Archive - February 23, 2023

Ukraine: One Year On: A Light in the Darkness by Jeff Walsh (South Africa 2016-18) When one of the Ukrainian refugees in the class I was teaching in Poland told me she was studying to become an opera singer, I didn’t know what to expect. She was a thin teenager with a slight build wearing a white pullover, safe from the violence she’d recently fled. She sang for a few moments and I was stunned. Her soprano voice was like a songbird. When I think of a “Soprano”, I tend to think of those rough and tumble, made-for-tv mobsters  from New Jersey, not a beautiful talented songstress who can hit silky, satin high notes of every octave. Kate was my student at UNICEF in Poland, a safe haven for refugees away from war torn Ukraine and great place for kids to learn. I had no idea that I had a songbird in my . . .

As we prepare to celebrate the 62nd anniversary of an  agency that appears to be ‘disappearing’ from the view of most Americans, if not Congress and the White House, we might ask why? How often do we hear, “Is there still a Peace Corps?” from the men and women on the street. It seems that for the public the Peace Corps faded away with the “Kennedy Generation.” But what brought about the Peace Corps in the first place? I thought I might try and chart the impulses that brought about its creation. These ‘impulses’ we might say are close to being lost in the fog of history. There were, however, several generally accepted desires that coalesced in the last days of the Fifties, framed by a number of people in speeches and in prose, and with the election of John F. Kennedy, became a reality as a federal agency. Most . . .