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Ironically, some of the townspeople harbored the thought that I MUST BE either a Fruit Company spy in their midst or a CIA agent sent to protect US business and political interests there. I say MUST BE because some simply could not imagine why anyone with a university degree would come to their town to just live, observe, and work alongside them with their benefit in mind. That was a novel concept. The Peace Corps Volunteer who I replaced at the Co-op must have experienced some of the same suspicion.

For the very first time in my young life, I was to learn what it was like to live in the racial minority. SW Philly had yet to experience radical transformation in that respect. The people of Patois Town were not indigenous people speaking an obscure, exotic language; they were bi-lingual and descendants of West Indian blacks whose native language was English. They were very aware of the racial divide that existed in the United States. They were familiar with Martin Luther King and the marches and held JFK in the highest regard; evidenced by pictures of Jack and Jackie in many homes. A local short-order cook showed me an incredibly beautiful poem he had composed and mailed to Jackie Kennedy following the Kennedy assassination a year earlier.

Fast forward nineteen months to June 1966

Many projects and the usual frustrations later, it was time to say farewell to the town and its people I had come to appreciate and admire. As I was assigned to this post to replace the very first Peace Corps Volunteer, I requested a replacement for me. This time, I requested someone with experience in construction who could work to complete a residential housing project that I had initiated.

Fast forward once more to June 2008

Last summer, the returned Volunteers who had formed the Peace Corps Panama Friends organization decided to have a reunion to celebrate the 25 years of service and the 45th year after the Peace Corps ' arrival in Panama in 1963. I went back to a fantastic reunion and learned that when the Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos ordered the Peace Corps to leave the country in 1971, the hasty departure resulted in a huge loss of records of what we had been working on since 1963. I had planned to return to my town to spend five days looking into the various projects I worked on to come to grips with the burning question that plagues many Volunteers. Did you do anything that would stand the test of time? Did you change anyone’s mind? Was anything at all made better for the Peace Corps’ efforts? As I said at the beginning, for those of us who went to explore a foreign culture, the gains for