August 2024 – Peace Corps Worldwide

A compelling novel | MISSING PARTS by Diana B. Roberts (Tunisia)

Aug 30 2024

Novel — Missing Parts by Diana B. Roberts (Tunisia 1966-68) Austin Macauley Publishers July 2024 219 pages $4.50 (Kindle); $15.95 (Paperback) Acclaimed fundraiser and seasoned storyteller Diana B. Roberts, affectionately known as Dina, invites readers on a deeply moving journey through the complexities of friendship, resilience, and life’s unpredictable twists in her latest novel, Missing Parts. This powerful standalone fiction weaves the tale of Lacey Pierce and Mimi Faraday, whose lives take divergent paths only to intersect again under the most unexpected of circumstances. Set against the backdrop of the transformative 1960s and 70s in a charming New England town, Missing Parts explores the enduring power of friendship and the profound impact of life’s choices. Lacey and Mimi, once inseparable during their youth, find themselves worlds apart — Lacey is serving in the Peace Corps in Africa, and Mimi is dedicating her life to community service in Newfoundland. . . .

Gary Bergthold (Ethiopia) died on July 20, 2024

Aug 29 2024

Obituary — Gary Bergthold was born in 1938 in Bakersfield and was proud of it. Although his life and work took him all over the world, he never forgot his roots and the humor and food brought to America by generations of his immigrant family. The oldest son of Glenn and Viola Bergthold, Gary spent his early years in Bakersfield, before leaving to attend UCLA where he received a BA and MA in Psychology. His brothers always marveled at his ability to absorb books through osmosis as they lay on his chest while he napped. At UCLA, he met his wife Linda Carlson, by sitting next to the pretty blonde girl in music class and asking if she could tutor him. They married in 1961 and set off on a lifetime of adventure around the world. In 1962 they joined the Peace Corps, and spent two years teaching secondary school . . .

RPCV Sculptor | Joel Shapiro (India)

Aug 29 2024

How Joel Shapiro ‘Retains the Intimacy’ of His Staggeringly Large Sculptures Ahead of a solo exhibition at New York’s Pace Gallery, we step inside the studio of the seasoned sculptor. by Tim Brinkhof — August 27, 2024 Share This Article Ever since he participated in the 1969 “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials” exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, Joel Shapiro has been a fixture in the world of modern American sculpture. The 82-year-old artist traces the genesis of his career to his experience serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in India 1964 to 1966. There, in between teaching villagers to dig latrines and build smokeless ovens, he became enamored with Indian sculpture, which introduced him to the medium’s psychological dimension. “India,” he later said, “gave me a sense of… the possibility of being an artist.” Born in Queens, New York, in 1941, Shapiro studied at New York University, earning . . .

THE LOST TREES OF WILLOW AVENUE by Mike Tidwell (Zaire)

Aug 28 2024

new book — The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street by Mike Tidwell (Zaire 1985-87) St. Martin’s Press March 2025 288 pages $14.99 (Kindle); $29.00 (Hardcover) — Pre-order Price Guarantee A riveting and elegant story of climate change on one city street, full of surprises and true stories of human struggle and dying local trees – all against the national backdrop of 2023’s record heat domes and raging wildfires and hurricanes. In 2023, author and activist Mike Tidwell decided to keep a record for a full year of the growing impacts of climate change on his one urban block right on the border with Washington, DC. A love letter to the magnificent oaks and other trees dying from record heat waves and bizarre rain, Tidwell’s story depicts the neighborhood’s battle to save the trees and combat climate change: The . . .

AFRICA OPENED MY HEART by Julie Wang (Benin)

Aug 27 2024

a new book— Africa Opened My Heart Julia Dreyer Wang (Benin 2012-14) Native Book Publishing August 2024 341 pages $19.99 (paperback), $3o.00 (Hardcover), $4.99 (Kindle) Africa Opened My Heart is a moving testament to having the courage to set out on new adventures later in life. After her husband died in 2009, Julie Wang, then 62, was encouraged to do so by reading about Jimmy Carter’s mother, Lillian, another older Peace Corps Volunteer. Julie was assigned to Benin, West Africa, a country she had barely heard of, but where she soon found herself falling in love with the Beninese people, who showed her how to survive and thrive in this sometimes-challenging country. As someone who had founded two businesses in the U.S., teaching entrepreneurial skills to Beninese young and old proved a pleasure. She thought she was doing well until confronted by a group of seamstresses who could . . .

