March 25, 2018 – Peace Corps Worldwide

David Mather (Chile) publishes RAW DOGIN’

Mar 25 2018

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 . . .

Remembering the murder of PCV Deborah Gardner (Tonga)

Mar 25 2018

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 . . .

Archive - March 25, 2018