Interview with Sheila McFarland, October 27, 2004

WILSON: This is Angene Wilson. I'm interviewing Sheila McFarland on October 27 for the Peace Corps Oral History Project. And the first question is, what is your full name, and when and where were you born?

MCFARLAND: Okay, my full name is Sheila Smith McFarland. I was born on September 4, 1949 in Lexington at the old, old St. Joseph Hospital.

WILSON: Okay. Tell me a little bit about your family and about growing up and then college.

MCFARLAND: Okay, we--my family has been in Anderson County, well, since probably the beginning of the state if not before. Three of the four 00:01:00great grandparents were here. My maternal grandmother grew up in Cincinnati but everybody else was around here in Lawrenceburg. Both my parents are college graduates. I have one brother who is younger who also is a graduate of UK. Everybody graduated from UK except me. And I am a graduate of Eastern Kentucky University, as is my husband. And after I graduated, six weeks later we were on the plane going to Pohnpei to join the Peace Corps.

WILSON: Wow. What did you study in college and when did you graduate?

MCFARLAND: I studied business education -- my area was accounting -- and let's see. What was your other--

WILSON: When?

MCFARLAND: Oh, when. June of 1972.

WILSON: Seventy-two?

MCFARLAND: Yes.

WILSON: Okay. So how did you find out about the Peace Corps and why did 00:02:00you join?

MCFARLAND: Well, how did we find out? I commuted to Eastern with-- the dean of the business college, his daughter was a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia and she came back home needed a ride to Eastern for summer school. However the dean found out that I was doing it I don't know, but he called up and said, "Would you be willing to let my daughter commute to school with you?" and that's how we started talking about Peace Corps. She--and she was coming back home to finish her degree after having served two years in Liberia. And we--Cecil was not particularly happy with his job at the state and we wanted to travel and we were very poor; just graduated college students. So, you know, somebody else will pay for this trip and let's go for it! He was -- Cecil -- was an agriculture volunteer, and so they were very -- Peace Corps -- was very interested in us because that's one of the--they were 00:03:00really pushing the ag projects, and by my teaching degree, the first place they sent us was Pohnpei, which was an agriculture trade school. And so we taught high school in the morning and then the boys worked, and they, because it was a boys school, worked in some type of field -- either construction, mechanics, or agriculture in the afternoons.

WILSON: What--at the point the process of joining was--how long did it take you and did you have a choice? Did you choose?

MCFARLAND: We actually did have a choice. How long? I think it was about a year's procedure. I seem to remember in the summer going down to Louisville to do the medical at the VA hospital down there.

WILSON: Now, this was before you left?

MCFARLAND: This would have been `71.

WILSON: Seventy-one. So it was before your senior year.

MCFARLAND: Summer of `71.

WILSON: Yeah.

MCFARLAND: Or some--I think that's it, and then in probably December 00:04:00we got a note from Peace Corps saying, "Can you go now?" because there is a program in Zaire where they are going to build a school two days up river. The first year you'll spend building the school, the second year you'll spend teaching. And I knew my personality that if I quit school I would never go back, so one of the things I did look into-- because at that time Peace Corps was giving--if you spent two years in Peace Corps, a lot of universities would give you credit for student teaching.

WILSON: Oh, I didn't know that.

MCFARLAND: Eastern would not. So that--then Peace Corps said, "Well, we will hold this place for you for the summer, but we've also got Iran that's opening up." It would have been a vocational school to teach there, which probably our skill wise would have been the best match for both of us because Cecil obviously would have done the agriculture and I could have done the business thing.

WILSON: Right.

MCFARLAND: And the other place they said was Micronesia. And we thought, "Oh, sandy beaches. Let's go!" Well, it turned out Pohnpei was not sandy beaches.

WILSON: Sure, not sandy beaches, no.

MCFARLAND: But that's how we ended up there. So for us it was about a year's process. It could have been a six-month thing, you know, had we left in January, but--

WILSON: Okay. Now, you trained in-country right? So you left, is that correct?

MCFARLAND: Yeah, we did staging in San Jose, and then we were the first in-country training, our Micronesian group was. Everybody else prior to that had always trained in Hawaii.

WILSON: Right.

MCFARLAND: And so we were the first in country training lived. So we all loaded up on a Northwest Orient plane that went on strike on the way to Honolulu, and they unloaded us there and put us on a Pan Am 747 because those were the high days of Vietnam. And there were enough seats for 00:06:00170 something of us to pile on this plane, sent us on to Guam, and from there we all spread out to go to our different districts.

WILSON: So you didn't stay in one place for training? Did they train you--

MCFARLAND: We did. In Pohnpei we stayed in the quote "capital city," Kolonia.

WILSON: Okay. Pohnpei is not very big, right?

MCFARLAND: Thirteen square miles.

WILSON: And so there were how many of you in Pohnpei?

MCFARLAND: We started out with 32 in training group; we COSed 13.

WILSON: Oh. ----------(??)

MCFARLAND: Well, we lost several during training. I can think of at least five--I mean I can see five faces right off hand. One of them was a fellow from Arizona that was used to the dry, dry weather. Well, the first month we were in Pohnpei we had 30-something inches of rain and he said, "I can't take the humidity." You know, you're--in no 00:07:00time at all your belts would turn green. I mean everybody wore the rubber thongs, flip flops, zories, whatever you want to call them. And things--it took a while for even your lightest seersucker dresses to dry out, so, yeah.

