Archive - July 2011

1
Groups, Batches, and Pods
2
Review of Lawrence Lihosit's Years On and Other Travel Essays
3
Tony D'Souza has something to say about rape in the Peace Corps!
4
Should the Peace Corps be privatized?
5
Another view of the value of the Peace Corps
6
What is being said on the Internet about the Peace Corps
7
Kevin Lowther Writes Book on Sierra Leonean John Kizell
8
Gallery Cat Editor Jason Boog (Guatemala 2000-02) says…..Sue Fondrie Has Written the Worst Sentence of 2011
9
Researching RPCVs For An Academic Study
10
A Writer Writes: Peace Corps Training, 1968
11
Review of Christina Shea's Smuggled
12
I Get Mail….from RPCV writers
13
Jerusalem Post Magazine Piece on Michael Levy (China 2005-06)
14
Review of Thor Hanson's Feathers
15
Memorial Service for Sally Bowles The Peace Corps First Staff Employee (Unpaid)!

Groups, Batches, and Pods

As a Volunteer in Colombia when I was asked by a Colombian, “Quien es?” I would reply “Cuerpo de Paz.”  When asked the same question by an American, I would say “Colombia XI.”  Those were all the IDs I needed; designations I was proud to claim, then and now. One of the unique features of Peace Corps administration that gets too little attention is the organization of Volunteers into groups. Volunteers apply individually, are accepted individually and serve individually; but in between, they are “staged,” “trained,” and “sworn in,” as a member of a group. Everyone in the group goes to the same country; has the same starting and terminating date; usually the same program description; attends classes together; and serves under the same Host Country management. The groups are named by country and then by number; the numbers are sequential within each country, except when they are not.* Taken all . . .

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Review of Lawrence Lihosit's Years On and Other Travel Essays

Years On and Other Travel Essays Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975–77) iUniverse May 2011 211 pages Paperback $18.95 Reviewed by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000–02; Madagascar 2002–03) AFTER READING LARRY LIHOSIT’S COLLECTION, Years On and Other Travel Essays, I find myself scratching my head as to why the author subtitled his book “travel essays,” for it was certainly the wrong phrase to use. While these twelve well-crafted and engaging essays — spanning some thirty years of his adventures and work in such places as Mexico, Honduras, and Bolivia — do take us to many foreign locales, to label Lihosit’s experiences as”travel” would be to denigrate what he’s accomplished. Let Theroux claim the word “travel,” for that’s what he does: sips coffee on trains while scrimshawing cribbed and crotchety notes. Lihosit, on the other hand, should have used something like Essays of Reckless Immersion, Essays of Fomenting Revolution, Essays of Giving . . .

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Tony D'Souza has something to say about rape in the Peace Corps!

[A thoughtful comment from Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000-02; Madagascar 2002-03)] This drivel was posted by an Illuminati-obsessed conspiracy theory website which regularly publishes anti-Semitic material. The “Great Peace Corps Rape Witch-Hunt of 2011” is revealing its true colors. There is no doubt that Peace Corps Administration mistreated Volunteer rape victims and should be held accountable. But no matter what improvements Peace Corps Admin makes, rape is a crime that happens everywhere, in every country, to every race. No military, police, or governmental force anywhere in the history of the world has been able to stop it. According to a February, 2010 NPR report, research funded by the US Department of Justice says that 1 in 5 US college women will be raped. That means that at a theoretical US university with 8500 students (roughly the number of current Peace Corps Volunteers), where half the students are women (4250), 850 will . . .

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Should the Peace Corps be privatized?

Walton Family Foundation Gifts Teach for America $49.5 Million  The Walton Family Foundation is run by Walmart founder Sam Waltonâ€TMs three children. First Posted: 7/27/11 09:04 AM ET Updated: 7/27/11 09:14 AM ET NEW YORK — The Walton Family Foundation announced a $49.5 million grant Wednesday to help double the size of Teach for America’s national teaching corps over the next three years. Teach for America is a program for recent college graduates who sign up to teach in some of the nation’s most under-served schools for a period of two years. The Walton Foundation’s gift marks the single largest private donation to Teach for America in the organization’s more than 20-year history. Later this fall, the organization will send 9,300 corps members to 43 regions across the country. Over the next few years, half of the Walton Family Foundation grant will go towards growing that teaching corps to 15,000 by . . .

