Archive - March 2018

1
Jody Olsen (Tunisia) sworn in (again) as Director of the Peace Corps
2
Health Justice for Peace Corps Volunteers posts new request
3
Review — The Peace Corps Experience, 1969-1976 by P. David Searles (staff)
4
Blatchford’s 1970’s “New Directions” for the Peace Corps (PC/HQ)
5
Good Peace Corps news from the Senate (Washington)
6
Talking with P. David Searles (Philippines & Peace Corps/HQ)
7
Come Celebrate the Life of Roger Landrum (Nigeria)
8
David Mather (Chile) publishes RAW DOGIN’
9
Remembering the murder of PCV Deborah Gardner (Tonga)
10
Review — DUSTY LAND by John Ashford (Botswana)
11
 Finding one’s way into book publishing
12
Talking with Romany Tin (Cambodia)
13
The Genius of Moritz Thomsen (Ecuador)
14
To Die in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia)
15
Joe Colmen Passes at 98 (HQ/Washington)

Jody Olsen (Tunisia) sworn in (again) as Director of the Peace Corps

  WASHINGTON – Dr. Josephine (Jody) K. Olsen was sworn in as the 20th Director of the Peace Corps this week. Olsen has previously served the agency in various capacities. Jody, who has made her career at the Peace Corps, having defied the Peace Corps Five-Year-Rule of  going “In, Up and Out” was a PCV in Tunisia (1966-68), Chief of Staff at HQ, Regional Director  and then Deputy and Acting Director of the Peace Corps from 2001 – 2009. In her ‘accepting’ of the position, she misspoke by saying, “It is an absolute honor to begin my service as Director of the Peace Corps.  I’m grateful to President Trump for his trust and confidence.” (Hello! Jody, you been to HQ. You know where the coffee machine is located.) The Peace Corps Press announcement went onto say: “Olsen is committed to leading a Peace Corps that remains the world’s preeminent volunteer agency, offering . . .

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Health Justice for Peace Corps Volunteers posts new request

Health Justice for Peace Corps Volunteers advocates for serving Volunteers and RPCVs. The group has been successful in bringing attention to the serious health related problems serving Volunteers may have incountry as well as the problems facing RPCVs with service connected medical conditions. Members have worked, not only with Peace Corps, but  also Congress seeking solutions. Both the pending Sam Farr Peace Corps Enchancement Act HR2259, which HJPCV has specifically worked for as well as the pending  Nick Castle Reform Act of 2018, S2286, reflect the attention they have brought to these important issues Now, a serving Volunteer wishes to gain support to ask Peace Corps to change existing STI testing guides. HJPCV supports her efforts:  From the HJPCV Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Health-Justice-for-Peace-Corps-Volunteers-252575374823790/ “A currently serving Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon is reaching out to PCVs and RPCVs to bring the attention of the Peace Corps to an important health issue . . .

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Review — The Peace Corps Experience, 1969-1976 by P. David Searles (staff)

    The Peace Corps Experience: Challenge and Change, 1969-1976 By P. David Searles (Philippines Country Director 1971-74; Peace Corps Deputy Director 1974-76) The University Press of Kentucky March 1997 254 pages $21.96 (hard cover) Reviewed by David Elliott (Poland 1991-93; Staff-India 1966-68, Nigeria 1965-66, Sierra Leone 1964-65) • Was the Peace Corps on its deathbed in 1969? Did Director Joe Blatchford revive the patient with his “New Directions” medicine? In his preface, P. Searles is explicit as to his book’s “main message”: In late 1969, President Richard Nixon’s first Peace Corps director, Joseph H. Blatchford, announced a set of policies, which he labeled New Directions, that changed its [Peace Corps’] nature and ensured its survival…Without these changes its tenth anniversary (in 1971) would have been a wake mourning the death of the last of the Kennedy era. Peace Corps history buffs may find this book entertaining, even provocative. Searles was . . .

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Blatchford’s 1970’s “New Directions” for the Peace Corps (PC/HQ)

I first published Director Blatchford’s announcement in  May, 1997 — JCoyne • New Directions On my recent trip to Kenya, Libya and Iran I was often the recipient of warm thanks for the work done by others in the past, coming from government ministers truly grateful for a help hand. But just as often I was asked if we couldn’t somehow provide more people trained in vocational education, agriculture, and business management, for example, than are not available. Everywhere the cry was for mean and women with higher priority skills–who can also work with people–to fill priority development needs. To consider these and other problems I called together a task force of 50 distinguished men and women to examine the Peace Corps in ten specific areas. They came from within and without the Peace Corps, from among former Volunteers, staff and men and women of outstanding ability in private life…I have . . .

