March 16, 2015 – Peace Corps Worldwide

First Lady Michelle Obama Takes PC Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet To Japan To Promote "Let Girls Learn"

Mar 16 2015

By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) – Michelle Obama won’t avoid Cambodia’s human rights record when she visits the southeast Asian nation this week, her final stop on a two-country trip to promote a new U.S. initiative to help millions of girls worldwide attend and complete school, the White House said Monday. The first lady, who is traveling without the president, is scheduled to arrive in Japan, her first stop, on Wednesday. On Friday, she heads to Cambodia. While the purpose of the five-day trip, from March 18-22, is to promote the “Let Girls Learn” initiative she and the president announced this month, Mrs. Obama will discuss the need for an open and inclusive political system in Cambodia and highlight basic values and principles that are important to the U.S., said Evan Medeiros, senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council. “She’s going to have ample opportunity . . .

Gerald Karey writes: The First Day

Mar 16 2015

A Writer Writes I wrote this about five years ago. It was, and is, the only time I have written at length about my Peace Corps service. Not that I didn’t value the experience, but I didn’t think it, or my contribution, was all that exceptional. I came, I taught English as a foreign language (just how well is not for me to judge), and I left. The Peace Corps was in Turkey for only eight years — from 1962 to 1970. The program was abandoned in an “increasingly fractious environment,” one former in-country director wrote. It was fueled by misunderstandings between the Peace Corps and the Turkish government, Peace Corps missteps (my TEFL group stormed Turkey with 200 Volunteers), a steady drumbeat of negative newspaper headlines, charges that Volunteers were CIA agents, and “Turkey’s descent into a morass of violence and radical politics,” the former director added. (If you’re . . .

Talking to Michael Meyer (China 1995-97)

Mar 16 2015

Michael Meyer received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction after publishing his first book, The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed. He has also held a Guggenheim Fellowship. His stories have appeared in Time, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and on “This American Life.” In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China has just been published by Bloomsbury Press. Today, Michael teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh and spends his free semesters in Singapore. I recently interviewed Mike about his career, China, and his books. • Mike, where did you serve as a PCV and when? Peace Corps China 2; 1995-1997. . Q. Now you stayed on in China . . . was this so you could write Last Days? No, post-Corps, I moved to Beijing in 1997 . . .

Archive - March 16, 2015