Archive - 2022

1
The Volunteer Who Codified the “Ten Stages of Genocide” — Gregory Stanton (Ivory Coast)
2
Review — A FEW MINOR ADJUSTMENTS by Cherie Kephart (Zambia)
3
Peace Corps will return to Solomon Islands
4
LETTERS FROM PEACE CORPS, HONDURAS by R. Scott Berg
5
Bill Roebuck (Côte d’Ivoire) — One RPCV Ambassador’s Life
6
The Passing of Tom Hebert (Nigeria)
7
Talking With Lawrence Grobel (Ghana)
8
Review — PADRE RAIMUNDO’s ARMY & Other Stories by Arthur Powers (Brazil)
9
Loom is a solution for saving traditional Pacific island weaving from extinction
10
Naturalist Jason Denlinger (Mozambique) returns to Dubuque after working 6 years in-country
11
TURQUOISE: Three Years in Ghana by Lawrence M. Grobel
12
RPCV Thomas Baranyi (Albania) Pleads Guilty to Storming U.S. Capitol
13
Elephants in our Midst (Botswana)
14
RPCV Caleb Rudow (Zambia) replaces Susan Fisher in North Carolina House
15
The Volunteer Who Brought China Home to America — Peter Hessler (China)

The Volunteer Who Codified the “Ten Stages of Genocide” — Gregory Stanton (Ivory Coast)

   by Jeremiah Norris (Colombia, 1963-65) • From 1969 to 1971 Gregory H. Stanton served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Ivory Coast. From there, he went on to be the Church World Service/CARE’s Field Director in Cambodia. From 1985 to 1991, Gregory was a Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University, and a Fulbright Professor at the University of Swaziland. In this time period, he also was a Professor of Justice, Law, and Society at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Gregory was the Chair of the American Bar Association’s Young Lawyer’s Division Committee on Human Rights and a Member of its Standing Committee on World Order, serving as Legal Advisor to the Ukrainian Independence Movement from 1988-1992. He was named the Ukrainian Man of the Year in 1992 by the UI Movement. In 1991, he founded the Cambodian Genocide Project at Yale University, initiating . . .

Read More

Review — A FEW MINOR ADJUSTMENTS by Cherie Kephart (Zambia)

  A Few Minor Adjustments: A Memoir of Healing Cherie  Kephart (Zambia 1994) Bazi Publishers, 2017 254 pages $15.95 (paperback), $24.95 (hardcover), $4.99 (Kindle) Reviewed by Christine Herbert (Zambia 2004–06) • When the reader first meets the author, Cherie Kephart, we catch a brief glimpse into the life of a vibrant young woman, living independently, with a future full of possibilities. Then an unexpected and unwelcome visitor arrives: sudden and crippling pain. Slowly her health unravels, each new symptom more baffling than the last. She tries one therapy after another, each diagnosis from each new specialist at odds with the last. In an effort to trace the source of her trauma, the author takes the reader back to the days of her Peace Corps service, ten years earlier. As a member of the very first volunteer cohort to serve in Zambia, she and the Peace Corps/Zambia staff had a steep . . .

Read More

Peace Corps will return to Solomon Islands

  (AP) The US says it will open an embassy in the Solomon Islands, laying out in unusually blunt terms a plan to increase its influence in the South Pacific nation before China becomes strongly embedded. The reasoning was explained in a State Department notification to Congress that was obtained by The Associated Press. The plan was confirmed by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a visit to Fiji Saturday on a Pacific tour that began in Australia. The State Department said the Peace Corps was planning to reopen an office in the Solomon Islands and have its volunteers serve there, and that several US agencies were establishing government positions with portfolios in the Solomons. The Peace Corps first went to the Solomon Islands in 1971. The Department needs to be part of this increased US presence, rather than remaining a remote player, it wrote. The State Department said . . .

Read More

LETTERS FROM PEACE CORPS, HONDURAS by R. Scott Berg

  The story takes place in the late 1970s when the author was in his early 20s as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the rural mountains of Honduras. The book was made possible by writing weekly letters to his Montana girlfriend during their long-distance relationship. The book is, first and foremost, a love story about two young people trying to make love stay. It is also about the life and death struggles of the poor campesinos, as well as the Peace Corps volunteers, trying to survive and make a difference. The people and situations described in the book are real and authentic. It describes the unique, and in some cases, bizarre events and politics surrounding life in one of the world’s poorest countries. It goes on to cover a three-month odyssey to South America involving encounters with the Maya and Inca peoples engaged in the same travel through life by . . .

