October 2015 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Report from Congress on post service disability benefits

Oct 31 2015

Nancy Tongue (RPCV Chile) is a tireless advocate for RPCVs who have had service contacted medical problems and who have had difficulty receiving the help to which they are entitled. She founded Health Justice for Volunteers http://www.healthjusticeforpeacecorpsvolunteers.org Nancy’s group is an associative group of the National Peace Corps Association. The group is working with both the NPCA and Peace Corps to create better solutions for RPCVs. Nancy has updated the work of her organization in an email and also attached the report from the GAO on post service disability benefits. From Nancy’s email message:letter-from-nancy-tongue “The Senate Foreign Relations Office has just posted the findings from their recent GAO report analyzing the difference between the benefits from the USDOL vs: what employees of the State Department receive. You will see that it was noted that they did not conduct actuarial analysis, which was what was needed in order to really understand . . .

Dinner in DC —Were You Invited?

Oct 30 2015

Last night in D.C. Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet, and Charlotte Kea from her office, and other RPCVs, including former Senator Christopher Dodd, were hosted by Boston University’s Scott Nichols, another RPCV so that the group could discuss raising funds to increase the number of PCVs overseas. The money raised, I presume, will be to lobby Congress to increase the Peace Corps budget. Nichols, I understand, is planning to hold a series of such dinners around the country before Carrie leaves her post at the end of the Obama administration. His aim is to make Peace Corps alumni, as he calls them, a more effective force for increasing the size of and funding for Peace Corps. As Carrie told her dinner partners, “many qualified applicants are turned away and several countries asking for volunteers cannot be accommodated because of lack of funds.” Some guests wrote checks on the spot. There were also . . .

NPCA Goes To Cuba! Part IV

Oct 29 2015

Early on Sunday, those of us up for another long drive, left Villa Clara to visit the Che Monument. It was really our first opportunity to see the countryside of Cuba, and this region of the island is quite beautiful with soft green hillsides and rolling land. What struck this Midwest farm boy was the nearly total lack of cultivated land. We learned later in the week that less than 30% of the country’s land is used for farming. Cuba imports about 80% of its food which makes it vulnerable to price increases, changes in food supply and the impacts of natural disasters, i.e., hurricanes. Most of this situation (if not all) is due to the dependence on Russia and then the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. How Cubans live today in rural Cuba is obvious from just this photo. It is a photo that could have . . .

NPCA Goes To Cuba! Part III

Oct 29 2015

In our tour of four provinces, the first ‘city’ we visited was Trinidad in the province of Sancti Spiritus, in central Cuba. Together with the nearby Valle de los Ingenios, it has been one of UNESCOs World Heritage sites since 1988. It is a cobbledstone town, a fairly well preserved Spanish colonial settlement of around 75,000. The center of town is the Plaza Mayor, an open-air museum of Spanish Colonial architecture. Dominating the square, and the town of brightly painted buildings, is the beautiful Santisima Trinidad Cathedral and Convento de San Francisco. We arrived in Trinidad from our nearby hotel Ma Dolores with the last of the summer rains. This ancient town does not have anything like a drainage system and we were forced to hug the sides of buildings as we navigate the few square blocks up side streets to the historic plaza area. Nevertheless, wherever you go in . . .

NPCA Goes To Cuba! Part II

Oct 28 2015

On Sunday morning we drove for two hours to the Che Guevara Mausoleum and Monument in Santa Clara. Here are the remains of “Che” and twenty-nine others, including one woman, who were killed in 1967 during Guevara’s attempt to spur an armed uprising in Bolivia. There is also a bronze 22-foot statue of Che in this monument complex. Guevara, who was born in Argentina, was buried with full military honors in 1997 after his remains were discovered in Bolivia, exhumed, and returned to Cuba. There is also an eternal flame lit by Fidel Castro in Che’s memory. Our guide told us that Santa Clara was selected as the site for the mausoleum and monument as a way to remember Guevara’s troops taking the city on December 31, 1958, during the Battle of Santa Clara. It was the final battle of the Cuban Revolution. After this defeat, Batista fled into exile. What is particularly . . .

