Archive - May 21, 2009

Way back when…I was working in the Peace Corps and one of my jobs was to interview PCVs who had ETed. This was in late 1964 and early 1965 and I remember this blond surfer guy coming in for his exit interview. He couldn’t wait to get out of the Peace Corps, having been overseas (I think Malawi) for a matter of weeks. What went wrong, I asked him. Books, he said. Books? Now that was a new one . I waited for him to explain, which he was happy to do. He went onto describe how all the PCVs he saw overseas were carrying thick paperbacks and whenever there was a moment of ‘downtime’ they’d pulled out a paperback and start reading. He kept shaking his head, looking worried, and confessing, “I didn’t want that to happen to me.” Clearly, he wasn’t a reader. I thought about him when I . . .