Read More

Bill Roebuck (Côte d’Ivoire) — One RPCV Ambassador’s Life

  by Carol L. Hanner Wake Forest Magazine • Former U.S. Ambassador to Bahrain, Bill Roebuck, who lives now in Arlington, Virginia, shares his Netflix-worthy stories from his 28-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service. His soft Southern voice bears no trace of adrenaline in the retelling. 2003 In 2003, an armored caravan ferries Roebuck (Wake Forest ’78, M.A. ’82) toward Gaza City. He and others in the lead car hear a muffled “ploomff” behind them. Attackers have detonated a bomb buried in the road, exploding the car that would have carried Roebuck if not for a last-minute change of plans. Instead, the assassination attempt kills three of the four American security officers in the targeted vehicle. 2009 In 2009, Roebuck travels across Baghdad in another armored caravan to an Iraqi ministry meeting. The next day, al-Qaida explosions blast the 10-story ministry building, killing at least 95 people, injuring 600 . . .

Read More

The Passing of Tom Hebert (Nigeria)

Tom Hebert (Nigeria 1962-64) 1938-2022 Rest in Peace, Tom Born in Wenatchee, Washington on August 9, 1938 with his early childhood spent on his parents’ cattle ranch in the Okanogan, he grew up on Vashon Island near Seattle where his parent founded a nursing home, the caring spirit of which is still going strong at Vashon Community Care. In 1960, he graduated from Linfield College as a theatre major and his graduate work was at the Dallas Theater Center and Baylor University, Waco, Texas. Preferring projects that empower local communities or challenge the status quo, Tom Hebert was a writer and public policy consultant and Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Nigeria, 1962-1964). After his Peace Corps service, he integrated the faculty of a black Southern University and later served 18 months establishing USO Clubs on U.S. Marine Corps combat bases in South Vietnam. His last assignment was as director, USO Saigon. . . .

Read More

Talking With Lawrence Grobel (Ghana)

    Lawrence Grobel (Ghana 1968-71) has written 31 books and for numerous national magazines and newspapers. Playboy called him “the Interviewer’s Interviewer” after his interview with Marlon Brando for their 25th-anniversary issue. He created the MFA in Professional Writing program for Antioch University in 1977 and in 1985 his book Conversations with Capote received a PEN Special Achievement award and reached the top of several bestseller lists. He is married to artist and textile designer Hiromi Oda and they have two daughters, Maya and Hana. His blog, books, and articles can be found on his website: www.lawrencegrobel.com. We interviewed Larry in connection with his new memoir — Turquoise — of his Peace Corps years in Ghana. • Larry, why the Peace Corps? When I turned 21 in February 1968, I had to start thinking seriously about my future, and whether I’d have one. The Vietnam War was raging, with over a half-million . . .

Read More

Review — PADRE RAIMUNDO’s ARMY & Other Stories by Arthur Powers (Brazil)

  Padre Raimundo’s Army & Other Stories Arthur Powers (Brazil 1969–73) Wiseblood Books July 2021 201 pages $15.00 (paperback) Reviewed by Marnie Mueller (1963–65) • Recently I’ve read a number of works of fiction, written with a deceptive simplicity, so much so that one doesn’t realize at first how profound and skillfully constructed they are. Arthur Powers’ Padre Raimundo’s Army, a slim book of seventeen short stories set in Brazil from 1970 to the early 2000s is one such example. A little backstory: Powers joined the Peace Corps in 1969 and ended up staying for forty years working primarily as a community organizer in rural Brazil. Except for a few years stateside earning a Harvard law degree he returned to Brazil for decades more work. He had arrived in-country as a religious agnostic and eventually found deep faith and an activist home in the Catholic church. He married a woman . . .

Read More

Loom is a solution for saving traditional Pacific island weaving from extinction

  By Joyce McClure, The Pacific Island Times   When the young women of Yap’s remote outer islands leave home to seek a college education, better work opportunities or medical care on the U.S. mainland, the risk of leaving their cultural traditions behind is very real. The art of traditional weaving is among the most important. Weaving has been passed down from mother to daughter for centuries on the small islands and atolls of Yap, one of four island states in the Federated States of Micronesia, originally known as the Caroline Islands. Scattered across 100,000 square miles of open water in the western Pacific Ocean, Yap is made up of four contiguous main islands and 134 atolls and islands of which 19 are inhabited. One commonality among the outer islanders is the oblong length of handwoven, fringed fabric called a lavalava that the women wear as a wrap-around skirt when they . . .

Read More

Naturalist Jason Denlinger (Mozambique) returns to Dubuque after working 6 years in-country

  Dubuque native returns home to work in conservation after years in Africa by Benjamin Fisher, Telegraph Herald   DUBUQUE, Iowa (AP) — The Dubuque County Conservation Department’s new naturalist has taken an unusual path to his position — from Dubuque to Mozambique and then back to eastern Iowa. Naturalist Jason Denlinger (Mozambique 1999-01) began work for the county late last month after six years at Gorongosa National Park in the East African country of Mozambique. Before working in Africa, Denlinger was a Dubuquer who had a fascination with pachyderms. “I always had this dream to work with elephants and in Africa,” he said. “My aunt was a Peace Corps volunteer, so then I was a Peace Corps volunteer, which really set me on my path (to Africa).” Denlinger first went to Mozambique 20 years ago with the Peace Corps before returning to Dubuque. That experience abroad would later help him secure . . .

