erupted into the second largest volcanic event of the 20th century. All the work she did was covered in 4 inches of volcanic ash. The Aeta were moved to evacuation camps. Many of them died. Only now are people beginning to go back the their former farmlands.  Kaela still writes to some of her friends in the Philippines, and  keeps track of current developments.

After Peace Corps she went to the University of Washington , where she again studied natural resources. There she met Steve Firebaugh, from Wisconsin. They and their 2 kids live on a farm between Readstown and Viroqua where they raise beef, poultry, sheep, and make maple syrup.

07/02/2011 08:12 AM

JUDY GATES IN THE PEACE CORPS

by John H. Sime

In 1963, Judy Johnson from West Prairie, Wisconsin graduated from the UW Stout with a degree in Home Economics. She decided to join the Peace Corps and she served in Turkey from 1963 to 1965.

Like most Peace Corps volunteers of the first phase of volunteers, her training was in the United States. Her language training was done in Portland , Oregon. In Puerto Rico, she and other recruits were taken through an intensive process of physical training and Outward Bound type role playing. The trainees were taken to locations and had to hike back to their destinations using their own resources and living off the land. This is no longer done for Peace Corps volunteers and now most training takes place in-country, the country of service.

Peace Corps often trains and transports large groups of new volunteers going to the same country at the same time. Judy was one of fifty trainees who were home economists, nurses, social workers, and business education teachers. She was the only one from Wisconsin. She lived in Turkey most of the time with two other Peace Corps girls–one from Nebraska and one from New York.

Like many, if not most incoming Peace Corps volunteers, Judy’s work ended up being nothing like she was recruited for. She was supposed to be a nutritionist, taking advantage of her state of the art university education to improve the diet of these poor people in Turkey. It turned out that the Turks were eating better than we were. They were eating whole wheat bread, fruits, vegetables, and fish from the sea. It was a food co-op dream. There was nary a TV dinner to be had.  But it also meant that Judy’s job was refined to teaching in local girl schools–first in Zonguldok (in northern Turkey) and, for the majority of Judy’s service, later in Iskenderun, in the southern Turkey along the Mediterranean. Iskenderun was founded by Alexander the Great in 333 BC. There was a network of five small country schools which funneled student to two high schools in the main town. Judy taught at all these places. She also taught night school for adults .

Most of the time she taught T.E.F.L.–a Peace Corps specialty: “Teaching English as a Foreign Language.”. This has been one of the big contributions Peace Corps has made to the world, worldwide, and it has gone on to aid in language learning here at home.  The night classes often consisted of professionals

Some of the students Judy taught were girls in the surrounding villages of about 12 to 13 years of age who were in the process of getting the only two years of education they would get prior to their marriages. She had to teach the alphabet to some of them. Some of these girls had never before held a pencil in their hands. Their lives consisted of housework. While at the schools they were learning to sew their trousseaus of table clothes, table runners, and other fancy items that would follow them shortly into bride hood.  The villages were widely divergent in their social customs and political and religious attitudes. One village would permit the girls to dress in an almost modern fashion, using lots of color and design, another village nearby would swathe their girls in layers of dark cloth, exposing only their eyes. Judy was able to teach a lot of sewing to these girls, taking advantage of skills she had learned growing up around here. She also gave classes on home decorating.  In the line of nutrition (which she had been originally slated for), Judy was able to teach her students how to make baby food out of local fruits and vegetables.

The house she shared with the other two girls was not a rough hut. It was good, typical concrete construction which had been built by the landlord, who lived upstairs and rented out the downstairs. It had running water.

After Peace Corps she came back to Vernon County and served for a time as the Vernon County Extension Agent.  After that she became a substitute teacher and later served for a long time as the Curator of the Vernon County Museum. She was later a guide at Norskedalen in Coon Valley.

After Peace Corps she married Wayne Gates and they have four kids.

06/22/2011 07:50 AM

Post Trauma Cleanup by John H. Sime

The call came from the Sheriff’s office after 10 PM.  A local high school boy had committed suicide with a high powered hunting rifle in his upstairs bedroom. Everybody knew him and within a few hours everybody within an hour’s drive of this small western Wisconsin village everybody was grieving along with the boy’s farm family. But right now there were a couple of tasks at hand:

“We usually have a man who cleans these situations up for us, but he is out of town. Do you think that you could clean up his room enough that the family could come back to the house?”  The Sherriff’s department had lodged the family temporarily in a motel until this task could be performed. Making the situation somewhat more complicated for me was the fact that my father, who really ran the funeral home where I worked, was at this point in the hospital, even then beginning his final illness. So I had to pick up the body plus clean up the room.  I called a couple of friends and neither of them was available. My wife gave me a good bit of advice:  “At this time of night in this town the only people you are going to find up and around are in the bars.”

