#14
Moscow Times
January 15, 2003
End of Peace Corps an Opportunity Lost
By Oksana Yablokova
Staff Writer

When he flew to China last summer to renew his visa, U.S. Peace Corps volunteer Alex Wendel expected to be back in his Sakhalin classroom teaching English within days.

But the Russian Consulate in Shenyang bluntly told him that his application had been rejected, along with those of the two other Sakhalin-based Peace Corps volunteers.

"I thought I would be gone for a week and did not say goodbye to any of my friends or students," Wendel, 27, said in a telephone interview from Kansas City, Missouri. "I never had a chance to go back, so I had my things shipped to me in the U.S."

Wendel was one of 30 Peace Corps workers teaching English and business who were denied re-entry to Russia last summer. Then in December, the government said the remaining 27 Peace Corps volunteers in the country were no longer needed. The decision came 10 days after Federal Security Service head Nikolai Patrushev suggested that some volunteers might be involved in intelligence activities.

Peace Corps officials denied this.

"Any allegations that Peace Corps volunteers are involved in intelligence activity are false and groundless," said Jeff Hay, who oversees the Peace Corps in Russia.

Hay's predecessor, Tim Douglas, who was country director in 2000-02, said the FSB has failed to back up its claim with any solid evidence, and that makes the decision to send the Peace Corps packing all the more disappointing.

"The fact is that there are still so few opportunities between two former hostile superpowers to practice partnership. That is the real loss," Douglas said.

More than 700 volunteers have taught English and provided business education across the country since Russia signed a Peace Corps agreement with the United States in 1992. Currently, there are 19 volunteers serving in western Russia and eight in the Far East, and their terms end this summer.

However, U.S. officials familiar with the situation said the volunteers were expected to be sent home within the next few weeks. They are waiting for a decision from Peace Corps headquarters in Washington on when they must leave.

The hosts of the Peace Corps volunteers said hundreds of young Russians have been cheated of a unique opportunity to practice English and learn about U.S. culture. "Alex not only taught English to students but trained our teachers and took part in summer programs for students. His mission here was broader; he helped bridge the cultural divide," said Irina Malamur, deputy director of Lyceum, where Wendel worked.

"Needless to say, our children and parents were upset when they found out in September that there would be no classes with Alex any more," she said by telephone from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.

Her regrets were shared by Dmitry Abramov, head of the international department of the Academy of Public Services in Kaluga, which lost Peace Corps volunteer Jeff Decker last summer.

"It's a shame that their activities have been found to be no longer needed, and our program will be thwarted," he said.

Decker helped the academy get a Peace Corps grant to buy an English-language library and equip a classroom with computers and software to learn foreign languages, Abramov said.

Decker, 24, described his year in Kaluga as amazing and said he had looked forward to serving another 12 months. "My Russian language was improving, I made many great Russian friends and am very anxious to come back and visit them," he said from Iowa. "I even made a Russian name for myself. Every time I walked through the rynok everyone would call me molodoi chelovek, so my Russian names is Molodoi Chelovekovich."

Wendel, who taught 308 students during his year on Sakhalin, lamented that his abrupt return home had prevented him from fulfilling his mission as a volunteer. "One of the goals of the Peace Corps activities is that we are supposed to return home and educate people about Russia," he said. "Instead of that, in my case everyone wanted to hear about the visa thing."

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