WILSON: So what did they do in training? Was it language and--

MCFARLAND: I would say more than at least half of the day was spent in language. It seemed like more. But it was probably just half a day in intensive language. And they did break us up somewhat. I mean it became obvious that there were some people along the way with us that just had the gift of being--you know, they hear a word it's theirs and they could just constantly rattle it off. So they were obviously in one group and the rest of us were struggling along. But we also had a cultural class every day making us more culturally sensitive and just 00:08:00understand the whole culture of Pohnpei.

WILSON: Okay, so you went to Pohnpei in `72.

MCFARLAND: Late June of `72.

WILSON: June of `72, and you were there until--

MCFARLAND: May of `74.

WILSON: And then we'll get to--what happened next? Right, okay.

MCFARLAND: Right.

WILSON: What was it like to arrive in Pohnpei? I mean you've talked about the humidity. What else? I mean was it hard to get acclimated or was it pretty easy? What was--

MCFARLAND: Well, I thought--as I recall, the hardest thing for probably Cecil more than myself -- Cecil is my husband by the way, and we did this together.

WILSON: Yes, right, husband.

MCFARLAND: We were married three years before we took off to Pohnpei. 00:09:00So we were not in the newlywed group.

WILSON: Okay. Right.

MCFARLAND: It was the food. You could--you know, Kentucky can be hot and dusty. Ponapean roads were not paved. You're talking crushed reef.

WILSON: Stones? Oh, reef. Oh, okay.

MCFARLAND: Stone, that's--

WILSON: Coral or--

MCFARLAND: Coral, thank you.

WILSON: Coral? Right.

MCFARLAND: That was the word I was searching for; very few vehicles because you are right there on the water it takes no time at all for them to start rusting out. So you walked everywhere, which was fine, everything's close. We stayed--there was a con---not a convent but a Catholic school that had a little bit of boarding, and so we all just sort of took over the whole place, and it was in the summer so, of course, their students were gone. And we actually used the facilities there, and that was our stay for training. And that was right at the 00:10:00edge of town so you, you know, looked down Main Street when you walked out of the facility. Pohnpei at that time was a U.S. trust territory which meant we had U.S. postal system. So that made getting into contact--you know, mother would write me on Sunday night and I would have the letters by Friday or Saturday.

WILSON: Wow.

MCFARLAND: Yeah. So that part of--you didn't feel like you were forever far away.

WILSON: What about things like food?

MCFARLAND: Everything pretty much imported.

WILSON: From the U.S. or from--

MCFARLAND: Well, it could have--a lot of Japanese--lots of things from Japan.

WILSON: Okay.

MCFARLAND: We loved the fresh fish. However, there were so--there were enough expats there that when the tuna boats came in, the tuna was literally gone in five minutes. If you weren't there when those dories 00:11:00came in, you didn't get fish. And the locals would take the money that they made from selling the fish and go down to the local co op and buy canned mackerel. You're saying, "You've got all this wonderful supply of seafood and they're eating canned mackerel." But everything had to be brought in. Where we actually served as volunteers it was Pohnpei Agriculture and Trade School. And being an agriculture school they had a huge garden, and we were allowed, you know, to take some vegetables from the garden for use.

WILSON: Right.

MCFARLAND: But don't talk to me about potatoes because they wouldn't grow; too wet. You couldn't grow potatoes but you can use cassava, you can use breadfruit if you want the mashed--and that works.

WILSON: What about--now, let's see, we probably better be clear. You talked about that earlier, but your job was teaching.

MCFARLAND: Yeah, I taught English to--the first year to the juniors and freshman. And the second year I picked up an algebra--beginning algebra class, that I taught to the better group of freshman. They did divide them up sort of into abilities because you had the wide spectrum just like you do here in the States. You have some students that are really, really good, and some that are challenged.

WILSON: And what were your--you talked a little bit about the food. What were living conditions liked? Where were you living?

MCFARLAND: We lived in a two-room plus a small bath, concrete block house that the construction students at our school built. We had--they did have running cold, and I mean cold, water that came down from the mountains. They had built--dammed it up and so piped that in. We 00:13:00cooked on kerosene--two small kerosene stoves, and we learned that if you took what they call ship biscuits, or you would think of it as a cookie tin, and you cut slices in the bottom of that tin and rig it up so that it becomes an oven. You just sit it on top of your burners and I had mother send me--an 8x8 pan would just fit in it so I could bake things, and she also sent me tins from the little pot pies and so I could make pies and, you know, the whole bit. But it didn't happen to often, but anyway--

WILSON: But you were living--because Peace Corps living arrangements are different. You were not--you were living by yourselves--

MCFARLAND: Well, we were--

WILSON:--cooking for yourselves--

MCFARLAND: --school--we--as far as a normal day, we got up, school was--classes were in the morning. The boys worked on the farm in the mechanics shop, in the construction shop in the afternoons. So we would teach our five classes in the morning, then the Jesuit fathers that ran the school furnished all the teachers with lunch.

WILSON: Oh, that was nice.