So I loaded up my body cot, buckets, mops, bleach and other sundry supplies and drove up town the local bars. As I walked through the door of a bar I spotted the perfect man–a still healthy middle aged man who worked in construction and had served in the U.S. Marine Corps in Viet-Nam. He saw me approach and joyously offered to buy me a drink, but he saw by the look on my face that this was not to be a simple night out drinking. I sat next to him and in hushed tones explained by situation. He nodded repeatedly, keeping his head down. Then he simply said: “Let’s go.” And we went. The sun was coming up when we finished our task and drove out of the farmyard with the shattered body of the boy. He mentioned to me that he had driven the boy on the school bus years ago. He would not take a dime in payment. He has consistently declined to talk about that event in later years.  But I was just lucky that man was there to help me.

I recall thinking at the time that there should be some kind of service that could perform this duty. It was not many years after that boy’s death that I began to hear about the formation of such organizations. Aftermath, Inc. operates out of the western suburbs of Chicago.  It is the largest such enterprise in the United States.  Their service began in 1996 under the leadership of Tim Reifsteck and Chris Wilson when they themselves had to help clean up after the suicide death of a neighbor.

In 2007 they opened an 11,000 sq. ft. office and training facility in Oswego, Illinois. They meet OSHA and EPA guidelines and follow all Federal, State, and local laws on the subject. They provide their service in 48 states, 365 days per year.  They also provide training for the myriad of sexually transmitted, blood borne pathogens that have become so problematic in our society in recent years. They can normally be on the scene of the clean-up between one and three hours after being called.  Crime scene clean up is an increasingly important part of their work. This requires not only caution and skill but also the ability to cooperate with local authorities.

05/21/2011 07:52 AM

Gerry Boehm in the Peace Corps

by John H. Sime

Gerry Boehm joined the Peace Corps in the wake of the call to service by John F. Kennedy. He had been very political in college, active in the Democratic Party. He had also thought about the seminary, and was active in the Newman Club. He truly believed war was not the answer. The Peace Corps filled the need he had for service, but allowed him to utilize the education he had just received at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire with a degree in Social Studies for secondary education and a minor in Journalism.

In 1964, he was among the earlier phase of Peace Corps organization. Most of their training took place at a Navy base in Norman, Oklahoma and a place in Mexico. He was one of about 50 people who were sent to Peru in January, 1965 as a big group to help conditions in a mountain region. For that reason they were given mountain gear and taught Quechua, the Incan language that would be far more useful in the remote mountains. Little did Gerry know that a local big wig in a town called Tambo Grande in the north east corner of Peru, was pulling strings to get his town a Peace Corps volunteer. This was place in a desertified plains region called Piura, a Quechua name which means “supply base” since the habitations in this hot dusty region were considered to be supply bases on the network of roads established by the Pre Columbian Inca up and down the Pacific Coast. So life was old here, but not easy. There was no running water in Tambo Grande when Gerry Boehm arrived in 1965.  55 gallon drums would be filled with water and brought to the town regularly. Electricity lasted about 4 hours per night. People would gather before one of the three television screens in the towns in the evening in the village store and give the proprietor a coin for the privilege. It was basically an agricultural area with serious irrigation problems.

The local jefe was a man named Carlos Schafer. He was part German and part Peruvian and his family had been in Peru for at least three generations.  He had grown up in Germany and England and been educated there. Now he was in Peru and eager to make his holdings successful. He was the man who went to the Peace Corps and asked for somebody to help with a local farming cooperative which had been set up earlier as an irrigation project by a man from Chili. This was a local enterprise using funds from the United States in the Kennedy era program called Alliance for Progress. The Chilean organizer had set up things alright, but he had not gone through the legal process of setting up the cooperative with the Peruvian government. Now he was gone. Therefore it was not at all legal in the eyes of the government. Gerry had to fix this by doing the leg work between the government and the farmers to officially register the co-op, this meant it could acquire the government benefits entitled to it as a co-op. He did a lot of other things to get the successful operation running better. In time he found himself teaching at two local high schools and eventually he was running the library.

Their Peace Corps training had encouraged them to seek out community leaders to assist them in their work, and Gerry became good friends with a man named Paco Wong. This man became a good friend and helped Gerry overcome a lot of local hurdles.

When the co-op was running well and the school ended its term he was recruited by another Peace Corps volunteer to help with a rice mill co-operative in Tumbes (about 300 miles from Tambo Grande).  This lasted about six months. He was in charge of purchasing materials, record keeping, and interpreting for an engineer (another Peace Corps volunteer) who was building the rice mill. When he left in September of 1966 the rice mill was not yet completed but it was complete shortly thereafter. In 1974, he and his wife Alice, whom he married after peace Corps, visited Tumbes and saw that the rice mill was doing well, with bins full of rice. They also visited Tambo Grande and they had obtained running water in the interim.

He came back from the Peace Corps changed. He returned to the U.S. as a Pacifist and became active in antiwar activities.

He and Alice have lived near Gays Mills, raising and homeschooling their children for the past 30 years.

04/14/2011 10:03 AM

“How my son’s ashes finally found their place” from Salon.com

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“…So, we started giving away little boxes of his ashes. He has since been to Africa. Costa Rica….”

02/27/2011 08:34 PM

Peace Corps and Africa at UW

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Above- U.W. Madison graduate John Sime with his 1976-78 Peace Corps group (at a reunion in Washington, D.C. in 2001)