The Role of the Peace Corps

The Peace Corps selected and trained volunteers to staff the blasting project and our group, India 89 (the 89th project in India), arrived in Kolar in late December of 1969. We brought with us a glimpse of a new age to the district’s villages, where change, if it came at all, came slowly. Many of the villages were still untouched by any form of mechanization. Barefoot farmers cultivated their fields in the same way that they had been doing for generations: struggling behind a bullock that drew a rudimentary wooden plow that was little more than a stick with a metal tip.

Respect for tradition was embedded in every aspect of this subsistence agrarian culture, and we found that when East met West, as it did most days, it was in a collision between the legacy of the past and the influences of the present. To those farmers and villagers, who we would live and work among, it must have seemed as though we stepped out of a time machine. Seen through their eyes, our rock drills, compressors, and pumps came from another world.