MCFARLAND: So immediately after--yes, it was. And it was usually rice and fried fish or a stew kind of thing; really super basic but filling. So we would go down to the cafeteria, and I mean more like small kitchen than cafeteria, and have lunch down there. Then Cecil would take off and go up to the farm. He was in charge of the piggery and 00:15:00the other--one of the other fathers was the plant guy. Cecil was the animal fellow. And then my normal afternoon would either be grade papers, washing clothes by hand, which we did. In fact, I used to say my washing machine was a manicure brush because it was just the right size that you could grab hold of it, you know. And so you would have to take your bar of soap and you would soap all down your dresses and you would give it a rub. I was fortunate that the ladies that did the cleaning for the Fathers down at the school would wash our sheets and our towels. So I didn't have to deal with something massive like that. But it was every afternoon, and it was--because it was rainy and muddy, Cecil's clothes from the farm would just be very--you had to wash every day.

WILSON: And how did you get them dry?

MCFARLAND: I hung them on the front porch underneath the--and the second 00:16:00year I actually had a big clothes line that one of the fellows in the mechanics shop made for me for the--it cost me a pan of brownies to make, and he welded this huge, huge T, and so I would then hang my clothes outside. But--because I think it's always hard to get all the soap out when you're doing stuff by hand,--

WILSON: Yeah. Yeah.

MCFARLAND:--I got so I called the rain my second rinse cycle and would just leave them out there, especially the towels and the sheets, through one extra rain and that was the rinse. And you had enough sun- -I mean when I talk about rain all the time, it would be late afternoon most of the time. I mean we rarely had days where it rained all day long. You didn't--it was either at night or like late afternoon so there was a lot of sun, but there was a lot of mud and wet, too.

WILSON: And then the two of you would have supper?

MCFARLAND: We would have supper, and it was usually rice with--because the school was run by these Americans, they ordered some supplies from San Francisco and we were allowed to tack on orders with theirs. So I had a case of tuna, a case of Mary Kitchen roast beef hash, a case of Dinty Moore beef stew, so that supplemented in with when the guys would -- our husbands and neighbors -- would go out fishing. Because when they came in, you cooked what they brought in because we had a kerosene stove that I would say was about three feet tall, maybe, and about two feet wide. And, you know, keeping this thing--it would make ice once a week depending on how full--how often I filled up the little kerosene thing at the back. So that was--I mean--and you tried--there were 00:18:00never leftovers, you know, because you had no place to put them.

WILSON: Right. And what about--you said you had a garden. What kind of vegetables then?

MCFARLAND: I remember the scallions being grown. We did get them. We did grow some corn, which was sort of a funny story because one of the fellows who--the school was always looking for volunteers -- outside sources -- and a German company came in and I forget what they brought. I know from Japan we got Yamaha tractors and backhoes and things like that. I forget what the fellow came for from Germany, but they served corn on the cob one night and he refused to eat it because only pigs eat corn.

WILSON: Well, at least that was a--

MCFARLAND: Yeah, but you could grow green beans. It might have been longer. I mean not exactly the green beans like we are accustomed to here. You could grow tomatoes at certain times of the year. Cecil 00:19:00learned to eat eggplant there. When we went to Pohnpei my husband ate corn, green beans, and mashed potatoes and that was about it. And mother had a pea recipe where she boiled up the peas and then just put a can of mushroom soup in and stirred it and immediately put it on the table. He would eat that; that was the extent of what he ate. When we came home the only thing he didn't eat was brussells sprouts.

WILSON: Wow.

MCFARLAND: So that was a nice thing about Peace Corps; it expanded the horizons.

WILSON: What about fruit?

MCFARLAND: Fruit. Mangoes, bananas straight off the trees,--

WILSON: Okay.

MCFARLAND:--well, coconut. Do you count that as a fruit?

WILSON: Well, coconut is something anyway.

MCFARLAND: Yeah, you harvest it off the trees.

WILSON: Right.

MCFARLAND: Breadfruit, which is more of a starchy--we would make breadfruit chips, or you mash that up and use sort of like mashed potatoes or whatever.

WILSON: Right. Right.

MCFARLAND: Yeah, I remember the little bananas. And if you've ever 00:20:00eaten bananas off of a tree as opposed to what we get in the grocery stores here, they have no flavor here. You just can't imagine. I mean we can imagine but--

WILSON: And a number of different kinds of bananas in lots of places, right?

MCFARLAND: Exactly. Right. I mean the plantains that you cook with or--

WILSON: Right. So what did you do after dinner? Did you have electricity?

MCFARLAND: Excuse me. Yes, we had electricity from six to nine at night. School had a generator that they would run so that the students could study. So you knew it came on at six, you knew it went off at nine. We did have short wave radio so I listened to that. We had neighbors that Cecil--he and this other fellow. He was in agriculture, the other fellow. In fact we ended up naming our son after him. But 00:21:00they would play Stratego, a board game, every afternoon after they came in from work. So you had that kind of visitation. Once a month the Fathers would invite all of us to come down for like a dinner party, so that was sort of a highlight. Every six weeks we would go into town, you know, for a big weekend in town and just eat at a restaurant and see the other volunteers. But there was no road around the island at that time so you had to go in by boat and you could go in at high tide when you could go outside the reef and go around. So it was a timing kind of thing.

