[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Oh, yeah. Oh, no, outdoors. Yeah. But, you know, I think we were enclosed on three sides and the other side faced our house and our water was the last one in the line. So it was like we could shower nude if you wanted to. I don't know. I think we did sometimes when it was dark enough. But, you know, and not together, you know, you don't want to violate people's sense of propriety.

[Assistant] Right.

[User] But it was nice because at night you would hear occasionally somebody strumming a guitar and some people singing along. Sometimes just talk, sometimes just the mosquitoes, but always the river murmuring around the village. It was. It was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

[Assistant] Yeah. Yeah, it sounds very nice. So how did you feel about leaving Fiji? It must have, uh, I'm sure even though you haven't, you said you didn't interact much, you must have made some good friends.

[User]
Well, we were eager to get off to the next thing, you know, we were in our mid twenties, early to mid twenties, I think. And yeah, and we had this whole adventure trip planned, so we were ready to go, you know.

The way we started it actually was to go see the rest of Fiji, quotation marks. We took a boat, a copra boat, which did basically everything else, mail supplies, you know, called the Ululakemba. It was a famous boat which several years later went down in a storm, but it had stopped offshore. And occasionally we'd just catch a ride with whoever had come out to pick up supplies, go into shore, look and see what people were doing, and then come back out. One of the islands we stopped at was Namuka, which had, not the only one, certainly one of them, that it was one of them. And that was one of the places they made masi, also known as tapa cloth. And we actually got to see the women making it.

[Assistant] They didn't make it in your village?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Oh, it shaped the rest of my life. Oh yeah. Very, very deeply. I mean, even to this day. I advocate for indigenous people. Now that people have finally come around to beginning to put together the idea that one of the ways that we could actually survive and correct climate change would be to take some practices and principles from indigenous tradition. Because what they all had in common was they didn't overuse what they had.

[Assistant] Yeah.

[User] And we all have in common is we do, and we throw it away. What's left, thrown out. I saw the downside of this when somebody got a nasty cut on their foot in Laselevu. What's that from? One of those tin cans.

[Assistant] Yeah.

[User] Because what do they do with garbage? I literally heard a woman in the village say this once, throw it far. Because, you know, traditionally it's all biodegradable.

[Assistant] The jungle will eat it up.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yeah, exactly. So. So, yeah, in terms of influence on me, I think it influenced Sally too, but you'd have to ask her. Have you interviewed her?

[Assistant] No.

[User]
OK. Anyway. So how it influenced me. I remember what happened and how I decided what I was going to do. I became very curious about what it meant to be an American, because when I was in Fiji I was told I was American. And I kind of had a sense of what that was, but it was kind of like the white sense of being white, you know, not this, not that, not the other thing, right? And so I thought it'd be interesting to do that. And I looked into graduate programs in American Studies, and I found one that included folklore at Indiana University, where John and Betty were, before we went there. And so we went out and looked at, stayed with John and Betty, and looked at Bloomington, Indiana, which basically was a university surrounded by cornfields at the time.

And I had also been, I had also been accepted. I'm getting ahead of myself, but I'll go back. I'd also been accepted at the University of Minnesota, located in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. OK, back up. I taught ESL while Sally finished up her education degrees. She got two of them in two years, it was a combined program, and it was an MA and an MA Ed or some kind of thing in special ed. And so she was well qualified and we went out in the spring of '64 and looked at the two places. And after I had spent the year teaching English as a second language to people from all over the world at the American Language Institute at New York University in Greenwich Village, which was a real trip, just wonderful. I had a blast. And people loved me.

[Assistant] Yeah.

[User] Because I was good at it. And I had enough arrogance not to see that, see where the ice was thin. I just kind of glided over it.

[Assistant] And do you think you would have done that if you hadn't been?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] And just totally missed the opportunity. I should have spent more time drinking yagona in the village. That's my take.

[Assistant] So that's your big regret?

[User] That's my big takeaway, yeah. Well, it sounds kind of frivolous, but it's not really.

[Assistant] All right. Anything you want to say though?

[User] I don't know. I guess we.

[Assistant] Wrap things up, or did we skip over anything?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That's my big takeaway, yeah. Well, it sounds kind of frivolous, but it's not really.

[Assistant] All right. Anything you want to say though?

[User] I don't know. I guess we.

[Assistant] Wrap things up, or did we skip over anything?

[User] Good God, I hope not. I don't think we skipped anything. Some of the formalities, but just, you know, that's superficial stuff, not what's important.

[Assistant] So if you, um, you've probably spoken to other people over the years about, who have been interested in Peace Corps and might want to join.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I don't know. I guess we.

[Assistant] Wrap things up, or did we skip over anything?

[User] Good God, I hope not. I don't think we skipped anything. Some of the formalities, but just, you know, that's superficial stuff, not what's important.

[Assistant] So if you, um, you've probably spoken to other people over the years about, who have been interested in Peace Corps and might want to join.

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] So what do you tell somebody that's thinking about joining Peace Corps?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Good God, I hope not. I don't think we skipped anything. Some of the formalities, but just, you know, that's superficial stuff, not what's important.

[Assistant] So if you, um, you've probably spoken to other people over the years about, who have been interested in Peace Corps and might want to join.

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] So what do you tell somebody that's thinking about joining Peace Corps?

[User] Check it out. Do it if you can. Because it will. It will feed you and deepen you in ways that you can't possibly imagine. Or maybe I should say no, because you can imagine almost anything. You can't possibly know how it's going to affect you and it'll all be with good, I think. You know, Peace Corps is one of the most fantastic things that Jack Kennedy ever did. And I don't think even he fully knew what he was doing. That's all right. Sometimes we have a vision and we have to follow it.

[Assistant] And your advice would be to spend more time drinking yagona with them?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] So what do you tell somebody that's thinking about joining Peace Corps?

[User] Check it out. Do it if you can. Because it will. It will feed you and deepen you in ways that you can't possibly imagine. Or maybe I should say no, because you can imagine almost anything. You can't possibly know how it's going to affect you and it'll all be with good, I think. You know, Peace Corps is one of the most fantastic things that Jack Kennedy ever did. And I don't think even he fully knew what he was doing. That's all right. Sometimes we have a vision and we have to follow it.

[Assistant] And your advice would be to spend more time drinking yagona with them?

[User] That's right. Or the equivalent.

[Assistant] All right, Steve. Well, I appreciate you taking the time today. It's been a great interview.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Check it out. Do it if you can. Because it will. It will feed you and deepen you in ways that you can't possibly imagine. Or maybe I should say no, because you can imagine almost anything. You can't possibly know how it's going to affect you and it'll all be with good, I think. You know, Peace Corps is one of the most fantastic things that Jack Kennedy ever did. And I don't think even he fully knew what he was doing. That's all right. Sometimes we have a vision and we have to follow it.

[Assistant] And your advice would be to spend more time drinking yagona with them?

[User] That's right. Or the equivalent.

[Assistant] All right, Steve. Well, I appreciate you taking the time today. It's been a great interview.

[User] Thank you.

[Assistant] And this concludes our time.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That was in ’61, and we worked about six months there before we came down here in February of 1962. I wasn’t one of the original members of the task group. They were already under way, and when I joined them, we had just started working on the lunar rendezvous concept for Apollo, where you orbit the Moon and come back and rendezvous. And I worked on that from the beginning with the task group and then for the next ten years.

[Assistant] Did you take a look-and-see trip out to Houston?

[User] No, I did not. Some other people did, and they brought movies back and showed us the ravages of Hurricane Carla and we said, “What are we doing?” [Laughs]

[Assistant] But you decided to move out here anyway.

[User] Yes, yes. My wife [Carolyn] didn’t want to come at first, but she learned to love it after a while. We came as a group, and so it was—everybody was family, so to speak. They said they had the Husband of the Week because we traveled so much. Whosever husband was home was in charge of repairs.

[Assistant] What did you initially think of Houston when you arrived?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No, I did not. Some other people did, and they brought movies back and showed us the ravages of Hurricane Carla and we said, “What are we doing?” [Laughs]

[Assistant] But you decided to move out here anyway.

[User] Yes, yes. My wife [Carolyn] didn’t want to come at first, but she learned to love it after a while. We came as a group, and so it was—everybody was family, so to speak. They said they had the Husband of the Week because we traveled so much. Whosever husband was home was in charge of repairs.

[Assistant] What did you initially think of Houston when you arrived?

[User] Hot and humid. But when I was thinking about coming down here, some Virginians told me that, “You don’t want to go there. It’s too hot and too humid.” I said, “It may be hotter than here, but it can’t be more humid.” I was wrong. But thank goodness for air-conditioning.

[Assistant] We’ve heard that from a number of people, actually. How did your job change when you moved from Virginia down here to Houston?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, yes. My wife [Carolyn] didn’t want to come at first, but she learned to love it after a while. We came as a group, and so it was—everybody was family, so to speak. They said they had the Husband of the Week because we traveled so much. Whosever husband was home was in charge of repairs.

[Assistant] What did you initially think of Houston when you arrived?

[User] Hot and humid. But when I was thinking about coming down here, some Virginians told me that, “You don’t want to go there. It’s too hot and too humid.” I said, “It may be hotter than here, but it can’t be more humid.” I was wrong. But thank goodness for air-conditioning.

