Archive - August 2, 2010

As Chris Hedrick (Senegal 1988-90), a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where he studied political history, and who is today the CD in Senegal, mentioned in his ‘comment’ on this site that it is the PCVs who make the difference, not the HQ staff in D.C. Chris wrote on July 29: As always, the real work of the Peace Corps is being done every day by Volunteers in the field. For example, my Volunteers have led the way in Senegal with innovative approaches to preventing malaria and distributing bed nets. They have provided an example that has now been adopted by the government of Senegal and USAID and is saving hundreds of lives here. See: http://pcsenegal.org/malaria/index.html No particular help from Washington, and none needed but outstanding work by dedicated Volunteers which my Senegalese staff and I do our best to support, as has ever been the case. There are a few other examples of what PCVs in . . .

Richard Wiley (Korea 1967-69) is the Associate Director of the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV. The Black Mountain Institute  is an international literary center “dedicated to promoting discourse on today’s most pressing issues” and Wiley is author of the novels Soldiers In Hiding (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for best American fiction and reissued in 2007 by Hawthorne Books), Fools’ Gold, Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, Indigo, and Ahmed’s Revenge. His most recent novel, Commodore Perry’s Minstrel Show, was published by the new Michener Series at the University of Texas Press in 2007. Wiley has been teaching creative writing at  UNLV since 1989, and brought the Peace Corps Masters International Program in creative writing to the university in the mid-nineties. Well, now he has arranged a wonderful evening of Peace Corps Writers in Las Vegas to celebrate the creation of the Peace Corps. This is another event to celebrate the . . .