Archive - 2015

1
A Writer Writes:The Lesson of the Machi by David C. Edmonds
2
Michael Varga’s (Chad) award winning story published in Glimmer Train
3
Our RPCV Trappistine Martha Driscoll (Ethiopia 1965-67)
4
NPCA Goes To Cuba! Part VIII (Final Blog) Cuba Today
5
Another Book Beating Up on the Peace Corps (But just the Recent Directors & of course, the Agency's Lawyers)
6
John S. Noffsinger and the Global Impact of the Thomasite Experience
7
One Last Word on Hemingway
8
New Academic Book Slams Early Peace Corps Volunteers & Agency
9
NPCA Goes To Cuba! Part VII
10
Cuba In The News
11
NPCA Goes To Cuba! Part VI
12
NPCA Goes To Cuba! Part V
13
Review: Breathing the Same Air by Gerry Christmas (Thailand 1973–76; Western Samoa 1976–78)
14
HOBGOBLIN IS REPUBLISHED (Just When You Thought You Were Safe After Halloween)
15
Report from Congress on post service disability benefits

A Writer Writes:The Lesson of the Machi by David C. Edmonds

A Writer Writes The Lesson of the Machi By David C. Edmonds (Chile (1963-65) Mapuche village near Chol Chol, Arauca, Chile September 1964 Friday-The drums wake me again. Now what? Another funeral for some poor child? A wedding? No, the village Machi, who performs all healing and religious rituals, is going to offer another lesson for the young girls. I don’t know the details because things that happen here don’t always make sense. So when I see the Machi’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Ñashay, passing by my little dirt-floor ruca with a pale of milk, I ask her what is going on. “It is called the Lesson of Two Loves,” she tells me in her broken way of speaking Spanish, standing there on the mud walkway in her head dress and shawl, all four feet, ten inches of her. “What is the Lesson of Two Loves?” “Yes, the Lesson of Two Loves. . . .

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Michael Varga’s (Chad) award winning story published in Glimmer Train

Michael Varga’s short story, “Chad Erupts in Strife,” which won the Fiction Open in 2014 from Glimmer Train Magazine [“harder to get into than Harvard”], is published in November (Issue #96) of the magazine). The story centers on how a Peace Corps Volunteer’s family reacts when word arrives in a cryptic newspaper article that war has broken out in Chad. Michael (Chad 1977–79) is a  Foreign Service Officer, playwright and actor, as well as a writer of fiction.  Three of his plays have been produced, and one published (Payable Upon Return).  His Peace Corps novel, Under Chad’s Spell, published by Peace Corps Writers, is available at Amazon.com.  For other works by Michael Varga, visit his website at www.michaelvarga.com.

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Our RPCV Trappistine Martha Driscoll (Ethiopia 1965-67)

Mother Martha Driscoll, O.C.S. O., (Ethiopia 1965-67) graduated from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service (at that time, women were not allowed in the undergraduate A&S College) and joined the Peace Corps. After Training at the University of Utah, she went to Ethiopia  as a secondary school teacher in Addis Ababa, where, as a wonderful singer and actress, she also “starred” in several play productions staged by British Ex-pats in the city. After her tour, she returned to New York City and Staten Island where she had grown up, and worked for awhile in New York before going to Boston and earning an MFA in Theater from Brandeis University. It was during this period, she told me, that she began to question what she wanted to do with her life, and on a trip to Europe she visited and then entered a monastery in Italy where she took her religious . . .

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NPCA Goes To Cuba! Part VIII (Final Blog) Cuba Today

  The conditions of Cuba today are obvious from first sight. This is a land that stopped progress decades ago when the Soviet Union turned its back on the island. The topic that is on everyone’s list of concerns when meeting Cubans is housing. Their housing. There is nowhere to live, though the neighborhoods in greater Havana, and other cities, are full of abandoned and crumbling architecture, beautiful pre-revolutionary housing crying out to be saved. After the revolution of 1959, and the U.S. embargo, most of Havana fell into a dilapidated state. By 1968, all privately owned businesses were nationalized. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba lost billions of dollars in aid from Russia. And the U.S., 90 miles away, wasn’t helping them. Now, after fifty plus years, Cuba is turning to tourism to right this socialist country where an estimated 15% of all Cubans live . . .

