September 7, 2022 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Review — A FIVE FINGER FEAST by Tim Suchsland (Kazakhstan)

Sep 07 2022

A Five Finger Feast: Two Years in Kazakhstan, Lessons from the Peace Corps by Tim Suchsland (Kazakhstan 2007–09), author and illustrator Peace Corps Writers, May 2022 395 pages $19.99 (paperback) Reviewed by Philip Montgomery (Kazakhstan 2007–09) • Travel is one of the greatest educators in life. Even more educational — worldview shaping even — is living in a country that is not your own, understanding what it means to be the outsider, the guest, the stranger. In this sense, all travel is not equal. Some journeys break up the monotony of everyday life, while others leave immense, immeasurable impacts on the sojourner, the kinds of experience that shape us more completely. Tim Suchsland’s A Five Finger Feast is an account of one such journey. In this memoir, Suchsland takes the reader along with him through his 2-year adventure of travel, growth, and discovery. Rather than presenting a superficial touristy version . . .

When Christ Stopped At Eboli

Sep 07 2022

by John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962-64) (First published in Dec 13 2009) The other weekend when visiting a small used bookstore appropriately named the BookBarn in rural Columbia County in upstate New York, several miles from where we have a weekend home, I spotted on a shelf in this low ceiling cluttered store a copy of Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped At Eboli. It is a book that I haven’t seen in some forty plus years, in fact since I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia. This book was one of appropriately 75 paperbacks that Sarge Shriver and the first administration of the Peace Corps put together in a portable ‘booklocker’ for Volunteers. The books were to be read and left in country, to become seeds for new libraries in the developing world where we were serving. The used copy I found in the Bookbarn was a later edition, a TIME Reading Program Special Edition, first published in . . .

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