Peace Corps writers – Page 2 – Peace Corps Worldwide

THE PLEASURE SEEKER by Robyn Michaels (Malawi)

Jan 04 2024

The Pleasure Seeker by Robyn Michaels (Malawi 1992) Self Published January 2024 326 pages $2.99 (Kindle); $14.95 (Paperback) This is a coming-of-age story and involves real African history. Dayal Singh is brilliant, quirky, and has Asperger’s. Son of parents trafficked to East Africa from India just before independence, he knows he’s Sikh, African, and calculus is the evidence of God. He becomes fascinated by a broken piano. and is offered a piano to buy, buys it and learns to play. Mentored by his older brothers, he follows them to Singapore to further his education, he then goes to Switzerland. He falls in love with the granddaughter of the man who bought his father. She tells him that the situation is impossible, and that he must stay in school as long as his way is paid. His youth is fraught, being an other. In Switzerland, he is constantly proselytized to, which only defines for him . . .

YET TO BE REVEALED by Geri Marr Burdman (Bolivia)

Jan 03 2024

Yet to be Revealed: Finding Paths to Meaning by Geri Marr Burdman, Ph.D. (Bolivia 1962-64) GeroWise Books November 2023 124 pages $16.95 (Paperback) Yet to be Revealed: Finding Paths to Meaning is a book to dive into as you grapple with the increasing challenges and chaos of today’s world. You will emerge with newfound purpose and passion for what counts in your life. Drawing from her experiences as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Bolivia as well as years of health work in the Caribbean, Central and South America, USA, Asia, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, Geri Marr Burdman shares riveting stories of people around the world who are living purposefully even in the midst of uncertainty and tumultuous circumstances. The author invites us to find a proactive route to meaning in the midst of the multifaceted challenges of our times-loss and grief, despair, inner emptiness, caregiving, parenting pressures, global . . .

Escape to Alaska by Steve Kaffen (Russia)

Dec 31 2023

Escape to Alaska by Steve Kaffen (Russia 1994-96) December 2023 $0.00 (Kindle) Kindle Unlimited; $4.99 (Buy within 24 hours. Author and explorer Steve Kaffen had to escape Washington, D.C.’s stifling summer heat and energy-sapping humidity, but where? Having just returned from Iceland, his natural conclusion: an escape to Alaska. The decision made perfect sense. Alaska is a haven of awesome natural beauty, spectacular scenery, great and meandering waterways, prolific animal and sea life, and fascinating indigenous cultures. It’s a land of superlatives: America’s largest state (by far) has the longest coastline, the tallest mountain, and the largest national park and national forest. Its thousands of glaciers include those in sprawling Glacier Bay, the enormous Hubbard Glacier, and majestic Mendenhall Glacier, an easy drive from the state’s low-key capital Juneau. Finally, Alaska is descriptive of a state of mind that embodies resourcefulness and self-reliance, confronting and surmounting challenges, an adventurous . . .

Travel Writer Alexa West (Bulgaria)

Dec 22 2023

The One-Way Ticket Plan: Find and Fund Your Purpose While Traveling the World by Alexa West (Bulgaria) New World Library September 2023 328 pages $9.99 (Kindle); $18.59 (Paperback) In 2011, Alexa West (Bulgaria) sat on her bedroom floor, packed her life into a backpack, and got on a one-way flight with just $200 in her pocket. She turned that $200 into over ten years of full-time travel. She went from budget backpacker to solo female travel expert — and now teaches thousands of women how to travel alone and how to make money from anywhere. In her new book, The One-Way Ticket Plan, Alexa reveals her decade’s worth of lessons, regrets, embarrassments, love stories, shortcuts, and problem-solving strategies — all packed into a hilarious page-turner and actionable plan for a total life makeover. From real-world advice on how travel can lower your cost of living to guidance . . .

Jack Allison (Malawi) . . . song writer

Dec 19 2023

Dr. Jack Allison served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi 1967-69. His public health education was punctuated by many original songs and jingles which became quite popular with Malawians throughout the country. Jack has had a distinguished career in academic emergency medicine, with an emphasis on public health. He responded to the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010 by treating hundreds of quake victims. In February 2012 he volunteered in Kenya and Somalia where he provided both emergency care and public health education to hundreds of Somali refugees; then in October, he volunteered in Zambia where he helped to install 112 shallow water wells. Since 2017 Jack has been a senior consultant to the Fulbright Association’s WASH project in Malawi. Allison’s avocation is singing and songwriting. He has written over 120 songs and jingles, and recorded over 100 of those. Since 1967 he has raised $160,000 with his . . .