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Good Peace Corps news from the Senate (Washington)

Thanks to the heads up from Bill Josephson (PC/HQ 1961-66) Dear John, The Senate unanimously passed on March 13 the Nick Castle Peace Corps Reform Act, S. 2286.  It was introduced in the House on March 14.  Attached is section 1(b), the Table of Contents.  It demonstrates the areas of Congressional concern and, therefore, of Congress’s opinion of the Peace Corps failings. In my 57 years of monitoring Peace Corps legislation, I have never before seen such a wide-ranging list of Congressional concerns, even to the records and monitoring of Peace Corps training attendance.  (I’ve always had anecdotal doubts about overseas training.) The Consolidated Appropriation Act continues the Peace Corps funding level of $410 million.  This makes even more important efforts to ensure that the Peace Corps’ 20 percent staff cuts savings go to enlisting more volunteers. The only provision I regret is the easing of the five year flush.  I feel sure it . . .

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Talking with P. David Searles (Philippines & Peace Corps/HQ)

David Searles’ career has included periods during which he worked in international business, government service and education. After service in the United States Marine Corps (1955-58) Searles worked in consumer goods marketing and in general management positions in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Latin America. His business career was interrupted by a brief stint as a high school teacher (1969-71) and longer periods of service with the Peace Corps (1971-76) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1976-1980).  Searles served three years as the country director for the Peace Corps in the Philippines, and two years at Peace Corps headquarters as a Regional Director for North Africa, Near East, Asia, and Pacific (NANEAP) and as Deputy Director under John Dellenback. Following the end of his business career in 1990 Searles earned a Ph. D. from the university of Kentucky (1993), and published two books: A College For Appalachia (1995) . . .

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Come Celebrate the Life of Roger Landrum (Nigeria)

Come Celebrate the Life of Roger Landrum Roger Landrum, whom many of you have known and enjoyed for decades, passed away at home after a battle with cancer on Dec. 9, 2017. His friends will hold a much-deserved Memorial Service to celebrate his life with our words and his, as well as with music and his photographs. This celebration will be held on  Saturday, June 2, 2018, 12:00pm in Washington, DC. Please save the date. And let us know if you plan to attend. We will follow-up more specific information about location, after we receive your responses. We need to have a proper estimate of numbers of attendants (to confirm an appropriate venue), so please respond as soon as possible. Email: Richard Harrill at: rharrill@email.unc.edu Sincerely, Bill Currier, Richie Harrill, and Norma Brooks

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David Mather (Chile) publishes RAW DOGIN’

  MY PEACE CORPS EXPERIENCE in southern Chile was life-changing — it greatly influenced many of the decisions I made in later life. I also thought those two years, from 1968 to 1970, were unique and I knew that some day I would try to write about them. Meanwhile, returning to the States, I became a back-to-the-lander and built a cabin in the backwoods of New Hampshire where I basically cloned my life in Chile, living off-grid and over a mile from the nearest town-maintained road for over fifty years. When I mostly retired from the specialty wood company I started and built up over the years, I finally had the time to write. One For The Road took me five years and many rough manuscripts before it was finally published through Peace Corps Writers. Ostensibly a combination coming-of-age and love story, the book has been more aptly described by . . .

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Remembering the murder of PCV Deborah Gardner (Tonga)

In the late Nineties, shortly after I had taken over the job of manager of the New York Recruitment Office for the Peace Corps, I got a call from a reporter at the New York Observer newspaper. I thought he was calling to ask me about the Peace Corps and to write an article about the agency. Well, in a way he was, but he started by asking if I knew anything about the murder of a young woman in Tonga in 1975. The reporter’s name was Philip Weiss and he didn’t realized he had stumbled on an RPCV who was fascinated by the history of the Peace Corps and obsessively collected PCV stories. Phil Weiss was also obsessed, but by the murder of this PCV in Tongo. In 1978, when he was 22 and backpacking around the world, he had crashed with a Peace Corps Volunteer in Samoa named . . .