[Assistant] We’ve heard that from a number of people, actually. How did your job change when you moved from Virginia down here to Houston?

[User] Well, in Virginia, it was more of a research atmosphere and time wasn’t critical until I started working for the task group. And then, like I say, we started traveling a lot, and we had to go get ourselves educated more on orbital mechanics and other aspects of space operations. And with all the various contractors around the country, we had to go to Rockwell [formerly North American Aviation Corporation], to Grumman [Aircraft Engineering Corporation] in New York, and that sort of thing. And you had to do your homework, and we worked awful long hours. You didn’t get paid the extra hours, but we lived and breathed it. It was a dream to work on something like that, and I think everybody was totally dedicated to it.

[Assistant] You mentioned just a few minutes ago that you worked on the lunar rendezvous concept. Can you talk to us about a paper that you wrote on a study of Earth orbit simulation of lunar orbit rendezvous?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That was a long time ago. I’d almost forgotten that one. But what we did, we looked at—rendezvous was checked out during the Gemini Program around Earth. And to make the lunar landing a successful mission, we had to rendezvous the LM [Lunar Module] back to the command module after the landing. And so we were very nervous about that, and although we checked it out here, what happens if he can’t come back, if something happened to propulsion?\n\n So we looked at a concept of what we call an equal period [or equi-period] transfer. If you’re in one orbit and you fire at a certain angle, you can change the orbit to come down to a lower altitude or come up to higher altitude, and the period around will be the same so it will come back and intercept with that orbit [in one revolution at the same point that you left]. But it turned out to be too expensive from a propulsion standpoint to do that, so we opted for what they call the Hohmann Transfer. That was named after a fellow by the name of [Walter] Hohmann, and he—you fire parallel to the velocity vector or against the velocity vector and just reduce your altitude. And it changes the period of the orbit, so you wind up going faster, but it was the cheapest way to do it. So that’s why we wound up doing that.

[Assistant] How were you able to create this simulation when the lunar module and the command and service module weren’t actually finished at this point?

[User] We didn’t have many simulations. As far as the rendezvous, it was mostly mathematical, and then they did the simulators. They had visuals of everything, and you had the cockpit layouts and you had the same plans of the lunar module and the command module, so you worked it from that standpoint with computers.

[Assistant] You were also heavily involved in the trajectory analysis planning for the lunar landings themselves.

[User] Yes. Right.

[Assistant] Can we talk about that a little bit?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] We didn’t have many simulations. As far as the rendezvous, it was mostly mathematical, and then they did the simulators. They had visuals of everything, and you had the cockpit layouts and you had the same plans of the lunar module and the command module, so you worked it from that standpoint with computers.

[Assistant] You were also heavily involved in the trajectory analysis planning for the lunar landings themselves.

[User] Yes. Right.

[Assistant] Can we talk about that a little bit?

[User] Yes. Right.

[Assistant] Can you talk about your role in planning the mission trajectories for the Apollo Program?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Basically, the commanders and the lunar landing pilots, I didn’t have much work with the command module pilots, but with Neil [A. Armstrong] and [Edwin E.] Buzz [Aldrin] and Pete [Charles] Conrad and—Shepard didn’t pay much attention to [us], and he found a glitch in the guidance logic, too. It wasn’t a major thing, but he did in his simulation and everything. But he was quite a guy. And John [W.] Young, I worked with him, and with Apollo 17, [Eugene A.] Cernan, yes. [And I worked quite a lot with Dave Scott on landing site selection for Apollo 15 and the steep approach and trajectory.]\n\n We would give them briefings before the mission, then go down and monitor their training down there [at Kennedy Space Center, Florida], so we were the background teachers, I guess, for them to understand why we did what we did. And, “We’d like to do so-and-so,” and we’d have to say, “Okay, that’s good to do,” or, “No, we can’t do that.” So we had a very good working relationship.

[Assistant] And how long did these briefings last?

[User] Oh, they were usually a couple hours when we’d go down for training sessions and all, and we were always in various meetings together proposing changes and everything. So we worked on and off with them throughout their training.

[Assistant] Did you participate in any of the lunar landing simulations?

[User] I got in the simulator and rode it down on automatic. They said, “That’s not flying.” I said, “I’ve got to see if my system works,” and it did. I said, “No, I don’t have the confidence to go take this thing over manually. That would waste everybody’s time.” But it was very interesting.\n\n They did a good job with those simulations, too. The video was very good the way they had the view out the window.

[Assistant] What about Grumman? Did you have any contact with them?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Oh, that was great. That was great. I had to go over to the other [Lunar Surface Scientist’s] staff support room and tell them where he was. When we did the simulations, like I was telling you, the snowman crater pattern, that big crater is what you could see, mostly. And he would plan to land just upstream of that in what we called Conrad’s Parking Lot. And it turned out he was little further along, and so he moved around and he landed up near the head crater.\n\n And so we were aware of that during all the simulations we did for the landings, but the scientists didn’t sit in on those simulations. They started their simulations after he was on the surface and that sort of thing. And so, “What’s the parking lot?” And so I went down and showed them a map where he was, and then they put up a sign on their door that unauthorized personnel shouldn’t be in there. They were a little embarrassed. But anyway, it all ended well, yes.

[Assistant] Did you receive any commendation for the Apollo 12 pinpoint landing?

[User] Yes, I got the Exceptional Service Medal for that. That was neat. John [W.] Aaron and I flew up to Washington with the crew in the NASA plane to get our medals from Dr. [George M.] Low. That was very rewarding, yes.

[Assistant] Did you have any involvement with the Apollo 13 mission?

[User] No. I went out there [to the control center] for a little bit. I’d gone home, was taking a shower or something, I think, and it came on the TV. And I came out to see if I could help with anything about using the LM systems, but I wasn’t a LM systems expert, so the best thing I could do was get out of their way. They did quite a job on that. They really did.

[Assistant] You mentioned that the Apollo 15 landing was pretty complicated. What were you thinking as they were landing?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, I got the Exceptional Service Medal for that. That was neat. John [W.] Aaron and I flew up to Washington with the crew in the NASA plane to get our medals from Dr. [George M.] Low. That was very rewarding, yes.

[Assistant] Did you have any involvement with the Apollo 13 mission?

[User] No. I went out there [to the control center] for a little bit. I’d gone home, was taking a shower or something, I think, and it came on the TV. And I came out to see if I could help with anything about using the LM systems, but I wasn’t a LM systems expert, so the best thing I could do was get out of their way. They did quite a job on that. They really did.

[Assistant] You mentioned that the Apollo 15 landing was pretty complicated. What were you thinking as they were landing?

[User] Oh, I was glad that we had modeled that terrain and heard them say, “There’s Bennett Hill.” [Laughs] Yes, that was great. We were sweating that one a little bit from going over those mountains and all, but we kept thinking positive.

[Assistant] I understand in ’72 you became the Manager of the Apollo Program Office within the MPAD [Mission Planning and Analysis] Division.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No. I went out there [to the control center] for a little bit. I’d gone home, was taking a shower or something, I think, and it came on the TV. And I came out to see if I could help with anything about using the LM systems, but I wasn’t a LM systems expert, so the best thing I could do was get out of their way. They did quite a job on that. They really did.

[Assistant] You mentioned that the Apollo 15 landing was pretty complicated. What were you thinking as they were landing?

[User] Oh, I was glad that we had modeled that terrain and heard them say, “There’s Bennett Hill.” [Laughs] Yes, that was great. We were sweating that one a little bit from going over those mountains and all, but we kept thinking positive.

[Assistant] I understand in ’72 you became the Manager of the Apollo Program Office within the MPAD [Mission Planning and Analysis] Division.

[User] Yes, their mission office, yes, and that’s when I was doing the site selection on 17.

[Assistant] Did you have any other duties or responsibilities?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Well, sometimes we chided them about the questions they asked. They didn’t always ask the pertinent questions, I guess, but sometimes they did. And that was the thing you’d have to say is, “Okay, I don’t really know the answer to that one, but it’s not important because of this, this, and this. If you really want to know the answer, we’ll try to get it for you,” and try to keep them back on track of what the right questions should be.\n\n But many times they asked intelligent questions, too, but you can’t just go and answer every question out there, or you’d be there forever if it’s not a pertinent question. So that’s what we were trying to do.

[Assistant] I also understand that you were Chief of the Mission Integration Branch.

[User] Right. That was when we were doing Apollo-Soyuz [Test Project] and Skylab. And there we combined our office with their office, and there weren’t the long trajectory burns on those, but it was similar work to what the folks had been doing there. And they were trying to show—get the right constraints for all their science that they were doing and that sort of thing on orbit.

[Assistant] What were your basic duties as chief?

[User] Just coordinate all the guys together and be sure we had the right people on the right jobs there. I wasn’t the technical expert in those.

[Assistant] Is there anything else you think we should know about your involvement with the Apollo Program or Skylab Program, that we haven’t covered?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Right. That was when we were doing Apollo-Soyuz [Test Project] and Skylab. And there we combined our office with their office, and there weren’t the long trajectory burns on those, but it was similar work to what the folks had been doing there. And they were trying to show—get the right constraints for all their science that they were doing and that sort of thing on orbit.

