July 1, 2009 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Step # 8 Ten Steps For The Next Peace Corps Director To Take To Improve The Agency, Save Money, And Make All PCVs & RPCV Happy!

Jul 01 2009

Step #8 A GI Bill for RPCVs The President’s Transition Team highlighted the fact that the Peace Corps never has fulfilled the promise of the Third Goal. This problem lies within the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps looks overseas. It doesn’t have the mind set to understand, as the Transition Team reported, “the power of returned Volunteer cultural and linguistic skills in the new multi-cultural America; show that Peace Corps service abroad helps solve problems here at home-completing the loop for Peace Corps; and create a re-employment stream for returned Volunteers. Taxpayers will see an impact at home (as teachers, public health workers and more). Over time, this grows into more support, first for overseas mission, and then for the domestic goal.” So what does the Director have to get the White House and Congress to do? 1.) Raise the Readjustment Allowance for RPCVs from $6,000 to $10,000. It has been at . . .

Here today, Ghana Tomorrow

Jul 01 2009

An article yesterday, June 30, about the Peace Corps in Ghana appeared in a Ghanaian newspaper written by RPCV Phillip Kurata . Kurata works for the State Department and writes for www.America.gov, a webiste of the State Department, that distributes news of the U.S. to the world. I thought you’d like to read what they are saying at State about us. Of course, Kurata is one of us. The first Peace Corps Volunteers arrived in Accra on the afternoon of September 1, 1961. The article has the arrival date in Ghana as August 30, but it was the afternoon of September1, 1961 according to John Demos, a member of the Ghana I. Fifty PCVs met Kennedy on the White House lawn, then went to a send-off party at the Ghanaian Embassy in Washington, D.C. on August 31. “Many libations were poured,” recalls Demos, a 1959 graduate of Harvard who had also done graduate work at Berkeley . . .

RPCV Janet Riehl Talks about Self-publishing

Jul 01 2009

Recently Claire Applewhite, author of The Wrong Side of Memphis, posed some questions to Janet Grace Riehl (Botswana 1972-73 & Ghana 1973-75). Riehl is the author of Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary, a self-published book of story poems, many of which center on her family. This interview appeared a few weeks ago in Jane Henderson’s Book Column in the St. Louis Post- Dispatch . Janet lives in southern Illinois, graduating from Alton High School in 1967, then earned a master’s degree in English from Southern Illinois University/Edwardsville and where she was co-editor of the poetry magazine, Sou’Wester. She lived and worked for five years in Ghana and Botswana with the Peace Corps and then the British World Friends (Quakers). She lived in California for a while before returning to Midwest. In this interview by Claire Applewhite, Janet sums up the various ways to get published today. What do you think it takes to get . . .

Archive - July 1, 2009