The Peace Corps got its start on March 1st, 1961, established under an executive order by President John F. Kennedy.

I was an early Peace Corps brat. My father, Jack Scott, left his job managing the presidential bomb shelter for Eisenhower to move his family to Venezuela as Assistant Director of the Peace Corps in that country, and then to Barbados as Director there.

Two years each in those countries made a lifelong impression on me as a preteen. We lived in Caracas and then Bridgetown, but Dad’s job took us out to where the Peace Corps volunteers lived. We had a house in the suburbs, they lived among the poorest and most disadvantaged in ramshackle structures made of found materials.

My earliest memory of Caracas was playing with dolls on the balcony with the sound of bombs going off from violent protests downtown. That was my normal, that and going to feed the piranhas in the park. I was 8 or 9.

Mom, Betty Scott, often went to the barrios to paint, bringing me along to dabble on my own paper or just play in the streets with the other kids.

In Barbados we experienced the birth of a nation when Barbados gained its independence from the United Kingdom. Mom’s painting of all the cultural aspects in play was chosen to represent the new country at the World’s Fair that year.

Some of Mom’s paintings are on a page I made to remember her. Betty Scott: Betty Scott/

When I was a young mother, married to a religious zealot, we moved first to France to learn french, then to Tunisia to learn arabic. Then back to France for a year before finally returning to the US. This all to camouflage the actual goal of religious colonization towards a people who were perfectly happy with their lives as they were.  Conversion could cost them their lives.  I realized I was inflicting pain, not joy, on my ‘targets’. I was also the recipient of the zealot’s abuses, qualities that belied the peaceful tone of the religion. 

This experience further deepened my empathy for other cultures and fractured my association with organized religion. I left that husband and that form of religion a few years after returning. Not soon enough, but I did. Trauma remains.

Living overseas gives one a vastly different perspective on life, politics and the world in general. Being hungry in the USA is nothing like being hungry in so-called third world countries. Whatever problems we have as a here pale in comparison to the reality most of the world faces daily.