June 2, 2022 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Talking with Tim Suchsland (Kazakhstan)

Jun 02 2022

Where and when did you serve in the Peace Corps, and what was your Peace Corp project assignment? Kazakhstan, 2007-09 — I was a TEFL teacher in a village near the Russian border called Yavlenka. Tell us about where you lived and worked. Yavlenka is in northern Kazakhstan about 50 miles from the Russian border and 1.5 hours from a city called Petropavl. The village was a regional center so it had quite a bit of activity and business for rural Kazakhstan. It was also a big agricultural area so lots of farming in the area. The landscape was fairly flat where the Kazakh steppe met the West Siberian Plains. I lived with host families my entire time in the PC. During training, I lived with a Kazakh family. My first year in Yavlenka I also lived with a Kazakh family of 5. In my last year, I lived with . . .

CHALLENGING PREGNANCY by Genevieve Grabman (Kyrgyz Republic)

Jun 02 2022

In Challenging Pregnancy, Genevieve Grabman recounts being pregnant with identical twins whose circulatory systems were connected in a rare condition called twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. Doctors couldn’t “unfuse” the fetuses because one twin also had several other confounding problems: selective intrauterine growth restriction, a two-vessel umbilical cord, a marginal cord insertion, and, possibly, a parasitic triplet. Ultimately, national anti-abortion politics — not medicine or her own choices — determined the outcome of Grabman’s pregnancy. At every juncture, anti-abortion politics limited the care available to her, the doctors and hospitals willing to treat her, the tools doctors could use, and the words her doctors could say. Although she asked for aggressive treatment to save at least one baby, hospital ethics boards blocked all able doctors from helping her. Challenging Pregnancy is about Grabman’s harrowing pregnancy and the science and politics of maternal healthcare in the United States, where every person must self-advocate for . . .

Archive - June 2, 2022