That span of years (1982 to 1991) reflects the whole series of jobs I had with Peace Corps. I got every possible extension I could from the 5-year rule and pushed it to 8
     Then a friend suggested I apply for a job in the State Department as a civil service trainer at the Foreign Service Institute — I’ve been here ever since. I am the head of one of the five schools of the Institute — we focus on transitions into and out of the U.S. foreign affairs community, as well as to overseas assignments and repatriation. We provide security awareness training, cross-cultural, protocol, personal adjustment, career planning, and related training, information and counseling services.

Let’s go back to the Peace Corps training for a moment. From your experience in the Peace Corps how well does the U.S. do cross-cultural training?

My first experience with Peace Corps training was what got me interested in cross-cultural training as a career. Like many Volunteers, I had an extended family home-stay experience early in my program as part of the cross-cultural training. I found it humbling, painful, joyful, and fascinating. Later in my career as a trainer for Peace Corps, it was one of the areas that I never tired of — that I always wanted to spend more time on, even when the training program participants weren’t that wild about spending more time on it.
     I know that for many governments, NGO, and private sector employees headed for international assignments, interest in cross-cultural training is primarily limited to culture-specific training, that is, people are interested mostly in training to make them more effective in a particular target culture. That’s understandable, but unfortunate: culture-generic cross-cultural training often allows open-minded travelers to explore a higher level of meaning and abstraction, and reap more portable, tangible, and reliable benefits through their efforts.

I’ve known Craig Storti (Morocco 1970–72) since I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the late ’70s/early ’80s. I have delighted not only in his commercial success as an author of cross-cultural books, but in the development and sophistication of his writing.
American University’s Gary Weaver has influenced generations of cross-cultural trainers. There are many great authors and trainers associated with Peace Corps cross-cultural training and I believe part of the achievement of the Third Goal is not only in sharing an understanding of other peoples and cultures of the world (culture-specific) among Americans, but also in sharing an understanding of how other cultures vary across the gamut of countries, including our own (culture-generic). Peace Corps has a proud role and history in the development of cross-cultural communication and training as a field.