Archive - 2012

1
The Practical Idealism of The Peace Corps, Essay by Jamie Price
2
Leaving El Salvador for the First Time 9.1.79 – 3.31.1980 Part One
3
Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963-65) Wins National Award for Dog Book
4
Innocent RPCV Imprisoned in Nicaragua
5
Heather Kaschmitter — A Writer Writes
6
Review of Terry Marshall's Soda Springs: Love, Sex and Civil Rights
7
Review of David Mather's One for the Road
8
Roland Merullo (Micronesia 1979-80)Wins Alex Award
9
Frances Stone's new book Through the Eyes of My Children
10
Review of Letters From Moritz Thomsen by Christopher West Davis (Kenya 1975-78)
11
P.F. Kluge (Micronesia 1967-69) and Josh Radnor Together Again at Kenyon College
12
Still more on the Peace Corps Book Locker!
13
Maureen Orth (Colombia 1965-67) on Morning Joe
14
Review of Coming Apart by Charles Murray (Thailand 1965-67)
15
Link to the Today Show and Maureen Orth's appearance

The Practical Idealism of The Peace Corps, Essay by Jamie Price

Maureen Orth (Colombia 1965-67) was kind enough to forward to me an article  entitled “Practical Idealism: How Sargent Shriver Built the Peace Corps”  in the February 10, 2012 issue of Commonweal magazine. The article was written by Jamie Price, the Director of the Insight Conflict Resolution Program at George Mason University and Executive Director of the Sargent Shriver Peace Institute. Commonweal, if you don’t know the publication, is a wonderful liberal independent journal of opinions published by lay Catholics. Their offices are located on the West Side of New York City, and as they say, they have “a good view of the Hudson River and beyond.” The Jamie Price piece is too long to re-print so let me just quote a few paragraphs. Jamie Price writes: “Fifty years ago the Peace Corps represented a brand-new idea. Nothing like it had ever been tried by the U.S. government, and the nation greeted it with widespread enthusiasm–one Harris . . .

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Leaving El Salvador for the First Time 9.1.79 – 3.31.1980 Part One

When is a country too dangerous for Peace Corps Volunteers to remain? And who decides? Host Country officials? Peace Corps staff?  Peace Corps Volunteers? Or, the State Department?  These questions are foundational issues for Peace Corps.  The collection, “El Salvador: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1977 -1984” (National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington D. C)- includes 20 public documents in which we can see how Peace Corps answered these questions during a turbulent time in El Salvador, some 32 years ago.  The website for the National Security Archive is: www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ Please note: “These materials are reproduced from www.nsarchive.org with the permission of the National Security Archive.” The documents consist of correspondence between Peace Corps in country staff and Peace Corps Washington; between Peace Corps staff and the State Department; and, between Peace Corps Volunteers assigned to El Salvador and Peace Corps Washington. Today, Peace Corps has withdrawn programs from Honduras . . .

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Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963-65) Wins National Award for Dog Book

Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963–65), anthropologist and writer, has won national recognition for his recent non-fiction book, Big Dogs of Tibet and the Himalayas: A Personal Journey (Orchid Press). His book received the Dog Writers Association of America’s (DWAA) prestigious Maxwell Medallion for Excellence at their annual meeting in New York City in early February.           Big Dogs is the result of Don’s life-long love of Tibetan mastiffs and other large canines of the Himalayan regions. He first went to Nepal as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1963, and returned later as an anthropologist. After he encountered the big dogs of the Himalayan region he began nearly a half-century of research on their place in local cultures and as livestock (yak and sheep) guardians. The book, based on his in-depth research is part memoir, part history and cultural description, and part reference book about the Tibetan mastiffs, with sections on three . . .

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Innocent RPCV Imprisoned in Nicaragua

By Ashley Fantz, Jason Puracal, a 34-year-old American, is seen in this image shot last year, imprisoned in Nicaragua. Well-known human rights attorneys, FBI agent, Iran hikers defend imprisoned American Jason Puracal, 34, was a real estate agent working in Nicaragua No evidence was presented to support his conviction and 22-year sentence, defense says Supporters: Puracal has been behind bars for 15 months, is seriously ill (CNN) — Since last summer, a former Peace Corps volunteer from Washington state has been wasting away in a Nicaraguan prison, wrongfully convicted of international drug trafficking, money laundering and organized crime, his supporters say. A growing chorus of defense attorneys, investigators, human rights activists and lawmakers is calling for 34-year-old Jason Puracal’s release. Puracal’s advocates include the director of the California Innocence Project, the human-rights attorney who helped win freedom for Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and an ex-FBI . . .

