Heart of Palms: My Peace Corps Years in Tranquilla

By Meredith W. Cornett and Florence Reed

Heart of Palms is a clear-eyed memoir of Peace Corps service in the rural Panamanian village of Tranquilla through the eyes of a young American woman trained as a community forester.

In the storied fifty-year history of the US Peace Corps, Heart of Palms is the first Peace Corps memoir set in Panama, the slender isthmus that connects two continents and two oceans. In her memoir, Meredith Cornett transports readers to the remote village of Tranquilla, where dugout canoes are the mainstay of daily transportation, life and nature are permeated by witchcraft, and a restful night’s sleep may be disturbed by a raiding phalanx of army ants.

Cornett is sent to help counter the rapid deforestation that is destroying the ecosystem and livelihoods of the Panama Canal watershed region. Her first chapters chronicle her arrival and struggles not only with the social issues of language, loneliness, and insecurity, but also with the tragicomic basics of mastering open-fire cookery and intrusions by insects and poisonous snakes. As she grows to understand the region and its people, her keen eye discerns the overwhelming scope of her task. Unable to plant trees faster than they are lost, she writes with moving clarity about her sense of powerlessness.

Combating deforestation leads Cornett into an equally fierce battle against her own feelings of fear and isolation. Her journey to Panama becomes a parallel journey into herself. In this way, Heart of Palms is much more than a record of her Peace Corps service; it is also a moving environmental coming-of-age story and nuanced meditation on one village’s relationship to nature. When she returns home two years later, Cornett brings with her both skills and experience and a remarkable, newfound sense of confidence and mission.

Writing with rueful, self-deprecating humor, Cornett lets us ride along with her on a wave of naïve optimism, a wave that breaks not only on fear and intimidation, but also on tedium and isolation. Heart of Palms offers a bracing alternative to the romantic idealism common to Peace Corps memoirs and will be valued as a welcome addition to writing about the Peace Corps and environmental service.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780817387402

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Introduction

The Idealism of the Peace Corps: Dead or Alive? At age twelve, I had hoped that the bold title of my first term paper would mask an underlying anxiety over my new attempt at thematic writing. In researching the project, I had perused several Peace Corps brochures; I knew that the vaunted ideals of international service, friendship, and cultural exchange were alive and well. But I liked the doubt posed by my title and hung on to it even as the paper devolved into an exposition on Peace Corps history, the number of countries served, and the application process.

In truth, the Peace Corps's idealistic principles are constants that have spanned five decades since the program's inception in 1961. During his presidential campaign in 1960, then Senator John F. Kennedy proposed a peace corps of talented men and women who would apply their skills in developing nations around the world. Young people, mostly recent college students, responded enthusiastically to his call for service. Kennedy's vision was a direct response to the Cold War, creating an overseas service corps to compete with an existing Soviet program. Shortly after taking office, President Kennedy tapped Sargent Shriver, his own brother-in-law, to lead the task force that shaped the organization. On March 1, 1961, Kennedy issued the executive order that created the Peace Corps, with Shriver at the helm. Less than six months later, the first groups of Peace Corps Volunteers departed for Ghana and Tanganyika.

Long after turning in that report, I returned time and again to those first brochures. Each pamphlet sported images of attractive, wholesome-looking young Americans. They cultivated fields, built latrines, or planted trees. Adoring host-country children surrounded most of them, whether in a cement-block classroom, a church kitchen, or a pasture. Some of the Volunteers (in a Peace Corps context, Volunteer always has a capital V) were in native dress. I knew I had to join their glamorous ranks, or my life would have no meaning.

Of course, there was no way for me to know in 1978 that I would actually realize my dream of joining the Peace Corps and that my country of service would be the Republic of Panamá, where the dictator General Omar Torrijos had ordered the Peace Corps to leave in the early 1970s. I had yet to grasp that US foreign policy was the driving force behind the Peace Corps's placement of its Volunteers. The Peace Corps fantasy I had fallen in love with was a naïve mixture of adventure, romance, and good