January 2010 – Page 4 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Thirty Days That Built The Peace Corps:Part One

Jan 06 2010

The day after his inauguration in January 1961, John F. Kennedy telephoned Sargent Shriver and asked him to form a presidential Task Force “to report how the Peace Corps should be organized and then to organize it.” When he heard from Kennedy, Shriver immediately called Harris Wofford who had worked with Shriver during Kennedy’s presidential campaign. The two men rented a suite of rooms in the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue in downtown Washington, D.C., a few blocks from the White House. Here, they began with a new phrase–the Peace Corps–a few lines from Kennedy’s speeches, and a laundry list of names of people involved in international affairs. They began to craft what would become, according to a 1962 article in TIME Magazine, “the greatest single success the Kennedy administration had produced.” Over the next few blogs, I’ll tell the story of those 30 days in Washington, D.C. when the Peace Corps became a reality, . . .

Peter Hessler On China

Jan 05 2010

I came across on the web an hour long talk by Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) at Politics & Prose Book Store in Washington, D.C. It was originally broadcast on C-Span. In this hour presentation, Peter talks about his Peace Corps years and his second book, published in 2006, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present. This title is derived from an archaeological site in China where the earliest form of writing was found inscribed on shells and bones. Peter also reads letters from his Chinese students who migrated from the countryside to the rapidly growing cities and talks about what it was like to teach in China. Peter was with the third group of PCVs to the country. After his tour Peter worked for the New York Times in China and now is a writer for the New Yorker. His Peace Corps book was called River Town. If you have time, (and you . . .

Peace Corps Worldwide One Year Later

Jan 05 2010

When I first came back from the Peace Corps and was living and working (and writing) in New York, I invited a young book editor out for dinner and she said to me, “I’ll go to dinner with you, John, but I won’t read your Peace Corps novel.” Well, we have been married thirty plus years now and she still hasn’t read my Peace Corps novel! It has always been difficult to find anyone who will read a book about the Peace Corps as many of you know from having finished your own book. When I first started to track “Peace Corps writers,” and publish with Marian Haley Beil Peace Corps Writers & Readers, I thought the publishing world had had enough Peace Corps first-person-experiences and I am as surprised as anyone that there continues to be published every year very important and well written accounts of life in the developing world written by RPCVs. We have had about . . .

Review: Buffaloes By My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika

Jan 03 2010

Jack Allison served a 3-year tour with the Peace Corps in Malawi, Central Africa, where he was a public health Volunteer in the bush. He is best known as a singer/songwriter there, having recorded arguably the most popular song with a message in Malawi — Ufa wa Mtedza (Peanut Flour in Your Child’s Corn Mush). After Peace Corps, Jack went to medical school, and recently retired after a 30-year career in academic emergency medicine. He has done three public health stints in Africa — a USAID mission in Tanzania in ’82, a Project Hope Mission in Malawi in ’94, and US State Department mission in Malawi in ’05 — the latter two involved helping to eradicate AIDS in that Central African country. Since 1967 Allison has raised more than $150,00.00 with his music, and he and his wife, Sue Wilson, have donated these monies to various charitable causes. (For more . . .

Archive - January 2010