Archive - 2021

The current issue of WorldView (online at the NPCA site) has an informative interview with Bill Moyers and Bill Josphenson on the creation of the Peace Corps. The interview introduces new information about those formative days of the agency. Here is an essay I wrote in the late ’90s about creating the Peace Corps based on interviews I had done with founders like Warren Wiggins and Harris Wofford and others who had been part of the Mayflower Gang that created the Peace Corps.    Establishing the Peace Corps Let me start with a quote from Gerard T. Rice’s book, The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps: In 1961 John F. Kennedy took two risky and conflicting initiatives in the Third World. One was to send five hundred additional military advisers into South Vietnam; by 1963 there would be seventeen thousand such advisers. The other was to send five hundred young Americans . . .

After helping to found the Peace Corps, the former West Virginia legislator started this magazine in 1969 and molded it for 32 years.  by Matthew Cooper December 22, 2021 A little over 20 years ago, I made a short film in honor of Charlie Peters, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly. The American Society of Magazine Editors was inducting my old boss and mentor to its Hall of Fame, a kind of Cooperstown of glossies. Held at a glitzy luncheon at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, the editors of venerable titles lavishly toasted themselves as the National Magazine Awards were handed out. (In retrospect, it had an end-of-an-era feeling, with 9/11 and the collapse of so many publications in the offing.) My short film was a precis to Charlie getting his Thalberg. It began with shots of the Time-Life Building, the Newsweek building, and the Condé Nast tower, followed by . . .

MY LIFE IN THE LAND OF THE ETERNAL SPRING: THE COFFEE PLANTATION BY Mark D. Walker (Guatemala 1971-73) Though I had lived and worked in Guatemala for seven years, it was a brief encounter with my young daughter, Michelle, on the San Francisco Miramar coffee plantation, perched on the side of the Volcano Atitlan that would determine my direction in life. It was a few days before Christmas, and I was strolling through the “Big House” when I came upon her in the living room. She stood, her feet planted on the orange tile floor, hugging her new Airedale puppy, Tiky, and gazing with wonder at the Christmas tree twinkling with colored lights and filled with handmade decorations. Below the tree, a number of brightly wrapped packages sat in contrast to the stark white walls. On the wall was a number of photographs of my wife’s family members It was . . .

  Dear Folks, As a matter of fact, Christmas was quite merry this year, even without snow. Friday, Phil, Mr. Rowat, Bernie, and I went out in search of a tree. What we were looking for was not a Eucalyptus tree or a false banana tree but for a more symmetric and Christmasy cedar, and sure enough down on the banks of the Gogeb River we found a prime candidate. We lost little time hacking it down with our stone-age ax but were startled when along came some village folks who wondered what we were up to. Phil being more quick-witted than the rest of us, and more fluent in the local dialect said we were taking it to help welcome the Provincial Governor who just happened to be coming for an annual visit the next day. Well, that made perfect sense all around, and we gleefully hauled off the . . .

An RPCV who went to Ethiopia with the first group in 1962 and is now living in a retirement community in DC. “I’m preparing to go to bed.  In comes Rahel, an Ethiopian nurse, to take my temperature and other vital measures.  While she’s here, she’s joined by Asnaku, Ethiopian, who has come to get out my PJS and reorder my clothes.  Then she is joined by Melat, the youngest of the Ethiopian caregivers, who not only helps Asnaku but also takes out my laundry for pick up overnight. Melat is a graduate of BarDahr University.  Great service.” A PCV story that has come full circle.

HUFFPOST PERSONAL I Joined A Far-Right Group Of Moms. What I Witnessed Was Frightening. Phoebe Cohen has walked many paths in life, including living in the Gobi Desert as a Peace Corps volunteer and working as a paramedic in several states. Cohen’s work has been featured in Graphic Medicine, Mutha Magazine and BorderX. She regularly posts on her website Merry Misandrist. Cohen is a part-time cartoonist, writer and nursing student. She has been known to go up to five hours without coffee. By  Phoebe Cohen (Mongolia 2005-07), Guest Writer   “There are about 20 of us. We are all maskless, all (apparently) white, mostly women and all on the younger side.” “Look out for the trigger words,” the woman says. She’s perched on a chair in front of the room. She’s well-dressed yet funky with elegant boots, a demure sweater and some colorful jewelry. “‘Equality,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘inclusion,’ ‘marginalization,’… These words . . .

First published on this site on Dec 22, 2020 My First Christmas in Africa by Mark Wentling by Mark Wentling (Honduras 1967-69 & Togo 1970-73) This holiday season has me reminiscing again about my first Christmas in Africa. As I stare blankly out the window I am transported back to 1970 and my humble room in the Adjakpo family compound in the village of Agu-Gadzapé, Togo. After three months of living there as a Peace Corps Volunteer and learning how to fit in where I would never really fit, the Christmas season was upon us and I began raising questions about what to do for Christmas. Everybody in our congested compound, which was always vibrantly alive with people doing their daily chores and what they had to do to survive the poverty that engulfed them so profoundly, liked the idea of doing something to celebrate Christmas. But, they all said . . .

  Here’s another look at Tanzania in the novel An African Season, written by Leonard Levitt (Tanzania 1963-65) that tells the better side of the Peace Corps in Africa. SARGENT SHRIVER WROTE about An African Season, The first book which truly conveys the flavor of Peace Corps work, the realities of it, the challenges, the frustrations . . .. An extraordinarily fine book. Levitt’s book is about his one year in rural Tanganyika, as the nation was called at the time. Levitt was a secondary school teacher in Ndumulu School in Mbeya, and his book is a wonderful look at Tanganyika in its last days of British colonial rule. The nation would become Tanzania in 1964 when Tanganyika joined with the island of Zanzibar. It is also worth reading for Levitt’s clear eye for details and telling incidents. Here are his first impressions on arriving in up-country Tanganyika. Levitt arrived late at night in . . .