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Another view of the value of the Peace Corps

“Conquer” by Love rather than Force of Arms America Needs to Replace the “Pentagon Approach” with the “Peace Approach” by Sherwood Ross If the United States attempted to “conquer” by love rather than force of arms, it might be respected, not reviled, globally. If the White House took an altruistic approach in foreign affairs—that is, if it rejected greed, exploitation, and war in favor of fair play, charity, and humanitarian assistance—it might enjoy such prosperity as exists beyond the dreams of its misguided rulers. It is no naïve suggestion to urge the Congress to transpose the budgets and numbers of personnel of the Pentagon and the Peace Corps. Naïve is how one would define the Pentagon’s 10-year-long failure to conquer Afghanistan by force of arms. Naïve is how the Pentagon can claim the U.S. has improved Iraq when that country far is worse off today than when the Pentagon first . . .

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What is being said on the Internet about the Peace Corps

Peace Corps Puts Volunteers in Danger July 25, 2011 (left, Peace Corps Volunteer Kate Puzey, 24, was murdered in March 2009 in Benin.) Idealistic young Americans are cannon fodder for the Illuminati-run peace corps. by David Richards (henrymakow.com) Henry Makow is the author of A Long Way to go for a Date. He received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto. henry@savethemales.ca. JFK founded the Peace Corps program 50-years-ago proclaiming it a charitable organization designed to encourage mutual understanding between Americans and other countries. In reality, the Peace Corps is a military organization serving the Illuminati. It sends Westerners into third-world countries to act as NWO “change agents,” Westernizing locals. Another function is to give murderous US foreign policy a charitable face. Since its beginning, 200,000 US volunteers have served the organization in 139 nations. There are now 8,650 Americans working in 77 countries in Asia, Africa, the . . .

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Kevin Lowther Writes Book on Sierra Leonean John Kizell

Every once in a while the Peace Corps produces a wonderful writer, and one of them is Kevin Lowther (Sierra Leone 1963-65). He is a former PC/HQ staffer, newspaper editor, and student of the agency who has written on African issues for the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor;  he is also the coauthor of Keeping Kennedy’s Promise: The Peace Corps,Unmet Hope of the New Frontier, published in 1978. I first met Kevin through the Volunteer in-country newsletter he edited while a PCV in Sierra Leone. I believe the newsletter was called The Tilley Lamp, and it would arrive (for some unknown reason!) in the Peace Corps Office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It was well written, informative, funny, and the best PCV newsletter produced during those early years of the agency. Now he has a new book The African American Odyssey of John Kizell: A South Carolina Slave Returns to Fight the Slave Trade in His African Homeland.  (Kevin . . .

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Gallery Cat Editor Jason Boog (Guatemala 2000-02) says…..Sue Fondrie Has Written the Worst Sentence of 2011

By Jason Boog on July 26, 2011 5:14 PM University of Wisconsin Oshkosh assistant professor Sue Fondrie has written the worst sentence of 2011, winning the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with the world’s worst opening to an imaginary novel. Here is the winning (?) sentence: “Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.” This prize is part of an annual bad writing competition that began in 1982 at San Jose State University. The contest was named after Victorian novelist Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton  an author famous for writing the opening line: “It was a dark and stormy night.”  

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Researching RPCVs For An Academic Study

[I received this special academic request for help from Nan Cowardin-Lee in California. Take a look, and see if you have time to help her in her research.  Nan is located in Berkeley, attending the university’s branch in San Franciso. ] My name is Nan Cowardin-Lee. I am a PhD student at Alliant International University in organizational psychology. I am conducting research on value and moral challenges experienced by individuals who have lived or studied abroad for more than 6 months. The research has a generational comparison component. Therefore, I am interested in obtaining information from individuals of all generations, and, in particular, I would appreciate hearing from individuals born before 1946. The research data is collected in two parts. In the first part, an on-line survey asks participants to report on a general or specific incident that challenged them while living in a culture that was not their own. A series . . .

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A Writer Writes: Peace Corps Training, 1968

Peace Corps Training, 1968 By Jerr Boschee (India 1968-70) January, 2011 . . . I’m listening to a series of Donovan songs from my iTunes archive and it’s carrying me back to my room in an Indian village long ago. I had a three-inch reel-to-reel tape of his music that I played over and over again on a clunky, battery-operated, table-top recorder, along with a dozen or so other tapes I’d inherited from a Peace Corps Volunteer who’d finished his term of service long before. The quality wasn’t great, but the music sure was: Richie Havens, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Simon & Garfunkel, Ray Charles, Mamas & Papas, Peter Paul & Mary . . . and of course The Doors. June, 1968 . . . A cluster of huts and small buildings in a campground in Temescal Canyon, nothing but craggy hillsides between the compound and the . . .