WILSON: So I guess you've really mentioned what you did for recreation. Did you--and Pohnpei is not very big. Did you get off the island for a vacation?

MCFARLAND: Well, we did. As for recreation, I mean, you could--there was a waterfall. You could take walks to the waterfalls. One 00:22:00Christmas we literally walked over the mountain to one of-- a priest that lived over there was a short wave--a ham radio operator, so we actually got to call home and it piped it through to San Diego who hooked up with a short wave guy in Denver who then went in--it seemed like it was like three connections, so you can imagine all these guys flipping switches. That was very much appreciated by family here. Our neighbor, the agriculture guy, had built himself an outrigger boat with a little horsepower motor thing on the back end and he would lend it to us and we would go to one of the little atolls, oh, maybe once a month. You would go out there on a Saturday and just, you know, swim. Girls had to swim in skirts. It didn't matter that you were topless or whatever, but you had to have--your thighs had to be covered. So I 00:23:00had a skirt just for swimming.

WILSON: And you wore--did you wear skirts, dresses for teaching?

MCFARLAND: Always. Yeah, and you know what? It was cooler.

WILSON: Yeah. Yeah.

MCFARLAND: Yeah, occasionally I did have a couple of pairs of shorts that I would wear around the house. But for the most part everything was just a little bit below the knee.

WILSON: So did you travel outside of Pohnpei while you were volunteers?

MCFARLAND: We did. We went to--our first year we went to Japan; this was when Pan Am was still flying and they had this special deal. But Pohnpei--

WILSON: And that was okay? I mean the Peace Corps let you go to--

MCFARLAND: Micronesia was one of the places that gave you R&R money because it was so expensive to get away or off of the islands that we actually--they gave us enough money to get us to Guam.

WILSON: Oh, okay.

MCFARLAND: And then you could pretty much choose what you wanted to do 00:24:00from there. We chose to go to Japan. And I remember we first got up there and, you know, got off the plane and here you've been in this little bitty place seeing about 100 people all the time--that was your world, 100 people. And you get into Tokyo and we checked into the hotel and we sat down on the bed and looked at each other -- excuse me -- and my husband said, "If we don't get out of this room right now and walk around, we will never leave the whole three weeks we are here." And it was such a culture shock, you know; just suddenly people, people. Japanese couldn't have been nicer. We were not, accosted is the wrong word, but we were approached by a fellow that was definitely into his cups. I think he had been a World War II veteran and so we just walked away when we realized he was coming and yelling at us. And 00:25:00the number of people that came up to us and apologized, "Please, this is not how we feel," and duh to duh. And, you know, you keep saying--

WILSON: It's okay.

MCFARLAND: "It's okay. It's alright." We walked away from a park one day and left our very good camera sitting on a picnic table, came back two hours later, remembered, and they ran up to us, "You left your camera." Just nothing but wonderful experiences the whole time we were there. And then we also took a trip to Kosrae which was about a day's boat ride south. It's more toward the equator even than Pohnpei, but it was in the Pohnpei district. And a week after we--we went down there and stayed a week and borrowed someone's house that--she was a teacher on the island and she had come to big Colonia for vacation. And so we went down and used her house, and when we had been back in 00:26:00town a week and they scrapped the boat for junk, which makes you--we spent how many hours on this--

WILSON: On this boat--

MCFARLAND: --boat and they scrapped it for junk. But it was beautiful down there, probably some of the prettiest sunsets, and we have seen lots of beautiful sunsets in our travels. But it was absolutely gorgeous down there, and quiet, quiet.

WILSON: Beach?

MCFARLAND: Yeah, still mangrove somewhat, but more beachy. I mean still it was the same thing, and we did have one couple in our group that was assigned there and they just sort of got claustrophobic at the end. I think they made it eighteen months and said--

WILSON: That was too much island fever.

MCFARLAND: "That's it, we can't." Too much island fever.

WILSON: Yeah, it can be hard. What were your interactions with "host- country nationals" as we call them in Peace Corps? Did you call them 00:27:00Pohn---

MCFARLAND: Pohnapeans.

WILSON: Pohnapeans.

MCFARLAND: Because we were at a school that was--represented all the districts of Micronesia. Of course you were with the boys all the time.

WILSON: So there were boys from all over?

MCFARLAND: All over Micronesia.

WILSON: Go ahead.

MCFARLAND: You felt like you knew every district, you know. In fact it was to the point where you could almost line a group of people up and you say, "Okay, you're from Palau, you're from Saipan, you're from Chuuk." I mean they just looked different. As far as the Pohnapeans went, we had some interaction with the people that worked on campus but not a lot. It was more with the students who were there.

WILSON: Right. And some of your peers or colleagues in a classroom were 00:28:00Pohnapeans or the Jesuits?

MCFARLAND: Either the Jesuit priests--there were three Jesuit priests who were teachers there. There were five of us who were Peace Corps volunteers. A single fellow that--when we got there Terry was starting his fourth year, and we went in with another couple who actually went with children. That was the time when Peace Corps was recruiting families.

WILSON: Right.

MCFARLAND: So there were the four of us then. Who else was teaching? We had a fellow that had been a former--from Hawaii, a former airplane mechanic, and then married a haole if that's--that her father owned one of the dry good stores in town, and so he would teach, stay at school and teach during the week, mechanics, and then he would go into town 00:29:00on weekends. If you wanted to hitch a ride, you wanted to go with him because he had a real fast outboard boat.