[Assistant] What were your basic duties as chief?

[User] Just coordinate all the guys together and be sure we had the right people on the right jobs there. I wasn’t the technical expert in those.

[Assistant] Is there anything else you think we should know about your involvement with the Apollo Program or Skylab Program, that we haven’t covered?

[User] I don’t think so at the moment.

[Assistant] Okay. I’d like to move on to the Shuttle Program, if you don’t mind.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Just coordinate all the guys together and be sure we had the right people on the right jobs there. I wasn’t the technical expert in those.

[Assistant] Is there anything else you think we should know about your involvement with the Apollo Program or Skylab Program, that we haven’t covered?

[User] I don’t think so at the moment.

[Assistant] Okay. I’d like to move on to the Shuttle Program, if you don’t mind.

[User] All right.

[Assistant] I understand that you were working in the Systems Integration Office for the Space Shuttle Program Office.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It was kind of hard to get information out of Orbiter for some reason, because the Orbiter Project was reporting to JSC Center Director as well as the Program Manager, and so they wanted everything, maybe like the fellow from Marshall, cleared and everything like that before they would talk to us about some of the things. But it all worked out. But you had to treat them a little differently, I guess, is the word.

[Assistant] I also understand that you worked on computer systems integration for the Space Shuttle.

[User] Well, that was in Systems Integration, and what we were doing was, it wasn’t any flight computers or anything like that; it was pulling together a bunch of databases for all the measurements you had onboard the Shuttle. You had a lot of development flight instrumentation on the first few flights, and [by the way] we’re going back to putting more [instrumentation] on now [for return to flight next year]. And so it was a massive amount of data in each project.\n\n So each project had their own database for their sets of instrumentation, and you had to pull them together into one database so that everybody could work with it. And that was our job, and that was a little difficult, because there again, some of them were already in existence and the people didn’t want to change and everything like that. Rockwell [International Corporation] had built the Orbiter data[base] and they were also the integration contractor, so we wound up using their system, but it was kind of difficult there for a while to do that. And unfortunately, I didn’t have any budget to control them with, so anyway, but we finally got it together. It could have been run a lot more efficiently, though.

[Assistant] I understand you were the Chairman of the Computer Systems Hardware and Software Integration.

[User] Yes, that was that same role, right.

[Assistant] The same thing, okay.\n\n What sort of interaction did you have with IBM [International Business Machines Corporation]?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Well, that was in Systems Integration, and what we were doing was, it wasn’t any flight computers or anything like that; it was pulling together a bunch of databases for all the measurements you had onboard the Shuttle. You had a lot of development flight instrumentation on the first few flights, and [by the way] we’re going back to putting more [instrumentation] on now [for return to flight next year]. And so it was a massive amount of data in each project.\n\n So each project had their own database for their sets of instrumentation, and you had to pull them together into one database so that everybody could work with it. And that was our job, and that was a little difficult, because there again, some of them were already in existence and the people didn’t want to change and everything like that. Rockwell [International Corporation] had built the Orbiter data[base] and they were also the integration contractor, so we wound up using their system, but it was kind of difficult there for a while to do that. And unfortunately, I didn’t have any budget to control them with, so anyway, but we finally got it together. It could have been run a lot more efficiently, though.

[Assistant] I understand you were the Chairman of the Computer Systems Hardware and Software Integration.

[User] Yes, that was that same role, right.

[Assistant] The same thing, okay.\n\n What sort of interaction did you have with IBM [International Business Machines Corporation]?

[User] Well, I went to San Jose [California] and took one of their management courses out there in [computer] systems, and that helped me an awful lot. They were involved in developing these databases as well. Very good, very good people.

[Assistant] Did you have any contact with Rockwell?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, that was that same role, right.

[Assistant] The same thing, okay.\n\n What sort of interaction did you have with IBM [International Business Machines Corporation]?

[User] Well, I went to San Jose [California] and took one of their management courses out there in [computer] systems, and that helped me an awful lot. They were involved in developing these databases as well. Very good, very good people.

[Assistant] Did you have any contact with Rockwell?

[User] Yes. In those days, too, yes, Rockwell wound up building [the] database.

[Assistant] What are your memories of STS-1?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Oh, they were long, very long. Arnie [Arnold D.] Aldrich chaired those, and it was a lot of various subjects to cover from one system to the other. Bob [Robert A.] Minor, Bob Minor was a software engineer out there at Rockwell in those days before he came here to Houston. He came in with a briefing one day and was about a couple inches thick. I said, “Bob, by definition, a briefing is supposed to be brief.” So anyway, he did a good job, and I told him afterwards, I said, “You know, that was really a good job you did, and if you’d have been selling tickets on the Titanic, I still think I would have bought one even knowing the ship was going to go down.” I don’t know if he took it as a compliment or not, but I meant it that way.

[Assistant] Once the first flight had flown, what were your major duties?

[User] I wasn’t in operations then. I was planning for the next mission, I guess you’d say, but I had no real-time responsibilities during Shuttle.

[Assistant] Can you talk to us about planning for the next few missions? What was your involvement?

[User] Well, again, it was to be sure that the performance, the weight and performance and all, was adequate and we had the right margins. One time Bob [Robert F.] Thompson was the Shuttle Program Manager and I said, “You’re overweight in this particular area.”\n\n And he says, “No, we’re not overweight. We have negative margin. We’ll work it out.” [Laughs] So that’s when I learned the term negative margin.

[Assistant] I understand that you retired from NASA in 1982.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I wasn’t in operations then. I was planning for the next mission, I guess you’d say, but I had no real-time responsibilities during Shuttle.

[Assistant] Can you talk to us about planning for the next few missions? What was your involvement?

[User] Well, again, it was to be sure that the performance, the weight and performance and all, was adequate and we had the right margins. One time Bob [Robert F.] Thompson was the Shuttle Program Manager and I said, “You’re overweight in this particular area.”\n\n And he says, “No, we’re not overweight. We have negative margin. We’ll work it out.” [Laughs] So that’s when I learned the term negative margin.

[Assistant] I understand that you retired from NASA in 1982.

[User] Right.

[Assistant] Can you tell us why you decided to retire at that point?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That was the first flight where we had the Rover, and they had the TV camera there to take the picture of the ascent. Ed was controlling this camera on the Rover from the control center, and so he wanted us to calculate what angle and rate he had to go to track this thing as it went up, so we ran the trajectory and where he was parked and that sort of thing, and gave him the data. “Oh, it can’t go that fast.” I said, “Ed, the result is done by the same folks that did the lunar descent trajectories and everything, and I have great confidence in them that they know what they’re doing.” I said, “If you don’t want to use it, don’t use it.” I mean, it wasn’t affecting my ascent. So he didn’t. So he cut the rates in about half, and this sequence of pictures taken off the camera [shows image] shows before the engine started, six-tenths of a second—two seconds. I lost this one. Anyway, at less than 3.7 seconds the ascent stage is gone, and he’s still looking at the descent stage.\n\n So on Apollo 16, he came around and wanted to know if we’d calculate it for him again, and I said, “Yeah, Ed. Are you going to use it?” [Laughter] And he did, and [he] tracked it beautifully.

[Assistant] He’s a character.

[User] Yes, he is.

[Assistant] You mentioned that you returned back to Houston and started working for Rockwell.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] What did you start doing for them?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Okay.

[Assistant] What do you think has been your most challenging milestone in your career with NASA?

[User] Oh, it’s definitely the lunar Apollo Program, yes. Like I say, with so many unknowns, and it’s something mankind had dreamed about all their lives and even us as kids, and we’re able to do that, yes, to be a part of that team was really great.

[Assistant] I’m sure it must have been exciting for you, having that interest.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] What do you think was your most significant accomplishment?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Oh, it’s definitely the lunar Apollo Program, yes. Like I say, with so many unknowns, and it’s something mankind had dreamed about all their lives and even us as kids, and we’re able to do that, yes, to be a part of that team was really great.

[Assistant] I’m sure it must have been exciting for you, having that interest.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] What do you think was your most significant accomplishment?

[User] Again, it would be the designing of the descent trajectory, because I was in a unique position of working on it when it was a future mission and then working in the design and development of the hardware that went on it to make my trajectories work right, and then to go over and to be in a part of operations and see it operating right. And I think I contributed that way. because the operations people had been doing rendezvous in Gemini and this sort of thing, and they didn’t have a lot of expertise at that time in the powered flight maneuvers. They learned quickly, I’ll say that, but I felt like I was sort of a tutor to them as well as the astronauts.

[Assistant] Before we close out today, I’d like to ask Sandra and Rebecca if they have any questions for you, if that’s okay.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] What do you think was your most significant accomplishment?

[User] Again, it would be the designing of the descent trajectory, because I was in a unique position of working on it when it was a future mission and then working in the design and development of the hardware that went on it to make my trajectories work right, and then to go over and to be in a part of operations and see it operating right. And I think I contributed that way. because the operations people had been doing rendezvous in Gemini and this sort of thing, and they didn’t have a lot of expertise at that time in the powered flight maneuvers. They learned quickly, I’ll say that, but I felt like I was sort of a tutor to them as well as the astronauts.

