Archive - March 2023

True North Editions : Bill Owens : 50th Anniversary Suburbia Collection “This is our second annual Fourth of July block party. This year thirty-three families came for beer, barbequed chicken, corn on the cob, potato salad, green salad, macaroni salad, and watermelon. After eating and drinking we staged our parade and fireworks.” © Bill Owens – Courtesy True North Editions / Scott Nichols Gallery Suburbia by Bill Owens (Jamaica 1964-66): this book marked the history of photography! It is fifty years old and a portfolio including 30 of his images has just been republished. Bill Owens and True North Editions celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the seminal book, Suburbia with this limited edition portfolio, Bill Owens — 50th Anniversary Suburbia Collection. The portfolio was created with the intent of placement in institutional collections, and is available through Scott Nichols Gallery. This portfolio is comprised of 36 remastered photographs from Suburbia, selected for . . .

Colin Rule Receives D’Alemberte-Raven Award from ABA Dispute Resolution Section! By JIM MELAMED March 27, 2023 Colin Rule (Eritrea 1995-97), CEO of Mediate.com and ODR.com, has been announced as the 2023 recipient of the D’Alemberte/Raven Award from the American Bar Association Dispute Resolution Section. Colin will be recognized at the May 11th Award Ceremony at the 25th annual ABA DR Spring Conference in Las Vegas. This D’Alemberte Raven Award award honors Talbot D’Alemberte and Robert D. Raven, who each held the unique position of being both ABA Presidents and Chairs of either the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution or its predecessor ABA Special Committee. Resourceful Internet Solutions, Inc., and Mediate.com were founded in 1995 by John Helie and Jim Melamed. Jim Melamed served as CEO of Mediate.com for 25 years until Colin succeeded Jim as CEO in June 2020. Rule returned to Mediate.com where he served as the company’s first General Manager in 1999! Rule spun . . .

Is True Love Possible? Readers Are Turning to This 1990s Novel for Answers. March 29, 2023 in News Katherine Champagne had never heard of “Mating,” the award-winning novel by Norman Rush, until one afternoon in 2020, when she popped into a random room on Clubhouse in the early days of that social media app. “It was me and a group of true strangers talking about books we liked,” said Ms. Champagne, 35, who lives in Queens and works at a start-up. A woman recommended the novel without giving anyone in the chat room much to go on. “She was just straight up like, ‘This is the best book I’ve ever read,’” Ms. Champagne recalled. César Acevedo, a bartender in Brooklyn, bought “Mating” within 24 hours of seeing a tweet posted in December by John Phipps, the fiction editor of the literary magazine The Fence. In the tweet, Mr. Phipps said he was . . .

God, President Kennedy, and Me by Tina Martin (Tonga 1969-71) A version of this appears in the anthology Even the Smallest Crab Has Teeth, 2011. I remember what I was doing on November 22, 1963 even before I heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Praying. Not just because I was chairman of Religious Emphasis Week at Columbia High School but because there was a beauty contest that night and, if it were God’s will, I was willing to win it. So I kept checking in with God, letting Him know that He was on my mind, and I sure hoped I was on His. I didn’t want Him to fix the contest. That wouldn’t be fair. I just wanted Him to help me do justice to whatever God-given beauty I might have so that I could honor the Future Teachers of America Club I was representing and serve as . . .

Back in the mid-sixties when I was an APCD in Ethiopia, a year after my tour as a PCV secondary school English teacher in Addis Ababa, I did a lot of flying on Ethiopia’s Airlines small fleet of single engine prop planes, piloted by young French guys all new to the Empire. It was difficult flying, even in the best of weather, over the vast terranes and high plateaus, and across the Semien and Bale Mountains, the Danakil Depression, where you would feel the fierce winds, and always had to land the small propeller plane on a narrow dirt runways in the middle of nowhere. Still, it was breathtaking to sail across endless kilometers and see tiny tukul houses dotting the hills as if they were nothing more than birthmarks on the African landscape. I was seeing Africa up-close and personal. It was my own special view of the vastness . . .

