Edward Seligman – 50th Reunion Essay

Edward Seligman

2004 11th St. NW, #324

Washington, DC 20001

ned_stepup@yahoo.com

202-569-1976

Education: Johns Hopkins MIPP 1986

College: Jonathan Edwards

For those innocent years of the late teens, Yale was as good a place as any to be in the turmoil and upheavals of the late ’60s—in fact better than most places—but the calm that college may have represented for previous generations escaped us. The big issues then and now are the same: poverty, racism, war, and ecology, the four horsemen who follow us ceaselessly. Back then, we were surrounded by those issues as everpresent forces—Vietnam and the draft, the inner-city but a few blocks away and the filth of the Quinnipiac River nearby. Nightly we watched Walter “Sickness” (aka Cronkite or krankenheit, the German word for sickness) deliver his monologues on these issues with the mind-numbing images of the war in SE Asia, the assassinations of King and RFK, the burning and riots in the cities. By graduation, I was ready to move on; within three months of June I was in Africa. I have only returned occasionally since.

The first eight years were spent largely working with local communities building small earthen dams to improve their water supplies. A former Yale roommate convinced me to return, claiming that I no longer knew what the US was all about, so I came back to readapt in the later ’70s. That failed, so back I went to Africa for another eight years, with a year in the middle when I settled in to get a master’s. At the end of the ’80s, I was again in the US working for the World Wildlife Fund.

When Clinton took over, I was offered a job that cemented the future: director of the Peace Corps program in a small country in the Gulf of Guinea. Although this job lasted only three years, it offered me the opportunity to do what I had been planning to do for a few years prior to that: to open my own non-governmental organization (NGO in the lingo). In the late ’90s, we started this organization that aims to help communities identify and solve their local problems. Whenever possible, we seek local solutions to those problems so our reliance on the outside is minimal. Nothing grandiose, just working with small groups on generally small problems. As anybody who has done this kind of thing knows, it’s the little things that count. Not really what Yale is all about, but that doesn’t mean that the message is incorrect. I have always enjoyed living in out-of-the-way places; in my opinion, one learns more and more quickly when outside one’s comfort zone than within it.