Peace Corps Volunteers sworn in to serve in Kyrgyzstan

Aug 27 2024

New Volunteers — AKIPRESS.COM – Twenty-one newly sworn-in Peace Corps Volunteers will co-teach English with local teachers in secondary schools across Chui, Naryn, Issyk-Kul, Talas, Osh, and Jalal-Abad oblasts over the next two years. This is the 30th group of Volunteers to serve in the Kyrgyz Republic since 1993. Guests at the ceremony included U.S. Ambassador to the Kyrgyz Republic Lesslie Viguerie, Peace Corps Country Director Hoyt Brian Yee, former Volunteers, as well as local teachers and directors of schools where the Volunteers will serve as co-teachers. “For more than 30 years, Volunteers and their communities have collaborated to increase student and teacher capacity in English and have built relationships that continue long beyond the two years of a Volunteer’s service. These relationships promote friendship and mutual understanding between the people of the Kyrgyz Republic and the United States,” said Ambassador Viguerie. By working alongside local English teachers, Volunteers . . .

OTHER RIVERS by Peter Hessler (China)

Aug 26 2024

Review — Other Rivers – spotlight on Generation Xi An American’s view of life in China during the tumultuous Covid years Reviewed by Amy Hawkins The Guardian 21 Aug 2024 When Peter Hessler (China 1996-98), the celebrated chronicler of Chinese society, arrived at Sichuan University in the autumn of 2019, he was expecting to take a break from writing. Hessler made his name as a journalist documenting the lives of everyday people during China’s boom years in the early 2000s. But he first got to know the country as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Sichuan in the mid-1990s – an experience that formed the basis of his first book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, a bestseller that introduced a generation of readers to a rapidly changing China. Nearly a quarter of a century on, he had planned to focus his energies on teaching. But events were about . . .

2024 Peace Corps Writers’ Marian Haley Beil Award for Best Book Review to Ben East (Malawi) for IF YOU TURN TO LOOK BACK by Tom Hazuka (Chile)

Aug 25 2024

2024 Peace Corps Writers’ Best Book Review Award is named in honor of Marian Haley Beil (Ethiopia 1962-64), co-founder and publisher since 1989 of the Peace Corps Writers newsletter, website, and book imprint. Following her tour of service, Marian worked for 4 years in the Office of Reports and Special Studies at Peace Corps Headquarters. She founded the Ethiopia & Eritrea RPCV group in 1991, and later co-founded Rochester RPCVs. If You Turn to Look Back: A Memoir and Meditation by Tom Hazuka (Chile 1978-80) Woodhall Press 388 pages September 2023 $19.95 (Paperback); $9.99 (Kindle) If You Turn to Look Back combines memoir with political, social, and economic investiif gations of what it means to be an American and a citizen of the world. American influence is ubiquitous in South America, and If You Turn to Look Back explores these relationships in a personal context. For Tom Hazuka was once part . . .

CONFESSIONAL POEMS AND VIGNETTES by Thomas Syre (Ethiopia)

Aug 24 2024

New book — Confessional Poems and Vignettes: Revisited by Thomas Syre, Sr. (Ethiopia 1972-74) Independently Published 94 pages January 2024 $15.00 (Paperback) Revisited is a collection of poems and vignettes revised and added to a collection of fiction first published in 2020 during the pandemic. Syre’s latest collection, written in the Fall of 2023, reflects on his life as a boy, a son, a man, a husband, and a father. He writes about his time as an active-duty peacetime Marine overseas. He also writes about his years in Ethiopia first with the Peace Corps as a young Volunteer and then his productive retirement years as a university professor of public health. The collection speaks to his personal, familial, and professional, regrets, failures, brokenness, and successes in life.

Review | FROM MOUNTAINS TO MEDICINE by Erica M. Elliott, MD (Ecuador)

Aug 24 2024

Review — From Mountains to Medicine: Scaling the Heights in Search of My Calling Erica M. Elliott, M.D. (Ecuador 1974–76) Lammastide Publishing January 2024 383 pages $19.95 (paperback), $16.99 (Kindle), 1 credit (audiobook– author narrator Reviewed by Sue Hoyt Aiken (Ethiopia 1962-64) . . . This is a remarkable memoir with vivid descriptions that confirmed how happy I , as the reader, was to be safely at home and not dangling from a rope at a very high altitude! It is fair to say her story takes us to the depths of despair, confusion, darkness and up to the highest peaks, exhilaration, pure joy and onward to many life accomplishments. As a Peace Corps Volunteer and Returned Peace Corps Volunteer she takes the life lessons learned while in these roles into a variety of situations. But before the Peace Corps there was a teaching experience with the Navaho in New Mexico, complicated . . .