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Another Book Beating Up on the Peace Corps (But just the Recent Directors & of course, the Agency's Lawyers)

Peace Corps: The Icon and the Reality is a 54 page ebook that you can get free off of Amazon. It was published in 2014. Take a look. Here is the copy of text from the Amazon page on what the book is about. Basically it looks at recent (since about 2000) changes at the agency and the deaths within the corps of PCVs. It is not kind to the Peace Corps administrations, at least not kind to former PCVs who became Peace Corps Directors, i.e. Aaron Williams (DR 1967-70), Ron Tschetter (India 1966-68). Mark Schneider (El Salvador 1966-68) comes off better, but, of course, Gaddi Vasquez (not a PCV) get beat up as usual. Here’s what the flap copy says: The body of literature critical of the Peace Corps is disturbing. The first real criticism of the Peace Corps in mainstream media came from the Dayton Daily News in . . .

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John S. Noffsinger and the Global Impact of the Thomasite Experience

John Coyne has been posting a series on early Peace Corps history. One of the articles referenced the early staffer, John Noffsinger.  The link to this article was rendered inactive because Peace Corps/Washington is transitioning to a new all inclusive website.  However, Elizabeth Karr, RPCV and current librarian has generously offered to help all RPCVs who wish to view the digitalized  text documents, such as this one, during this transition period. Elizabeth asks that requests be sent to the email: library@peacecorps.gov As we wait for Mary-Ann Tirone Smith’s review of Peace Corps Fantasies, John’s history becomes even more important.  Here is the link to his posting that included John S. Noffsinger.  Following the link is the article by Paul A. Rodell, RPCV. https://peacecorpsworldwide.org/ivs/ John S. Noffsinger & the Global Impact of the Thomasite Experience* By Paul A. Rodell Peace Corps/Philippines 68-71 Introduction This paper explores the life of a remarkable . . .

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One Last Word on Hemingway

At the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City now there is the first major museum exhibition devoted to Hemingway and his work. Most of Hemingway’s papers are at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. After Hemingway’s death in 1961, JFK, a reader of Hemingway, helped Mary Welsh get into Cuba and retrieve many of his belongings. She later donated Hemingway’s archive to the new presidential library partly in gratitude to JFK. This exhibition is entitled, “Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars.” I remember clearly hearing the news that Hemingway had killed himself. I was still in graduate school, still in the Air National Guard, and I had come home from being a weekend warrior and my girlfriend at the time stopped by to see me and in the late afternoon and mentioned off highhandedly that Hemingway had killed himself, as if it was of little importance. Once before I . . .

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New Academic Book Slams Early Peace Corps Volunteers & Agency

(Thanks to Janet Lee (Ethiopia 1974-76) for the ‘heads up’ on this new book about the Peace Corps.) How the 1960s Peace Corps’ gendered modernization ideology shaped social movements across the Americas In a provocative cultural history of the 1960s Peace Corps, Molly Geidel argues that the agency’s representative development ventures legitimated the violent exercise of American power around the world and the destruction of indigenous ways of life. Peace Corps Fantasies illuminates the normative force and gendered imperatives of U. S. endeavors to fortify liberal internationalism against anticolonial struggles for freedom. -Quote from Alyosh  Goldstein, University of New Mexico Description of the book on the back cover To tens of thousands of volunteers in its first decade, the Peace Corps was “the toughest job you’ll ever love.” In the United States’ popular imagination to this day, it is a symbol of selfless altruism and the most successful program of John . . .