WILSON: Oh, okay.

MCFARLAND: You didn't want to go on the school's boat that went chugga- chugga-chugga.

WILSON: Right. Right. So your life was pretty much not limited but took place in connection with the school?

MCFARLAND: Yes, and--because you--I mean, you couldn't get in.

WILSON: Yeah.

MCFARLAND: You didn't go into town but, say, once every six weeks. And that's where I picked up reading. I started reading a lot. In fact mother wanted me to go see a psychiatrist when I wrote and said, "I'm reading now," because she begged me and begged me to read when I was a kid and I wouldn't do it. And then I didn't have television--

WILSON: And so there was a--

MCFARLAND:--and picked up on reading, and so you ended up reading a lot.

WILSON: And what did you read? Now, you know, in the beginning in `61-`62, I don't know how long through the `60s they gave Peace Corps 00:30:00volunteers a footlocker of books because they were worried about us. They thought that we wouldn't have enough to do and we wouldn't have enough to read.

MCFARLAND: Yeah. Well, Peace Corps had a library in town.

WILSON: Oh, okay. Alright.

MCFARLAND: You know as you travel and you come and you always dumped your books there. As I say the school had a limited library.

WILSON: Yeah.

MCFARLAND: Mother--I was very much into Perry Mason murder mysteries so she would send me those. I know our daughter, who is a Peace Corps volunteer in Jordan, Kathleen, is a much better reader of more informative stuff. But she read War and Peace a couple of times, I think, if that tells you how isolated she was in her spot!

WILSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a long one.

MCFARLAND: Yeah, yeah.

WILSON: What are several particularly meaningful and memorable stories from those two years?

MCFARLAND: Well, the memorable part to us was we became godparents 00:31:00to the neighbor's children. Still an American father and a Filipino mother, and in fact she got married this last summer so I got to stand in for her mother.

WILSON: Oh, wow.

MCFARLAND: But it is a relationship that we kept up over the years. But as far as the cultural part and mixing with the Pohnapeans, I think of the -- fancy is the wrong word -- the ceremonies that they would have where they--everybody sort of had their narcotic drink kind of thing, and on Pohnpei it was called sikayo, and you took this root that was some what of a narcotic and you sort of washed it out on this stone. There was very much a formality to do this, and you know, you beat it with a stick and then you put it in between some strips of bark and they twist it, this mud and whatever, into this cup. And it was sort 00:32:00of a numbing feeling; it had the consistency of egg whites with rocks in it is the best I can--I know that sounds very appealing!

WILSON: What did you drink it in?

MCFARLAND: Half a coconut shell.

WILSON: Okay, alright.

MCFARLAND: But I--

WILSON: Did you drink it at one time? I mean--

MCFARLAND: You could sip it and pass. You didn't have to chug-a-lug the cup.

WILSON: Oh, okay.

MCFARLAND: It would just keep going around; started getting empty, you know, they would squeeze more into it. That was pretty much--women didn't do that. It was pretty much a man thing.

WILSON: Okay.

MCFARLAND: Unless you were the head lady in the village. Father Costigan--and Father Costigan is the one that started the school, and he was still there when we were there. His head honcho cook, Pedua, would -- these things are just sort of popping in my head -- would come and she would sit down with the men after dinner and participate in this, and maybe the fellow that--he was the number one boat driver that 00:33:00would run the stuff back, sometimes his wife would join them, but for the most part it was just the men.

WILSON: And are they sitting?

MCFARLAND: They are sitting down, actually, just in a--they had a great big stone just outside the cafeteria or the lunch room where the Fathers always ate and stuff, so--

WILSON: But they were sitting on chairs or on mats or--

MCFARLAND: No, squatting on either a mat or a small stool maybe.

WILSON: Right. Right. Okay. Any other stories, any other things that happened to you that you just--

MCFARLAND: Well, it's probably already on the other tape, Cecil talking about going to the feast one day and we were the honored guests and we were going--had our little banana leaf and we were going through the line. And you get to the end after you've already gotten your breadfruit and the fish and the yams, whatever, and you open it up 00:34:00and there is a dog that they've cooked with his, you know, teeth just sort of sticking out. And they hand the knife to Cecil and, you know, "What are we going to do? We've got this guy now. What's he going to do?" So he sliced off a little bit of meat off the back leg, you know, and you smile sweetly and you eat it. And they were appreciative I think of the fact that, you know, you would try things. We tried to be sensitive in that, there a lot of the girls up until--well, depending on where they were, not so much in town but definitely out in the villages, they would go topless. But supposedly the priest had told them that you will go blind if--you know, this white man sees you walking down the paths. So they would always sort of cover up with their arms, and then as soon as he would get by they would drop them 00:35:00for me because no big deal, another lady. Courting there was done by arranging with the grandmother or the mother that you wanted to court the daughter, and you would sneak into their house at night. And we had one volunteer do this and he goofed up and went to the wrong mosquito net and it was the grandmother, not the granddaughter. So she had to direct him over, and it was--the whole family knew it was going to happen but it was sort of a play or a stage play kind of thing that then the father and the brothers were obligated to raise a ruckus and to chase you out, you know, of the house. But it was all very much--I mean that's how they dated. It was very much arranged but--

WILSON: What about--it occurs to me, because you are talking about having been in a boy's school, so did you have any connections to any 00:36:00of the girls or the women?

