July 9, 2018 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Finding “Teranga” from Senegal to the streets of Paris by Carrie Knowlton (Senegal)

Jul 09 2018

Teranga by Carrie Knowlton (Senegal 1999-01) • You can fall in love with a person, but you can also fall in love with moments in time, the sounds of drums on the beach, and roosters crowing while women pound millet at dawn. You can fall in love with the way the Atlantic Ocean smells at sunset and the way all those things come together to become your memory of a place. After two and a half years living in Senegal while serving in the Peace Corps, I was smitten. Senegal is that bump that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean just below the Sahara desert on the western-most tip of Africa. There is a beach in the capital, Dakar, where you can sit and eat a plate of fish and rice, watch the sunset, and listen to drumming and the call to prayer. The country is 92% Muslim and French is . . .

RPCV Who Served with Distinction in the Foreign Service (Ethiopia)

Jul 09 2018

Recently, I have published a series of blog items on RPCVs who have fulfilled Kennedy’s wish that Returned Peace Corps Volunteers would join the State Department and become our future ambassadors and finally break the “pale, male & Yale” syndrome of the Foreign Service. I have now identified fifty-four RPCVs, men and women of all ethnic groups, who have become, as they are formally called, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. RPCVs have also made significant contributions to the State Department in many ways besides becoming ambassadors. One who did so is Tom Gallagher, a Volunteer with me in Ethiopia from 1962-64. Gallagher was the youngest chief of a major diplomatic mission (US Consulate, Guayaquil), and was well on his way to an ambassadorial appointment when he made the decision to become the first civil servant in the world to publicly and voluntarily declare that he was a homosexual. Having done so, . . .

Archive - July 9, 2018