Given by Eleanor L. Shumway, 5th Guardian in Chief, in 1988
Read by Richard A. London, 6th Guardian in Chief
June 8, 2025
INTRODUCTION
Last week I received an email meant for Eleanor, which had been sent to dozens of her past colleagues with the following message:
“The Peace Corps has announced that the agency will close its country program in Ethiopia, as ongoing security concerns prevent the return of Peace Corps volunteers to service in the foreseeable future. The Peace Corps has been active in Ethiopia since 1962 and over 4,000 volunteers have served in the Education, Community Economic Development, Agriculture, and Health sectors. While there are no currently serving volunteers in Ethiopia, the agency established a Virtual Service Pilot program in 2021, and 129 US virtual participants have engaged with Ethiopian partner organizations since that time. The 63-year legacy of friendship and partnership between Ethiopia and the United States, fostered through lasting connections amongst returned Peace Corps volunteers, host families, community partners, and agency staff will endure.“
In honor of this past effort, I invite you to tune into Eleanor’s recollection of a life-serving experience that had a profound influence on the rest of her life, as well as on everyone who was touched by this significant program.
WE BELONG TO THE WORLD
by Eleanor L. Shumway, 5th Guardian in Chief
First Given in November 1988
In early 1964, I filled out several pages of application forms for the Peace Corps and sent them off in great anticipation. By May I had received a letter inviting me for intensive training at UCLA, and in September I was on a flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, along with 285 other volunteers. Two incredible years later, I came back.
I brought home a vast number of slides, and a large amount of artifacts. I’ve thrown most of the slides away and given the other ones to people, Ethiopians who fled their country later without anything from home. My house that once looked like an African museum, stuffed, is cleared out of most things. I gave many things to my family members and they’ve given them back, it’s been so many years. One of my Ethiopian students and his family are here in the United States after having had to flee from the revolution and came with nothing. They had no tangible items of their own culture so most all the things I gave away went to them. And I feel that this is another part of that process, and I need to share this with you — you who are my Temple family, my Halcyon family and my friends.
I was struck with this statement from the second volume of The Teachings of the Temple: “Unless we belong to the world instead of to one tiny bit of it, we are limited beyond anything we can conceive of. It is no light task, that of belonging truly to the world, of making our decisions based on the welfare of others. After all, does it not resolve itself into the words of Jesus, ‘Thy will, not mine, be done.’ Let infinite Love and Law make our vital decisions for us, instead of our personal desires and so save ourselves and all dear to us from unnecessary suffering and continued ignorance…”
These are thoughts and words from the Master, speaking on problems of intolerance. I’m sure we don’t question this; we’re drawn to teachings of Brotherhood and tolerance or we wouldn’t be together. But how do we put these instructions into practice in our lives? Other than general guidelines, I can’t tell you what to feel, what words to say, what prayers to pray, or what deeds to do. That choice is yours to make and mine to make, but we can share these choices, share how they work for us, share the learning gained and perhaps learn from each other’s experiences — which is really why I’m grateful for this opportunity to share some of these things with you this morning.
Ever since I can remember, people have been important to me — the interaction with, the observation of, and the reading about. My early memories are of playmates in Montrose, then moving here and being involved in the larger community, the Halcyon Store, Post Office, and especially the library, which led me into an unlimited community through books. I’ll never forget my excitement about Egypt and the puzzled look on my Mother’s face as I described the wonderful things I’d been reading about the pie-ram-ids. It took her a few minutes to figure it out and correct my pronunciation of pyramids. When I finally stood beside the pyramids at Giza, I saw superimposed on those awe-inspiring structures a picture of our kitchen in Halcyon and Mom helping me with the problems of a reading vocabulary that outran a speaking vocabulary.
My projected career in international relations didn’t survive my failure at college the first time around, but the interest was still there. Looking back, it seems as if life was asking me to fill slots that gave me an exposure to a wide variety of people and places on a practical everyday basis, each step fitting me to take the next one, each one having several choices, one choice always leading to the next logical one. I must confess, I didn’t see the pattern then. Hindsight is so clear.