Read More

TURQUOISE: Three Years in Ghana by Lawrence M. Grobel

  The ’60s was a turbulent time in America. It was the Age of Aquarius but also the age of domestic conflict among those who supported the Vietnam War and those who opposed it–particularly the young men being drafted to fight it. For some, there was a better way to serve their country: the Peace Corps. An idealistic venture that kept the Hounds of War at bay. And that’s what led Lawrence Grobel to Ghana, a country he knew absolutely nothing about, located 6000 miles away on the Gold Coast of West Africa. Turquoise is based on the memoir he wrote while teaching at the Institute of Journalism in Accra, the capital city, and traveling throughout Ghana and West Africa. It’s a brilliant collection of snapshots, detailing everything he experienced in real time, from embarrassing cocktail talk at the American Embassy to witnessing fetish ceremonies and meeting hustlers, con men, artists, . . .

Read More

RPCV Thomas Baranyi (Albania) Pleads Guilty to Storming U.S. Capitol

  By Kevin Shea | For NJ.com    Thomas Baranyi, the Mercer County man who gave a TV interview after storming the U.S. Capitol last year and showed blood on his hand from a rioter who’d been shot, pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court in Washington, D.C. Baranyi, 30, who’d been charged with four crimes for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, pleaded guilty to one count of entering and remaining in a restricted building. He’ll be sentenced in May, and faces up to six months in prison. Born and raised in Hamilton, and now living in Ewing, Baranyi was candid in the local TV news interview, which made headlines nationwide and went viral online. He introduced himself as “Thomas Baranyi from New Jersey,” and proceeded to narrate his role. “We tore through the scaffolding, through flash bangs and tear gas and blitzed our way in through all the chambers just trying to get . . .

Read More

Elephants in our Midst (Botswana)

  Entrepreneurs and animal advocates bring a cause closer to home By LISA CRAWFORD WATSON | newsroom@montereyherald.com |  February 1, 2022    Maybe it was while getting her master’s degree at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, which included joining the Peace Corps, or when she went to Botswana with local artist Mary Beth Harris and became both enchanted by elephants and devastated by their plight, that Carmel’s Susie Bauer (Central Africa Republic 1982-84) decided to establish a nonprofit organization.Tuesday, she and Harris opened “Mopane” at The Crossroads in Carmel, named after a tree in Southern Africa. Known as the “tree of life,” its foliage feeds elephants, and its grubs become tribal cuisine. This boutique will carry custom jewelry, fabrics, art, and vessels — primarily fair trade products from Africa. Half the proceeds will go to Elephant Havens Wildlife Foundation, a nonprofit rescue organization in Botswana, and the other half will benefit various . . .

Read More

RPCV Caleb Rudow (Zambia) replaces Susan Fisher in North Carolina House

  A data scientist and former Peace Corps Volunteer has joined the North Carolina State House, filling out the term of  longtime Rep. Susan Fisher of Asheville. Rep. Caleb Rudow (Zambia 2012-2015) was the choice of Buncombe County Democratic activists to serve out the remainder of Fisher’s two-year term. Gov. Roy Cooper then appointed Rudow, as state law required. Rudow was sworn in on Feb. 1. Rudow is the son of an Asheville attorney, Marc Rudow, and his wife Deborah Miles, is the founder and long-time Executive Director of the UNC Asheville Center for Diversity Education. A 2005 graduate of Asheville High School, Rudow majored in philosophy at UNC-Chapel Hill and later earned an MA in Public Policy from the LBJ School of Government at UT-Austin (TX). Rudow learned Spanish under Señora Castro at Asheville High and then spent a full semester in Costa Rica—after several other trips to Central . . .

Read More

The Volunteer Who Brought China Home to America — Peter Hessler (China)

   by Jeremiah Norris  (Colombia, 1963-65) Peter Hessler graduated from Princeton University in 1992 with an A. B. in English. The summer before graduation, he wrote an extensive ethnography about the small town of Sikeston, Missouri, which was published by the Journal for Applied Anthropology. After graduation, he received a Rhodes Scholarship to study English language and literature at Mansfield College, University of Oxford. Peter then served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in China from 1996 to 1998, teaching English at Fuling Teachers College, in a small city near the Yangtze River. After Peace Corps, Peter continued his work in China as a freelance writer for publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The South China Morning Post, and National Geographic. He joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2000 and served as a foreign correspondent until 2007. Peter left China in 2007 and settled . . .

Read More

Copyright © 2022. Peace Corps Worldwide.