[Assistant] Before we close out today, I’d like to ask Sandra and Rebecca if they have any questions for you, if that’s okay.

[User] Okay, great.

[Assistant] I had one for you. When you were talking about your Landing Analysis Branch and you showed us your picture, you had twenty of you working together. Can you share with us a few more details—how twenty of you worked together, so many missions were going on at the same time, and planning, and how that was all coordinated and everyone had their own duties?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Oh, you bet. I think so.

[Assistant] Hopefully we'll never have to put much of that to test.

[User] Well, hopefully the equipment that we work with—"we worked with"—I still talk as if I was still in the program, but, you know, I still know everybody and know what's going on. But anyway, and this is [something]…you try and impress on the new folks coming along, the equipment that we work on and that we use has to be able to immediately do what it's supposed to do, but you hope that it never has to be used for that purpose. It's kind of a funny feeling, but you don't want to ever know if it's going to fail. At least I don't. I don't want to know whether it worked or not. So let's keep it the way it is.

[Assistant] That's right. Better to be prepared for whatever can happen and not have to find out.

[User] Not have to use it. That's right. [Tape recorder turned off.]\n\n [

[Assistant] During this interim time you also worked on the 8 psi hard suit. What were some of your duties in that regard?]


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Oh, yes. I think so. I believe so. It's easier to change out the parts. Now, please keep in mind that I haven't worked with this suit in several years, but from what I remember of it, it's easier to change the components in the hard suit. It's easier to use one set of hardware for more people in future missions, like you're going to be going to Mars and back to the moon, supposedly, and also on Space Station missions you're not going to have suit technicians up there to take care of the equipment. You're going to have to have something that can be used, a minimum of suits and equipment for the maximum amount of people. I think the way that they're going now with this hard upper torso and things, the interchangeable components with the quick—well, use of piano wire, actually, to hold the pieces together, that makes it easier for people who are not trained suit technicians to change out the parts. In other words, the astronauts that are there are going to have to change the parts out to fit the next person that's going to use that suit, because everybody cannot have their own suit pre-fitted on Earth and taken to wherever they're going to have to take it. They're going to have to change out the parts where they are.

[Assistant] Absolutely. Well, I guess we'll have to watch and see what happens.

[User] I guess we will. Hopefully it'll happen in our lifetime—well, it will in yours, but it won't in mine, probably, but that's okay.

[Assistant] I don't know. I think you've still got quite a few years ahead of you.

[User] I hope so.

[Assistant] Looking at suits and differences, you also worked, when you were working with the Shuttle Program, on some of the Shuttle-Mir flights. Is that correct?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I guess we will. Hopefully it'll happen in our lifetime—well, it will in yours, but it won't in mine, probably, but that's okay.

[Assistant] I don't know. I think you've still got quite a few years ahead of you.

[User] I hope so.

[Assistant] Looking at suits and differences, you also worked, when you were working with the Shuttle Program, on some of the Shuttle-Mir flights. Is that correct?

[User] Yes, I worked on some of those, not very many. Most of those, my rotation just didn't put me on them. I think I worked maybe two of those.

[Assistant] In the course of any of that work, did you get exposed at all to any of the Russian suits or differences, or maybe by working with some of the international members, having them compare some differences?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I hope so.

[Assistant] Looking at suits and differences, you also worked, when you were working with the Shuttle Program, on some of the Shuttle-Mir flights. Is that correct?

[User] Yes, I worked on some of those, not very many. Most of those, my rotation just didn't put me on them. I think I worked maybe two of those.

[Assistant] In the course of any of that work, did you get exposed at all to any of the Russian suits or differences, or maybe by working with some of the international members, having them compare some differences?

[User] *I didn't get very involved with that at all. I saw the suit that Shannon [W.] Lucid had, and I saw another suit that one of the other—I think it was Jerry [M.] Linenger, his suit that he had. I saw the EV suit that they wear and was able to take a look at it, then I saw primarily the escape suits that they had for Shannon and for Jerry and for those folks. They're basically a full-pressure suit. Their entrance and closure is a little bit different than ours, but basically it's the same stuff. They've got gloves. They've got a suit. They've got a helmet. It all works basically the same. You get in it, you close it up, you pressurize it. That's about it. There are a lot of similarities, as I'm sure everybody would understand, people taking trade secrets from other people. It happens. It happened then. They copied a lot of our stuff. We may have gotten some ideas from them and put them into effect on ours. I don't know that for a fact, but I'm sure it probably happened.

[Assistant] Looking at the Shuttle-Mir Program, but also tying in a little bit with Apollo-Soyuz, even though you didn't work it, your background was with the Air Force, and you had been trained that Russia's the enemy, basically. How was the feeling when you began to work with them? Was it something you were surprised about, that it happened?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Have you talked to Joe yet?

[Assistant] We have talked with him about setting up an interview, but we haven't had one yet.

[User] Well, I'll tell you what, you're in for an hour or two of pleasure when you start talking to that man.

[Assistant] That's great. Looking back again over the course of your career, would you ever have imagined where it would end up and where it would lead you?

[User] Early in my career I had no idea that I would be doing today what I'm doing, but in the late sixties and early seventies, I knew that what I was doing before I retired is what I wanted to do, so I worked toward that goal. That's the reason I went to work for ILC when I retired. That's one of the reasons that I went to recruiting school and recruited people for the Air Force for two and a half years. That wasn't the most enjoyable experience I ever had, by the way, but I knew that that's what I wanted to do. But as far as way back in my early Air Force career, I had no idea that that would ever happen.\n\n From '70 on, I knew that if I had anything to do with it, I was going to be a NASA suit technician, and that's the way it ended up. Whether that's a lofty goal or just one down here somewhere, that was it, and we made it.

[Assistant] I think that's great. You mentioned ILC, and I think I missed that earlier. You worked with them briefly before you did come on as a NASA suit technician.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I hope so. I hope I made some kind of little dent in the program somewhere along the line.

[Assistant] What's on the books for now?

[User] Man, I've been working so hard since I retired. I retired in January, and I've been remodeling my house and now I'm remodeling my garage. I'm about half through with it. After that, I'm not sure. I'm going to try to not have to work for somebody. I'm just going to try to just do what I want to do. If it works out that I need to go to work for somebody, I'm sure I still have enough friends here and there that know how I work and what I do that I could probably get back into aerospace if I wanted to. I have no immediate plans to return to work. I'm going to enjoy my retirement and do my family projects and home projects and help raise my grandchildren, and that's it.

[Assistant] That sounds like a good deal to me.

[User] Pursue my hobbies. I fish and I play a little bit of golf and work on little projects. I have little garden, vegetable garden, things like that.

[Assistant] Sounds great to me.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Man, I've been working so hard since I retired. I retired in January, and I've been remodeling my house and now I'm remodeling my garage. I'm about half through with it. After that, I'm not sure. I'm going to try to not have to work for somebody. I'm just going to try to just do what I want to do. If it works out that I need to go to work for somebody, I'm sure I still have enough friends here and there that know how I work and what I do that I could probably get back into aerospace if I wanted to. I have no immediate plans to return to work. I'm going to enjoy my retirement and do my family projects and home projects and help raise my grandchildren, and that's it.

[Assistant] That sounds like a good deal to me.

[User] Pursue my hobbies. I fish and I play a little bit of golf and work on little projects. I have little garden, vegetable garden, things like that.

[Assistant] Sounds great to me.

[User] A little community service. I have one committee that I'm on. I live in Webster, and I'm on the Parks, Recreation, and Beautification Board there. So I get to say a little bit about what happens in town there, and I may do some more volunteer work. I've always wanted to build at least one house in this Habitat for Humanity program, so I may get involved in at least one of those, because I've developed some skills recently that can be used there in doing that project at the house. You know, things like that. Other than that, I'm going to enjoy the rest of what I've got left.

[Assistant] Seems like a good plan.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Pursue my hobbies. I fish and I play a little bit of golf and work on little projects. I have little garden, vegetable garden, things like that.

[Assistant] Sounds great to me.

[User] A little community service. I have one committee that I'm on. I live in Webster, and I'm on the Parks, Recreation, and Beautification Board there. So I get to say a little bit about what happens in town there, and I may do some more volunteer work. I've always wanted to build at least one house in this Habitat for Humanity program, so I may get involved in at least one of those, because I've developed some skills recently that can be used there in doing that project at the house. You know, things like that. Other than that, I'm going to enjoy the rest of what I've got left.

[Assistant] Seems like a good plan.

[User] Well, it's a plan.

[Assistant] Looking back at Apollo and Skylab, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about some of the differences between the training you did with the astronauts in Apollo and what you did in Skylab.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] From?

[User] From April 2010 to June of 2012.

[Assistant] Ok, and what project or sector did you work in?

[User] I was a health volunteer.

[Assistant] Great. So Kelli, to start off with, why did you join the Peace Corps?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] From April 2010 to June of 2012.

[Assistant] Ok, and what project or sector did you work in?

[User] I was a health volunteer.

[Assistant] Great. So Kelli, to start off with, why did you join the Peace Corps?

