July 12, 2023 – Peace Corps Worldwide

2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Book of Non-Fiction

Jul 12 2023

Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet by Michael Meyer (China 1995-97) The incredible story of Benjamin Franklin’s parting gift to the working-class people of Boston and Philadelphia — a deathbed wager that captures the Founder’s American Dream and his lessons for our current, conflicted age. Benjamin Franklin was not a gambling man. But at the end of his illustrious life, the Founder allowed himself a final wager on the survival of the United States: a gift of two thousand pounds to Boston and Philadelphia, to be lent out to tradesmen over the next two centuries to jump-start their careers. Each loan would be repaid with interest over ten years. If all went according to Franklin’s inventive scheme, the accrued final payout in 1991 would be a windfall. In Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet, Michael Meyer traces the evolution of these twin funds as they age alongside America itself, bankrolling woodworkers and . . .

Film of RPCVs returning to Sierra Leone

Jul 12 2023

The Peace Corps Returns A Documentary film by Steve Kovacs and RoseAnn Rotandaro. In the summer of 2011 twenty Peace Corps Volunteers returned to Sierra Leone, West Africa. For most of them, it was the first time returning to the country since they had served in the 1960’s and 1970’s. They came to reconnect with their friends in Sierra Leone. It was an auspicious time for their trip. The nation was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary of independence from Great Britain. The year also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Peace Corp’s arrival in Sierra Leone. From 1961, and for a 30-year period, 3,500 the U.S. Peace Corps Volunteers served in Sierra Leone. Then, in 1991, a civil war broke out and ravaged this small nation for over eleven years. It claimed 50,000 lives and victimized more than 20,000 surviving citizens victims by amputating limbs and other acts . . .

Archive - July 12, 2023