Search Results For -Tongue

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Nancy Tongue Defends Glenn Blumhorst Against NPCA Board
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Review | A BOUQUET OF DAYS by Fran Palmeri (Benin)
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An interview with North Africa Folklorist Deborah Kapchan (Morocco)
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“Improbably Grateful” by Michael Varga (Chad)
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“Monadnock”
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A Conversation with Jody Olsen, Former Peace Corps Director
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How To Launch Your Novel–The First Ten Days
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Review–Brazilian Odyssey by Stephen Murphy (PC Staff)
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Ancestral Ideas by Abby Ripley (Niger)
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“The Mad Man and Me at the Commercial School in Addis Ababa”
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Art for Art’s Sake: El Paso Sculptor, Satirist and Political Advocate Ho Baron (Nigeria & Ethiopia)
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Review — ELISABETH SAMSON FORBIDDEN BRIDE by C.V. Hamilton (Suriname)
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When the Right Hand Washes the Left (Nigeria)
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Asylum Seeker Finds Emmett Coyne
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A Writer Writes: Letter from Pamplin by Mark Jacobs (Paraguay)

Nancy Tongue Defends Glenn Blumhorst Against NPCA Board

Dear NPCA Board of Directors, I have heard about the dismissal of Glenn Blumhorst from NPCA and am most distressed about it. I understand there were rumors on social media but I didn’t take them seriously until I received the email from NPCA last week and was shocked. I have read the plaintiff report and also am aware that the case against him was reviewed by Attorney Herbet, an independent legal counsel and that Glenn was found unimpeachable by Attorney Herbert. I am dumbfounded that he has been dismissed. I have suffered severe health issues from my service in the PC in Chile (1980-82) and had been trying, in vain, to get any recognition for the need for help from either NPCA or the Peace Corps for nearly three decades between 1982-2011. In 2011 when Tony Barclay came on board and openly listened to my story about the suffering of so many . . .

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Review | A BOUQUET OF DAYS by Fran Palmeri (Benin)

  A Bouquet of Days: Rambles through the Natural Beauties of Florida by Fran Palmeri (Benin 1967–68) Blurb 200 pages January 2024 $32.87 (paperback) Reviewed by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993-96),  • • • Fran Palmeri and her husband Bob, who was with the USIA, were assigned to  Dahomey (now Benin) in 1967/68, and helped set up the Peace Corps program there.  She is a member of the RPCV Gulf Coast Florida group.  An award-winning writer/photographer, Fran has been exploring natural Florida for fifty years. A Bouquet of Days is divided into four chapters, one for each season.  Fran guides us through the manifestations of Florida’s seasonal changes as they affect the weather, plants, animals, insects, birds, trees and whatever else lives on this tiny tongue of the planet.  She also tells you through her expressive words and color-splashed photographs how the changes affect her.  “Sometimes when winter overstays its welcome a . . .

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An interview with North Africa Folklorist Deborah Kapchan (Morocco)

RPCVs in the news — Deborah Kapchan is an American folklorist, writer, translator and ethnographer, specializing in North Africa and its diaspora in Europe. In 2000, Kapchan became a Gugenheim fellow. She has been a Fulbright-Hays recipient twice, and is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society.  She is professor of Performance Studies at New York University, and the former director of the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology (now the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies) at the University of Texas at Austin. After completing her Bachelors of Arts in English Literature and French at New York University while studying flute performance with Harold Jones in New York, Kapchan went to Morocco in 1982 as a Peace Corps Volunteer. There she learned Moroccan Arabic, and in 1984 got a job doing ethnography in Marrakech and in El Ksiba, Morocco. This experience reoriented her life and in 1985 . . .

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“Improbably Grateful” by Michael Varga (Chad)

In the news — Improbably Grateful by Michael Varga (Chad 1977-79) ’85 M.A. Notre Dame Magazine   In 1995 the doctors told me I would probably be dead of AIDS by April 1997. I had retired early from the U.S. Foreign Service, and AIDS patients were dying rapidly. There was no effective treatment for AIDS or HIV. It was a grim time, and I had no reason to think I would be any different than the hordes of patients who had already succumbed, who were deprived of a normal life span and the opportunity to grow old. I imagined some fairy-tale scene where my friends would gather around my deathbed as I took my last breath. Spurred by that image, I told my friends to come to visit “before it was too late.” I pressed them to understand the urgency of my situation and said I needed their support in . . .