NPCA Goes To Cuba! Part I

Oct 27 2015

Last week the first NPCA trip to Cuba took place, an arrangement with Global Exchange, an organization that promotes people-to-people contact. This San Francisco travel group is one of only 12 ways in which the United States permitted to sponsored tours to the island. Twenty-five of us went on this trip, including Glenn Blumhorst, the President & CEO of the NPCA. In all 18 were RPCVs, one was a former HQ staff, there was a former PCV & Staff (me!), a current staff person, and four family/friends. Also the group had one 2015 COS RPCV (Nepal) and 2 RPCVs from the first PCVs to Samoa and Ethiopia. A second June trip to Cuba is now tentatively planned by the NPCA and in some ways we were the ‘experiment’. Let me say first that traveling with other RPCVs (if you have to go in a group) is the only way to visit . . .

Could Ambassador Christopher Stevens RPCV Been Saved?

Oct 18 2015

Ambassador Stevens was an RPCV. He brought his Peace Corps experience and his values to his appointment as Ambassador to Libya. He was assassinated in an terrorist attack in Libya on September 11, 2012. This week, the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton will testify before a House Committee investigating the circumstances surrounding the terrorist attack. . To understand one accounting of what happened immediately before, during, and after the attack, read the testimony of Gregory Hicks, who was in charge when Ambassador Stevens had left on a mission. Here is the link: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/08/transcript-whistle-blower-account-sept-11-libya-terror-attack/

Another RPCV Runs for Congress: Joel Rubin (Costa Rica (1994-96)

Oct 16 2015

Joel Rubin, Candidate for Congress & Returned Peace Corps Volunteer October 14, 2015 Dear Peace Corps Community, My name is Joel Rubin and I’m writing you to ask for your support as I make a run for Congress in Maryland’s 8th District. Like you, I’m an RPCV, and I would be honored to be a champion for both the Peace Corps and international development in the U.S. House of Representatives. The key vote in this race is the Democratic primary on April 26, 2016, and we will be organizing every day until Election Day to win it. I need your help to do this, through volunteering for, spreading the word about, and donating to my campaign. Like you, I’m a fighter for positive change. And much of my passion is traced to my experience in the Peace Corps. It changed my life. When I went to Costa Rica in 1994 as an Environmental Education . . .

More About Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65)

Oct 14 2015

(This is a short essay I wrote years ago about Theroux and his ‘Peace Corps Experience’ and I am reposting it now to continue the discussion of his latest book.) Living on the Edge: Paul Theroux • He went — in the way the Peace Corps rolls the dice of our lives – to Africa as a teacher. “My schoolroom is on the Great Rift, and in this schoolroom there is a line of children, heads shaved liked prisoners, muscles showing through their rags,” he wrote home in 1964. “These children appear in the morning out of the slowly drifting hoops of fog-wisp. It is chilly, almost cold. There is no visibility at six in the morning; only a fierce white-out where earth is the patch of dirt under their bare feet, a platform, and the sky is everything else.” How many of us stood in front of similar classrooms . . .

Bob Shacochis (Eastern Caribbean 1975-76) "The Mending Fields"

Oct 14 2015

This is one of my favorite short pieces written by an RPCV….a wonderful writer, Bob Shacochis (Eastern Caribbean 1975-76)! He wrote this piece years ago for an NPR “All Things Considered” segment I managed to arrange to recognize the 25th anniversary of the Peace Corps. • I was assigned to the Island of Saint Kit in the West Indies. Once on an inter-island plane I sat across the aisle from one of my new colleagues, an unfriendly, over-serious young woman. She was twenty-four, twenty-five . . . we were all twenty-four, twenty-five. I didn’t know her much or like her. As the plane banked over the island, she pressed against the window, staring down at the landscape. I couldn’t see much of her face, just enough really to recognize an expression of pain. Below us spread an endless manicured lawn, bright green and lush of sugarcane, the island’s main source of income. . . .