[User]
I had this moment, my freshman year of college, where I just desperately needed to decide that day what I was going to do for the rest of my life. And it was actually Super Bowl Sunday. And I didn't know that because I don't care about sports. So I was just online like Googling nonspecific job opportunities. And I had just dropped my second major, which was social work, because I didn't think I thought it would be too heartbreaking. So I knew I wanted to help people and I knew I wanted to live somewhere that was not the U.S. for at least some time in my life.

So I Googled something like jobs, helping people, other countries. And that took me to the Peace Corps website. And I spent maybe four or five minutes on the website. I never knew any returned volunteers. I didn't know a lot about the Peace Corps. And I was like, that's what I'm doing. And I called my mom during the Super Bowl. My parents are sports fans, so they were watching the football game. And I said, I'm going to join the Peace Corps when I graduate from college. And she said something like, that's, no, that's too far away. Don't do that. And then she said, actually, can we talk about this later, after the game? And I was like, oh, is there a football game today? And she's like, it's the Super Bowl. And I was like, oh yeah, no. We’ve got a couple of years to talk about it. Just thought I'd give you a heads up. And then I just kind of stuck with it and applied and joined the Peace Corps.

[Assistant] How long did it take you from? Did you apply right then?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No, I applied after my junior year. It was from the time that I hit apply on the application on the website until I got on a plane, it was a year and nine months. That was back when the applications took a little longer and you couldn't, like, apply to a specific country or job.

[Assistant] What year was that?

[User] That was, I left in 2010.

[Assistant] Yeah. And what college did you graduate from?

[User] I went to Abilene Christian University. Mostly I just wanted to buy myself time after college to figure out what I was going to do with my life. And it worked, I figured it out.

[Assistant] What was your upbringing like? Did you see things in your life before Peace Corps that shaped that decision or that shaped your shaped your service? Did you travel much?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That was, I left in 2010.

[Assistant] Yeah. And what college did you graduate from?

[User] I went to Abilene Christian University. Mostly I just wanted to buy myself time after college to figure out what I was going to do with my life. And it worked, I figured it out.

[Assistant] What was your upbringing like? Did you see things in your life before Peace Corps that shaped that decision or that shaped your shaped your service? Did you travel much?

[User] I had never traveled. When I was in college in preparation for joining the Peace Corps, I did like a lot of work to kind of pad my resume, to make them want me more. I studied abroad in England and in Ireland. That was the first time I left the country. So growing up, I grew up in East Texas, in a city called Tyler, Texas, and, I had a really cool family and it was really nice, but I always wanted to live in another country. I was just always really interested in that. And even as a kid, I would always tell my parents that I was emigrating. I was just going to go somewhere else. And especially in the winter, it was east Texas. The winters were not bad. I just have a low tolerance for it. I would say I'm moving to the equator. And actually I did Peace Corps Response too, and I impulse applied to a Peace Corps Response one cold February day. I’m moving to the equator! And then I did move to the equator. Yeah, I just always wanted to do, I always wanted to live in another country and the career path I'd been on. Well, as an adult and also all the things that interested me as a kid, were like helping professions, so it was inevitable.

[Assistant] Did you know where you were going when you applied or when you were three months before you left even?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I went to Abilene Christian University. Mostly I just wanted to buy myself time after college to figure out what I was going to do with my life. And it worked, I figured it out.

[Assistant] What was your upbringing like? Did you see things in your life before Peace Corps that shaped that decision or that shaped your shaped your service? Did you travel much?

[User] I had never traveled. When I was in college in preparation for joining the Peace Corps, I did like a lot of work to kind of pad my resume, to make them want me more. I studied abroad in England and in Ireland. That was the first time I left the country. So growing up, I grew up in East Texas, in a city called Tyler, Texas, and, I had a really cool family and it was really nice, but I always wanted to live in another country. I was just always really interested in that. And even as a kid, I would always tell my parents that I was emigrating. I was just going to go somewhere else. And especially in the winter, it was east Texas. The winters were not bad. I just have a low tolerance for it. I would say I'm moving to the equator. And actually I did Peace Corps Response too, and I impulse applied to a Peace Corps Response one cold February day. I’m moving to the equator! And then I did move to the equator. Yeah, I just always wanted to do, I always wanted to live in another country and the career path I'd been on. Well, as an adult and also all the things that interested me as a kid, were like helping professions, so it was inevitable.

[Assistant] Did you know where you were going when you applied or when you were three months before you left even?

[User] Ok, so I applied. At that time, you could tell them like three parts of the world that you wanted to, like that were your preference, your top three, but you couldn't give them like a country or anything.

[Assistant] So do you remember what your top three were?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yeah, after I applied. He contacted me and started sending me emails and letting me know what was next in the process, and at the time you still had to mail everything in and get it back by mail. It's a lot more streamlined now. But, yeah, he contacted me and we did my interview in his office. He was in Dallas and I was in Abilene, so I had to drive like three hours to Dallas and I stayed with my brother the night before the interview. And the office was in this big government building in downtown Dallas and I was like 21 at the time. And my brother offered just to take the day off and drive me to the interview. He was like, I don't want you to have to drive in downtown Dallas, having never lived here, and then going into an interview. I'll just drive you. And he did. It was very sweet. And then he took me to breakfast after because I was too nervous to eat. Yeah. But I hear they do interviews like over the phone now. Which sounds really nice.

[Assistant] What kind of questions did the interviewer ask you?

[User] The interviewer asked. It was mostly just have you considered all of these things, have you considered living really far away from your family? And what are you going to do when, uh, you don't know many people and all that? Yeah, just wanted to make sure that I really thought it through. And I answered that, like, you answer any of your questions for your first job out of college. I just told him yes to everything. Yeah, no, totally, it'll be fine. And, and then he asked me about my relationship status and if I needed a relationship worksheet and I was super single, so it was fine. Yeah, he just wanted to know if I had considered everything. And I definitely thought that I had. So I told him, yeah, totally, I know everything.

[Assistant] And how long was it from your interview to when you got your invitation?

[User] It was, I want to say, like a little more than a year, yeah.

[Assistant] It's a long time.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It was, I want to say, like a little more than a year, yeah.

[Assistant] It's a long time.

[User] Yeah, I got, oh, I got something else before that though. Oh, my nomination came like maybe a month later. Which did not include a country or a job.

[Assistant] Right.

[User]
So, there was that. I was preparing for most of my college career since I knew I wanted to do the Peace Corps, for a good job in the Peace Corps. I looked through all the Peace Corps jobs. And community development sounded really interesting to me, so I took a couple of jobs in community development and neighborhood relations and I minored in community development for a second and then dropped it. Um, but then I ended up being nominated to education, which I didn't have experience in, and then ended up being a health volunteer in a school. So I was a guidance and counseling teacher, which in Botswana, guidance and counseling is a subject in school.

It's really cool. You don't get any grades or have any homework. You just have an adult you can talk to you about stuff, and you talk about things you need to know for life, like a life skills class. And that also included sex ed, which is why it fell under health, because everyone in Botswana, all the Peace Corps volunteers in Botswana, I think from the early 2000s, were health volunteers. We'd been there since they got their independence and then in the late ‘90s, they were doing really well. They have a really strong economy. They're really proud of their not being corrupt. And they're like, you know what, use your resources other places, we're doing fine. But the HIV pandemic hit really hard in Botswana and so they invited us back. And everyone was just health sector and in different working in different capacities, but all in health. When I was there, it was somewhere around 25 percent of the population, one in four, had HIV. When I checked most recently, it was down to like 21 to 23, I think.

[Assistant] One in 22 or 23?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yeah, I got, oh, I got something else before that though. Oh, my nomination came like maybe a month later. Which did not include a country or a job.

[Assistant] Right.

[User]
So, there was that. I was preparing for most of my college career since I knew I wanted to do the Peace Corps, for a good job in the Peace Corps. I looked through all the Peace Corps jobs. And community development sounded really interesting to me, so I took a couple of jobs in community development and neighborhood relations and I minored in community development for a second and then dropped it. Um, but then I ended up being nominated to education, which I didn't have experience in, and then ended up being a health volunteer in a school. So I was a guidance and counseling teacher, which in Botswana, guidance and counseling is a subject in school.

It's really cool. You don't get any grades or have any homework. You just have an adult you can talk to you about stuff, and you talk about things you need to know for life, like a life skills class. And that also included sex ed, which is why it fell under health, because everyone in Botswana, all the Peace Corps volunteers in Botswana, I think from the early 2000s, were health volunteers. We'd been there since they got their independence and then in the late ‘90s, they were doing really well. They have a really strong economy. They're really proud of their not being corrupt. And they're like, you know what, use your resources other places, we're doing fine. But the HIV pandemic hit really hard in Botswana and so they invited us back. And everyone was just health sector and in different working in different capacities, but all in health. When I was there, it was somewhere around 25 percent of the population, one in four, had HIV. When I checked most recently, it was down to like 21 to 23, I think.

[Assistant] One in 22 or 23?

[User] No, no. 22 or 23 percent. Yeah.

