Archive - 2011

1
From the White House…..p.s. I don't think we were invited!
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Review of Thomas and Peter Weck's The Lima Bear Stories
3
RPCV Writers–Hessler and Erdman–on Wisconsin Public Radio
4
National Public Service Museum and Student Center planned with a spot for the Public Service Volunteer Experience
5
The Peace Corps and USAID in Bed Together!
6
Writing About Ernest Hemingway
7
Tyler McMahon (El Salvador 1999-02) Debut Novel Rocks & Rolls!
8
A Writer Writes: Chernobyl by Ashley Hardaway (Ukraine 2006-08)
9
Talking with Publisher Tom Weck (Ethiopia 1965-67)
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Review of Leslie Noyes Mass' Back to Pakistan: A Fifty-Year Journey
11
Remembering Alan Weiss by Ed Gruberg (Nigeria 1962-64) Final
12
Talking With Robert Cohen about Alan Weiss, # 5
13
Excerpt # 4 from High Risk/High Gain: Africa
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Excerpt #3 from High Risk/High Gain: Shriver arrives at Training
15
Excerpts # 2 from High Risk/High Gain

From the White House…..p.s. I don't think we were invited!

Friends: Please join us as we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Peace Corps and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Peace Corps Director, Aaron Williams, USAID Administrator, Rajiv Shah, and senior White House Administration officials will participate in this event on Wednesday, November 23rd at 9:30AM EST. If you are able to attend, please rsvp no later than Friday, November 18th at 5PM EST, and fill out the attached Excel sheet with information we will need to clear you into the building. Thank you, Karen Richardson The White House Office of Public Engagement EVENT DETAILS WHAT: White House 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Peace Corps and USAID WHEN: Wednesday, November 23rd at 9:30AM EST (Please arrive by 8:45 EST at the south west gate on 17th and State Place NW) WHERE: White House Complex, Eisenhower Executive Office Building, South Court Auditorium Karen Richardson Associate Director White House . . .

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Review of Thomas and Peter Weck's The Lima Bear Stories

The Lima Bear Stories Thomas Weck (Ethiopia 1965–67) and Peter Weck Illustrated by Len DiSalvo $15.95 (hardcover) • The Megasaurus 40 pages May 2011 • How Back-Back Got His Name 32 pages July 2011 • The Cave Monster 32 pages September 2011 Reviewed by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000-02, Madagascar 2002-03) THOMAS AND PETER WECK, along with illustrator Len DiSalvo, have created a series of children’s books for 4–8 year olds called The Lima Bear Stories, three of which, The Megasaurus, How Back-Back Got His Name, and The Cave Monster, I have had the pleasure of reading to my two and three-year-olds over the past week. The stories, about a kingdom of lima bean-sized bears and a number of regular-sized animal friends of the bears, are based on stories Thomas told his children. The books are handsome and beautifully illustrated, and knowing what my children would do to the books . . .

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RPCV Writers–Hessler and Erdman–on Wisconsin Public Radio

Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders is a live one-hour weekday global cultural affairs program with a focus on the future. It is broadcast from Wisconsin Public Radio and hosted by Jean Feraca. Its mission is described on the website (http://www.wpr.org/hereonearth/aboutus.cfm). Yesterday’s broadcast focused on Peace Corps writers  Sarah Erdman (Cote d’Ivoire 1998-2000), author of Nine Hills to Nambonkaha,  and Peter Hessler (China  1996-98), who wrote River Town and two other books on China. To listen to the program, go to:http://wpr.org/hereonearth/archive_111115k.cfm This program is an hour long and several RPCVs ‘call in’  so the discussion goes beyond books to the Peace Corps experience, and what has happened to all of us! It is terrific show. Sarah and Peter did a great job talking about their books and their tours. In true Peace Corps spirit, Sarah calls in to the program from Brussels where she is at the moment,  and Peter was on his cell phone from downtown . . .

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National Public Service Museum and Student Center planned with a spot for the Public Service Volunteer Experience

ASPA is the American Society for Public Administration. The organization’s website is: http://www.aspanet.org/scriptcontent/index.cfm The ASPA Board has endorsed the goal of “establishing a National Public Service Museum and Student Center to serve as a place for American Youth to learn about the current challenges and past accomplishments of public servants.” In an article in the August/September 2011 issue of The ASPA Times, Richard Baum, Chair of the ASPA Museum Project Team, describes the project in detail: “The Museum, to be based in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, would present information abut government policies and programs in a dynamic, interactive manner, taking a page from newer museums, such as the journalism focused Washington -based Newseum. It would serve as a place for youth, through class or family visits, to gain a better understanding of what government actually does and how and it does it”… The new Museum will show the government’s . . .

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The Peace Corps and USAID in Bed Together!