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Review — DUSTY LAND by John Ashford (Botswana)

  Dusty Land: Stories of Two Teachers in the Kalahari John Ashford (Botswana 1990–92) Peace Corps Writers December, 2017 260 pages $13.00 (paperback)   Reviewed by D.W. Jefferson (El Salvador 1974–76; Costa Rica 1976–77) • MANY RETURNED PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEERS (RPCVs) feel a need to share our stories of life in another country, and our often transformative experiences. Because most of our family, friends and coworkers just are not very interested, we find our audience in local RPCV groups and at RPCV conferences. John Ashford took the next step and filled his need by publishing two collections of stories. Dusty Land is the second of those story collections. The author and his wife Gen were midcareer and middle-aged professionals when they joined the Peace Corps and headed to the African nation of Botswana. This book of stories and his previous one, titled Meeting the Mantis – Searching for a Man . . .

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 Finding one’s way into book publishing

They are known infamously as “gate keepers.” The men and women who throughout the long history of publishing make the decision on whether a book gets published. These mysterious editors who control the fate of every would-be writer hide away mostly in New York skyscrapers and decide what is worthy of publication. Or at least that is what most would-be novelists think. Perhaps the most famous editor of all book editors was Maxwell Perkins. Perkins published F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. They were his first famous writers but he would go onto publish a wide range of novelists, from J.P. Marquand to Erskine Caldwell to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, as well as, late in his editorial career, convince James Jones not to pen an autobiographical novel but write instead From Here to Eternity. You might ask: how did these editors become ‘gate keepers’? Well, they start in the . . .

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Talking with Romany Tin (Cambodia)

The Peace Corps may do work around the world to reduce HIV stigma and discrimination, but, according to a report on Friday, it’s a different story if one of its volunteers tests positive. A Peace Corps volunteer who was stationed in Cambodia claims the federal government agency quarantined him in a hotel room and then terminated his service after he tested positive for HIV. Wrote Jorge Rivas in Splinter News I published the article  “Peace Corps accused of quarantining, then firing, PCV with HIV (Cambodia)” about PCV Romany Tin on March 12 on our site and then reached out to get his story of what happened in Cambodia and with the Peace Corps. — JCoyne • First off, Romany, where did you go to college? I attending California State University Long Beach and majored in Political Science and International Studies. I graduated in May of 2017 and departed to Peace Corps on July . . .

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The Genius of Moritz Thomsen (Ecuador)

I first  published this item on June 1, 2009. A new publication from Quito, Ecuador, is out with a scholarly look at the writings of Moritz Thomsen (Ecuador 1965–67). It is the online publication LiberArte, from the Universidad de San Francisco de Quito. Contributors to LiberArte are primarily professors and students at the university. The journal, first published in January, 2005, features articles on literature, film, and critical trends in Ecuador. Last year there was a conference on Thomsen’s writing held in Quito. If you are interested in any reports from that conference, contact Martin Vega (vegamart@gmail.com) Martin also welcomes comments and critiques of Thomsen from those who knew him. I asked Martin if he knew Moritz and he said he didn’t, but that Alvaro Aleman, who heads up their journal, did know Moritz and often visited him in Guayaquil and spoke with him at length about authors and books. After Thomsen’s death, Alvaro . . .

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To Die in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia)

Peace Corps Volunteer Susan Traub was killed on the night she and her husband arrived as new Peace Corps Volunteers to Ethiopia. It was a  tragic death through absolutely no fault of her own and only because she turned left and not right when she stepped out of the Land Rover at the hotel on her first night in Addis Ababa. This story is about Susan, and it is also about her husband, Charles, who was also injured that night, but who went onto have an amazing life in all the years since, living through the death of his young wife, his own injury, and then a tour in Vietnam. Today he has emerged having had a successful career as a photographer, college professor, author of fifteen books, and a husband and a father. What happened in Ethiopia in September 1967, happened in the last days of my tour as . . .

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Joe Colmen Passes at 98 (HQ/Washington)

In her book on the early days of the Peace Corps, (Come As You Are) Coates Redmon writes of Colmen, “He was one of Shriver’s foils who could, like Mankiewicz and Gelman, make Shriver laugh his great whooping laugh and cause him to make light of things in tense situations. Colmen was an obsessive punster and an instigator of mass guffawing at senior staff meetings. Like Mel Brooks, whom Colmen physically resembled, Colmen likes to see the group dynamic reach the brink of craziness. Like Brooks, Colmen likes to provoke “dangerous laughing.” On his first trip to Africa with Shriver, Colmen and a hand full of other HQ officials went to the royal palace of Emperor Haile Selassie and after Shriver’s official visit with the Emperor, Shriver and the small group were given a tour of the royal gardens. As they reached an outer corridor of the palace, a sort . . .

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