[Assistant] So that's closer to one in five.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] O-o-o! It’s a lot of tongue waggling. You stick your tongue out of your mouth and go back and forth and make a loud noise. That's what the women do. And the men do this like low grunting. O-o-o. And then when they're really excited, women will get up and dance and they kind of come over and dance around you. And it's really fun and it's really cool. And it was my favorite thing for the years that I lived there. But the abrupt introduction to that when I was feeling culture shock for the very first time and just realizing I had left the country was, it was a lot. And I was like, I don't know what to do.

[Assistant] Was this in the morning after you arrived?

[User] No, this is a few days later. We had a couple of days just to wake up to adjust to that.

[Assistant] Yeah, acclimate.

[User] Yeah, I think it was in the evening and I got matched with my family and my host mom was young. She was maybe like nine or 10 years older than I was at the time. She was in her early thirties and she had three kids who were such sweethearts. And she was really nice. And my host dad was really nice. And they're a great family. And I think it was just my host mom who came to the ceremony and she was so sweet. And the thing I really love about Botswana, one, is that they're a very affectionate culture and I'm a really affectionate person. So she grabbed my hand and walked me back to my seat and sat down like put her hands on my legs. And she was just talking to me and then leaning over me to talk to her friends. And it was just really casual and easy. And she told me what my Setswana name was, which that whole day I had to keep asking her what my name was. It was Tumisang, which means to proclaim.

[Assistant] How did you get that name?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No, this is a few days later. We had a couple of days just to wake up to adjust to that.

[Assistant] Yeah, acclimate.

[User] Yeah, I think it was in the evening and I got matched with my family and my host mom was young. She was maybe like nine or 10 years older than I was at the time. She was in her early thirties and she had three kids who were such sweethearts. And she was really nice. And my host dad was really nice. And they're a great family. And I think it was just my host mom who came to the ceremony and she was so sweet. And the thing I really love about Botswana, one, is that they're a very affectionate culture and I'm a really affectionate person. So she grabbed my hand and walked me back to my seat and sat down like put her hands on my legs. And she was just talking to me and then leaning over me to talk to her friends. And it was just really casual and easy. And she told me what my Setswana name was, which that whole day I had to keep asking her what my name was. It was Tumisang, which means to proclaim.

[Assistant] How did you get that name?

[User] She picked it before she met me. Yeah, they just told them to pick a name for their volunteer, like before they were introduced.

[Assistant] What language was she speaking to you?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yeah, I think it was in the evening and I got matched with my family and my host mom was young. She was maybe like nine or 10 years older than I was at the time. She was in her early thirties and she had three kids who were such sweethearts. And she was really nice. And my host dad was really nice. And they're a great family. And I think it was just my host mom who came to the ceremony and she was so sweet. And the thing I really love about Botswana, one, is that they're a very affectionate culture and I'm a really affectionate person. So she grabbed my hand and walked me back to my seat and sat down like put her hands on my legs. And she was just talking to me and then leaning over me to talk to her friends. And it was just really casual and easy. And she told me what my Setswana name was, which that whole day I had to keep asking her what my name was. It was Tumisang, which means to proclaim.

[Assistant] How did you get that name?

[User] She picked it before she met me. Yeah, they just told them to pick a name for their volunteer, like before they were introduced.

[Assistant] What language was she speaking to you?

[User] English. Their official language is English. So everybody knows English. And that's like the business language of, everybody learned English in school. And as a teacher, I was required to teach in English. But their national language is Setswana. So that's everybody's first language and that's how everybody talks to their family and their friends and like when they're out in public. But usually when they saw me, they would switch to English because they just assume. I mean, they were right.

[Assistant] Did you learn any Setswana?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] She picked it before she met me. Yeah, they just told them to pick a name for their volunteer, like before they were introduced.

[Assistant] What language was she speaking to you?

[User] English. Their official language is English. So everybody knows English. And that's like the business language of, everybody learned English in school. And as a teacher, I was required to teach in English. But their national language is Setswana. So that's everybody's first language and that's how everybody talks to their family and their friends and like when they're out in public. But usually when they saw me, they would switch to English because they just assume. I mean, they were right.

[Assistant] Did you learn any Setswana?

[User] I tried. I learned a little bit of Setswana. I can make small talk and Setswana and ask for directions and order lunch and tell the classroom to be quiet and pay attention. But I had English as such a crutch that I didn't learn it very well.

[Assistant] Did Peace Corps teach you any Setswana or was it all?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] English. Their official language is English. So everybody knows English. And that's like the business language of, everybody learned English in school. And as a teacher, I was required to teach in English. But their national language is Setswana. So that's everybody's first language and that's how everybody talks to their family and their friends and like when they're out in public. But usually when they saw me, they would switch to English because they just assume. I mean, they were right.

[Assistant] Did you learn any Setswana?

[User] I tried. I learned a little bit of Setswana. I can make small talk and Setswana and ask for directions and order lunch and tell the classroom to be quiet and pay attention. But I had English as such a crutch that I didn't learn it very well.

[Assistant] Did Peace Corps teach you any Setswana or was it all?

[User] Yes, they taught us so much Setswana. Our trainings, so to go back to how we arrived. So usually Peace Corps training is three months, but ours was only two months, and we had four hours of Setswana classes in the morning. Sometimes six, usually four. And then four hours in the afternoon of HIV education and sometimes more specific to what field we were in. Like I was in high school, so they were teaching us life skills stuff. But, yeah, it's a Bantu language, which I didn't know that was even a kind of language. I feel like, I don't know, French or Spanish or whatever, I have at least heard some of those words before. But with Setswana, I had never heard anyone speak, so I didn't know it was a language, I didn't know was a language class, which is embarrassing. So, so many people speak Bantu languages in the world. But yeah, it's not. Like in the scope of languages, it's not a terribly difficult language to learn. But because they had absolutely no context and I don't know any other languages, I don't know about like how to learn languages. I did a terrible job with it.

[Assistant] Is the alphabet the same?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yeah. Um, there's some different noises that we don't have, which took me a long time. There's one that's kind of guttural, like a grr, which I didn't learn until I got a cold and I was like, this helps. But there's the TL noise. And that took me, there's a TL and a THL and I would say it with some just some kids in my neighborhood. Kids are really wonderful language teachers, and they'd be like, tl, thl, and they sound the same. And they're like, they're different. And I'm like, they sound the same! And they'd be like, no, listen. And I'm like, no, that sounds the same.

[Assistant] A slight variation on click.

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] So what you said there were 57 people in your group. Were there different sectors that was it broken into, two or three or how many different sectors was the group broken into?

[User] There were four. So let’s see if I can remember them. This is a funny thing, there was a community outreach one, which was what I was prepared for, and they were at like clinics and they were doing social work with nurses and social workers. And then there was the DAC office, what did that stand for? District AIDS Council, I think. So they were like in a government position and they worked with like funding HIV and AIDS projects. And then the fourth one was NGO. They worked with nonprofits.

[Assistant] But it was all under the health sector?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] So what you said there were 57 people in your group. Were there different sectors that was it broken into, two or three or how many different sectors was the group broken into?

[User] There were four. So let’s see if I can remember them. This is a funny thing, there was a community outreach one, which was what I was prepared for, and they were at like clinics and they were doing social work with nurses and social workers. And then there was the DAC office, what did that stand for? District AIDS Council, I think. So they were like in a government position and they worked with like funding HIV and AIDS projects. And then the fourth one was NGO. They worked with nonprofits.

[Assistant] But it was all under the health sector?

[User] They were all health volunteers because like I said, Botswana is doing really well as a country, but they just need a lot of help with AIDS.

[Assistant] The AIDS crisis. And what did you learn in your technical training? You spent the morning in language and then you spent the afternoon in technical training. What was that like?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] There were four. So let’s see if I can remember them. This is a funny thing, there was a community outreach one, which was what I was prepared for, and they were at like clinics and they were doing social work with nurses and social workers. And then there was the DAC office, what did that stand for? District AIDS Council, I think. So they were like in a government position and they worked with like funding HIV and AIDS projects. And then the fourth one was NGO. They worked with nonprofits.

[Assistant] But it was all under the health sector?

[User] They were all health volunteers because like I said, Botswana is doing really well as a country, but they just need a lot of help with AIDS.

[Assistant] The AIDS crisis. And what did you learn in your technical training? You spent the morning in language and then you spent the afternoon in technical training. What was that like?

[User] We just learned about HIV. I hadn't had any experience with HIV. And they asked me to get some volunteer experience with HIV and I went and volunteered at an AIDS resource center. But that was like packing up condom packets to hand out and then like volunteering in the food pantry. So I didn't actually learn a lot about the.

[Assistant] Interacting with patients or the community?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] They were all health volunteers because like I said, Botswana is doing really well as a country, but they just need a lot of help with AIDS.

[Assistant] The AIDS crisis. And what did you learn in your technical training? You spent the morning in language and then you spent the afternoon in technical training. What was that like?

[User] We just learned about HIV. I hadn't had any experience with HIV. And they asked me to get some volunteer experience with HIV and I went and volunteered at an AIDS resource center. But that was like packing up condom packets to hand out and then like volunteering in the food pantry. So I didn't actually learn a lot about the.

[Assistant] Interacting with patients or the community?

