In the fall of 1977, my wife, Diane, and I were assigned to be Peace Corps Environmental Education Specialists with the Paraguayan National Forest Service. At the time, unlike today, environmental education was an odd Peace Corps assignment, and we were the only “official” environmental educators in the country. Our job was pretty much what we could make it, so we ended up writing curricula, leading training workshops and developing interpretive programs in the national parks.
But it dawned on us that these efforts would essentially cease when we left the country. So we came up with an idea to establish a national natural history museum that would employ promising Paraguayan students as scientists-in-training. These students, we hoped, would end up working for conservation in Paraguay and educating their fellow citizens. It was a hare-brained idea, but our Paraguayan boss was in favor of giving it a shot.
We convinced the World Wildlife Fund to donate some money and, critically, the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to “donate” expert field biologists. We found talented, motivated Paraguayan students whom the Paraguayan Forest Service proceeded to employ as scientists. Their job would be to launch a national biological inventory and begin a new national natural history museum. Scientists would come down for short-term expeditions, accompany the students into the field and work with them there and in the Forest Service office, which served as a temporary facility where we could store data and work on specimens. Peace Corps Volunteers would serve as full-time counterparts to the students, work with them when the scientists weren’t around and ensure that when they did arrive that we would be ready for them. This meant they wouldn’t have to wait around the capital city for vehicles, gasoline, food and equipment. Diane and I extended our service to a third year to serve as project coordinators.
The plan worked beautifully. I still remember bat skulls swinging from the Forest Service windows, drying in the sun like Gothic wind chimes. Peace Corps Volunteers continued to work with the project until 1989, at which time it was determined that the now-functioning museum could do quite nicely on its own. Today, it is housed in its own building and supports an active research and education program. You can learn more about it from its website.
I think the arrangement of having an outside expert working with a Volunteer and his/her counterpart worked very well. The expert brought the experience and knowledge, and the Volunteer and counterpart brought unique cultural and community knowledge.
Our successor as project coordinator was PCV Lee Fitzgerald, who today is a professor and noted ecologist at Texas A&M University. During his time in Paraguay, Marlin Perkins, host of the television nature program “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” showed up with a film crew. He had contacted the Peace Corps office with the idea of filming an example of Peace Corps work with conservation and had settled on our project. “Wild Kingdom” isn’t around anymore, but in its day it was a popular nature program. You can click through the 30-year-old episode of Lee, Marlin Perkins and the Paraguayans tramping above.
I won’t say that they didn’t stretch the truth at times in the film. For example, we never had a net gun, and we wouldn’t have fired it at flying cormorants if we did. In 2010, the United Nations Foundation held an awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., honoring six women conservation leaders. They were celebrated at Congress and at the State Department. Representing South America was Aida Luz Aquino, Paraguay country director for the World Wildlife Fund. I knew “Lucy” as a 19-year-old student, who was one of those promising scientists-in-training. Without this “hare-brained scheme,” Lucy may never have had the opportunity to work with conservation and show the world what she could do.
Dave Wood served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Paraguay, along with his wife, Diane, from 1977 to 1981. After a career working in environmental education, both in the United States and abroad, he has returned to Peace Corps, where he is now the Environment Specialist with the Office of Programming and Training Support.
