Search Results For -Mad Woman Part Five

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Mad Woman At The Peace Corps: Elizabeth Forsling Harris, Part Five
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Robin Seyfert (South Africa, Zambia) | “Handmade Hope”
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Mad Men’s First Director of Recruitment, Bob Gale
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Peace Corps staff member made $258,000 after killing a woman
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Once Again: Five Great Short Stories About the Peace Corps Experience
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Five Great Short Stories About the Peace Corps Experience
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The Volunteer who was “Our Woman in Havana” — Vicki Huddleston (Peru)
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Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman by Jia Tolentino (Kyrgyzstan)
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Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast, Madagascar) talks with Bill Owens (Jamaica)
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“THE MAGIC STONE and the Woman who Wrote It!” (Kenya)
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Review — OUR WOMAN IN HAVANA by Vicki Huddleston (Peru)
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The Peace Corps in the Time of Trump, Part 6
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#26 Mad Men At The Peace Corps: Sally Bowles (Washington, D.C.)
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# 13 Mad Woman At The Peace Corps: Elizabeth Forsling Harris (Washington, D.C.)
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Tony D'Souza (Ivory Coast 2000-02, Madagascar 2002-03) Goes Back To Teguela

Mad Woman At The Peace Corps: Elizabeth Forsling Harris, Part Five

Betty had put Shriver on the spot by forcing the issue of whether married Volunteers could give birth while serving overseas. She did it with this, the last of her MOM and POP memos: “Look Sarge. The Peace Corps is probably the most progressive organization in America. It’s what America claims to be all about: equality. In the Peace Corps, blacks have equality. Women have equality. Our female Volunteers are paid the same living allowances as the male Volunteers. They have the same responsibilities, the same physical hardships. We have said, in effect, that the rules are no different in the Peace Corps; the same goes for both sexes. So to suddenly say that a female Peace Corps Volunteer is too fragile, too fine, and too clean to have a baby in the Third World country, especially if she is game to do this, is to go back on our . . .

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Robin Seyfert (South Africa, Zambia) | “Handmade Hope”

In the news — By Christine Spicer .Viewpoint, PLNU  ­RPCV Robin Seyfert  knows beauty can be found in people and places that are overlooked or even steeped in darkness. As the founder and managing director of Basha Enterprises Ltd., she sees women who have been trafficked or who are vulnerable to exploitation find hope and healing through dignified work in a safe environment. Basha Boutique sells jewelry, kantha blankets, accessories, and Christmas items, all handmade by women who are rebuilding their lives. The kantha is a profound symbol of Basha Boutique’s work and mission. “A kantha is a quilt made of old saris stitched into straight, even rows,” Seyfert explained. “They are all sewn freehand. We take old discarded saris and stitch them into a blanket that is really beautiful. As each artisan transforms the worn cloth, she is also rebuilding her life.” ‘Basha’ means house in Bengali, and ‘asha’ means . . .

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Mad Men’s First Director of Recruitment, Bob Gale

BOB GALE Bob Gale was six foot two, blue eyed, and owned a big personality.  He was an academic coming to the Peace Corps from being the vice president for development at Carlton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and a Humphrey supporter. Gale had decided he wanted to go to Washington with the New Frontier and work for the Peace Corps and got in touch with Hubert Humphrey, who he knew, and a meeting was arranged with Bill Haddad (another early Mad Man) who was already working at the agency. William F. Haddad was the Associate Director for the Office of Planning and Evaluation. (At the age of 14 in post-Pearl Harbor, he had enlisted in the Army Air Corps pilot training program and advanced to cadet squadron commander before his true age was discovered.) Haddad (who went on to become a Congressman from New York State) had come to the Peace Corps from being . . .

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Peace Corps staff member made $258,000 after killing a woman

July 14, 2023 Sweeping Peace Corps legislation headed to the U.S. Senate includes a provision allowing the agency’s director to suspend without pay any employee who engages in serious misconduct. The proposal follows a USA TODAY investigation that exposed for the first time a leading Peace Corps official who remained on the payroll for 18 months after he went on a reckless drunk driving spree that left a Tanzanian mother dead. That case was one of several troubling instances behind the provision in the new bill, which was approved by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week, according to Rep. John Garamendi (Ethiopia 1965-67), D-Calif. who introduced the bill in the House. “We noted that the director did not have sufficient administrative authority to deal with profoundly disturbing problems,” said Garamendi, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia. John Peterson, now 68, received more than $250,000 in salary and . . .

