Archive - May 30, 2022

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MY SADDEST PLEASURES: 50 Years on the Road by Mark D. Walker (Guatemala)
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Talking with Glenn Ivers (Liberia)
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Final Words about the First Days of the Peace Corps — Part 5

MY SADDEST PLEASURES: 50 Years on the Road by Mark D. Walker (Guatemala)

  In his new book, Mark Walker reflects on his fifty years of travel miscalculations and disasters and how and why he travels changed over the years, as has who he traveled with. As a young Peace Corps Volunteer with no overseas travel experience, the world was his oyster, and he figured he could go anywhere if he set his mind to it—with little or no money. Then he married a Guatemalan lady and had to think more about “our” needs; then, three children meant additional requirements and responsibilities. And later, as a professional fundraiser, he would set up donor visits to program areas where the organizations he represented needed funds, which meant considering the needs of up to fifteen individuals of all ages, including children and some donors in their 70s and 80s. He’s become a savvier trekker, although he was still prone to the occasional snafu. This book . . .

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Talking with Glenn Ivers (Liberia)

An interview with Glenn H. Ivers (Liberia 1974-76), author of ANGELS OF BASTOGNE   Glenn, what is Angels of Bastogne about? This is a story from World War II. The main characters are Jack Prior, a U.S. Army doctor, and two heroic Belgian nurses who volunteered to serve in his aid station in Bastogne, Belgium in December 1944, during a German offensive, the “Battle of the Bulge.” The aid station was short-staffed, under-equipped, and unsuitable for the tidal wave of wounded they faced, yet with grit and great compassion they persevered. What is the genre of the book? It has been described as historical fiction by a prominent Upstate New York historian, who generally “avoids books of this type,” but who nonetheless claimed he could not put the book down once he started reading it. I think of it as narrative nonfiction because it is a true story with an . . .

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Final Words about the First Days of the Peace Corps — Part 5

  What continues to surprise me is how few people–since that morning in the Mayflower Hotel–have read “A Towering Task” the position paper written by Warren Wiggins and Bill Josephson which was the first draft of defining the Peace Corps; it was the bible for the future Peace Corps. When I asked Warren Wiggins about this, he commented, saying, “It’s marvelous that nobody has read it because, you see, in most ways I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. In some ways I was dead on, but I did recommend that we ship air-conditioned trailers to the Philippines to house the Volunteers. It’s a far cry from the theology of the Peace Corps that evolved, but then, those were the early days.” What is clear now from the safety of time and distance is that being anti-establishment, amateurish, anti-professional was the reason for the success of the . . .

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