MCFARLAND: Other than the ladies that worked at the school and because my--there wasn't--I never learned language, and I think part of it was who would you ever practice with? But a lot of the boys, English was how they all--

WILSON: Because they spoke themselves different languages, right?

MCFARLAND: Yeah, I mean if you've got five or six different districts, English is what they had. We taught in English; that's what they all had in common. I mean that's what--if they were mixing districts, they used English to communicate with each other so--

WILSON: Yeah. The next question is, what was it like coming home, except that you didn't go home. So do you want to explain that?

MCFARLAND: Well, we did.

WILSON: Well, you did go home.

MCFARLAND: We did come home. I came home really for my brother's graduation from college. Cecil actually stayed a couple of weeks later and then came home. But we had decided--

WILSON: And this is in `74?

MCFARLAND: This is in May of `74 and we had already talked about it starting probably the September before, say, September of `73. We wanted to go back overseas, we wanted to stay out, we didn't particularly want to stay in Pohnpei just because we wanted to do something different. So--because our neighbors up the street that we were godparents to their daughter, because Jean was Filipino and she had nothing but wonderful things to say about the Philippines, we thought, "Ah, we ought to try to go to the Philippines." What we actually did was we wrote to the Peace Corps office in the Philippines and said, you know, Cecil, "I'm an agriculture volunteer, my wife will do whatever you tell her to do. We would like to come there as volunteers." Then Philippines wrote to Washington D.C. and said, "We want this couple to come and be in this program." So we sort of did 00:38:00it backwards. I think we were a little bit afraid if we tried to go through Washington it would drag around and something would happen and we wouldn't get there. So anyway we did what they called an extension transfer. And at that point you had the--they still flew us home after our two years in Micronesia was up. We had--I think that program started, like, the second week of July or something because I had almost--we had two months at home. You don't get a salary for that length of time because you're not there.

WILSON: Right.

MCFARLAND: But we were able to come home and be with family and stuff for a while. And then went back over and went to the Philippines. Now, because we did an extension transfer they said, "Your time will start counting either" -- excuse me -- "It will start counting when you finish training." Excuse me, keeping this straight. Training was over 00:39:00in late September. Well, we knew that once we finished there then, yes, Cecil knew he was ready for graduate school. I mean that was going to be our next step. So we actually only extended for eighteen months because training didn't count.

WILSON: But you did go through training? You were part of the--

MCFARLAND: We did--oh, yeah, you had to go through training. I mean we did the whole thing all over again. And there were ten of us: six from Michigan State, another couple that had transferred in from Fiji and then the two of us. So we were ten. They had--and then we ended up finishing up in April right before Easter because we came home. We arrived like Thursday--no, Friday before Easter or something; crazy kind of schedule.

WILSON: And so what was that second tour like in comparison to the first?

MCFARLAND: In some ways I think it was harder. We lived in a house very small, cockroach-infested house -- I'm sure it was pre World War II -- on the edge of a rice paddy. So any little bit of rain and it was very, very humid. The job--

WILSON: And where were you in the Philippines?

MCFARLAND: We were in Pampanga which is near Clark Air Force Base.

WILSON: Okay. Okay, right.

MCFARLAND: So that was difficult in that everybody said that, "Oh, well, you're military." No, we're not military; we're the Peace Corps volunteers that are earning $90 a month. You know, we can't afford to do--you know, we don't have a car. Look people, see this.

WILSON: Yeah, right, and you can't buy them.

MCFARLAND: And you can't buy it. Cecil was there--worked for--was like an extension agent, so the office gave him a motorcycle so at least he 00:41:00did have wheels to get around on. And then I worked actually on one of the military bases -- agrarian reform. I felt like I was probably taking a Filipino's job, although they probably wouldn't have replaced me because there was no money to pay anybody. I have no idea how much my counterparts there were making. What I was doing, you know, an eighth grade education could have done. After I had been there about- -well, I got pregnant with Graham because at that point they allowed you to have babies there. So--in fact, I got pregnant at the very end of our training and he was born the next June. So I really didn't stay at agrarian reform that long. Actually then, after I quit that, which was 00:42:00probably, I don't remember, but I'm going to guess even March or April, that early on. And then I helped Cecil doing some accounting stuff because he was setting up feed mills through the rural banks, that was all part of a shared thing, so we did that. But for the most part Peace Corps really wanted my husband because he was doing the work of the program manager as far as traveling and visiting other volunteers. The program manager didn't want to leave Manila. So I was never afraid that, "Oh, because you're not doing anything." I mean in essence they should have sent us home because I didn't have a job, but they kept us.

WILSON: What--let's go to the other side, or no, I guess we have a little bit more in this, sorry. You already mentioned that you're 00:43:00still in contact with somebody from your Peace Corps experience first. What about in the Philippines? Are there other people that you're in contact with still?

MCFARLAND: Not really.

WILSON: Okay.

