Archive - March 21, 2013

In the first years of the Peace Corps, Charlie Peters, the legendary Chief of the Division of Evaluation at the Peace Corps, would hire journalists to do evaluations of Peace Corps projects. Novelist Fletcher Knebel did an evaluation of Liberia and from that would come his best-selling novel, The Zinzin Road. Mark Harris, the author of Bang the Drum Slowly, wrote a book about his “Peace Corps experience” in the dark days surrounding JFK’s assassination. However, this story from Dr. Jack Allison (Malawi 1966–69), who is a  Professor of Emergency Medical Care at College of Health & Human Sciences of Western Carolina University, is new to me, and I am happy that Jack sent it along to be published. It is another tale from those wonderful early days of the Mad Men at the Peace Corps agency. Here is Jack’s narrative of the famous New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin in Malawi in 1966, and what went wrong and right for . . .

Pit Stop in the Paris of Africa by Julie R. Dargis (Morocco 1984–87) Indie House Press 237 pages $14.95 (paperback), $7.49 (Kindle) 2013 Review by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993–96) Julie R. Dargis was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco more than twenty-five years ago. After her service, she “. . . continued kicking around the world in search of adventure.” She got more than she bargained for in war-torn countries like Serbia, Congo, Somalia, Pakistan, Darfur, Rwanda, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire. Eventually Julie finds the real goal of her search . . . herself. Not only has she written a fascinating memoir of her exploits, but she writes poetry as well, and has published a collection, Seven Sonnets. Here’s an excerpt from an ode to Peace Corps. I lay in bed, then sat up with a start. The Peace Corps was for me a time to seek; To live and . . .