Oral history
Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection
RPCV-ACC-2017-039
Sylva Telford Staab served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkey from 1965 to 1967. She was motivated by a visit from Sargent Shriver to her college campus, and applied to the Peace Corps during her senior year. Her training began in Oregon at Portland State University, and continued in Ankara, Turkey. Staab was assigned to work on a rural community development project in western Turkey in a village near Edirne. After her marriage to a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, Sylva moved to her husband’s village, where she worked with women in health care, began a preschool, and helped develop a library with funding from CARE. The couple spent their final five months of Peace Corps service teaching English to adults in Ankara. The Staabs returned to Turkey to visit the village in 2001 and again in 2014. Interviewed and recorded by Phyllis Noble, 7 March 2017. 2 digital files (web streaming files combined into 1 file).