Archive - February 24, 2014

Frances, you were part of the short-lived Peace Corps experiment to recruit families to be Peace Corps Volunteers. When you joined how big was your family? My husband Paul and I had four children in 1971. Daniel had just turned 11. Our daughter Nancy was 8; Peter turned 6 right after we were in, and Matthew turned 3 that August. . With a large family, why did you join? We happened to be in between jobs deciding what we should do next when we found out about the Peace Corps taking families. The Peace Corps was  something we were always interested in and decide why not.  It sounded like the perfect thing for us at the time and we felt up to the challenge of contributing in this manner. We also felt it would be a wonderful educational experience for our family. . Where were you sent as Volunteer? We . . .

Wanderlust Satisfied by Kay Gillies Dixon (Colombia 1962–64) Peace Corps Writers 159 Pages $12.00 (paperback), $3.99 (Kindle) 2013 Reviewed by Helene Ballmann Dudley (Colombia 1968–70, Albania/Slovakia 1997–99) One aspect of a good memoir is its ability to identify commonality in the human experience.  I thought Kay Gillies Dixon had borrowed my mother and my life for the first section of her book.  Kay, like myself, wanted something more than the rather limited path laid out for her to follow. Her roots were deep in western Pennsylvania, but her eyes were scanning the horizon for adventures unknown and definitely not understood in her small town. While Kay paints a vivid picture of growing up in Pennsylvania, including more than I ever wanted to know about Thanksgiving turkeys, she left me wanting more about her Peace Corps experience.  Perhaps it was because, as she writes “Our efforts in urban community development work . . .