Twelve years after high school graduation came college graduation, and the choice of the Philippines and the U.S. Navy Dependents Schools in which to teach. I could have accepted contracts offered in Ben Gazi, Libya, or in Germany, but I chose the assignment in Subic Bay because I knew precious people there. And it was there during a school assembly that I heard from a young American woman of the experiences she was having as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines. The Peace Corps was only two years old by then.
At that time, we really needed to hear of these positive, peace-oriented efforts of Americans because the base had been on full alert as we rode out the tensions of the Bay of Pigs, an American-Russian confrontation. I had been tantalized by the dream of people helping people when JFK proposed it during his campaign. When he signed it into being with an executive order on March 1, 1961, I still hadn’t finished college but I could hardly wait. Then came the stories of intensive training the volunteers were undergoing, rappelling up and down cliffs, running miles, learning languages, swimming rivers. Swimming…uh-oh! Cliffs, running, and languages were bad enough, but swimming was not for me. So I chose the Naval Dependents School as a way overseas, and there was that Peace Corps volunteer telling me she wasn’t climbing cliffs or swimming on any required basis. Hmm…
Kennedy had been asking all Americans to take a look at what we could do for others for fulfilling our responsibility to the concept of global peace on a practical level. He wasn’t the first to ask; there were many programs working on this concept, but he did ask. And he asked at a time and in a manner that caught the American imagination, at the idealism and the practicality of this country. You all know those words, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Ask not what America can do for you, but together what we can do for the freedom of man.” Eisenhower needled him about the “Kiddy Corps,” as did others. But Kennedy went ahead with the plan, and the President’s presumption proved to be prophetic. As one of the first volunteers put it, “I’ve never done anything political, patriotic, or unselfish because nobody ever asked me to. Kennedy asked.”
I still had doubts about my ability to fulfill Peace Corps ideals. I had returned home after a year in the Far East, loving it but devoured by homesickness for Halcyon and all it means to me. Yet once here, I knew that the overseas experience was not yet finished. I seriously filled out applications for the American school in Guatemala City, and one day at Cal Poly, my friend Alice and I picked up Peace Corps applications. That night I filled in those hundreds of blanks, tongue in cheek, about one-quarter serious about the whole thing. We did go take the aptitude tests in San Luis Obispo.
Then President Kennedy was shot. For me it was almost a personal handing on of a torch, a quest. When I was accepted in Guatemala City, I turned it down, even though I had not yet heard from the Peace Corps. On my birthday in May of 1964, I was notified of my acceptance for the English teaching program in Ethiopia; Alice had been accepted for the Philippines. I had to get out the encyclopedia to find out where Ethiopia was located on the world map. There was only a small amount of information: Haile Selassie, African mountain kingdom; exports of coffee and honey.
After thirteen weeks at UCLA, I learned much, much more about Africa and Ethiopia — and about myself. I learned I could run cross-country stretches of two miles, do more sit-ups and push-ups than I thought existed, teach games I’d never played before, and became a pincushion for the Medical Center. I learned what to say, what not to say, what to pack, what not to pack, what to teach and how to teach it. Training was ten hours a day, six days a week. It greatly relieved my mind to be told to stay out of water in Africa and avoid the chances of shistosomiasis, a liver fluke that needs a human host in its life cycle.
I came home to pack, attend going-away parties, be interviewed by the local papers, and climb aboard a plane bound for New York, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Athens, Cairo, and Addis Ababa. Recently, as I was putting away all those letters that I had written home and Mom had saved, I came across some letters that Teddy had written to me. Gertrude Tedford — Teddy — was my godmother and very dear friend to many of us, who has since passed away. She wrote me a special going away letter as I went off to the Peace Corps that I’d like to share with you.
“My Dearest Eleanor,
“During these last hours before you set off on your great adventure, my crowding thoughts try to encompass a lifetime of experiences and responses that have built a sturdy bridge between us. A bridge which can and does wipe out any sense of distance or separation in the usual meaning of the term. Once more the end of an important cycle in your life draws near.