MCFARLAND: Just the one fellow that was around when Graham was born. We keep up with one fellow that we knew from Pohnpei, he's an engineer -- has his own firm now -- in California. John Thomas, who we knew in the Philippines, is an AID employee. And it seems like it was always just one person from each--

WILSON: Each--

MCFARLAND:--class. In fact I found it interesting that the fellow who was our country director when we were in Pohnpei ended up being our daughter's Peace Corps trainer in training. He was head of her group. So twenty something years later--

WILSON: Some people are still there even in spite of the fact there's a 00:44:00six-year rule, right?

MCFARLAND: Yeah, yeah.

WILSON: Let's see. Let me ask you the next two questions and then you can decide how you want to answer them because they are related for you, I think. What has the impact of Peace Corps been on your family, and what has the impact been on your career path and that of your husband in terms of what you've done since Peace Corps. Okay, and let's switch sides.

MCFARLAND: Okay.

[Tape one side one ends; tape one side two begins.]

WILSON: Okay. So the questions are, what has been the impact of Peace Corps, the Peace Corps experience, on your family, and you've also already mentioned that one of your daughters went into Peace Corps. And what have you done since Peace Corps, and how did Peace Corps affect that?

MCFARLAND: Yeah. Well I--it's--as far as career-wise, after graduate 00:45:00school my husband knew that he wanted to go into with USAID but it took a masters degree. So after Peace Corps we went to Hawaii, he got his masters degree at UH and then we came home and he was in one of the IDI programs, which is you come on as an intern and they literally take you through the whole thing. I always found it funny when he went up for the interview and they said, "How will your wife feel about traveling overseas?" and he said, "She's the one that got us in Peace Corps in the first place. I don't think this is going to be a problem."

WILSON: Right, yeah.

MCFARLAND: Obviously it gave us a life of service overseas, yes, with federal government. He stayed in agriculture up until about `92 or `93 and then he moved over into the executive--the administrative side. In 00:46:00AID they call them executive officers. I think it--between Peace Corps and a service with 26 years with AID it has totally given me such a vast appreciation of the world. I mean I feel like we've seen it from the bottom, we've seen it from the top, we've seen it from the middle. We've always tried to stay in touch with Peace Corps volunteers when we were in these other countries where we served. In Pohnpei--

WILSON: Well, why don't you go through some of it so that we've got that on the tape, where all you've been. You came back then in `76, I guess, right, from Philippines?

MCFARLAND: We came back in April from the Philippines, then Cecil started graduate school at UH in the fall, and a year and a half later he was getting his degree, and that's when our second child was born. Then we came home to Kentucky, convincing my brother that we would only be living with him and his wife for the maximum of two months because we were joining AID. Well, seven months later we finally move out of his house and Cecil starts with AID. We spent a year in Washington because soon after he started that I became pregnant with our third child and our--we knew that our assignment was going to be Guyana, and they did not allow you to deliver in Guyana. The health care was not as such. Well, we would be going about the time that I would have been seven months pregnant, so we ended up actually doing a whole year in Washington and not going out to Guyana until after our 00:48:00last one was born. Spent two years there, then we went to Guatemala for five years, from there Kenya for four years, did a four-year tour in Washington D.C. and everybody always laughs. That was the hardship post, the serving in Washington. From Washington we went to Egypt for two years, Rwanda for two years, and Cecil finished his career in Malawi. In fact now he's in Djibouti doing part-time work.

WILSON: Okay, and what did you do?

MCFARLAND: I am one of those I never was career oriented. All I ever wanted to do was be a wife and a mom, and I am very thankful that this lifestyle has allowed me to do that. I stayed home with the children. I did teach one class at our American school in Guyana. Guatemala 00:49:00I would do a little short term like clean out a library at the AID office for a couple of months. But there I was mainly carpooling with the baseball practice and going to the orthodontist and taking them to karate lessons; I mean typical, typical like what parents go through here.

WILSON: Yeah, what you go through here. Yeah, right, right.

MCFARLAND: Then we went to Kenya and I did take a job at the embassy there working in their general services office. I worked out at the warehouse in charge of ordering furniture and making sure houses were ready when people came to serve, but I was very fortunate in that I had a boss that said, "I want you to work 32 hours a week and I don't care when you put those 32 in." In theory I was supposed to work Monday through Thursday, but I always went in on Friday because if the 00:50:00children had something at school on Wednesday afternoon I would leave two hours early. So he said, you know, "Just make sure you get your hours in. I don't really care." So I really was having my cake and eating it too. We would leave home in the morning ten minutes before the kids caught the school bus and most afternoons we beat them home because of all the after school, excuse me, after school activities. So that part afforded us, we were fortunate there. I did not--but I worked fulltime in Washington D.C. when we served there in--for the state department for their housing--real estate section. And you--

WILSON: So you were using your business and your accounting background, right.

MCFARLAND: I was definitely using my business and accounting skills. I probably--the one time I was working, if I had had the choice, I wouldn't have--would have been D.C. because I think that was a time 00:51:00that the kids really needed me at home.

WILSON: Well, and--

MCFARLAND: It was hard enough. I mean they had spent their whole lives overseas, and we came home when the oldest one was a junior. So I had a junior, a freshman, and a seventh grader having never lived in the United States before.

WILSON: Oh, wow. Oh, oh, oh.