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“Monadnock”

   A story by Giles Ryan (Korea)   Here in New England, about forty of us, old friends, have come together again to mark the fifty years since we all first gathered for Peace Corps language training, a shared experience followed by another, our time in Korea as school teachers, after which we were never the same. Tolstoy long ago observed that there are only two kinds of stories — someone goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. All of us have done both. We all went on a journey long ago and far away, and then we spread out across Korea, each one of us a stranger come to town. The towns were all different and we each had our own experience, and we were all marked by it for the rest of our lives. We are so pleased to reconnect like this, making eye contact . . .

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A Conversation with Jody Olsen, Former Peace Corps Director

Women’s Economic Empowerment and the Peace Corps – A Conversation with Jody Olsen, Former Peace Corps Director Interviewed Held on March 8, 2019 Edited for this blog Dr. Olsen served as a volunteer in Tunisia in the late 1960s, and she held various leadership positions throughout the agency in the ’80s, the ’90s, and 2000s. And between that time she spent time as a visiting professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore School of Social Work, as well as the director of the university’s Global Education Initiatives. The  moderator is CSIS Senior Associate Nina Easton chair of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women International Summit and the co-chair of the Fortune Global Forum. Nina Easton: OK, hands up: How many former Peace Corps volunteers do we have here? Ooh. (Cheers, applause.) OK. (Applause.) And, Jody, thank you for your service. Jody Olsen: Well, thank you. Nina Easton: I warned you that we . . .

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How To Launch Your Novel–The First Ten Days

Do you want to write a novel? Do you have a great story that you need to tell? Is there this little nagging voice in the back of your mind that has been saying all your life: ‘Go ahead and do it! Write your story!’ Do you want to finally stop reading books and start writing one of your own? If you know you’ll never be satisfied until you sit down and write your novel; if you’re tired of people saying, “You’re not a real writer.”; if you know in your heart that you can do it, then begin! The truth is all writing begins in the human heart. But then, how do you unlock what’s in your heart and write your novel? Here’s how: You do it in the next 100 days. Over the next three months, you will write and rewrite your novel by following the simple instructions . . .

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Review–Brazilian Odyssey by Stephen Murphy (PC Staff)

Brazilian Odyssey By Stephen E. Murphy  (Regional Director, Inter-Americas Region, 2002-03) bookhouse publishing 246 pages 2022 $18.95 (Paperback)       Reviewed by Stephen Foehr (Ethiopia 1965-66) It’s a forever story, little guy armed with idealism takes on big, bad, and corrupt. This evergreen theme kindles, and rekindles, the flame of hope. We keep turning the pages to find out about Evil vs Good, the tag team Greed/Power against Humanity/Right. Can justice prevail? Is it possible that personal integrity need not be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of you lose, I win? Do the good guys have a fighting chance? The destruction of the Brazilian Amazon is a reoccurring headline of doom; the oxygen-giving rainforest decimated for profit; the indigenous peoples murdered for their land, their way of life transformed into poverty and cultural extermination. American professor Luke Shannon takes a group of students from Seattle University on a . . .

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Ancestral Ideas by Abby Ripley (Niger)

Ancestral Ideas Early in our lineage the handy man, Homo habilis, sees in his mind’s eye a useful connection between his hand and an egg-shaped basalt cobble milled by a river’s turbulent current long ago. He fits it to his hand and swiftly strikes another stone which produces a flake, a thin sharp-edged chopper or scraper easily seen as a tool to cut trees or meat, to scrape bark or the hide of an animal. Striding through tall grasses of the African savanna in the bright sunlight, Homo erectus, holds steady the image of his hunting fellows, taking a grazing zebra bachelor by surprise, by their combined effort like a pack of hyenas. They circle around under shady acacia trees, hearing casual snorts and the switching of tails; a lame one flees too late and is killed with clubs. A runner, having returned to camp, brings others with hand axes, cleavers, . . .

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“The Mad Man and Me at the Commercial School in Addis Ababa”

  by John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962-64) • We 275 PCVs, the first to be assigned to Ethiopia, arrived in-country in early September of 1962. Addis Ababa, the capital, was at an altitude of 7,726 feet. It has one of the finest climates to be found in the world. It was once a ramshackle city, which years before the travel writer John Gunther described as looking as if someone had tossed scraps of metal onto the slopes of Entoto mountain. I was assigned to live and teach in Addis, and lived my first year in a large stone house on Churchill Road, a main artery of the city that led uphill to the center of the city — the Piazza, with four other PCVs. That house, like most in Addis, had a tin roof and it was pleasant to wake early on school days during the rainy season and hear the heavy, . . .

