September 27, 2016 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Review: VENEZUELA SOJOURN by Jon C. Halter (Venezuela)

Sep 27 2016

Venezuela Sojourn: The Peace Corps Diary of Jon C. Halter Jon C. Halter (Venezuela 1966–68) CreateSpace September 2015 264 pages $12.00 (paperback) Reviewed by Catherine Bell (Brazil 1966–68) • Venezuela Sojourn is a completely unromanticized view of a Peace Corps assignment in Venezuela in the 1960s. All the elements of a typical Peace Corps experience of that era are here — difficulties with the language, attraction to other Volunteers, friction with in-country contacts, parties where you try to figure out who everyone is, the frustration of trying to find something to do, meetings with little result, preoccupations with food and digestion and with deselection and other bureaucratic hurdles against the background of Vietnam, sporadic attempts to find the courage to do the more difficult things that ought to be done. Committed to a test Peace Corps Scout program, Halter is a well-meaning Volunteer — though no idealist. He recounts some success at teaching phys. . . .

Writers From The Peace Corps Workshop

Sep 27 2016

On Wednesday, September 21, 2016, Marian Haley Beil and I spoke to RPCVs attending the opening Workshops of the National Peace Corps Association Conference in Washington, D.C. Publisher Marian Beil’s Workshop was on the mechanics of self-publishing a book and I spoke about writing a Peace Corps memoir, novel, or collection of stories. Here are my comments to approximately 100 RPCVs who attend our sessions. I focused first on the history of Peace Corps books and their importance to American literature and then I had suggestions on how one might write their book. John Coyne, Editor Writers From The Peace Corps One of the most important books of the late 1950 was The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. The book’s hero was a skilled technician committed to helping in developing countries at a grassroots level by building water pumps, digging roads, building bridges. He was called the . . .

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