Archive - April 3, 2024

What I know is that RPCVs return home and tell their Peace Corps tales to family and friends and then move onto grad schools, marriage, children and careers. We want RPCVs to do just that. And we want our Peace Corps history to be told and retold. It is what we all did as Americans to help developing nations. We made friends, learned a new language and culture, and for a short period of time lived a life that was special to us and the people we came to help. Marian Beil and I want our website to be a place where RPCVs can tell their stories as they remember what they did to help people of another culture enhanced their lives. Peace Corps service is our contribution to the developing world. It was two years away from the U.S. where we met strangers with a smile and a hand . . .

  An intimate and revelatory account of two generations of students in China’s heartland, by an author who has observed the country’s tumultuous changes over the past quarter century More than two decades after teaching English during the early part of China’s economic boom, Peter Hessler, an experience chronicler in his book River Town, returned to Sichuan Province to instruct students from the next generation. At the same time, Hessler and his wife enrolled their twin daughters in a local state-run elementary school, where they were the only Westerners. Over the years, Hessler had kept in close contact with many of the people he had taught in the 1990s, and by reconnecting with these individuals —members of China’s “Reform generation,” who were now in their forties — were teaching current undergrads,  and Hessler gained from them a unique perspective on China’s incredible transformation. In 1996, when Hessler arrived in China, . . .