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Art for Art’s Sake: El Paso Sculptor, Satirist and Political Advocate Ho Baron (Nigeria & Ethiopia)

  by Mary K. Cantrell November 9, 2021 Photos by Cody Bjornson • “I’m not a Buddhist. I’m not anything. I’m an artist. I’m a fool,” Ho Baron (Nigeria 1966-67, Ethiopia 1968) muses on his identity early one morning while wandering the brick paths of his self-made sculpture garden outside of his home in El Paso’s Manhattan Heights Historic District. Baron wears a T-shirt, cargo shorts, white tube socks, and a mischievous expression. Baron, 79, is surrounded by totemic, surreal creatures of his own making. His “gods for future religions,” a tongue-in-cheek concept, are humanoid figures cast in bronze and stone. With deep grooves and maze-like textures, they appear simultaneously ancient and futuristic. The artist decided to capitalize on his ability to reach an audience, given his house’s location right off of the busy Piedras Street, and set up a public sculpture garden with twelve primary pieces, which he jokingly refers . . .

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Review — ELISABETH SAMSON FORBIDDEN BRIDE by C.V. Hamilton (Suriname)

  Elisabeth Samson, Forbidden Bride C.V. Hamilton (Suriname 1999-01) ‎Swift House Press June 2020 401 pages $17.95 (paperback), $3.99 (Kindle) Reviewed by Stephen Foehr (Ethiopia 1965-67) • Elisabeth Samson was a real person, a Free Negress. But members of her family remained in slavery, while others were bought out of enslavement, which is how Samson was born free in the 18th century Dutch colony of Suriname. The situation was ripe for drama and moral dilemma, especially with the addition of a Black/White love affair. And there is this twist: Elisabeth Samson was a rich plantation owner with hundreds of slaves, importer of luxury European goods, a Dutch colonial wannabe, whose greatest anguish was not being allowed to marry the love of her life, a white man, and that they had not conceived a child. C.V. Hamilton’s novel Elisabeth Samson, Forbidden Bride is based on Samson’s journals discovered by the author and . . .

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When the Right Hand Washes the Left (Nigeria)

   David G. Schickele first presented his retrospective view of Volunteer service in a speech given at Swarthmore College in 1963 that was printed in the Swarthmore College Bulletin. At the time, there was great interest on college campuses about the Peace Corps and early RPCVs were frequently asked to write or speak on their college campuses about their experiences. A 1958 graduate of Swarthmore, Schickele worked as a freelance professional violinist before joining the Peace Corps in 1961. After his tour, he would, with Roger Landrum make a documentary film on the Peace Corps in Nigeria called “Give Me A Riddle” that was intended for Peace Corps recruitment, but was never really used by the agency. The film was perhaps too honest a representation of Peace Corps Volunteers life overseas and the agency couldn’t handle it. However, the Peace Corps did pick up Schickele’s essay from the Swarthmore College Bulletin and reprinted . . .

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Asylum Seeker Finds Emmett Coyne

  Recently my cousin (who never was a PCV) wrote his story of working with Asylum Seekers to sponsor a Palestinian emigrant. His story is insightful and touching and might suggest to some of us RPCVs how we might become sponsors ourselves. JC  • MONTHS AGO I came across a program, Asylum Seekers, which seeks to place such persons with sponsors. I began the interview process to become a sponsor. The sponsor incurs financial assistance, especially for the first six months, as asylum seekers are not allowed to work for pay. Finally, I began to receive notices about potential persons who ran the gamut from Russians to Africans to South Americans, etc. Subsequently, I narrowed down my interest to some French-speaking men from West African countries. Several never materialized for various reasons. Suddenly, on Wed. night, April 21, I received a call, inquiring if I would be willing to sponsor . . .

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A Writer Writes: Letter from Pamplin by Mark Jacobs (Paraguay)

  It’s a fact of Peace Corps life that a volunteer must learn to get by in a world not his own, not her own. It’s never a perfect adjustment, not a completely comfortable fit. Often you make mistakes, some of which can be serious. Others are hilarious. (Once, at the dinner table with our training family in Asunción, as we were learning Spanish, my wife, Anne, commented that she had been taking notes in her diarrhea, which completely cracked people up and may still rank near the top in their hall of conversational fame.) In our case, our Peace Corps experience of feeling our way, doing our best to understand what was going on, turned out to be good practice for the foreign service, which we joined a few years after returning from Paraguay. Our Peace Corps country was nothing like Bolivia, or Honduras, or Spain, despite the common . . .

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