June 15, 2010 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Review of Larry Lihosit's South of the Frontera

Jun 15 2010

Peter Chilson’s recent fiction collection, Disturbance-Loving Species, won the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Bakeless Prize in Short Fiction and Peace Corps Writers’ 2008 Maria Thomas Fiction Prize. He is the author of the travelogue Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa, which won the nonfiction award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. His essays have twice appeared in Best American Travel Writing. Peter has also published in Creative Nonfiction, Ascent, The American Scholar, TheSmartSet, Audubon, The North American Review, Gulf Coast, and High Country News, where he was an editor. He teaches writing and literature at Washington State University and is working on a book about borderlands in Africa. • South of the Frontera: A Peace Corps Memoir by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) iUniverse $22.95 313 pages March 2010 Reviewed by Peter Chilson (Niger 1985–87) IN 1975 LARRY LIHOSIT LOST HIS JOB and took off . . .

An RPCV Sit-In at the Peace Corps

Jun 15 2010

Thomas F. Roeser is (or was) a radio talk show host in Chicago, a right winger, who has a blog: www.tomroeser.com. A couple years back he wrote about the Peace Corps as he was the agency’s PR person in 1970 when a band of RPCVs took over the building. I have heard and read various accounts of this happening, but here’s Tom’s take from his blog of the day and night the RPCVs sat in at the Peace Corps. I’ve edit it down some for length. In May, 1970, a week after the Kent State shootings in Ohio, more than 100,000 anti-war demonstrators converged on Washington to protest the shooting of the students as well as the Nixon administration’s incursion into Cambodia. Police ringed the White House with buses to block the demonstrators from getting too close to the mansion. Early in the morning before the march, Nixon met with protesters . . .

Archive - June 15, 2010