“You cannot know with what pride and tenderness I watch you take this big step that I feel will probably have significance of which we have no idea at present. A brand-new section of the road will soon be yours to travel and I imagine there will be times when you may wish for a more clearly marked road map, but it is my belief that to one with your inner stature this is likely to be denied. Many, possibly most, of your contemporaries have elected to follow a path made smooth by others where little will be required of them beyond the exercising of physical and mental muscles. So be it. But for you, my dear, and for others of like mind, life is a high adventure of the spirit. A trail to blaze with tools made sharp and keen on the grindstone of the inner self. As I sit here and try to project myself into your future, to try to picture you in your new environment, I succeed only in superimposing a familiar one upon it. A sort of Halcyon with a tower of Babel in the middle. Closer to the truth than you know.
“So, in spite of an effort to read whatever was available about Africa and in spite of all the fascinating listening to that which was so generously make possible to me, I am still anticipating the foreign flavor of an armchair trip to such a faraway land.
“Already the Greek side of myself misses you and I would kind of like to have my cake and eat it too, please. However, I know that the quality of communication that can pass over our bridge at will, will be operating with its usual force in spite of physical separation, very many miles and very different customs and environments.
“And so the line between us will remain open and the vitality of our inner connection can give us that sense of closeness that is more satisfying than mere physical presence. So my dear, as you face into your new challenge, I feel that to negotiate it successfully you will probably need occasional courage and increasingly great skill, endless patience, and a good healthy sense of humor. These I wish you in full measure, not so much that you acquire them as that you recognize them in yourself at a time when you may need to draw on them. You have them, Sweetie Pie, and how. I guess what I’m trying to say is have confidence in yourself, for whether you recognize it or not, you are a very special person and have so much to contribute towards a struggling world. I wish you much joy. The enduring kind that comes in spite of, instead of because of. I hope that you will have many pleasant contacts and a few good friends. May you always have that poise and assurance that is perfectly tailored to fit your requirements at all times and in all situations. And while you’re about it, I hope you will build yourself a special sort of dream. For I have found that a dream is a nice sort of balance when our ship gets to tossing about.
“Have a good trip and take with you the very deep and special love of your godmother, Teddy.”
When all 285 of us got off that plane at Addis and joined the 125 volunteers who had been there for a year, we more than doubled the number of college-trained teachers in the country. When I personally got off that plane — which by then I wasn’t real interested in doing, as I had been traveling without much sleep for two days, had a bad head cold, and was full of anguish with a terrible case of the home-sicks — I knew I had the option of resigning at that point. The thing that stopped me was the thought of all those parties, all the publicity, and that letter from Teddy.
I decided to at least try it till Christmas. And then I was caught, for in the words from Anna in the musical The King and I, “The children, the children. I can’t forget the children, their shining faces looking up at me… .” I was assigned to teach third and fourth graders. It was the third graders’ first introduction to English, and I knew comparatively little Amharic. I wrote home soon after I began teaching those third graders the mysteries of English:
“Yesterday, I was teaching the third grade class how to write their names in English. There I was standing on a dirt floor, in a room with dark brown mud walls, in front of a small chalkboard, a corrugated tin roof and tight-packed rows of hard wooden benches crammed with interested but squirmy students. Pretty typical third graders. I wrote all 55 names on the board and as I turned around, they said. ‘Thank you’ in English. Nearly their entire vocabulary in English at that point. And they had their little tongues out. In Amharic language this, that, there, those sounds that come with the tongue between the teeth, there is no such sound. And what’s more, it’s not socially acceptable to show your tongue. So for me to come along and say, ‘You’re not saying it right, don’t say shank you, say THank you’, it was hard, but they did it. They were so pleased with themselves, they were absolutely beaming and I was nearly bawling.”
In another letter I said: “I had the cutest third grade boy whose name is Samuel, pronounced Sam-u-el (the A sounds ah). I told him he would be called Sam in America. He understands more English than many of the others. He’s so pleased with Sam. He came up today and had me show him how to write S-A-M. There are no nicknames in this country so this is unusual. He simply beams when I call him Sam. Yesterday when Sarah and I walked across town, Sam followed nearby, looking as if he just happened to come by. He is sitting now in the corner of the room wiggling his bare toes, silently whistling as he practices cursive a-b-c’s for the first time.
“I started the girl guides yesterday, no relation to the Girl Scouts, I assure you. There are about 15 of the ninth and tenth graders who want to learn to sew and so forth. The school has only one sewing machine, a treadle, which is broken. I’ll get parts in Addis one day when we go in. In the meantime needle and thread will have to do.