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Once Again: Five Great Short Stories About the Peace Corps Experience

Five Great Short Stories About the Peace Corps Experience   The Mending Fields by Bob Shacochis (Eastern Caribbean 1975–76) I WAS ASSIGNED to the Island of Saint Kit in the West Indies. Once on an inter-island plane, I sat across the aisle from one of my new colleagues, an unfriendly, overserious young woman. She was twenty-four, twenty-five . . . we were all twenty-four, twenty-five. I didn’t know her much or like her. As the plane banked over the island, she pressed against the window, staring down at the landscape. I couldn’t see much of her face, just enough really to recognize an expression of pain. Below us spread an endless manicured lawn, bright green and lush of sugarcane, the island’s main source of income. Each field planted carefully to control erosion. Until that year, Saint Kit’s precious volcanic soil had been bleeding into the sea; somehow they had resolved . . .

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Five Great Short Stories About the Peace Corps Experience

    The Mending Fields by Bob Shacochis (Eastern Caribbean 1975–76)   I WAS ASSIGNED to the Island of Saint Kit in the West Indies. Once on an inter-island plane, I sat across the aisle from one of my new colleagues, an unfriendly, overserious young woman. She was twenty-four, twenty-five . . . we were all twenty-four, twenty-five. I didn’t know her much or like her. As the plane banked over the island, she pressed against the window, staring down at the landscape. I couldn’t see much of her face, just enough really to recognize an expression of pain. Below us spread an endless manicured lawn, bright green and lush of sugarcane, the island’s main source of income. Each field planted carefully to control erosion. Until that year, Saint Kit’s precious volcanic soil had been bleeding into the sea; somehow they had resolved the problem. The crop was now being . . .

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The Volunteer who was “Our Woman in Havana” — Vicki Huddleston (Peru)

  A Profile of Citizenship By Jeremiah Norris Colombia (1963-65)  • The author of Our Woman in Havana, Vicki Huddleston, was raised in Hungry Horse, Montana. She graduated from the University of Montana, entered the Peace Corps as a Volunteer in Peru, 1964-65. After Peace Corps, she attended graduate school at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, followed by becoming a Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Afterward, she went on to a distinguished career with the Department of State, serving as Ambassador to Madagascar, then under Presidents Bush and Clinton, as the Chief of the U. S. Interests Section in Havana, finally as Ambassador in Mali. In her book, Vicki chronicles several compelling memories of her official interventions with Fidel Castro, as well as some risky initiatives she undertook to allow Cubans an opportunity to bridge the differences between what their government was telling them and external events . . .

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Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman by Jia Tolentino (Kyrgyzstan)

Thanks for a ‘heads up’ from Bea Hogan (Uzbekistan 1992-94)  Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman How we became suckers for the hard labor of self-optimization. By Jia Tolentino (Kyrgyzstan 2009-10) From The Guardian (US Edition) Last modified on Fri 2 Aug 2019 06.31 EDT The ideal woman has always been generic. I bet you can picture the version of her that runs the show today. She’s of indeterminate age but resolutely youthful presentation. She’s got glossy hair and the clean, shameless expression of a person who believes she was made to be looked at. She is often luxuriating when you see her – on remote beaches, under stars in the desert, across a carefully styled table, surrounded by beautiful possessions or photogenic friends. Showcasing herself at leisure is either the bulk of her work or an essential part of it; in this, she is not so unusual – . . .

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Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast, Madagascar) talks with Bill Owens (Jamaica)

    Talking with Bill Owens (Jamaica 1964–65) By Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000–02, Madagascar 2002–03) Bill Owens (Jamaica 1964-1965) took iconic photos of the Hells Angels beating concertgoers with pool cue sticks at the Rolling Stones’ performance during the Altamont Speedway Free Festival four months after Woodstock on December 6, 1969. Altamont, which included violence almost all day and one stabbing death, is considered by historians as the end of the Summer of Love and the overall 1960s youth ethos. This series of photos include panoramas of the massive, unruly crowd, Grace Slick and Carlos Santana on stage with the press of humanity so close in, they’re clearly performing under duress. Of that day, Owens has written: I got a call from a friend, she said the Associated Press wanted to hire me for a day to cover a rock and roll concert. I road my motorcycle to the . . .

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“THE MAGIC STONE and the Woman who Wrote It!” (Kenya)

While Arthur Dobrin was a student at City College in New York, he heard Harris Wofford speak at the college, and afterwards he went to Lyn and said, “Let’s join the Peace Corps.” In August of 1964, shortly before they were married, Lyn and Arthur Dobrin, applied to the Peace Corps. They were first offered Volunteer placement inThailand. “We didn’t want to do it because the assignment involved moving all over the country. We wanted to stay in one place and Arthur was more interested in Africa so when we were offered a project in cooperative development in Kenya, we said yes.” In addition to her assigned role of working with farmers cooperatives, Lyn had two additional goals. She wanted to write a cookbook and collect folk tales. She had decided before leaving for Kenya that she wanted to “write something that Kenyan children could relate to.” The cookbook never . . .

