February 6, 2010 – Peace Corps Worldwide

100 Days (Or Less) Part Ten: Day Five

Feb 06 2010

Day Five You can never know enough about your characters. W. Somerset Maugham Get a stack of 5 X 7 cards and put each character’s name at the top on a card. Next, think about the role each plays in your story, and what kind of person each is: age, education, place of birth, hot-headed, funny, fat, ugly. What are their quirks? Do they wash their hands 500 times a day? Do they hear voices? Are they kind to kids but love to torture cats? Do they have a favorite expression or phrase that they say over and over again? Put it down, put down so much that you finally come to know these characters intimately. Alfred Hitchcock would write down the scenes of his movies on index cards, one scene to a card. That way, as he said, by the time he was ready to shoot the film, he . . .

Peace Corps At Day One, # 7

Feb 06 2010

Training I Ordinary Americans had rarely been trained systematically for service overseas. As assistant Secretary of State Harlan Cleveland pointed out in his study, “The Overseas American,” attempts at orienting Americans to overseas service had usually been casual and totally inadequatee. As a result many Americans living abroad, whether privately or as officials, had not had a real understanding of the society in which they found themselves. Fewer still had learned the local language. These were the errors the Peace Corps resolved to avoid when they began Peace Corps Training in the summer of 1961. When the Peace Corps was established on March 1, there were few guidelines on how to train PCV effectively for service in the Third World. Faced with this dearth of precedents, Associate Director Larry Dennis sponsored a series of Peace Corps Institutes which brought people together from Government agencies, universities, foundations, business, labor and professional and . . .

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