Archive - December 21, 2021

  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 . . .

by Tricia L. Nadolny, Donovan Slack, Nick Penzenstadler and Kizito Makoye Published in USA TODAY – 12/21/21 DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — An American Peace Corps employee in Tanzania in 2019 killed a mother of three and injured two others in a series of car crashes that began after he left a bar where he had been drinking and brought a sex worker back to his government-leased home. Witnesses pelted the man’s car with rocks and pursued on motorcycles as he fled the scenes of his crimes. The chaotic and deadly episode ended when he slammed into a pole and was detained by police. But within hours, Peace Corps and U.S. Embassy staff rushed the man onto a plane and out of the country. Tanzanian authorities were unable to charge him first, and the U.S. Department of Justice later declined to file criminal charges because of a lack of jurisdiction. The man . . .