Archive - January 2012

In the weeks and months that followed the bombing of Rangoon, Geren worked as a driver, and then as a field hospital attendant on the front lines which the Chinese were failing to hold against the advancing Japanese. “Our supplies were cut off and the Japs were advancing all the time,” Paul recalled. “We were the only medical unit with Western standards. The few members of the Quaker Volunteer Ambulance Corps and myself, we carried the wounded back from the battlefield.” All of this time his faith buffered him. On Christmas Eve, 1941, he wrote in his Diary, “The Japanese are promising a ‘Christmas present for the white people’ over the Bangkok radio.” They carried on in Rangoon. From Geren’s Diary, Christmas Eve, 1941: Whatever came yesterday, and whatever will come tomorrow, tonight we sang Christmas carols. We were a motley choir, begotten of a day between air raids, so widely apart . . .

Paul Francis Geren was deeply religious. And his religion, it appears to me, propelled him through his life, aiding him in his journey from Rangoon to Ramgarh, the legendary march out of Burma, and through dozens of  other appointments, foreign and domestic, government and academic. The pivotal point of this man’s life, however, was his escape from Burma that he details in Burma Diary, his short articulate memoir that was published by Harper & Brothers in 1943, and became an immediate best seller. It is a story told with quiet dignity, much like the man himself who is described often by others as “a quiet, studious looking individual.” But first, a quick survey summary of WWII for all of us who missed the war, thanks to Harold J. Schultz, Chairman of the International Studies at Stetson University. Schultz wrote about Paul when Geren became the fifth president of that Florida college: The Battle . . .

IN THE FIRST YEAR OF THE PEACE CORPS there was a man at the agency whose name is never mentioned in any histories today, or even remembered by the men and women of that time, all those Mad Men and Women who were turning official Washington on its ear as they created from nothing a new government department at 806 Connecticut Avenue, diagonally across Lafayette Park from the White House. Even the first architects of the Peace Corps who were ‘present at the creation’ in the Mayflower Hotel that winter of 1961 seldom note him by name. He came and went silently at the Peace Corps, lasting less than a year in the Maiatico Building. What is most surprising is that Paul Francis Geren was someone of real importance at the agency. He was the first Deputy Director of the Peace Corps. Who was Paul F. Geren I wanted to know when . . .

Eritrea Remembered: Recollections & Photos by Peace Corps Volunteers edited by Marian Haley Beil (Ethiopia 1962–64) Peace Corps Writers 184 pages $10.00 (paperback), $2.99 (Kindle) December 2011 • The Fish & Rice Chronicles: My Extraordinary Adventures in Palau and Micronesia by PG Bryan (Micronesia 1967–70) Xlibris 334 pages $19.99 (paperback), $29.99 (hard cover), $7.69 (Kindle) August 2011 • Report of My Death: Beyond-the-Grave Confessions of North American Writers by Girard R. Christmas ( Thailand 1973–76; Western Samoa 1976–78) Lulu Publisher 660 pages $49.95 (hard cover);$34.95 (paperback);$13.99 (Kindle) 2007, Revised 2010 • Hope Is Cut: Youth, Unemployment, and the Future in Urban Ethiopia by Daniel Mains (Ethiopia 1998–99) Temple University Press 208 pages $69.50 (hard cover) November 2011 • One For The Road (Novel) by David J. Mather (Chile 1968-70) Peace Corps Writers 400 pages September 2011 $14.95 (paperback)

Jeffrey Tayler (Morocco 1988-90; PC/Staff Poland 1992; Uzbekistan 1992-93) is a PCV writer who never came home but has kept writing. He is the author of such travel books as Siberian Dawn and Facing the Congo, and has published numerous articles in The Atlantic, Spin, Harper’s, and Conde´ Nast Traveler, plus being a regular commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”  Tayler lives in Russia and in the current issue of The Atlantic has a piece on a remote archipelago of Russia, one of county’s holiest places, the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral. It is located on the largest of the Solovetsky Islands and “amid the gale-lashed White Sea, just outside the Arctic Circle,” Jeff writes. Tayler lives in Moscow and Solovki is 650 miles away by plane. (And you thought it was a long way to your site!) The Soviets opened the Solovetsky Monastery back in 1967 as a museum and the monks returned there in 1990. It has taken this RPCV a little . . .

The accepted supposition is that there are only six degrees of separation between any two people on Earth. But, I think, if we are talking about RPCVs that ratio tightens and it is more like 4 connections between you and anyone else in the world. And if you add growing up in the rural Mid-West in a town of less than 100,000, and being the same age, well, then, maybe, for all practical purposes, you’re kissin’ cousins. So that is why it is not so strange that Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) has a piece in the January 9, 2012, New Yorker about a guy named Jake Adelstein–who Peter knew as a kid in Missouri–and who went to Tokyo five years ago not knowing a word of Japanese, became a crime reporter for the country’s largest newspapers, and now lives in Tokyo under police protection because of his articles on the yakuza, Japan’s version of . . .

Sweet Teeth and Loose Bowels: The Adventures of an International Aid Worker by Michael S. Gerber (Philippines 1970–73) Troubador Publishing 296 pages $18.95 (paperback) 2007 Reviewed by Robert E. Hamilton (Ethiopia 1965–67) UNDERSTANDABLY, ONE DOESN’T INFORM the family gathered around the Thanksgiving table, “Hey, I’m reading an informative book on international aid with the interesting title of . . ..”  One alternative:  “Read Chapter 34 of Book Two of  Dr. Michael Gerber’s 2007 publication.” There the title is explained.  A better title might have derived from a comment by a fellow Non-Government Organization (NGO) colleague:  “It is the poor and the suffering who create jobs for us.” (Page 252)  Or, as his youngest son, then 11, remarked, following Gerber’s description of what an NGO director does: “Now I understand your job. I can just tell my friends you are a ‘professional beggar.’” Michael Gerber (BA, MA, Ph.D.) worked in Asia and . . .