Archive - 2014

Here is a conversation I recently had with Aaron Barlow, author of  Hard as Kerosene published by Peace Corps writers. — JC • Aaron, where were you a PCV? In Togo from 1988 to 1990. . Where are you from in the States? Though I was born in North Carolina, I grew up primarily in the Midwest, with stops back South and in the Northeast. I attended Beloit College in Wisconsin for my undergraduate degree and the University of Iowa for my MA and PhD. . Then you joined the Peace Corps? No. I had spent two years in Burkina Faso as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer and had met many PCVs and admired them all. From them, I learned that there is much more to African life than can be found in the cities. I joined so that I could live in a village and discover a part of Africa . . .

Somehow: Living on Uganda Time by Douglas Cruickshank (Uganda 2009-12) Verflectin Media, San Francisco http://douglascruickshank.com/ $60.00 400 pages 2013 Reviewed by Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963-65) Douglas Cruickshank’s Somehow: Living on Uganda Time, is a big book, and its 400 pages of photos and text are heavy, amazingly so. Not as in ‘heavy going’, but as in profoundly engrossing. To both the author-photographer and his friends the Ugandans, it is heavy with special meanings; stimulating, fascinating, captivating and… You get the idea. When he joined the Peace Corps and went to Uganda Douglas Cruickshank was 56 and had recently downsized his life. He called it the “Great Shedding of Things”, having sold and given away most of his possessions and encumbrances – except his camera, a sense of adventure and his way of seeing and capturing the essence of life digitally. He entered Uganda as a stranger in a strange land, . . .