QUICK & EASY THAI: 70 EVERYDAY RECIPES by Nancie McDermott (Thailand)

Dec 18 2023

About the author Nancie McDermott (Thailand 1975-78) is a North Carolina native, born in Burlington, raised in High Point, and educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has written 13 cookbooks. Nancie’s first 10 cookbooks focus on Asian kitchens, Her three years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand gave her a lifelong love for the cuisines, history and cultures of Asia, and she has spent the last twenty years cooking, reading, traveling, writing, and teaching about Asian food. Since moving back home to North Carolina in 1999, she has written three more cookbooks which focus on recipes of the American South, the place she fell in love with cooking in her grandmother’s dairy farm kitchen. Now living with her family in Chapel Hill, NC, Nancie writes, researches, and teaches about both her beats, while serving as a contributing editor for Edible Piedmont magazine. Nancie . . .

THE SHOWGIRL AND THE WRITER by Marnie Mueller (Ecuador)

Dec 04 2023

Dear Friends, Family, and Colleagues, My latest book, The Showgirl and the Writer: A Friendship Forged in the Aftermath of the Japanese American Incarceration was published in July of this year by Peace Corps Writers, an Imprint of Peace Corps Worldwide. I am grateful to many of you who have read, reviewed, and referred the book to potential readers. For others, The Showgirl and the Writer is a hybrid memoir/biography about my long friendship with Mary Mon Toy, a Nisei performer who had been forcibly removed from her home to an American concentration camp in Idaho during WWII. Our underlying bond was the incarceration of Japanese Americans; I was born in the Tule Lake Japanese American high security camp in California where my Caucasian parents had volunteered to work. This book has been a labor of love, a personal and political journey. When I learned upon Mary’s death in 2010 that she had been keeping . . .

THE LENGTHENING SHADOW OF SLAVERY by John E. Fleming (Malawi)

Nov 25 2023

Because Black students continue to face significant academic and financial challenges in their attempt to receive higher education in America, their home country, Dr. John Fleming felt that there was a pressing need to re-publish the 1976 edition of his book, The Lengthening Shadow of Slavery: A Historical Justification for Affirmative Action for Blacks in Higher Education with a new 2023 edition entitled The Lengthening Shadow of Slavery: Fifty-Year Reprise of the Historical Justification for Affirmative Action for African Americans in U.S. Higher Education. Dr. Fleming strongly felt that it was necessary to explore, yet again, why the U.S.’s own African-American students receive the worst educational outcomes at all levels of the American education pipeline while foreign students who major in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields at U.S. colleges and universities get the best education money can buy. On the face of it this is not an easy question to answer; but . . .

“Punching at Destiny” by Michael Varga (Chad)

Nov 17 2023

Punching at Destiny The Uneven Path Forward Michael Varga (Chad 1977-79) U.S. Foreign Service, retired • I was a sophomore in high school, I was cast in a production of the musical play Guys & Dolls. I was Gambler #3, and I had only one line to deliver. During a game of craps, I was supposed to get into a tussle with Gambler #6, yell “You cheated!”and slug him. When we rehearsed the play, I was confident I could make it look like my fist was making contact with his face. The director had said that I was supposed to swing my arm as if to hit his face, but position my back so that the audience wouldn’t see my hand sliding just beyond his right cheek. But on opening night, full of adrenaline, stimulated by the sounds of the audience reacting with oohs and aahs, when it came time . . .