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Review — OUR WOMAN IN HAVANA by Vicki Huddleston (Peru)

  Our Woman in Havana A Diplomat’s Chronicle of America’s Long Struggle With Castro’s Cuba BY Ambassador Vicki Huddleston (Peru 1964–66) The Overlook Press 304pages $29.95 Reviewed by Patricia Taylor Edmisten (Peru, 1962–64) • The title of Ambassador Vicki Huddleston’s memoir, Our Woman in Havana, is a riff on Graham Greene’s novel, Our Man in Havana, published in 1958. In the novel, Graham sardonically takes on British intelligence, especially M16 and its use of Cuban informants. Ambassador Huddleston, by contrast, has written a forthright memoir covering the years 1999-2002 when she worked as Chief of the US Interests Section in Havana.  As backstory to those years, she provides an interesting narrative of the historical events leading to early US attempts to dominate Cuba and shape its future.  In a brief epilogue, she brings us up to the year 2017 when hopes for a continuing Cuban Spring were jeopardized with Donald . . .

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The Peace Corps in the Time of Trump, Part 6

In the middle of 1989, Loret Ruppe left the Peace Corps to become a U.S. ambassador in Europe and Paul Coverdell was appointed Director on April 20. Once again the head of the agency became a revolving door. All Directors, as we know, have a way of stamping their tour (however brief) with some new project. For Coverdell it was the famous school-to-school program and the establishment of the Fellows/USA which helps RPCVs get into graduate programs. Coverdell would also say that the Peace Corps should be a “vibrant, vital part of the U.S. foreign policy.” This was a radical change for an organization that has embodied the spirit of altruism since its inception. The Peace Corps has always been about helping other people because it was the right thing to do, not because it was politically advantageous or even politically correct. Coverdell, however, is most famous for a front . . .

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#26 Mad Men At The Peace Corps: Sally Bowles (Washington, D.C.)

The most famous recruitment trip of them all was in early October 1963. It was the one that gave rise to the term, Blitz Recruiting. Gale put together five advance teams and five follow-up teams. Each team spent a week in southern California and then a week in northern California, visiting every major campus in both areas. Coates Redmon sums up the ‘teams’ in her book. “One advance team consisting of Nan McEvoy, then deputy director of the Africa Regional Office, and Frank Erwin, then deputy director of Selection, were assigned first to Los Angeles Sate University (where there was only modest interest in the Peace Corps) and next to San Francisco State University (where there was considerable interests). Bob Gale, Linda Lyle (his secretary) and Doug Kiker took on the University of Southern California in the south and then the University of California at Berkeley in the north. Gale had friends at both.” . . .

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# 13 Mad Woman At The Peace Corps: Elizabeth Forsling Harris (Washington, D.C.)

Betty Harris was what we used to call a ‘a piece of work.’ She was thirty-nine-years old in 1961 and had been a political organizer and a public relations executive in Dallas, Texas, before arriving in D.C. She had also been a pioneering journalist in New York City before women had such jobs, working with among others, Newsweek and NBC. When she arrived at the Peace Corps in 1961 she had just gone through a bitter divorce with Leon Harris, the son of man whose department store in Dallas that became the model of Neiman-Marcus. Betty always, in fact, looked as if she had just stepped out of the pages of a Neiman-Marcus catalog. ‘Chic’ is the term that Coates Redmon uses to describe Betty in Come As You Are. Betty Harris knew Shriver longer than anyone else at the Peace Corps, having first met the man in the 1940s when they both . . .

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Tony D'Souza (Ivory Coast 2000-02, Madagascar 2002-03) Goes Back To Teguela

[Tony D’Souza had been a HIV/AIDS Volunteer in a village in northern Ivory Coast when that country’s decade-long civil war erupted in 2002. Evacuated to Ghana, Tony transferred to Madagascar before coming home and writing about his experiences in his 2006 novel Whiteman. Whiteman won most of the major first novel prizes, including from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was excerpted by the New Yorker. In 2007, Tony received an NEA grant, and in 2008, a Guggenheim. Last fall, Tony visited his village for the first time in ten years. In this nonfiction piece for Sarah Lawrence University’s Lumina, he writes of the toll of AIDS on the friends left behind, the ravages of the war, the death of his Ivorian girlfriend, and despite all, the happiness of going back to a place one loves. This essay Les Petites Camionaires (The Guys With the Little Truck) on his . . .

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