[User] Or learn anything about HIV. So it was a lot learning about the disease, learning about how it spread, learning to teach people how to keep themselves safe. And then we also just learned a lot about the culture and how to talk about a taboo topic in a culture. They didn't have words in Setswana for a lot of the sex things that we were talking about, they only spoke about them in English. Like I think they did not say sex at all, they said sharing blankets. And they didn't have a word for condom, they just use the word for sock. So a lot of what we did was just getting people comfortable talking about it, because that's what you have to do with HIV education, is that you first have to be comfortable talking about HIV. And I have worked in HIV education since in the U.S. and my Response tour was in Guyana, and that is true everywhere, that it's just really hard to get people to talk. And a lot of your job in HIV education is getting people comfortable with talking about it before you can have genuine conversations about it. I was really lucky. I had teenagers, so they were young and open-minded and I would ask them what adults they could talk to. And they said, we cannot talk to adults about this. It's not OK.

[Assistant] And your training helped you handle those situations, know what to do in those situations?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yeah, they taught us some, well, my training was for education. So they taught us like ways to teach this to kids and like games that you can play. And even with adults that I mean. People like fun, interactive education, so we learned like games to play, to make people comfortable touching condoms and talking about condoms and then just doing condom demonstrations and how to, like, use that.

[Assistant] Can you give an example of one of the games or interaction that you played?

[User] I think one was like blowing up a condom as big as it would go. I think one was like getting as many objects into a condom as you could. And then there was one, oh, this one I really like. That was a line up. And I use this since like in the U.S., where you just print out each step of using a condom on a different sheet of paper and then have everyone hold one step and then they're not allowed to speak, but they have to put themselves in order of how it goes. And it's like get consent. I have opened the condom. All these different things until they're in order and they all have to switch and not talk to each other.

[Assistant] Who taught your training?

[User] So we had language teachers who were. They're really fun. I feel like, if you think about pre-service training like summer camp, which is a really easy parallel, I feel like the language teachers are like the cool counselors.

[Assistant] Were they local?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I think one was like blowing up a condom as big as it would go. I think one was like getting as many objects into a condom as you could. And then there was one, oh, this one I really like. That was a line up. And I use this since like in the U.S., where you just print out each step of using a condom on a different sheet of paper and then have everyone hold one step and then they're not allowed to speak, but they have to put themselves in order of how it goes. And it's like get consent. I have opened the condom. All these different things until they're in order and they all have to switch and not talk to each other.

[Assistant] Who taught your training?

[User] So we had language teachers who were. They're really fun. I feel like, if you think about pre-service training like summer camp, which is a really easy parallel, I feel like the language teachers are like the cool counselors.

[Assistant] Were they local?

[User] Yeah, they were local. Um, they were are a lot of fun. And they did this all the time and yeah, they're really easy to get along with. And the technical training was taught by either currently serving Peace Corps volunteers would come in every once in a while and teach a session on things that they found work really well. And I did that in my later years, too. And sometimes there were staff members, sometimes they had outside professionals come in and teach us things. They had a former minister of health come in. Her name was Sheila Tlou, and she was, I think, my favorite speaker ever. And she just gave us some context on, like the history of Botswana. She had been the minister of health, so she knew some things about it. But, yeah, all kinds of people came in and taught.

[Assistant] Did you how long had Peace Corps been in that country, was that training fairly well developed by the time you got there?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] So we had language teachers who were. They're really fun. I feel like, if you think about pre-service training like summer camp, which is a really easy parallel, I feel like the language teachers are like the cool counselors.

[Assistant] Were they local?

[User] Yeah, they were local. Um, they were are a lot of fun. And they did this all the time and yeah, they're really easy to get along with. And the technical training was taught by either currently serving Peace Corps volunteers would come in every once in a while and teach a session on things that they found work really well. And I did that in my later years, too. And sometimes there were staff members, sometimes they had outside professionals come in and teach us things. They had a former minister of health come in. Her name was Sheila Tlou, and she was, I think, my favorite speaker ever. And she just gave us some context on, like the history of Botswana. She had been the minister of health, so she knew some things about it. But, yeah, all kinds of people came in and taught.

[Assistant] Did you how long had Peace Corps been in that country, was that training fairly well developed by the time you got there?

[User] Yeah, they had been there since ‘63 when Botswana got their independence from England. I think they left in ‘97 and then started again in 2003, maybe. Don’t quote me on that. So, yeah, they've been around for a minute.

[Assistant] Was your staff, the Peace Corps staff, were they familiar with the country, were they experienced or new? Or good? Did they interact with the volunteers at all?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yeah, the Peace Corps staff is in the capital, Gaborone. And then our training was in a village Molepolole, which is one of the maybe the biggest village, which is, I want to say, like an hour from the capital. I think the staff commuted in, which is brutal, but. Yeah, that's where our training was, and then I was placed in a village called Thamaga, which was like halfway between Molepolole and Gaborone. So I just kind of stayed on this one little, lived in this one little region. But I got to travel all over the country and it's a beautiful country.

[Assistant] I would love to hear more about the country. Did you travel during training at all, or were you just kind of seeing that one area?

[User] So our training was really cool in that we got to, I think maybe the third week, fourth week of training, we get to spend a whole week shadowing another volunteer. So they just sent us to a currently serving volunteer’s house. And we stayed in their house and we ate all our meals with them and we went to work with them and we just saw what life was like as a volunteer. And that was really great because I had no idea what to expect at all. And even if you just ask any currently serving volunteer what to expect, they'll all tell you, don't have expectations. It's all so different. And it's, I mean, it's in all places all over the world. So it's all going to be really different and even village to village and job to job. So that was one place that I got to travel. And that was also just like 45 minutes from our training site. And then our sixth or seventh week, we got to go to our actual site that we would be at for the next two years and just like go see our job, meet our coworkers, stay in our house.

[Assistant] How big is Botswana?

[User] It's about the size of Texas.

[Assistant] And so everybody traveled out from the training village. That must have taken a long time for some people to get to their site.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] So our training was really cool in that we got to, I think maybe the third week, fourth week of training, we get to spend a whole week shadowing another volunteer. So they just sent us to a currently serving volunteer’s house. And we stayed in their house and we ate all our meals with them and we went to work with them and we just saw what life was like as a volunteer. And that was really great because I had no idea what to expect at all. And even if you just ask any currently serving volunteer what to expect, they'll all tell you, don't have expectations. It's all so different. And it's, I mean, it's in all places all over the world. So it's all going to be really different and even village to village and job to job. So that was one place that I got to travel. And that was also just like 45 minutes from our training site. And then our sixth or seventh week, we got to go to our actual site that we would be at for the next two years and just like go see our job, meet our coworkers, stay in our house.

[Assistant] How big is Botswana?

[User] It's about the size of Texas.

[Assistant] And so everybody traveled out from the training village. That must have taken a long time for some people to get to their site.

[User] Yeah, for me, it was like 30 minutes, wasn’t long at all.

[Assistant] What was the name of your village?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It's about the size of Texas.

[Assistant] And so everybody traveled out from the training village. That must have taken a long time for some people to get to their site.

[User] Yeah, for me, it was like 30 minutes, wasn’t long at all.

[Assistant] What was the name of your village?

[User] Thamaga. Yeah, but some people had to, like, stay overnight somewhere because there's not roads everywhere. Some people were going all the way to the opposite side of the country. And so they have like less days of actual shadowing just because it took them so long to get that back. For me, it was like I got there before work started.

[Assistant] How did you feel when you got your assignment and realized it was so close to where you'd been doing your training?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yeah, for me, it was like 30 minutes, wasn’t long at all.

[Assistant] What was the name of your village?

[User] Thamaga. Yeah, but some people had to, like, stay overnight somewhere because there's not roads everywhere. Some people were going all the way to the opposite side of the country. And so they have like less days of actual shadowing just because it took them so long to get that back. For me, it was like I got there before work started.

[Assistant] How did you feel when you got your assignment and realized it was so close to where you'd been doing your training?

[User] I was actually really excited because we had driven through that village on our way to visit like a historical site or something like that, and it is such a beautiful place. Like, where we were staying, a large majority of the country is in the Kalahari Desert, so it's mostly just flat. But my village had all these beautiful rock formations and we had stopped in at that village because they had a famous pottery shop, Botsewelo Pottery. And we like stopped in and some people got some pottery and we like walked around like, oh it’s cool. And then I found out that my house was actually on the compound of that pottery shop, so I actually visited basically my front yard before I left. It was just like, it was still pretty big. It was like twenty thousand people. It's a really beautiful geographically, just like kind of a sleepy little village. I really liked it. I'm not going to say at first, I wasn't a little disappointed that I wasn’t like all the way up north in that river delta where it's gorgeous and there's like elephants in your backyard. But I did really love my assignment.

[Assistant] So what was your what was your host family like?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] My host family was really sweet. I had a 14 year old little brother named Poncho and an eight year old little sister, Mompon. And I think she like one or two year old little sister named Mickey. And they are great. My little brother was like, he was just so sweet and just such a good kid. And he cooked dinner for us every night. And I walked in one night and he was like, I asked what he was making for dinner. And he said, I'm making liver. And I was like, oh, good. And they had hosted volunteers for years. And he's like, it's okay, I know Americans don't like liver, I'm cooking you something else. And I was like, Poncho, you're my hero. And I was like, what are you making me? And he said, intestines. And I was like, okay, well thanks buddy.