“A year ago today, the hideous nightmare of the assassination was well underway. So much has happened in the time since. But it still seems so close. The children here speak of Kennedy frequently, often forgetting he is not still alive.”
It was also during that fall that I was busy coming really alive. I had fallen very deeply in love at the age of 31 for the first time in my life with one of my fellow volunteers. It was like adolescence twice compounded. And so things really began to sparkle inside of me.
In December of 1964, I wrote: “Christmas Day we taught school. I had to take Jo to the hospital in the morning to get another shot. She was the fellow Peace Corps Volunteer who was having a bout of stubborn bronchitis. We have a government hospital here in town, run by Norwegian missionary doctors, that is very good. When we get sick we have to report to the Peace Corps doctors by phone. We have one of the six telephones in town in our house. One day it rang and we discovered it worked. But unless it is very serious, they send us to Norwegians. They are very competent doctors. Jo and I sat in the waiting room while waiting for the doctor. We were knitting busily. Two older Ethiopian women were sitting next to us fascinated with what we were doing. Jo was knitting with one needle and one of those spools producing a rope-like thing that will be sewn into a rug. I’m still working on my black sweater.
“In my very limited Amharic with the help of the Amharic dictionary I just happened to have in my basket (I carry it everywhere) we discussed what we were doing, how long it would take to finish, what the material was, and so forth. The women wanted to know what we did in Yirgalem, where we lived, and all about us. All of this was going on in Amharic the entire time. I was startled to realize how much I had actually learned from my students at school. And the genuine delight when you can even haltingly try to carry on a conversation is ample reward for the struggle.”
In the Summer of 1965, Sarah’s and my summer project was teaching summer school. By that time, I was teaching Home Economics. On the school compound I had a small cement brick house that had three rooms. No running water. Any water I got was by students who had misbehaved in other classes and were sent to the office, then sent from there down to the river with buckets to bring me water for the Home Economics program. It was really wonderful because most of the kids who misbehaved were boys, and getting water was woman’s work — getting sent for water was a real slam. Suddenly nobody was misbehaving in class, and I had no water!
We elected to have our summer project there in the Home Ec house because I had big tables and we had a project with third and fourth graders. I described it in this letter home:
“Summer school is fun. These children have never had any kind of art materials before, other than a pencil and a small piece of paper. We bought great big sheets of newsprint that thrilled them afresh every day. Since we were unable to get crayons, we are using colored chalk, also scissors, colored paper, yarn, glue, cloth, grass, flowers, seeds, etc. Children in the US are so sophisticated even before they enter school in regards to these things. I wish I had words to describe the faces of these nine- and ten-year-old Ethiopian children when they finger-painted for the first time. They looked askance at the glob of blue guck we put on their wet paper. Then tentative hands were put into it, faces grimacing first at the texture, then as they worked it around, looks of pure wonder and delight as they felt the sensuous pleasure of spreading the paint using all their fingers. Blue paint soon spread all over the paper, clothes, tables, and walls.
“Each day we have a different topic that we talk about. The town, their families, the country, things in nature, machines and so forth. We discuss it in English, learning all the new words, then we express it in picture form in different mediums. One day it may be in chalk, or a collage of paper and cloth. small paper, large paper, shared paper, all different. Then before we send them home we give them a treat. A candy, popcorn, ice cubes, or something along that line. With the home economics equipment that I was given out of the government storeroom came this big American refrigerator. It doesn’t have much bearing on the average Ethiopian lives, or didn’t in those days, but we used it. I kept it full of soft drinks that I sold to the teachers during break time and I used that money to buy supplies for the Home Ec program. We also made ice cubes which were something really special for the kids. We made lots of ice cubes. One of the other volunteers had been sent a hand-cranked ice cream maker by his aunts in New Hampshire, so we made ice cream and invited all the neighborhood kids at regular intervals. That was a treat that, if nothing else, guarantees their attendance the next day. One day last week, we made finger puppets from a tube rolled of colored paper. Such excitement! Never had they seen puppets before, but they worked for two solid hours without stopping. They posed proudly with them the next day when I took pictures. Yesterday they took them home. One little girl who had been absent yesterday saw me in the street later and came running pell-mell, threw herself into my arms, and gasped, ‘Miss Shumway, where is my pukket?’ Refraining from correcting her pronunciation just then, I assured her I had saved it and she could have it for sure on Monday.”