MCFARLAND: So--but, I mean, we all survived it, but it was such an expensive place. Even the kids didn't want me working. And Cecil has never been one that says, "You've got to go out and have a career." In fact with our last posting in Malawi I was part-time secretary for the security officer, and he really didn't even want me taking the job. He says, "Why don't you stay home and play golf or, you know, do all this other stuff?" But it was--I enjoyed the getting out and the being with people, too.

WILSON: Right. So I think we've got your international experience since, but your international experience continues, right? I mean you've come 00:52:00back to Kentucky and you are building a house and living here.

MCFARLAND: Right.

WILSON: But that doesn't mean you're staying in Kentucky all the time?

MCFARLAND: No. Well, our son is in the navy and he and his wife are stationed in Spain, and so we definitely go see them. In fact I will be going next spring to see the new grandchild boy that we just found out about today.

WILSON: Boy! Oh, wow! Oh, just today?

MCFARLAND: So yeah, start knitting blue, start knitting blue.

WILSON: Oh, wow, that's great.

MCFARLAND: We--when we were in Malawi, Capetown, South Africa became our most favorite place, so we are going back there next year and we will see friends. Because Cecil found this running group called the "hash house harriers" and they meet somewhere in the world every two years for an international gathering. When we go to Capetown next April, 00:53:00because that is the off year for the world gathering, it's a regional gathering. And so Africa's is going to be in Capetown. The one for North America, I think, is in Toronto next September, and they always- -North America always seems to have in around Labor Day. I'm not sure why they choose that but, anyway, it seems it always worked out. So, yes, we have not given up our passports. In fact Cecil is in Djibouti even as we speak doing a part-time thing for AID; it's a two-month contract and he's--it's enough that he keeps his fingers in the pot and still sees all these people that, you know, he's--we've run into over the years. It was old home week when he stopped off in Nairobi for three days;--

WILSON: Oh, sure.

MCFARLAND:--you know, all these people that we knew, so that part of it has been good. But it came a time when, you know, I'm tired of making these decisions, having this stress. And so after 31 years of moving 00:54:00around the world we called it quits.

WILSON: At least you'll have one house for--

MCFARLAND: For a while, yes, because we are never building another one.

WILSON: So to sort of summarize, let me tell you what the last two questions are. What has been the impact of Peace Corps impact on the way you think about the world and what's going on in the world now? And then a more general question: what do you think the overall impact of Peace Corps has been, and what should its role be today? So first yourself and then some--

MCFARLAND: Yeah. It definitely opened our eyes. I like to think. I grew up in a home where especially my maternal grandmother was very much a lady of the world. Her father--she went around the world in 1920--

WILSON: Wow.

MCFARLAND:--with her dad,--

WILSON: What a heritage.

MCFARLAND:--whose--one of her sisters was a missionary in China, and she had come home to have her first child and she knew he was going to be a boy and he was going to be president of the United States one day. And, of course, he had to be born on American soil, so when she went back to China, great grandfather and my grandmother went along with her. So she was always one that giving to missions is very important. You've got to think of your fellow man. So I know that influenced-- influenced us. The role in the world that--to me that is sort of a hard one to answer because I think Peace Corps--I think we discussed this 00:56:00the other night. You do your best work to me by setting an example. If you make a difference in one person's life you have been a great success. And especially now, the thing's going with AIDS; we attended several of the swearing-ins in Malawi for the new volunteers. And from the ambassador--American ambassador always came, he would talk about it. Whatever government official there. Because in Malawi we had health volunteers and education and I want to say there was one other group, but maybe not. But you always hit on AIDS. If you can make a difference in one, even two, two lives while you are there, you have 00:57:00been a tremendous success. You know I like to think people saw us and went, "Well, maybe America's not the big, bad place that we think it is." And I think Kathleen, our daughter who is the volunteer in Jordan; she probably felt that as much so if not more than what we did. Of course we did this thirty years ago and she was a volunteer `99 to `01.

WILSON: Right.

MCFARLAND: In fact she was still there when the World Trade--

WILSON: And ----------(??) in a local country.

MCFARLAND: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

WILSON: And she was there when the--

MCFARLAND: When the World Trade Center went down, and the people in her village, you know, "Please don't hate us," you know, "We didn't do this."

WILSON: Right.

MCFARLAND: But, you know, we--she felt like she had respect there and she tried to give it. You know, just to set the example.

WILSON: Well--and now she's doing graduate work in--

MCFARLAND: She is doing graduate work in international studies, and she ended up working in New York for the last couple of years for a--they do a lot of work with domestic violence and she was their Spanish speaker. She was a Spanish major at Transy, and she was their Spanish speaker in the office. She said sadly she learned a lot of Spanish words, you know, abuse vocabulary that she had never learned before.

WILSON: Right, right.

MCFARLAND: But she is very anxious to get back overseas and continue on. So I guess we won't be throwing our passports away anytime soon.

WILSON: No, you'll have to go visit them, right?

MCFARLAND: Yeah, exactly.

WILSON: Okay, well thank you very much. Is there anything else that we missed here? So you think the Peace Corps can still--still has a--

MCFARLAND: Oh, definitely. Yeah, I think we definitely still have a 00:59:00role in the world.

WILSON: Yeah.

MCFARLAND: Yeah, in fact I want to get the Sargent Shriver book that you were referring to.

WILSON: Yeah, yeah, right. I think you would enjoy that.

[End of interview.]