Interview with Kendall Dudley, August 2, 2023

Interview Summary

Kendall Dudley served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran from 1967 to 1969 as a town planner for the Ministry of the Interior. He traces the start of his concern for international service to seeing the bombed villages of post-war Italy as a child. Midway through Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, he drove from Paris to Cairo where he experienced desert culture, Muslim cities, the beauty of Islamic architecture, and new concepts of time and purpose. While the foreign service was a predictable choice after graduation, the late 60s made Peace Corps an ethical and essential one for Kendall, especially if he could go to the Middle East. Going to the Peace Corps office in Washington, he discovered a city planning program starting up in Iran that needed a draftsman. Kendall agreed to become one, and he and 60 other volunteers arrived at the barbed wire compound that was Thiokol Chemical’s Job Corps and Peace Corps training site in Clearfield, Utah. Iranian instructors taught him Farsi, history, and cultural survival skills as he also learned about the Japanese internment camps in Utah and race relations from Job Corps members. Around Thanksgiving, the group flew to Tehran and was greeted by many poor indigents at the airport who created fire pits from oil drums to fight the cold. After a week in Tehran studying Farsi and history, he was becoming street-wise to the badgering treatment of American women and the effusive attention he got as an American. He and three other volunteers - Dick Lee, Marjorie and Steven Moore - traveled in a decades old Mercedes bus to the Kurdish town of Sanandaj near the Iraqi border that included harrowing hairpin turns down and into Kermanshah valley. He stayed in a simple hotel during Ramadan before finding a traditional house that had been sheared in half by the building of a paved street years before. An Agfa photo shop fronted the house and served as its entrance to a tiny garden and pool fed by a water spigot, the only source of water for the house. The toilet was across the garden from the two-room living spaces: one windowless and used for storage, and the other served as a living room/bedroom with a “kitchen” in the hallway. Charming, with stained glass doors and niches in the wall for clothing and books, it looked onto the rooftops of the houses below and the rugged hills of Kurdistan. At night, Kendall heard occasional gunfire in the hills as Iranian gendarmes and Kurdish dissidents struggled for control, with each morning broken by the muezzin’s call to prayer. His work as a draftsman-turning town planner meant he walked to work every day, drafted construction plans for projects in the area, and walked home to a supper prepared by his delightful maid, Parvaneh (Butterfly), who was shared by other PCVs in town. He pretended to enjoy cow’s head with garlic and warm sheep’s eye but stuck with chicken kebabs and rice, flat bread, and yogurt cured in goatskin. Over time, he did more planning work that involved travel to towns close to the Iraqi border whose populations changed dramatically depending on the season, the ability to smuggle goods, and the level of conflict on either side of the border. Without his knowing at first, anyone he interviewed came under suspicion by SAVAK, the secret police. He managed to create town plans based on interviews, government data, and imagination that the Ministry of the Interior liked. He was invited to Tehran to do that work elsewhere in the country. He moved to an Austrian style, 1930s town house in central Tehran with indoor plumbing and gracious neighbors. He rode the congested city bus to the seven-story Ministry building overlooking the old mud city to the south and the concrete and steel city rising to the north. There he worked with two PCVs in an office of 15 planners and architects, made trips to the provinces, wrote proposals, and came to be changed by what he saw: the land, the built environment, his friendships, and the everyday human drama of living in a culture that showed obedience to Shah and Islam, was funded by oil, and held together by powerful families and the security state. The fate of his town plans? Hard to know, but many were used to benefit locals in power, served as decorations on municipality walls, and helped satisfy the Shah’s need to show markers of progress. More fundamental were the contacts Kendall made that humanized the image of Americans and modeled work done more for service than personal gain. His friends could never forget he was not a Muslim and that he may be a member of the CIA. For a year after leaving Iran, he traveled through India and Southeast Asia trying to process his experience and determine the work he would do once home. In a Japanese temple, a voice asked: what do you love to do? The 30 pounds of books he trucked around offered cues: work that combined non-western art, journal writing, photography, psychology, and the value of personal experience in shaping life choices. He returned to Iran to photograph lesser-known buildings, images of which are found in major museums worldwide. Once home in Cambridge, MA, he studied Islamic architecture (Harvard) and career theory (Lesley University), taught journal writing, and worked as a photographer. These experiences led him to becoming a career and life design consultant using writing and art to enhance work/life decision-making skills. Kendall worked for Harvard for 15 years in addition to having a private career design practice while his public art projects that dealt with war and peace in the Middle East have been funded by state and local grants including one from Boston Area Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. He is currently working on his second novel hoping for publication, part of which is set in Iran. For several years, he was on the board of the Peace Corps Iran Association that holds national conferences, keeps its 800 members tuned to events there, and pushes for the signing of the nuclear arms treaty. Kendall is indebted to the Peace Corps for providing core experiences that helped shape his life.

Interview Keyword

Peace Corps (US) Country of Service: Iran Dates of Service: 1967-1969 Peace Corps Volunteer Job: Community and Economic Development Peace Corps (US):1960-1970 Language: Farsi Language Training: Clearfield, Utah also Tehran, Sanandaj Cultural Training: Tehran, Sanandaj

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