Archive - June 30, 2009

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africa-remembered
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Review: Let Them Eat Junk
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Step # 7:Ten Steps For The Next Peace Corps Director To Take To Improve The Agency, Save Money, And Make All PCVs & RPCV Happy!

Review: Let Them Eat Junk

Let Them Eat Junk by Robert Albritton and published this year in the U.K. by Pluto Press and Canada by Arbeiter Ring [“left-wing politics with a rock-n- roll attitude”],  is reviewed by fellow Ethiopia 2 RPCV Philip Damon. It is an impressive review of an important book. • Let Them Eat Junk by Robert Albritton (Ethiopia 1963–65) London, UK: Pluto Press; Winnipeg, Canada: Arbeiter Ring Publishing April, 2009 224 pages Reviewed by Philip Damon (Ethiopia 1963–65) To his credit, Rob Albritton never employs the tired cliché “a perfect storm” in his acid analysis of the world’s runaway food crisis. Instead, he coyly alludes in his title to the “callous indifference” of a much earlier elite of power and privilege, whose post-royalist inheritors he specifies in the subtitle: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity. Yet he could have applied the meteorological metaphor every bit as aptly, since with a planetary population . . .

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Step # 7:Ten Steps For The Next Peace Corps Director To Take To Improve The Agency, Save Money, And Make All PCVs & RPCV Happy!

Step # 7: Curtailing APCDs I remember a period of time–perhaps six months–in 1965 when there were 450 PCVs in Ethiopia working mostly teachers, nurses and highway surveyors and there were a total of 4 APCDs. Like all bureaucracies overseas staffs have grown and grown in 50 years. It is the nature of the beast. Now is the time to try it a new way. A couple true stories. A good friend would worked in HQ in the early days, then much later as a CD in Africa, said that what was needed as a CD was someone with  counseling skills, not management or development experience, and that she spent much of her days talk with emotionally distraught PCVs. It is not for naught that psychological payments are so high in the agency when the PCVs come home again. Working as an APCD in Ethiopia, I had under my supervision a . . .

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