Alan Kobrin '68
The Size of the Moon
Even before he entered the Peace Corps, political activism was becoming the defining motif in Alan Kobrin's life. It could hardly be otherwise: Kobrin, a psychology major, completed his Kenyon education in 1968, a tumultuous year during which the Tet offensive raised new questions about American involvement in Vietnam, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated, and the short-lived "Prague Spring" revolutionized Czechoslovakia.
The Kenyon campus was roiled by the anti-war movement. Kobrin was one of many students who campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in the Democratic primaries. He also managed the radio station, which sent its own correspondents on special assignments, including an interview in Washington, D.C., with General Lewis Blaine Hershey, who directed the Selective Service System and thus the draft lottery.
After briefly-very briefly-considering the Air Force Reserve, Kobrin turned to the Peace Corps as a logical expression of his political interests. "My initial idea was that there are places all around the world that I don't know about," he says, "people who manage to live their lives without having been brought up here in the States. I thought there was something to be learned by going overseas and living in a different culture."
The differences were startling. One week, Kobrin was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, working as a substitute teacher in an inner-city school. The next, he was in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in Peace Corps training. Within a few weeks, he found himself in a small, dusty town of about two thousand people called Mattru Jong, teaching science and art.
"When Armstrong walked on the moon," Kobrin says, "I was teaching science class in Sierra Leone. I had to contextualize [the moon walk] for our students, many of whose parents said that this was impossible because the moon was the size of a quarter."
Despite such challenges, he had enormous admiration for his students. "They couldn't do enough to learn; they were just model students," he says. "Some of them hoofed it for hours to get to the school, carrying huge sacks of rice on their backs that would become their food for the semester. They saw a way out through education."
Since his eight-month stint in Mattru Jong, Korbin has pursued a wide range of endeavors-teaching English in Brazil, working as a photographer in Latin America, teaching Portuguese back in the States, and serving as a Portuguese translator for the Immigration Service. In Florida, his home since 1985, he has helped run a community radio station, worked as an administrator at Florida International University in Miami, and designed Web sites. He is also active in the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition.
Political activism remains a vital part of his life. He served as the Florida coordinator for Ralph Nader's 2000 presidential campaign and has volunteered extensively for the Green Party (including having served as a national cochair), which he sees as the most promising vehicle for the kinds of changes he feels are needed in American society. In Miami, where he lives, he also helped found groups that were opposed to both the Gulf War of 1991 and the 2003 Iraq war.
Looking back, Kobrin says that the Peace Corps served in part as "PR for America, to show that we had young, idealistic people who were willing to go around the world and do things." He adds: "I think the Peace Corps always offered more to the people in it than to the people in the host countries."
His Peace Corps service was instrumental in affirming the values that fuel his activism. "I do not feel content," he says, "unless I'm doing something to try and make this a better experience for all of us." Political engagement "is what I do, because I don't know how not to do it."
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