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 for decades one of the poorest nations in the world. In the mid-1960s, when Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) began arriving, Korea's hills were barren, and the gutters were filled with human waste. The authoritarian government maintained a strict curfew, barring people from the streets from midnight to 4 a.m. “My first impression was ‘My god, what have I got myself into?’” Ed Klein (K-1) said in 2016. “It was the way it was,” David McCann (K-1) said in 2019, “and that didn't strike me as strange.” U.S. President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps in 1961 with an executive order. It was designed to serve three main goals: helping various countries meet their need for trained me