Archive - July 2016

A $750,000 study designed to examine if taking the malaria prevention drug, chloroquine (Arlen) would reduce the risk of breast cancer among RPCV women did not attract sufficient number of respondents.  It is not clear if any further study will be done.  The research team needed between 14,000 t0 18,000 participants, but less than 500 RPCV women had responded by May of 2014. The three year study ended in 2015. Background: The  Research Team at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas received the  $750,000 grant from the Department of Defense to study, “A Translational Approach to Validate In Vivo Anti-Tumor Effects of Chloroquine on Breast Cancer Risk”. Animal studies had suggested that female mammals who were given chloroquine had a lifetime reduced risk of breast cancer. The grant was awarded to Baylor to investigate if this effect could be found in human females.  The Baylor team chose to study RPCV . . .

Do you want to write a book about your Peace Corps experience and earn your Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing? The online MFA program at National University is recruiting special cohort of current or returned Peace Corps Volunteers who are interested in turning their Peace Corps experiences into books. The cohort of students will be led by former Peace Corps Volunteer and author of 26 books, John Coyne. Students in the cohort will take three classes together where they write about their Peace Corps experiences, then get to choose from a wide range of workshops with the experienced faculty and diverse student writers in the National University MFA program. The program culminates with the students writing a book-length manuscript of publishable quality. Current or returned Peace Corps volunteers who are members of the NPCA will receive a 15% tuition reduction for the entire MFA program. If you would . . .

Driftwood Press is a new quarterly literary magazine published in Tampa, FL  They publish fiction, poetry, photography, graphic narrative, literary criticism, and interviews. Recently they published a short story by Mark Jacobs (Paraguay 1978-80) entitled, “Daddy Says” and with it is a short explanation about the short stories that shows (somewhat) how a writer’s mind works. Here’s what Mark had to say. “Something was wrong with my weed-whacker. I’m a city guy living in the country, and no good with tools or machinery. I took the weed-whacker to an old man who ran an old-fashioned small-engine repair shop out of his home, also out in the country. His grown son was working with him. Machines and parts of machines spread across an acre or two like history. Through the years countless mechanical problems had been taken on and either solved or abandoned. When I showed up, relatives of the old . . .

In early 2014, Mario Machado was a RPCV recently returned from a two years plus Peace Corps assignment in Paraguay. Machado wrote a thoughtful essay published in the Huffington Post about the importance of relationships in development, The Privilege of Doing Development Work: Voluntourism and Its Limitations. There are provocative observations about “volunteerism”.  It is an important article for the RPCV community and beyond.  Read it here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mario-machado/the-privilege-of-doing-de_b_4832836.html What do you think?

I heard recently from Jan Worth-Nelson (Tonga 1976-78) that she and Emile Hons (Tonga 1974-76) were interviewed by two UK freelance producers from Sky TV about the Deborah Gardner Peace Corps 1976 murder in Tonga. The documentary is part of a series called “Passport to Murder” produced for Discovery ID TV. Their segment is luridly titled “The Devil in Paradise.” It is scheduled to air on July 29, 2016. As Jan wrote me, “Its amazing how that brutal story keeps going and going and going. It affected me strongly to talk about it again and think about it again after 40 years. Jan Worth-Nelson is a writer and former writing professor at the University of Michigan–Flint. She has published in a wide variety of publications, from the Christian Science Monitor to Midwestern Gothic. Her “Beam, Arch, Pillar, Porch: a Love Story” appears in the new Happy Anyway: The Flint Anthology from Belt Publishing. Jan has an . . .