Archive - 2017

William Canby Jr. is one of three judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals who on Tuesday will hear oral arguments in the challenge to President Donald Trump’s travel ban. Canby’s colleagues are Michelle Friedland, who was appointed by Barack Obama, and Richard Clifton, who was appointed by George W. Bush. William Canby in 1962 joined the Peace Corps as an Associate Director after spending some time working in private practice. He would go on to becoming the deputy director for the Peace Corps for Ethiopia. After that, he became the director of the Peace Corps for Uganda for two years. He returned to the United States in the late ’60s to teach law at Arizona State University, but he returned to Ethiopia in 1999 to help achieve peace in the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea.    

  Jacqueline Lyons (Lesotho 1992-95) is the author of the poetry collection, The Way They Say Yes Here, poems about her time in Lesotho. Peace Corps Writers awarded this collection its poetry award in 2005. Her poems and essays have been published in over 20 literary journals and she has won several writing awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2003), a Utah Arts Council Literary Award for Poetry and Nonfiction (2002). Jacqueline’s collection will be the poetry textbook for the forthcoming (we hope) MFA in Creative Writing for PCVs and RPCVs at National University this coming April. With that in mind, I interviewed Jacqueline recently about her career and poetry since the Peace Corps. • Where did you grow up, Jacqueline, and what college did you attend? I grew up in eastern central Wisconsin, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire with two majors in English . . .

Thirty-eight US Peace Corps Trainees arrived in the country on Tuesday to begin their two years of service to the people of Guyana. A release from the US Embassy yesterday said that the 30th group of Peace Corps Volunteers to serve in Guyana have begun pre-service training on the Essequibo Coast, living with local host families and learning the Guyanese way of life. They are stationed in the villages of Suddie, Huist D’ieren, Queenstown, Windsor Castle, Capoey Lake, Lake Mainstay and Anna Regina. This US Embassy photo shows the Volunteers As health and education volunteers, they will engage in field practicums in local schools and health centres.  The group is expected to be officially sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers in early April, after which they will begin service throughout Guyana, the release said.

Brittany White (Peru 2015-17) is a Youth Development PCV in Northern Peru working with young people to help promote sexual health awareness as well helping to promote diversity and inclusion within the volunteer community. This item is from her own blog which she kindly agreed to let me republish. Thanks also to Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963-65) for giving me the “Heads Up” about Brittany’s piece. Thank You: From a Black Peace Corps Volunteer to a Black President On October 11,  2008, I woke up in the middle of the night to stand outside and wait for the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to speak. I had read all of his books, kept all the important newspaper clippings, obsessively watched CNN, and could tell you random facts like, “Did you know that Senator Obama is a two time Grammy winner?” I was 18, excited to be a first time participant in a . . .

Bob Stevenson (novel) by Richard Wiley (Korea 1967-69) Bellevue Literary Press, 2016 221 pages $16.99 (paperback) Reviewed by Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978-79) Up until reading Richard Wiley’s new novel Bob Stevenson, I had not given much thought to Robert Louis Stevenson since my sons, now in their early twenties, were in the first and third grades.  Alas, both, as I recall, proved equally determined to process through the Murray Elementary School auditorium brandishing Treasure Island in the “Books Alive” parade that serves in our system as a reasonable facsimile of a Halloween event.  (I live in a part of the country where enough evangelical Christians write off Halloween as devil worship that bona fide Halloween parties are not allowed in the schools).  I finally managed to talk one of them into dressing up as Robin Hood instead of Long John Silver, but it wasn’t easy. Suffice it to say that . . .

I just listened to a Tom Woods podcast of an interview with Gret Glyer who has created an app called DonorSee that allows anyone help in the developing world by using Glyer’s new app. The app program is only 4 months old and a month ago the Peace Corps issued an order that Peace Corps Volunteers were not permitted to be involved with the DonorSee organization. Glyer (and Tom Wood) see the use of the app as a way that Volunteers (as Americans) can be helpful by promoting donations between the US and the developing world. Woods and Glyer see the agency as standing in the way of giving immediate help to others. My guess it is the lawyers decision in the agency who have said ‘no” but the story that is getting back now to the US is that PCVs are not helping others, but are preventing any sort of help. Volunteers look like losers. Listen yourself to the podcast and hear what . . .

Many of us who knew Jack from our Peace Corps days have heard his stories of boxing in college and boxing briefly as a professional in Mexico before returning to Michigan and becoming a boxing coach as he finished his degrees. I asked his daughter Jane Constantineau to spend me Jack’s account from his book and she was kind enough to do so. JC note. Kill the Gringo In retrospect, I question the wisdom of my boxing coach’s plan to send me south of the border with no handler, no Spanish, and no backup. But at the time, I found Marty’s idea ingenious. We were dealing with long odds in trying to maneuver me, an undergraduate boxer, into the position of head boxing coach at the University of Michigan, and I was willing to go the distance to overcome them. On a hazy day in June I crossed the El Paso-Juarez . . .