The letters home weren’t all of uplifting nature or experience. There were times of boredom, heartache, conflict, depression, illness — but you get through these things, these times, as you get through the best of times: one step at a time, sometimes learning and sometimes not. All of these times came tumbling out of my trunk of memories when I went to Cal Poly in November of 1988 to attend a vigil of returned Peace Corps volunteers who were commemorating the 25th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination. There were about 30 of us, young and not so young, sitting in that room, talking about the dream that had sent us to the four corners of the world.
There was one man who had been with the very first group of volunteers who had been sent out. That group went to a reception in the White House, where they were all wished well by Kennedy. When Jake reached the remote corner of Tanzania where he was posted, he set about helping to design and build a road of gravel connecting villages. These better roads were very important. He, too, soared the highs and struggled with the lows and came home after two years to share what he had learned. He went back to that dusty corner of the world 18 years later, and found it wasn’t much different: the road was still there but more like a washboard; the dust still all embracing; the people’s lives weren’t much changed but there were delighted to see him. He wrote in his journal, “Kennedy must have been one hell of a guy for me to come here.”
Many sitting around that table had served more than one tour. All parts of the world were represented. We spoke of fulfilling three particular goals of the Peace Corps: To take skills to places that needed them and asked for them; to take knowledge of America to other countries by being the best example of American mystique that we could be; and then to bring back a sense of the cultures where we worked and share that sense with those at home, enhancing and enlarging the American commitment to the world community. All three goals were worked on in small ways, even on one-to-one exchanges, which can bring tremendous change when multiplied by the 150,100 returned Peace Corps volunteers and the 5,000 who are now in the field. This was in 1988, and the Peace Corps is still viable in many places in the world.
At that table was the nurse in Barbados who taught her neighbor to boil his water for safer drinking, and that the moon wasn’t really made of Swiss cheese. She was in Barbados when we sent our first astronauts to walk on the moon, and her adult neighbor was genuinely upset that any government could allow such a thing when it was so obvious that the moon was made of Swiss cheese and was very dangerous to walk upon. And so, with the aid of her binoculars and her enthusiasm, her powers of persuasion, she convinced him that it wasn’t Swiss cheese and that it was OK.
There was the young man sitting at that table who wept as he told us about the village in Afghanistan where he had worked for two years in the late 1970’s, which had been destroyed in the recent war there. There was another man at that table who had come to listen. He had just been accepted by the Peace Corps for service in South America, and the University was allowing his project there to be his Master’s Degree thesis. All of us touched by a dream, all of us sharing that dream, and all putting it into some kind of action in our daily lives.
I am not suggesting that the Peace Corps is for everyone. I do know there are many ways to build that process of becoming one with the world rather than being only one tiny bit of it. We have to begin within ourselves, our own consciousness and reach out to our neighbor, our neighborhood, our town, our county, the state, our region, the nation. The ways of reaching are as diverse as we are, but from our diversity comes our strength and our unity as one world.
It wasn’t until after I got home that I came across a message from Master Hilarion regarding this. It was given in about 1930, and it spoke to me so intensely, it’s as though it’s imprinted in every cell in my body. He says:
“I am the world’s. The world is mine, as you are mine indeed. All people draw I to my heart, call all to my hearthstone. Upon you I depend to greet them with me, to give welcome with arms of soul outstretched in understanding embrace. Endeavor to put them at ease, see that they feel at home. Speak with them in language of their own, when possible to you. Better to assume certain customs of theirs while they are becoming acquainted with you and their new surroundings than you turn them from you with lack of cordiality or appreciation. Hospitality thrusts not its peculiarities of difference upon others but reconciles the same through study and consideration. You shall find far more foreign types at your door, standing in your aisles than you have known before. Creeds, colors, races of all kinds are in crusade to your shrine at the present moment. Do you not rejoice? We rely upon you to open your hearts wide to give breadth and scope that the pageant may have full sweep. It is composed of your children and your children’s children of other lives, and of those who must follow you in future days, upon whom you may look for dependence.”
Thank you.
— Eleanor L. Shumway
5th Guardian in Chief