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Heather Kaschmitter — A Writer Writes

A Writer Writes Heather Kaschmitter was a Youth and Community Development Volunteer on the island of Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia. She was in the 69th group of PCVs to be sent to Micronesia. While there, she started a library at an elementary school and taught English part time, and all the while, she gathered stories of the island that someday she hoped to build into a book. Here is one of the stories she’ll tell. • Sakau Moon Ring by Heather Kaschmitter (Micronesia 2002–04) Disclaimer For me to write about sakau, I beg the forgiveness of the Pohnpeians, and any other culture that drinks kava.  As an American, there is no way I will ever be able to understand or appreciate the importance of this beverage completely. My understanding is that sakau was historically a sacred beverage. In the past, women were forbidden from drinking, and it is still looked down upon, even though women . . .

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Review of Terry Marshall's Soda Springs: Love, Sex and Civil Rights

Soda Springs: Love, Sex and Civil Rights by Terry Marshall (Philippines 1965–68; Solomon Islands & Kiribati Co-CD 1977–80, PC Washington 1980–82) Illustrations by Chuck Asay Friesen Press 367 pages Hardcover $30.39, paperback $19.13, Kindle $7.79 December 2010 Reviewed by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000–02, Madagascar 2002–03) IF A POLITICALLY-CORRECT, TWO-DIMENSIONAL  soap opera  featuring twenty-year-old virgins is what you’re looking for, then Terry Marshall’s novel Soda Springs: Love, Sex and Civil Rights is the book for you. One of the reasons I found the novel irksome — just as with another recent book by a former Peace Corps Country Director, J. Larry Brown and Peasants Come Last — is Marshall’s heavy-handed marketing of Soda Springs. Unlike most review books that come my way, Soda Springs was accompanied by a leaflet campaign touting the cumbersome tome as, “Soda Springs, a place you’ll never forget. A book you can’t put down. You’ll laugh. . . .

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Review of David Mather's One for the Road

One for the Road David Mather (Chile 1968–70) Peace Corps Writers 400 pages $14.95 (paperback) 2011 Reviewed by Reilly Ridgell (Micronesia 1971–73) THERE ARE SOME 32 PEACE CORPS NOVELS listed in the Peace Corps Worldwide bibliography. I’ve now read four and written one. From that small sample, I’m beginning to detect some patterns that may hinder us Peace Corps novelists from achieving the success we dream of.  Generally speaking, the Peace Corps novels that I’ve read tend to be long on setting and short on plot. In fact, and I was guilty of this, the plot tends to be a vehicle with which to provide the reader with all kinds of information about the Peace Corps experience. Sometimes we end up with novels that read like memoirs. We are just so affected by our time in Peace Corps and how different life can be somewhere other than a US suburb that . . .

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Roland Merullo (Micronesia 1979-80)Wins Alex Award

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) is a national association of librarians, library workers and advocates library services for teens. Each year they give out an Alex Awards for ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults. The winning titles are selected from the previous year’s publishing. The Alex Awards were first given annually beginning in 1998 and became an official ALA award in 2002. One of the winning books this year is The Talk-Funny Girl (Crown, July 2011) written by Roland Merullo (Micronesia 1979–80). The  novel is set in central western New Hampshire. It is the story of a seventeen-year-old girl who lives with her parents in a cabin in the woods. They belong to a cult that believes the sins of the adults are forgiven through the suffering of the children. (“Suffer the little children. . .” a Biblical verse they grossly misinterpret.) They are abusive and . . .

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Frances Stone's new book Through the Eyes of My Children

DURING A BRIEF PERIOD in the 1970s the Peace Corps accepted families as Volunteers. Frances and Paul Stone eagerly  made the decision to sign up for the program as a way of serving their country overseas for two years. They were among the first families to join, and were assigned to the Philippines with their four children to share their expertise in agriculture and education while keeping up with their  energetic, enthusiastic youngsters. Frances Stone’s (Philippines 1971–73) Through the Eyes of My Children: The Adventures of a Peace Corps Volunteer Family, published this month by Peace Corps Writers, is a delightful read for young adults from middle school age on up who are interested in true life adventures about young people. This is the story of a family of six who all become Peace Corps Volunteers, and it is told in the voices of the children. Daniel the oldest sees . . .