“Jack’s life story is at once inspirational and terrifying, such a compelling combination for this modest man who looked like a country doctor and lived like a poster for a Harrison Ford movie.”  —TOM BROKAW Kill the Gringo is the wide-ranging, action-packed memoir of Jack Hood Vaughn, whose career in diplomacy, social advocacy and conservation spanned more than 25 jobs and 11 countries. A professional boxer during his college years, Jack joined the Marines in 1941, fighting in the battles of Guam and Okinawa during World War II. His rapport with people and facility with language led to a speedy rise in international development in Latin America and Africa where he drew the attention of Vice President Lyndon Johnson during his visit to Senegal in 1961. Three years later, President Johnson appointed Jack ambassador to Panama when violent anti-American riots there led to a severing of diplomatic ties. As the . . .

By Edward Mycue  (Ghana I) Myth becomes parable evolving to symbol in the story of TURTLE who is holding up the world: one nameless fabled old lady explained what upheld the turtle: it’s turtles all the way down she asserted. I have told my story before, meeting John Fitzgerald Kennedy, US SENATOR, in 1960 as a Boston University graduate student under a fellowship from the Lowell Institute for Cooperative Broadcasting when I served as an intern at WGBH-TV then on the M.I.T. campus and (prior to the establishment of PBS — Public Broadcasting System) the linchpin of the Network for Educational Television (NET). The first time Kennedy was seeking the Democrat Party nomination for US PRESIDENT and the second time was after he became the nominee for president. Both times he came to WGBH-TV to appear on the New England News program helmed by Louis Lyons, curator for journalism of the Nieman . . .

I guess we all want to return back to school for different reasons. I was in the Peace Corps in the Philippines on and off from 1976 to 1984. Five years as an  Agricultural Extension Volunteer then later as a staff member. I worked with the five tribes in the Cordillera Mountains collectively called Igorots. It didn’t take long to realize my agricultural techniques were not going to work in the steep mountains where rice was the main crop grown in inaccessible terraces. I was fortunate to connect with Mother Basille Gekierre, a Belgian missionary there since 1925. Mother Basille was unique among missionaries in that she saw the value of preserving the culture. When I got there she had converted a classroom, in the old brick schoolhouse, which covered the Bontoc Igorot. By a stroke of luck, she was able to get $250,000 to build a new museum. Now . . .

On January 14, 1960, Congressman Henry Reuss (D. Wis) introduced a bill for a study of a “Point Four Youth Corps” plan. It is passed. On June 15, 1960, Senator Hubert Humphrey (D. Minn) introduces a bill calling for the establishment of a “Peace Corps.” It is not passed. On November 2, 1960, Presidential candidate Kennedy announces plans for a “Peace Corps” at the Cow Palace, in San Francisco. On June 24, 1961, Colombia I begins the first Peace Corps Training program. On August 28, 1961, the first groups of Volunteers going to Ghana and Tanzania meet President Kennedy in the Rose Garden. On August 30, 1961, The first group of Peace Corps Volunteers departs for Ghana. The 51 Volunteers are serving as secondary school teachers. On September 12, 1961, Tom Livingston from Woodale, Illinois became the first Peace Corps Volunteer when he took up his post as an English teacher at . . .

Fellow Ghana PCV Ed Mycue reported the sad news that Tom Livingston (Ghana 1961-63) died today, January 24, 2017, in Oakland, California Kaiser Hosptial. Tom is credited with being the first ever PCV when he took up his post in 1961 as an English teacher at a secondary school in Dodowa, Ghana. – Gerald T. Rice in his definitive history of the first years of the Peace Corps, The Bold Experiment JFK’s Peace Corps published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 1985 and based on his Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Glasgow tells how the Volunteers arrived at Accra airport in Ghana on August 30, 1961. (The Volunteers bound for Tanzania did not arrive until a day later.) The Ghana PCVs began to travel to their assignments in different parts of Ghana two weeks later. On September 12, 1961, Tom Livingston became the first Volunteer to begin working overseas. – . . .

The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom BattlIne That Brought Down the Klan Laurence Leamer (Nepal 1964–66) William Morrow June 2016 384 pages $27.99 (hardcover), $12.99 (Kindle)   The Lynching published last year is a finalist for the Edgar Award as best true crime book of the year.  In a review of the book, Martin Ganzglass (Somalia 1966-68) wrote, “Whatever hyperbole appears on the back cover will not do justice to Laurence Leamer’s The Lynching — The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan. This fast paced factual thriller, with its numerous short, punchy chapters, is better than a John Grisham courtroom novel.” Review — THE LYNCHING by Laurence Leamer (Nepal)