Forty Peace Corps volunteers will train at Harvard this summer for assignments in Nyasaland, Africa, as rural public health assistants. The six-week program is the first offered by the Peace Corps to prepare volunteers for Nyasaland.

The program in Nyasaland is aimed primarily at combatting tuberculosis. The volunteers will work in separate villages as medical assistants in a team with a doctor and two nurses, travelling periodically from village to village aboard a mobile X-ray unit.

From June 22 through July 31 the volunteers will receive intensive training at Harvard in the Cinyanja language and in American, African, and world affairs. The director of the Harvard training program is Robert Rotberg, assistant professor of History. The deputy director is Donald Brown, assistant professor of Government and Social Studies.

The volunteers will spend a second six weeks at the School of Tropical Public Health at the University of North Carolina, studying sanitation, preventative medicine, and the identification of disease, especially tuberculosis.

This is the second such program at Harvard. The first was terminated because Peace Corps officials preferred that the volunteers be trained entirely in the United States, while Harvard felt that at least some of the training should take place in the country where the volunteers would work in order to prepare them effectively.