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Review of Letters From Moritz Thomsen by Christopher West Davis (Kenya 1975-78)

Letters From Moritz Thomsen by Christopher West Davis (Kenya 1975–78) Create Space $ 11.95 (paperback) 137 pages 2010 Review by John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962-64) WHEN YOU OPEN A BOOK and read the first paragraph that begins: One lazy spring afternoon in 1981, a high school friend from New York, Peter L., showed up at the door of my basement apartment in Washington, D.C. with a scruffy old geezer in tow. The old guy was writer Moritz Thomsen, 64 at the time, once dubbed “the greatest American writer you’ve never heard of,” who was making a rare trip north from his self-imposed exile in Ecuador to visit his literary friends and agent in New York, and take the train down here to D.C. to attend a lecture by another of his friends, Paul Theroux, at the Library of  Congress. Well, you know you are dealing with a real writer. Christopher West Davis is . . .

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P.F. Kluge (Micronesia 1967-69) and Josh Radnor Together Again at Kenyon College

A Writer Writes Whenever I want to annoy Peace Corps writers I tell them that P.F. Kluge Micronesia (1969-70) is the smartest writer to serve as a PCV. That gets them. They, of course, if they know anything of Kluge’s work, can’t really dismiss my claim. Paul Frederick Kluge has had a long and illustrious career as a novelist, academic, travel writer, journalist and lecturer. Not to list all of his lengthy CV, (which runs a full five pages) let just note a few of his many accomplishments. Early in his career, when he was a young editor at Life magazine, he wrote a story for them that became the film, Dog Day Afternoon. He next wrote a novel that became the 1983 film of the same name, Eddie and the Cruisers. In 1992 he wrote his “Peace Corps” memoir, The Edge of Paradise: America in Micronesia, published by Random . . .

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Still more on the Peace Corps Book Locker!

Questions on the famous Peace Corps Locker came back to me recently and once again I went searching through files looking for lost documents and I came across a letter written to me by Jack Hood Vaughn on December 3, 1999. For those RPCVs who never received a Peace Corps Book Locker, they were given out to all of us in the early days.  The Book Locker was sent overseas  with the first Volunteers so we might start a small library in our schools, as well as having something to read. These paperback books were to be left behind when we left our towns and villages. Now, of course, PCVs have cell phone and laptops, iPods and iPhones….who needs a book! Well, we certainly did. What I had been trying to track down, back in the ’90s, was how did the Book  Locker come to be? I have heard that it was Eunice Shriver who first had the idea, and . . .

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Maureen Orth (Colombia 1965-67) on Morning Joe

Very early this morning, Maureen Orth was on Morning Joe. It was a much better opportunity for her to talk about her Peace Corps Post Card Blog and to show some PCVs in China. I’m told by ‘those in positions to know’ that the agency was very helpful in arranging the trip to China, though as an RPCV Maureen and her partner, Susan Koch, were on their own with contributions from American Express, and, I believe, Bank of America. Check out the website: www.PeaceCorpsPostcards.com  and this morning’s appearance on NBC Morning  Joe. Luckily Joe wasn’t around so Maureen didn’t have to deal with him and his super ego! http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036789/ns/msnbc_tv-morning_joe/

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Review of Coming Apart by Charles Murray (Thailand 1965-67)

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 Charles Murray (Thailand 1965–67) Crown Forum 407 pages $27.00 (hardback) 2012 Reviewed by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975–77) WHILE READING CHARLES MURRAY’S NEW BOOK, I thought about our recent national obsession with civil discourse and events in Oakland, California. Since it never snows in Oakland, Occupy Wall Street has been very visible there. It would have been most illustrative to seat Mr. Murray at a cloth covered table, set on a high platform overlooking the street below. A finely dressed and polite moderator could have introduced him while the author poured himself a glass of water from an imported bottle. “Charles Murray is an American libertarian, author and PhD invited here to explain that you do not have jobs because you are fat, lazy and dishonest sons and daughters of bitches.” Murray cloaks these terms in ten dollar words and phrases but . . .

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