Remembering Peace Corps' 15 years in Korea
It may come as a shock to many these days that the Peace Corps once had a mission in Korea. The U.S. volunteer agency sent more than 2,000 young volunteers to Korea between 1966 and 1981 in 51 waves, from K-1 to K-51. The country they arrived in was very different from the advanced nation Korea has grown to become. Coming out of the 1910-45 Japanese occupation and 1950-53 Korean War, Korea was…
In the 1960s, the Peace Corps, a U.S. volunteer agency, sent over 2,000 young volunteers to Korea over a 15-year period from 1966 to 1981. This was a stark contrast to the Korea that exists today, as the country was struggling to recover from the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945 and the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. During this time, Korea was among the poorest nations in the world.
When Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) began arriving in the mid-1960s, they were greeted by a Korea vastly different from the nation that would eventually become an advanced economic power. The landscape was rugged, with the country's hills being barren and its gutters filled with human waste. Moreover, the authoritarian government enforced a strict curfew, prohibiting people from leaving their homes between midnight and 4 a.m. Ed Klein, a PCV who arrived in 1966, expressed his astonishment upon his arrival in 2016, stating, "My first impression was 'My god, what have I got myself into?'"
Similarly, David McCann, another K-1 PCV, echoed this sentiment in 2019, saying, "It was the way it was," and adding that it did not strike him as strange at the time.
Written by urgent.news from The Korea Times's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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