Olive in Deutschland (and the rest of Europe)
- Chandler Museum
When Olive Goodykoontz was on assignment as a relief worker in Germany she had her own address wherever she was located - Aachen, Darmstadt, Düsseldorf - but she also did a lot of traveling. One of her jobs while working overseas was to travel to various schools around Germany and Switzerland. While at each she would check on any exchange students, encourage the schools to become affiliated with American schools, lecture on International Relations, record interviews with the school directors, and write assesments of each school's needs to be sent back with her monthly reports to the AFSC home office. A partial list of schools Olive visited (based on her own writings) can be found here.
Olive also traveled to other European countries like Holland and Sweden to attend annual conferences of various different international relief and foreign service groups. At these conferences delegates would report on the activities of their different groups in whichever country they had been assigned and share ideas on how to move forward for the coming year including where need was most great and which activies should be prioritized. Â
Although Olive was an American stationed in Germany, she did her initial service training in England (where there is a London AFSC office) and several of the other workers in her section were from the U.K. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Germany was divided into "zones" that were overseen by militaries of the various Ally countries. Olive's assignments were in the British Zone and the French Zone, so while she did interact with U.S. military personnel occasionally, it was not a day-to-day occurrance. However, medical care (from major surgery to doctor check-ups) was provided to the AFSC workers by the temporary U.S. military hospital in Frankfurt.
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