Archive - January 22, 2014

Wanderlust Satisfied is the story of Kay Gillies Dixon (Colombia 1962–64), one of the first Peace Corps Volunteers, and her  personal search through her two years of service, and how that experience changed everything about the rest of her life. Like so many Volunteers, she determined to follow her own ideals and dreams and unlearn the “Shoulds” and “Have-tos” she had been assigned by society. Kay was reared in a small town in western Pennsylvania, in the 1950s, during simpler times when a long distance telephone call was a big deal, and television sets displayed only three channels — all of them featuring stories about the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev, and the Berlin Wall on the evening news. At the same time our country was caught in the struggle for basic civil rights for all peoples as Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference worked to register voters . . .

Iracema’s Footprint (Peace Corps novel) by Bernard F. Blanche (Brazil 1965–67) Eloquest Books $21.95 460 pages April 2010 Reviewed by Deidre Swesnik (Mali 1996-98) Think Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets John Grisham. Throw in a touch of John Wayne and you’ve got yourself Iracema’s Footprint. Iracema is both the name of an Amazon warrior and the name of the village at the center of the book.  Like the villagers who spend every night in the town square circling round and round the towering statue of Iracema, the main characters swirl around in a current of dizzying misunderstanding throughout the story. At the beginning of the book, we arrive in the village of Iracema on a bus with Marcus. He’s a twenty-something community health worker from Sao Paolo going to this remote town in Brazil’s Northeast region. Soon after his arrival, he meets Ben, the local Peace Corps Volunteer. The metropolitan Paulista . . .