Archive - February 1, 2017

I just listened to a Tom Woods podcast of an interview with Gret Glyer who has created an app called DonorSee that allows anyone help in the developing world by using Glyer’s new app. The app program is only 4 months old and a month ago the Peace Corps issued an order that Peace Corps Volunteers were not permitted to be involved with the DonorSee organization. Glyer (and Tom Wood) see the use of the app as a way that Volunteers (as Americans) can be helpful by promoting donations between the US and the developing world. Woods and Glyer see the agency as standing in the way of giving immediate help to others. My guess it is the lawyers decision in the agency who have said ‘no” but the story that is getting back now to the US is that PCVs are not helping others, but are preventing any sort of help. Volunteers look like losers. Listen yourself to the podcast and hear what . . .

Many of us who knew Jack from our Peace Corps days have heard his stories of boxing in college and boxing briefly as a professional in Mexico before returning to Michigan and becoming a boxing coach as he finished his degrees. I asked his daughter Jane Constantineau to spend me Jack’s account from his book and she was kind enough to do so. JC note. Kill the Gringo In retrospect, I question the wisdom of my boxing coach’s plan to send me south of the border with no handler, no Spanish, and no backup. But at the time, I found Marty’s idea ingenious. We were dealing with long odds in trying to maneuver me, an undergraduate boxer, into the position of head boxing coach at the University of Michigan, and I was willing to go the distance to overcome them. On a hazy day in June I crossed the El Paso-Juarez . . .