When John Kennedy founded the Peace Corps in 1961, young Tom Scanlon of Scranton, PA was quick to enlist and join the first group of volunteers to go abroad after Congress passed the Peace Corps Act. Now three decades later, Scanlon's letters provide a vivid memoir of those very different days-when, for example, Communism was winning the ideological war for the minds of people in the developing world. Tom and forty-four others lived as Chile's campesinos lived, ate what they ate, sang what they sang, and realized dreams such as helping farmers organize to sell their goods cooperatively. Tom and his group invented something vital as they made one small piece of the world a slightly better place---as 7,000 Peace Corps volunteers around the world continue to do today. Perhaps things were not so different then---but as these letters relate, the early volunteers lived in times of gritty challenge, drama, romance and danger in the spectacular landscapes of southern Chile.