Rachel Schneller's (Mali 1996-98) "Water"

Oct 13 2015

This lovely piece is by a very fine writer, Rachel Schneller (Mali 1996-98). She recreates a scene many of us have marveled at during our Peace Corps years. Water When a woman carries water on her head, you see her neck bend outward behind her like a crossbow. Ten liters of water weights twenty-two pounds, a fifth of a woman’s body weight, and I’ve seen women carry at least twenty liters in aluminum pots large enough to hold a television set. To get the water from the cement floor surrounding the outdoor hand pump to the top of your head, you need help from the other women. You and another woman grab the pot’s edges and lift it straight up between you. When you get it to the head height, you duck underneath the pot and place it on the wad of rolled-up cloth you always wear there when fetching . . .

Kathleen Moore (Ethiopia 1964-64) Letters Home

Oct 12 2015

The Peace Corps has produced some amazing writers. Here is a short piece by another fine writer who served in Ethiopia years ago. In this short slice of life, Kathy distills the Peace Corps experience that I am sure is shared by many RPCVs throughout the decades of the Peace Corps, in all the villages where Volunteers lived and worked. Letters Home When I read the letters that I sent home from Ethiopia, letters that my mother saved, I wonder at the ordinariness of these letters sent from a place as extraordinary as my village. How quickly I became accustomed to the life there. How mundane it all seemed so that there was nothing to write home about. Keeping live chickens locked in my shint-bet (outhouse) so the hyenas wouldn’t eat them was normal. Standing on my bed and throwing a sixty-pound butane gas tank at a scorpion crawling toward me was not a . . .

Review — Marrying Santiago by Suzanne Adam (Colombia 1964–66)

Oct 08 2015

Marrying Santiago by Suzanne Adam (Colombia 1964–66) Peace Corps Writers May 2015 $15.00 (paperback), $3.49 (Kindle) Reviewed by Bob Arias (Colombia 1964–66) • A Journey within a Journey I feel that Suzanne is very much the same beautiful individual that she was when she became a Peace Corps Volunteer along with me in 1964 in Colombia. And like her move in 1971 to Santiago, Chile to be with her soon-to-be husband, Santiago, Suzanne took California with her when she went into the Peace Corps. One tough lady, always proud of who she was, and ready to go over the next hill to see if things are different, or perhaps to find a new flower or one of natures creatures. I agree with her, she would have made a great California Forest Ranger with a Smokey the Bear hat! Moving to Chile to follow Santiago was much more than changing homes . . .

Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65) on the Air and in the TIMES

Oct 07 2015

In case you missed it, Brian Lehrer on WNYC had Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65) on his show this morning (see link below). He talked about his new book on travels in the South and mentioned the Peace Corps. (Thanks to a “Heads Up” from Bill Preston (Thailand 1977-80) http://www.wnyc.org/story/paul-theroux-american-south/ In case you missed it, Paul had a piece in the New York Times on Sunday, October 4, 2015. Thanks to a “Heads Up” from William Evensen (Peru 1964-66) A factory in Toccoa, Ga., that was closed in 2010 by the manufacturing company SundayReview | OPINION The Hypocrisy of ‘Helping’ the Poor By PAUL THEROUX OCT. 2, 2015 EVERY so often, you hear grotesquely wealthy American chief executives announce in sanctimonious tones the intention to use their accumulated hundreds of millions, or billions, “to lift people out of poverty.” Sometimes they are referring to Africans, but sometimes they are referring to Americans. And . . .

Author as promoter — David Edmonds and his LILY OF PERU

Oct 07 2015

In January of this year David Edmonds (Chile 1963-65) published his “romance thriller” Lily of Peru with the Peace Corps Writers imprint. David has written that since then the book has received a “good deal of love.” The attention that the book has received includes: Latino Literacy: International Latino Book Awards – Honorable Mention: Best Novel – Adventure or Drama – English Article on the Tampa Bay “Creative Loafing” website, “Local author named an International Latino Book Awards finalist“ 2015 Readers’ Favorite: Silver Award for “Fiction – Thriller – Terrorist” category . Florida Writers Association‘s 2015 Royal Palms Literary Awards: Finalist in the fiction category. (winners to be announced Oct 15-18) Latino Literacy: Latino Books into Movies Awards: Finalist. Favorable reviews and interviews in blogs, newspapers and writers’ magazines. One of those reviews of Lily of Peru, written by Tracy A. Fischer for Readers’ Favorite, follows: Sigh. That was my . . .

Archive - October 2015