Archive - 2020

  The Museum of the Peace Corps Experience will host a screening of “A Towering Task,” the award-winning Peace Corps documentary, viewable September 18 – 30, 2020. Income from ticket sales will allow us to create Museum exhibits next year during the 60thAnniversary of Peace Corps. Please help us get the word out. Distribute this message as widely as possible. Help us expand public awareness of the Peace Corps and its history-making impact. By selling tickets for an online showing, Cinema 21 theater in Portland, Oregon will donate all its earnings to the Museum. Ticket purchases will begin after September 1. Then you’ll receive another message including links to purchase $10 tickets from Cinema 21 for online streaming. The message will also invite viewers to a Zoom panel discussion on September 30 with Alana DeJoseph, documentary Producer, Glenn Blumhorst, President, National Peace Corps Association, and other returned Peace Corps Volunteers. It’s a win-win proposition—but . . .

  Breaking the mold: How Beyond Good is reinventing the chocolate business   Building a chocolate factory has been part of Tim McCollum’s  (Madagascar 1999-2011) plan since he founded Beyond Good, formerly Madécasse, in 2008. On its own that’s not an easy feat, but the location for the company’s first state-of-the-art production facility added another layer of difficulty. Beyond Good set up shop in Madagascar, where it sources rare, wonderfully fruity Criollo cacao directly from farmers. Though Africa — West Africa, in particular — supplies 70 percent of the world’s cocoa, the “statistical equivalent of 0 percent” of the world’s chocolate is produced there, McCollum says. There are several reasons for that, ranging from a lack of infrastructure, the need to ship and install manufacturing equipment, employee training, and ultimately, the distribution of profits. “They all add up to it being a very difficult proposition,” McCollum says. “But creating serious value . . .

    Guss, Felix, and Jim Upshaw founded the community of County Line in the 1870s in northwest Nacogdoches County, in deep East Texas.  As with hundreds of other relatively autonomous black communities created at that time, the Upshaws sought a safe place to raise their children and create a livelihood during Reconstruction and Jim Crow Texas. In the late 1980s photographer, Richard Orton visited County Line for the first time and became aware of a world he did not know existed as a white man.  He met some remarkable people there who changed his life. The more than 50 duotone photographs and text convey the contemporary experience of growing up in a “freedom colony.” Covering a period of twenty-five years, photographer Richard Orton juxtaposes his images with text from people who grew up in and have remained connected to their birthplace.  Thad Sitton’s foreword sets the community in historical . . .

  Strange Beauty of the World: Poems Bill Preston (Thailand 1977–80) Peace Corps Writers 148 pages August 2018 $14.00 (paperback), $9.99 (Kindle)   Reviewed by Peter V. Deekle (Iran 1968–70) Bill Preston (Thailand, 1977-1980) began his professional encounter with his native language, English, during his Peace Corps TEFL assignment, as did this reviewer. But Bill continued his formal engagement with English well beyond Peace Corps. This engagement has strengthened his expertise as a writer and poet. Strange Beauty of the World is a collection both personal and universal in its appeal, organized in broad sections of Bill’s experience and recollections. The universality of each poem enables the reader to find a unique voice and vision of the expressed sentiments and events. Regardless of style and form (mostly extended narrative forms, but a few, often playful, rhyming) the poems seem to this reviewer both appropriate to the themes and evocative of each subject’s meaning. . . .

  Mark Twain, Detective by Joseph Peter Theroux (Western Samoa 1975 – 78) Self Published 212 pages June 2020 $10.00 (paperback), $0.00 (Kindle)   Reviewed by Sue Hoyt Aiken (Ethiopia 1962-64)  • The author provides a look back to a period of history involving famous good guys and the famous not so good guys.  The Editors Note: Introductory is as interesting as the story itself leaving the reader eager to unearth more about Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson and the whole sugar-dominating force, the Speckles’ family. Their flamboyance is in stark contrast to the undercurrent of trafficking in human souls, opium and more. The mystery unfolds and plays out in Hawaii in the late 1800s when Twain sails to Hawaii to give a lecture. While a pandemic supposedly prevented him from coming ashore to deliver the lecture, materials later discovered would say otherwise. Did he join Lloyd Osborne, did he witness the Georgia . . .

  Woven: A Peace Corps Adventure Spun with Faith, Laughter, and Love Nancy Heil Knor (Belize 1989-91) Peace Corps Writers November 5, 2019 322 pages $12.95 (paperback)   • Talking with Nancy Heil Knor (Belize), author of Woven an interview by Marian Haley Beil (Ethiopia 1962-64) Nancy, where and when did you serve in the Peace Corps? I had the privilege of serving in the village of San Pedro Columbia in Belize, Central America, from 1989–1991. I loved it! The village is inhabited by K’ekchi Mayan families who are mostly subsistence farmers. When I lived there, the population was about 1,000 people; it was one of the larger Mayan villages in the southernmost district of Belize. What was your Peace Corps project assignment? Originally, I was sent to the village to teach the villagers how to plant carrots in order to increase their intake of Vitamin A. Vitamin A helps prevent vision . . .

  You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories by Kristen Roupenian (Kenya 2003-05) Gallery/Scout Press 240 pages January 2019 $10.99 (hardcover), $14.99 (paperback), $11.99 (Kindle) • “Cat Person’s” author’s bad-date story and her date with fame By Meredith Goldstein Boston Globe December 29, 2018, 7:13 p.m.    Last December, writer Kristen Roupenian was sitting at Cultivate, a coffee shop in Michigan, with her girlfriend of a few months. It had been a big year for the Plymouth native, who’d finished her master of fine arts at the University of Michigan in April. Her short story “Cat Person ” had been accepted by The New Yorker (the dream of many aspiring fiction writers) and was now up on the magazine’s website. Just then Roupenian’s girlfriend, writer Callie Collins, checked her phone. Something strange was happening. “She used to work in publishing so she has more of a finger on the literary pulse . . .