[Assistant] Get over it.

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] What was your living situation like?

[User] So we were supposed to have, like in our home stay families, we were supposed to have our own room and that was a stipulation. So all five of them slept in one room. And then I had my own room. They all slept in one room in the same bed. And I can't imagine, like trying to sleep with that many people, but they did it every night and they seemed fine with it. We had one bathroom, we had running water and electricity.

[Assistant] Was your house made out of, what was your house made out of?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] What was your living situation like?

[User] So we were supposed to have, like in our home stay families, we were supposed to have our own room and that was a stipulation. So all five of them slept in one room. And then I had my own room. They all slept in one room in the same bed. And I can't imagine, like trying to sleep with that many people, but they did it every night and they seemed fine with it. We had one bathroom, we had running water and electricity.

[Assistant] Was your house made out of, what was your house made out of?

[User] Cinder block and a tin roof, my home stay family. My house, my actual house that I lived in was so, so much nicer than I was expecting.

[Assistant] So your home stay family?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] So we were supposed to have, like in our home stay families, we were supposed to have our own room and that was a stipulation. So all five of them slept in one room. And then I had my own room. They all slept in one room in the same bed. And I can't imagine, like trying to sleep with that many people, but they did it every night and they seemed fine with it. We had one bathroom, we had running water and electricity.

[Assistant] Was your house made out of, what was your house made out of?

[User] Cinder block and a tin roof, my home stay family. My house, my actual house that I lived in was so, so much nicer than I was expecting.

[Assistant] So your home stay family?

[User] Was just during training.

[Assistant] Just during training. So when you left training and went to your village, you had your own?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Cinder block and a tin roof, my home stay family. My house, my actual house that I lived in was so, so much nicer than I was expecting.

[Assistant] So your home stay family?

[User] Was just during training.

[Assistant] Just during training. So when you left training and went to your village, you had your own?

[User] My own whole house on the compound of the pottery shop. And there was just like a rock formation to one side and a church on the other side and a pottery shop and then a road. So I didn't actually have any neighbors, which is has its pros and cons. But it was this big two bedroom house. It was pink, which was fine. And then I had a just like a bare concrete floor. It had a lot of cracks and the ants would come up through and I would have to sweep the ants out of my house like two or three times a day because there were just so many of them.

[Assistant] Did they bite?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Was just during training.

[Assistant] Just during training. So when you left training and went to your village, you had your own?

[User] My own whole house on the compound of the pottery shop. And there was just like a rock formation to one side and a church on the other side and a pottery shop and then a road. So I didn't actually have any neighbors, which is has its pros and cons. But it was this big two bedroom house. It was pink, which was fine. And then I had a just like a bare concrete floor. It had a lot of cracks and the ants would come up through and I would have to sweep the ants out of my house like two or three times a day because there were just so many of them.

[Assistant] Did they bite?

[User] Nope, just kind of took over. It was just during the winter that they would be around. But most of the time it was fine. And then the two bedrooms had a thatched roof, which keeps it really cool and the house really nice. And then I had two bathrooms. One had just the toilet in it and the other one had the shower and the sink in it and a shower. That one, with the shower and the sink, had a window in it to another room that was the storeroom for the pottery shop. And that room, like it was one of the rooms in my house, but I couldn't get to it. And it just had like a door from the outside. It was also connected to my bedroom. So I would hear them in there like working during the day, like talking and gossiping. And I only took showers after business hours because of that. But when I would go in there to wash my hands or something, they'd be like, good morning Tumisang! And I was like, hey how’s it going? And I had a kitchen with a sink and a stove and an oven.

[Assistant] What does Tumisang mean?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] My own whole house on the compound of the pottery shop. And there was just like a rock formation to one side and a church on the other side and a pottery shop and then a road. So I didn't actually have any neighbors, which is has its pros and cons. But it was this big two bedroom house. It was pink, which was fine. And then I had a just like a bare concrete floor. It had a lot of cracks and the ants would come up through and I would have to sweep the ants out of my house like two or three times a day because there were just so many of them.

[Assistant] Did they bite?

[User] Nope, just kind of took over. It was just during the winter that they would be around. But most of the time it was fine. And then the two bedrooms had a thatched roof, which keeps it really cool and the house really nice. And then I had two bathrooms. One had just the toilet in it and the other one had the shower and the sink in it and a shower. That one, with the shower and the sink, had a window in it to another room that was the storeroom for the pottery shop. And that room, like it was one of the rooms in my house, but I couldn't get to it. And it just had like a door from the outside. It was also connected to my bedroom. So I would hear them in there like working during the day, like talking and gossiping. And I only took showers after business hours because of that. But when I would go in there to wash my hands or something, they'd be like, good morning Tumisang! And I was like, hey how’s it going? And I had a kitchen with a sink and a stove and an oven.

[Assistant] What does Tumisang mean?

[User] To proclaim.

[Assistant] Oh, that's your name.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Nope, just kind of took over. It was just during the winter that they would be around. But most of the time it was fine. And then the two bedrooms had a thatched roof, which keeps it really cool and the house really nice. And then I had two bathrooms. One had just the toilet in it and the other one had the shower and the sink in it and a shower. That one, with the shower and the sink, had a window in it to another room that was the storeroom for the pottery shop. And that room, like it was one of the rooms in my house, but I couldn't get to it. And it just had like a door from the outside. It was also connected to my bedroom. So I would hear them in there like working during the day, like talking and gossiping. And I only took showers after business hours because of that. But when I would go in there to wash my hands or something, they'd be like, good morning Tumisang! And I was like, hey how’s it going? And I had a kitchen with a sink and a stove and an oven.

[Assistant] What does Tumisang mean?

[User] To proclaim.

[Assistant] Oh, that's your name.

[User] My name. Yeah, or they would call me Tumi. That's the nickname. Or when you're calling someone like to have them come over to you, you put ‘way’ at the end. So instead of knocking, people would just stand on my front porch and yell my name. They’d go, Tumi! Tumisang! Tumiway! Tumi! Until I came to the door. I was like, you can just knock, it’s fine.

[Assistant] So did you pay rent to the people who owned the pottery shop then?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] To proclaim.

[Assistant] Oh, that's your name.

[User] My name. Yeah, or they would call me Tumi. That's the nickname. Or when you're calling someone like to have them come over to you, you put ‘way’ at the end. So instead of knocking, people would just stand on my front porch and yell my name. They’d go, Tumi! Tumisang! Tumiway! Tumi! Until I came to the door. I was like, you can just knock, it’s fine.

[Assistant] So did you pay rent to the people who owned the pottery shop then?

[User] I did, yeah. My landlady was also the manager of the pottery shop. She was fierce, she was on top of anything that I ever needed help with, which, that wasn't the situation with all of the other volunteers, that people like the landlords with take care of things, but.

[Assistant] Did everybody live in their own house or have their own house?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] My name. Yeah, or they would call me Tumi. That's the nickname. Or when you're calling someone like to have them come over to you, you put ‘way’ at the end. So instead of knocking, people would just stand on my front porch and yell my name. They’d go, Tumi! Tumisang! Tumiway! Tumi! Until I came to the door. I was like, you can just knock, it’s fine.

[Assistant] So did you pay rent to the people who owned the pottery shop then?

[User] I did, yeah. My landlady was also the manager of the pottery shop. She was fierce, she was on top of anything that I ever needed help with, which, that wasn't the situation with all of the other volunteers, that people like the landlords with take care of things, but.

[Assistant] Did everybody live in their own house or have their own house?

[User] Yes. Everybody had their own house. Trying to make sure that was true. Some people had apartments and married couples shared a house, but yeah, everybody had their own place.

[Assistant] What was the rest of your group like?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I did, yeah. My landlady was also the manager of the pottery shop. She was fierce, she was on top of anything that I ever needed help with, which, that wasn't the situation with all of the other volunteers, that people like the landlords with take care of things, but.

[Assistant] Did everybody live in their own house or have their own house?

[User] Yes. Everybody had their own house. Trying to make sure that was true. Some people had apartments and married couples shared a house, but yeah, everybody had their own place.

[Assistant] What was the rest of your group like?

[User] The rest of my group was a lot of fun. There were so many of us that, like after training, everybody went to their own parts of the country and it was kind of hard to get to. So whenever we had like an in-service training or mid-service training, it was just a big party because we were so excited to see everybody. And sometimes I think there is a part of the country that was easier for me to get to, it was only like five and a half hours on a bus, so I’d go up and visit them sometimes. But when we wanted to get together, because we all had our own houses, we would just like to have a party and invite everybody. And people would come in on Saturday and then just like spend the night on Saturday night and then go back on Sunday. But it was really fun. It was like, it was like an adult slumber party. People just put their sleeping bags on the floor and we'd hang out and cook a really fancy dinner. Yeah, my group was great. I'm still friends with some of them and they were wonderful. One of the older volunteers sends me an email every year on my birthday. It's really sweet.

[Assistant] How close was the closest volunteer to you?