GAELS ON THREE by Don Schlenger (Ethiopia)

Nov 04 2023

Gaels On Three by Don Schlenger (Ethiopia 1966-68) Ink Start Media Publisher September 2023 318 pages $2.99 (Kindle); $13.99 (Paperback) It’s the eighties in north Jersey with big hair and bad music, and a love story set around a Catholic junior high school girls’ basketball team. Will and Ramona were childhood sweethearts and neighbors from age four, who tragically broke up weeks before high school graduation in 1976. Will went right into the army, Ramona to college on a basketball scholarship. Six years later, with no interim contact, Will calls Ramona and asks if she will help him coach the girls’ basketball team at St. Ethel of the Holy Oasis Junior High School, close by where they grew up. They negotiate, they bicker, use bad language, argue, and finally she agrees. With conditions: a sixpack of Schaefers and a box of Mrs. T’s on demand. Supporting them are . . .

THE LAST BIRD OF PARADISE by Clifford Garstang (Korea)

Nov 02 2023

The Last Bird of Paradise Black Rose Writing Clifford Garstang (South Korea 1976-77) February 2024 340 pages $6.99 (Kindle); $23.95 (Paperback). Can be pre-ordered. Two women, nearly a century apart, seek to rebuild their lives when they reluctantly leave their homelands. Arriving in Singapore, they find romance in a tropical paradise, but also find they haven’t left behind the dangers that caused them to flee. In the aftermath of 9/11 and haunted by the specter of terrorism, Aislinn Givens leaves her New York law practice and joins her husband in Southeast Asia when he takes a job there. Seeking to establish herself in a local law firm, Aislinn begins to understand the historic resentment of foreigners who have exploited the region for centuries. Learning about the turmoil of Singapore’s colonial period, she acquires several paintings done by an English artist during World War I that she believes are . . .

Playwright Tom David Barna (Burkina Faso)

Oct 18 2023

The Minnesota Playwright Born in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania-USA, Tom David Barna is a graduate of Kaiserslautern American High School in Germany and New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico-USA. A a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Burkina Faso (1979-80) and a retired Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel. His paternal grandparents immigrated from Russia. Tom’s father, Thomas Barna was the first family member born in the United States and buried at Arlington National Cemetery having served in the Korean Conflict and the Viet Nam War. Tom David Barna, playwright, has penned more than forty-two full length plays, forty-nine short plays, co-author for a 13-part radio series and author of four children’s books (Cantata Publishing) and several eBooks (Rakuten Kobo Publishing). He has been commissioned for projects as varied as episodic radio and children’s musicals and recently collaborated on a new full-length musical with Melody Bay Productions/Publisher, a . . .

SOCRATES IN SICHUAN by Peter Vernezze (China)

Oct 15 2023

Socrates in Sichuan: Chinese Students Search for Truth, Justice, and the (Chinese) Way Peter J. Vernezze (China 2006-08) Potomac Books April 2011 212 pages $10.01 (Kindle); $9.49 (Hardback) When Peter J. Vernezze took a leave of absence from his position as a philosophy professor to serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer in China, he supplemented his main task―teaching English―with leading a weekly philosophical discussion group with Chinese undergraduate and graduate students at Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu. In each session the students debated topics as diverse as the status of truth, the meaning of life, the reality of fate, the definition of sanity, the necessity of religion, and the value of romantic love. Each of the twenty-five chapters of Socrates in Sichuan focuses on the topic of one evening’s discussion, which was always in the form of a question: How are ancient conceptions of virtue holding up in . . .

“Improbably Grateful” by Michael Varga (Chad)

Oct 09 2023

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 . . .

THE COUSCOUS CHRONICLES by Azzedine T. Downes (Morocco

Oct 05 2023

The Couscious Chronicles: Stories of Food, Love, and Donkeys from a Life Between Cultures by Azzedine T. Downes (Morocco 1981-85) (PC Staff 1991-95) Disruption Books 328 pages June 2023 $12.99 (Kindle); $18.02 (Paperback) Azzedine Downes moves between cultures, places, and time in this wryly comedic, at times mysterious, and always curious memoir of a lifelong nomad. The best strategy was to drink tea, smile, and enjoy the frustration of not knowing where the story leads. If time is endless, why rush to the point of a story? Now an international leader in the fight for animal welfare, Azzedine began his career as a volunteer teacher and later was appointed to leadership in the U.S. Peace Corps. An American Muslim with Irish roots, he’s a natural cultural shape-shifter, immersing himself in the cultures of Morocco, Eastern Europe, Northwest Africa, Israel and his native United States. Along the way he befriends . . .