USAID, Peace Corps Join Arms in Support of Education The Peace Corps and USAID have signed an agreement entitled the Global Education Framework, a joint venture, they say, “that would implement global initiatives for basic and higher education, and youth and workforce development.” The agreement means more money for the Peace Corps, and more programs for education, gender equality and the youth. “The Global Education Framework agreement demonstrates how we are effectively and efficiently programming every development dollar to deliver meaningful results in education,” says USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah. “By working together, we strengthen our organizations to better assist the countries and people we serve.” Other activities being supported under the GEF are: Development of new training modules for volunteers and staff. Training teachers and school officials for the two-year Peace Corps Education Assistance Project in Mindanao, Philippines. Volunteers teaching English to judges and court staff under the Millennium Challenge Corp. Rwanda . . .

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Writing About Ernest Hemingway

My family knows to buy me Hemingway books for my birthday. If there is no new Hemingway book, I get socks! This fall, however, there are three new books about Hemingway, and two of them have come my way. The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume I: 1907-1922 and Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 by Paul Hendrickson. It was published by Knopf last month. And Hemingway’s Boat is a wonder of a book! Let me confess that Paul Hendrickson and I share something of a history, though we have never met. Both of us attended Saint Louis University as undergraduates, and both of us came under the magical spell of Dr. Albert Montesi, SLU’s famous creative writing teacher. Paul came to SLU years after I attended college and did not join the Peace Corps. He went onto become a staff writer at The Washington Post where he also wrote books, one being The Living and the . . .

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Tyler McMahon (El Salvador 1999-02) Debut Novel Rocks & Rolls!

Thirty years ago P.F. Kluge (Micronesia 1967-69) published a novel entitled Eddie and the Cruisers about a New Jersey rock band. The book was turned into a cult movie. (Kluge also wrote the WSJ article(s) that were the basis of  the movie Dog Day Afternoon.) Cruisers was (is) a terrific book, published by Viking in 1980. Now comes another ‘rock band’ novel by an RPCV! This one is the first novel by  Tyler McMahon (El Salvador 1999-02) who served in Palo Grande, in the Rosario de Mora municipality, and who is now an Assistant Professor at Hawaii Pacific University. His novel, How the Mistakes Were Made, was published in October by St. Martin’s Press. The story is about Laura Loss who comes of age in the hardcore punk scene of the 1980s, the jailbait bassist in her brother Anthony’s band. Now, a decade after tragedy destroyed Anthony and their iconic group, she finds herself serving coffee in Seattle. While on a reluctant . . .

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A Writer Writes: Chernobyl by Ashley Hardaway (Ukraine 2006-08)

Ashley Hardaway (Ukraine 2006–08) has never been able to sit still. It progressively got worse. Far away universities. Backpacking trips. Solo vacations. It wasn’t any big shock when she announced she was joining the Peace Corps – leaving for Ukraine a month after graduating from college. Afterwards, upon moving back to America, Ashley would continuously find herself saying “In Ukraine this one time…” To everyone’s great delight and/or horror she got a publishing deal for a travel guide to Ukraine — Ukraine: Discover the Real Ukraine. Traveling around the county again and writing about it would either rid her of all her thoughts regarding this country, or provide her with even more stories to torment people with at Christmas time. So far, all signs point to the latter. Ashley Hardaway now lives in Florida where she continues to write – about other things besides Ukraine. However, for our site, she wrote a piece on . . .

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Talking with Publisher Tom Weck (Ethiopia 1965-67)

JUST NORTH OF THE PROVINCIAL CAPITAL of Dessie in the Debub Wollo Zone of Ethiopia is a small road-side town called Haik (or Hayq), wedged between low range hills and Lake Hayq. It is famous for being the home of the Coptic Church’s Istifanos Monastery, and for being the Peace Corps site where Tom Weck taught 7th and 8th grade English and math from 1965 to 1967. Tom was the only PCV in Haik, though a dozen or more PCVs (including his future wife) were stationed in Dessie, 28 kilometers south on an all-weather gravel road that bisected, north and south, the Empire of Emperor Haile Selassie. Haik was a town through which everyone — from missionaries, tourists, lorry drivers, and the Ethiopian government officials — raced. There was nothing in Haik, beyond the monastery and a 1930s Italian graveyard for the bodies of dead Blackshirt soldiers of the brief . . .