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NPCA Goes To Cuba! Part VII

PHOTOS OF FINCA VIGIA Side view of Finca Vigia and tower built by Hemingway; Adriana Ivancich, stayed here, his last love Hemingway had something like 90,000 books in his home Hemingway and Mary Welsh, his fourth wife Cafe in the parking lot below the house where today you can buy a famous Hemingway drink the famous drink! Have one on us, Ernie

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Cuba In The News

In USA Today, Monday, November 2, 2015, there is a full page article on this week’s business fair in Havana, the first such fair held since re-establishing ties with Cuba. The newspaper title reads: AMERICAN BUSINESSES FLOOD CUBAN TRADE FAIR. The first paragraph of the piece written by Alan Gomez reads: HAVANA: It was an unusual sight in this communist island that for decades was barred from importing most U.S. goods: an American owned, American-made tractor, ready for sale. Those of us who were just in Cuba for 8-days on the NPCA tour, traveling through four provinces, and as many towns, and across farmland, from east to west, north to south, will quickly and truthfully say: just in time. The farm tractor was built by Alabama-based Cleber and what Cleber is proposing is not to sell the American-made tractors to Cubans, but to shift construction from Paint Rock, Alabama to . . .

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NPCA Goes To Cuba! Part VI

In 1939 when Martha Gellhorn went to Havana to join Hemingway he was still living at the Ambos Mundos and she was upset that he was living, as Kenneth S. Lynn reports in his book, Hemingway, “in the squalor of his room.” Gellhorn would say years later, “I am really not abnormally clean. I’m simply as clean as any normal person. But Ernest was extremely dirty, one of the most unfastidious men I’ve ever known.” She went looking for a house where they might life and came across a newspaper listing of a fifteen-acre estate called Finca Vigia on a hilltop overlooking the village of San Francisco de Paula, fifteen miles from downtown Havana. Lynn in his Hemingway book describes Finca Vigia this way: “The one-story farmhouse, a sprawling, Spanish-style structure with a sixty-foot living room, had most decidedly seen better days, and the furnishings were hideous. Further-more, the outdoor . . .

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NPCA Goes To Cuba! Part V

In Paul Hendrickson’s wonderful book entitled Hemingway’s Boat that focuses on his years–1934-61-in Cuba, Paul writes that in ’34, Hemingway paid two dollars a day for Room 511 at the Ambos Mundos Hotel. (If Pauline, his second wife, came to stay with him, as she did on two separate occasions, it would cost him a half a dollar more.) Often he would go to Cuba in those early days with Joe Russell, the owner of Key West’s Sloppy Joe’s Bar, on Russell’s thirty-two-foot cruiser, Anita. They would go for two-weeks but often spend two months fishing. It was here at the Ambos Mundos in Room 511 where Ernie would also carry on an affair with Jane Mason, the twenty-two-year old wife of G. Grant Mason, the head of Pan American Airways in Cuba and the owner of a beautiful estate in Jaimanitas, west of Havana. The affair did not last . . .

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Review: Breathing the Same Air by Gerry Christmas (Thailand 1973–76; Western Samoa 1976–78)

Breathing the Same Air: A Peace Corps Romance Girard R. Christmas (Thailand 1973–76; Western Samoa 1976–78) Lulu April 2015 366 pages $22.99 (paperback), $8.99 (Kindle) Reviewed by Tino Calabia (Peru1963–65) • “I never looked at the Peace Corps as a two- or three-year excursion into the Valley of Riotous Romance,” writes Gerry Christmas, a Volunteer in the late 1970s.  And from Christmas’ epistolary memoir Breathing the Same Air: A Peace Corps Romance, his three-year tour in Thailand followed by two years in Samoa proved neither riotous nor a steamy, bodice-ripping romance. In 330 pages, 68 letters (49 to his mother and father) trace the on-again, off-again travails of Volunteer Christmas’s love sparked by a woman named Aied in Thailand. Later, 6,200 miles away in Samoa, his heart still pines for her. Through it all, his mounting success teaching English would match his success as a writer, one especially adept in . . .

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HOBGOBLIN IS REPUBLISHED (Just When You Thought You Were Safe After Halloween)

Hobgoblin (reissued) John Coyne Dover Publications September 2015 330 pages $11.99 (Kindle) $14.95 (paperback) coming in November To purchase Hobgoblin from Amazon.com, click on the book cover, the bold book title or the publishing format you would like — and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance that will help support this site and its annual writers awards.

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Report from Congress on post service disability benefits

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 . . .

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