James Jouppi

After graduating with Cornell’s civil engineering class of 1971 and a five-week stint as a taxi driver in New York City, Jim Jouppi shipped out for a Peace Corps adventure in Thailand which was interrupted by his involvement in an unthinkable dilemma, partly of his own making. He was later employed in the States as an engineer-in-training, carpenter apprentice, refugee worker, and postal worker, spent three years in the Army as a medic, and earned a master’s degree in Tropical Public Health Civil Englineering. . His first sustained attempt at memoir writing was critiqued by the late Dr. John Shade of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation in 1978 as “a statement of the times which has to be presented as other than the truth because too many people are not ready for the truth.” His self-published Peace Corps survival manual was later critiqued by Buckminster Fuller protégée James (Jay) Baldwin as “part of your basic homework if you are considering the Peace Corps or any other government-sponsored assistance program.”