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Review of Leslie Noyes Mass' Back to Pakistan: A Fifty-Year Journey

Back to Pakistan: A Fifty-Year Journey by Leslie Noyes Mass (Pakistan 1962–64) Rowman and Littlefield Publishers $32.95 212 pages (paperback) 2011 Reviewed by  David Day (Kenya 1965–66; India 1967–68) IN THIS ACCOUNT of her initial Peace Corps assignment in rural western Pakistan from 1962 to 1964, and a return visit forty-seven years later, in 2009, Leslie Mass gives us tightly-focused access to the lives of women and a range of attempts to educate them in arguably one of the world’s most dangerous countries. It’s a glimpse not often seen in terrorism-haunted media coverage of this troublesome, strategically important Muslim nation. As part of her titular “journey,” we are taken — with the aid of numerous excerpts from letters written to George (a close friend and later, husband), and verbatim transcripts from tape recordings of conversations — from the dusty alleys of small villages to the snow-capped peaks of the Karakoram . . .

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Remembering Alan Weiss by Ed Gruberg (Nigeria 1962-64) Final

[Another RPCV, Ed Gruberg, wrote me about Alan Weiss and his thoughts of Alan as a person and a writer.] I always expected Weiss to become a famous writer. How could he not be? He was smart and witty and was a great storyteller. He had a fine ear and he relished pointing out other people’s flaws. He worked very hard, wrote hours every day. All he had to do was get it down on paper. In his short life he published very little: one novel; one extended soliloquy to Ibadan that I published in Voyeur, a small magazine I ran; and one scholarly mathematical article on totitives, co-authored with a Yoruba colleague, Victor Olunloyo that was published twice – in an American mathematics journal and a British mathematics journal. He left unfinished a novel about Nigeria as it unraveled in the sixties. A piece about Malcolm X’s speech at the . . .

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Talking With Robert Cohen about Alan Weiss, # 5

Robert Cohen (Nigeria 1962-64) was an Associate Peace Corps Director in Liberia from 1965 to 1967, and is today an educational consultant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and cabaret singer. He has also been on the board of Friends of Nigeria. In 1963, he was Alan’s roommate in Nigeria. As his roommate in Africa, what do you remember most about Alan in Nigeria? His “wedding,” a rag-tag affair that took place at a Yoruba Magistrates Court, in midday, all of us suited and tied for the occasion and sweating mightily as we all awaited our group’s turn before the magistrate. This was one event that Alan could NOT simply OBSERVE. He was the main character, along with fiancee Judith, and unaccustomed to that role, despite his writing. Also, I remember the going-away party Weiss and Judith held for at least a dozen of us. Weiss sat at the end of a long banquet table . . .

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Excerpt # 4 from High Risk/High Gain: Africa

Page 255: The sick circus of training behind us, we would go to Africa. But we couldn’t have been more disaffected, more fragmented into our basic globules of personality; and if wave after wave of new Volunteers followed us over there, and gave us the big hello, we would certainly hello in return – but tied to that fellow as participants in a great movement to revolutionize the quality of American life, well, don’t be silly. Each of us would fall in love with Africa, bits and pieces of that bedeviled continent, and make friends, small friendships in our own way, one or two, a handful, except JZ, who would make hundreds, thousands, who would conquer a town, riding maverick over the laterite roads on her blue Honda, this blonde giant of a white girl, crazy and loving and finally at peace, momentarily at peace, in a great sprawl of . . .

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Excerpt #3 from High Risk/High Gain: Shriver arrives at Training

Page 235-237: I don’t recall a blare of trumpets and a silver leaping flash of mercury, but there might as well have been. He wasn’t there. And suddenly he was. Moving effortlessly, like a gleaming thoroughbred trotting into the winners’ circle. You got the feeling he always moved like that: like a fighter waltzing across a ring, or an Olympian surging victory-foamed out of a pool, a dancing golden boy, the world’s greatest . . . The roar rose as if the cement were splitting under our feet, it rose in stages, in tiers, until it shook the rafters, till it fluttered Palmer’s necktie, a leaping frenzy of noise, as people roared and whimpered and climbed high on the backs of chairs to shout their inspiring gratitude. It was everything: the end of a long summer, the heat, the bursting tension, the wait, the golden boy appearance, that dance, smile, aristocratic wave, . . .

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Excerpts # 2 from High Risk/High Gain

Pages 31-33: There followed a briefing by the Peace Corps Field Assessment Officer, a psychiatrist. Now in sections, we met in a reverberatingly hot classroom of Teachers College. The psychiatrist was a ruffle-haired, soft-cheeked young guy, trying to – suck! suck! – get his pipe lit. Off to one side, half sitting against the desk, was presumable a colleague, a haggard-looking creature with a large balding dome of a head and jutting elbows. The spitting image of Raskolnikov. “We’re meeting today,” said the psychiatrist, “to tell you what to expect in the way of selection procedures. It would be disingenuous of us to pretend that you won’t be observed and assessed throughout training. Most of you will be judged acceptable and sent to Nigeria, but a small percentage will be disqualified. Why disqualified? I will come to that. It shouldn’t surprise you that we want emotionally mature, competent individuals who . . .

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