Award-Winning Author to be Next Ofstad Scholar at Truman State Universty Nina Mukerjee Furstenau (Tunisia 1984-86) is an award-winning author and journalist with special interests in food and identity. Her food memoir, Biting Through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland, won the 2014 M.F.K. Fisher Book Award and the International Grand Prize/Les Dames d’Escoffier for culinary literature, among other recognitions. Her most recent book, Green Chili and Other Impostors, focuses on heritage foods and colonial power. Her textbook Food & Culture will be released sometime in 2023.Among her other accomplishments, Furstenau has launched five business magazines and served as publisher of two of them for 15 years prior to going to the University of Missouri Science and Agricultural Journalism program where she was director of food systems communication from 2010-18. In the past, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia (1984-86) and was a Fulbright Global . . .

(Thanks for the ‘heads up’ from Kay (Gillies) Dixon (Colombia 1962-64) The Peace Corps’ mission has blurred with age. It is time for a new prescription. The agency’s foe and foil were clear in 1961. To counter the spread of communism in newly independent states, it enlisted a post-World War II generation of American idealists to share our country’s new affluence around the globe. Overseas, Peace Corps volunteers inspired trust in democracy by teaching citizens of poor nations skills they requested in their languages and communities. At home, Peace Corps volunteers promoted international friendship by showcasing beneficial values and practices learned abroad. Everywhere, Peace Corps volunteers learned to innovate, withstand hardship, honor commitments and appreciate the power of humble efforts to help others. Three policies underpinned that mission. Host-community ownership was promoted by having local people use a bottom-up development model called Participatory Analysis for Community Action to choose volunteer . . .

Saving the Planet By Kathleen Coskran (Ethiopia 1965-67) The title of the Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis was “Can We Save Our Planet?” The speaker, Carl Pope, former Executive Director and Chairman of the Sierra Club, was asked, “What can we do to halt the population explosion that threatens the planet?” Pope’s answer: “Educate girls.” I nearly jumped out of my chair to shout, YES! I had recently returned from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where I attended a gathering of 130 girls and young women, some still in secondary school, and others who had been able to finish secondary school and go on to college and university because of Resources for the Enrichment of African Lives (REAL,  real-africa.org). REAL was founded by Tsehai Wodajo, from Nedjo, Ethiopia. Tsehai knew first hand what it took to keep a girl from a poor family in school. In 1970, 8th grader Tsehai wrote . . .

This Colorado ‘solar garden’ is literally a farm under solar panels By Kirk Siegler This year, the garden produced more than 8,000 pounds of produce, while the panels above generate enough power for 300 local homes. When Byron Kominek ( Cameroon 2004-06) returned home after the Peace Corps and later working as a diplomat in Africa, his family’s 24-acre farm near Boulder, Colo., was struggling to turn a profit. “Our farm has mainly been hay producing for fifty years,” Kominek said, on a recent chilly morning, the sun illuminating a dusting of snow on the foothills to his West. “This is a big change on one of our three pastures.” That big change is certainly an eye opener: 3,200 solar panels mounted on posts eight feet high above what used to be an alfalfa field on this patch of rolling farmland at the doorstep of the Rocky Mountains. Getting to . . .

President Biden announces key nominee for US ambassador to Palau     In a statement from the White House, Joel Ehrendreich, is a  Nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Palau. Mr. Ehrenreich is an American diplomat who has served as the director of the Office of Japanese Affairs at the State Department since 2022. He is the nominee to serve as the United States ambassador to Palau. On March 21, 2023, his nomination was sent to the Senate. His nomination is pending before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Early in his career, Ehrendreich served in the Peace Corps in Niger from 1985 to 1987. He is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of Counselor. He served as director of Regional and Security Policy in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Prior to that, he was a senior operations officer . . .