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Review of Christina Shea's Smuggled

Smuggled By Christina Shea (Hungary 1990–92) Grove/Atlantic, Inc., Black Cat July 2011 256 Pages $14.00 Reviewed by Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963–65) CHRISTINA SHEA’S SMUGGLED IS a tale of the emotionally corrosive power of dictatorial societies. It is also the story of human resiliency in the face of repressive governmental policies. Christina Shea has done an estimable job of illustrating this dichotomy in her second novel, an austere political saga covering fifty years of political upheaval in Eastern Europe, more specifically, Hungary and Romania between 1943 and 1991, spanning World War Two, the Stalinist takeover, and the eventual collapse of Communism. In limpid, unadorned prose, Shea, follows Jewish Éva Farkas from the age of five when she is smuggled out of Hungary in a flour sack, over the border into Romania where she is renamed Anca Balaj, and begins her transformation under the protective identity of “Romanian internal refugee” in the . . .

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I Get Mail….from RPCV writers

Once a week or so I get a book in the mail sent by an RPCV. Usually I know the book is coming, or there is a letter inside the package, saying, “hi, I’ve written a book about my time in….” Yesterday, however, I got an oversize (9×12) beautiful book of text and photos entitled Colombia: Pictures & Stories from someone named Sandy Fisher (Colombia 1962-64). No explanation. No note. No nothin’ as my son use to say when he was six. Plus, it was autographed! Well, someone had scribbled “Sandy Fisher” on the title page, no date, no comment, no nothin’. (You’ve got to love Peace Corps Writers. They are surely not into self-promotion.) This “Sandy,” as I said, was a PCV in Colombia from 1962-64, first doing community development work in Tenjo, outside of Bogota. After one year there, he went to be a volunteer leader on the Caribbean . . .

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Jerusalem Post Magazine Piece on Michael Levy (China 2005-06)

Changing Places 07/21/2011 16:05 By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER  ‘It is said that in America, the money is in the pockets of the Jews and the brains are in the heads of the Chinese,’ a local official in Guizhou province tells Michael Levy, a Peace Corps volunteer. Before long, the man adds, America will fade away and China “will have one hundred years of glory. When the Jews begin to immigrate here, we will know we have won!” Levy nods, rests his head on a table, and falls asleep. It is not his first – nor will it be his last – awkward conversation about Jews, Judaism and the United States. In Kosher Chinese, Levy, who currently teaches at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York, recounts his experiences in 2005 and 2006 teaching English as a second language at Gui Da University in rural China. Up-close-and-personal, funny and, alas, occasionally . . .

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Review of Thor Hanson's Feathers

Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle by Thor Hanson (Uganda 1993–95) Basic Books $25.99 336 pages 2011 Reviewed by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993–96) THOR HANSON, A CONSERVATION BIOLOGIST, has written a scientific treatise on a subject that most of us never notice — feathers.  But you don’t have to be an ornithologist to consider reading this book, you just have to be curious. Bird watching is not always “for the birds.” Hanson writes that it is “. . . a dangerous trap, because the true wonder of birding lies in the watching, soaking up the fine details of plumage, behavior and habit. Even common birds do uncommon things, and every sighting is worth more than a glance and a tick on a checklist.” You might see something like “Snowy Sheathbills striding about, bent forward like tiny professors lost in thought.” The scope of this book would be daunting . . .

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Memorial Service for Sally Bowles The Peace Corps First Staff Employee (Unpaid)!

Memorial Service for Sarah Bowles A memorial service for Sally Bowles will take place at 3 p.m., September 17 in Essex, Connecticut, at Hayden’s Point, where Sally grew up, now the home of Sally’s friends and neighbors Dorinda and Mark Winkelman. The service will be outdoors overlooking the Connecticut River, and will be followed by a reception. Thomas Bennet is compiling photographs of Sally. Please send him any photographs that you would like to share. Email:  <thomas.bennet@gmail.com> So that we know how many to expect, please let us know you are coming by registering (click on the link below) rather than replying to this email. Click to register (don’t forget to click “submit” at the end of the form) Please send this message on to other friends of Sally’s whom we may have missed. Directions: Click on the link below for a map.  Note that you should drive to the . . .

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