Archive - May 7, 2022

  Brian Norris (Bolivia 1997-00), an associate political science professor at Lincoln University, won a Fulbright Global Scholar Award from the U.S. State Department and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, and will begin researching rural local governments in Colombia and Mozambique this summer. The three-year grant will take Norris, who has worked in foreign countries for more than 25 years, to Colombia in 2022 and 2024, and to Mozambique in 2023. Norris will spend the next three summers conducting research and documenting how successful rural governments are at providing basic services and infrastructure to their communities. “The governments of Colombia and Mozambique have granted more power and autonomy to rural local governments that are often in a better position to provide services than the national government,” Norris said in a university news release. “In practice, though, it is very difficult to decentralize power in geographically large and sprawling countries of . . .

  by Bonnie Black (Gabon 1996-98) May 6, 2022 • Martha Stewart and I go back aways. We’ve never met, but our lives have followed somewhat parallel paths. We’re about the same age (she’s three years older); both from New Jersey; both were models when young, then later became caterers in New York; we were both about the same size, shape, and coloring; both gave birth to one child, daughters, born within days of each other in 1965; both love cooking, homemaking, gardening… The list goes on and on. She’s uber-famous, of course, and I am not. But that’s quite all right with me. There was a time, though, when I achieved a modicum of Martha Stewart-like fame: when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in my early fifties in Gabon, Central Africa. This experience struck me as funny at the time, so I wrote about it humorously in my . . .