RPCV REV. Dr. Otis Turner Dies at age 83 (Philippines)

Aug 24 2024

Obituary — LOUISVILLE — The Rev. Dr. Otis Turner, a Presbyterian pastor and scholar who was a longtime advocate for racial and social justice, died Aug. 2 in Jacksonville, Florida. His funeral service is set for noon Eastern Time on Monday at Sardis Missionary Baptist Church in Dawson, Georgia. According to his obituary, Turner was the first Black person to enroll at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, in 1965. Turner was born in Dawson, Georgia, on Sept. 12, 1940, to Plumpton and Edna Turner. He and siblings were raised on the family farm. He grew up and married Gloria Silver, and to that union a son was born. In 2001, he married Patsy Ford and gained two bonus sons. His early education was in a one-room, two-teacher school nestled in woods adjacent to a railroad track and surrounded by large farm plantations. The daily four-mile walk to and from . . .

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY INTERVENTIONS by Thomas Syre Sr. (Ethiopia)

Aug 23 2024

Positive Psychology Interventions for Increasing Well-Being and Happines: A Guided Self-Help by James L. Krag M.D. & Thomas Syre Sr. (Ethiopia 1972-74) February, 2024 208 pages $9.00 (Kindle); $14.00 (Paperback) Positive Psychology Interventions for Well-Being and Happiness focuses on what is strong with us rather than what is wrong with us. This self-help book teaches proven Positive Psychology Interventions that will increase well-being and fulfillment in your life. Historically, psychology and psychiatry have focused on disease and there has been too little study of what makes life worth living and on promoting simple, effective, preventive approaches to well-being. Research has shown that: Well-being and happiness can be defined. Well-being and happiness can be measured. Well-being and happiness can be learned. If you, or someone you care about, would like to learn proven ways to increase well-being and happiness, then this book is for you.

Empowering women and children from Nepal to the Amazon | Lisa Labita Woodson (Nepal)

Aug 22 2024

RPCVs in the news — Lisa Labita Woodson, MPH, PhD Fulbright-Fogarty Fellow: 2022-2023 U.S. institution: University of Arizona Foreign institution: Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Lima, Peru Research topic: The effects of COVID-19 on adolescent pregnancy and educational attainment in the Amazon Basin Current affiliation: Editor-In-Chief, Beyond Global Health; Principal investigator in sexual and reproductive health research, Mamas del Río PCV Nepal (2004 evacuated due to civil unrest) Dr. Lisa Labita Woodson’s path to global health research began somewhat by accident. Initially she aspired to be a poet or an ecologist. Her journey took a dramatic turn after she joined the Peace Corps (Nepal 2004). Assigned as a science teacher to Nepal, she witnessed a tragic joint suicide of one of her students and their partner, which was due to an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. This experience compelled Woodson to seek mental health consultations and reproductive health education for her students. She . . .

2024 Peace Corps Writers’ Poetry Award Winner

Aug 22 2024

I Am a Fact Not a Fiction: Selected Poems Edward Mycue (Ghana 1961-63) San Francisco poet Edward Mycue was born in Niagara Falls, New York, and raised in Texas. He was a Lowell Fellow at Boston University Graduate School of Public Relations and Communications, a WGBH-TV Boston intern, a Macdowell Colony Fellow, a Peace Corps teacher in Ghana, editor at the Norton Coker Press, and he taught American Literature at the International Peoples College in Elsinore, Denmark. He has had 18 books or chapbooks published. His poems appear in multiple anthologies and journals. I Am a Fact Not a Fiction is a selection of poems culled from three areas of interest: War and Peace, Life / Time Memory, and History. . . . “The precision of Ed Mycue’s dreamscape is laser-sharp and as warm as chocolate. Images rush pell-mell across the page, jumbling and tossing each other aside as one . . .

Peace Corps Director welcomed in Tonga

Aug 21 2024

Wednesday, August 21, 2024 Nuku’alofa, Tonga By Katalina Siasau On a first visit to Tonga and the Pacific, US Peace Corps Director Carol Spahn, from Washington DC, was welcomed by the Peace Corps Tonga staff with a traditional Kava ceremony on Tuesday, at the Peace Corps Office in Nuku’alofa. During her visit this week, Director Spahn will administer the oath of services to 19 new Peace Corps volunteers on Friday. The Peace Corps has been active in the Pacific since the early 1960s, and serving in Tonga for 57 years. There are about 100 Peace Corps volunteers in the Pacific and approximately 30 in Tonga. In an interview before her welcome kava ceremony, Director Spahn said the impact of Covid 19 had been a challenge for Peace Corps operations and services in the region. “The global pandemic impacted every country around the world. It closed off borders and it isolated people from each other. and . . .

Archive - August 2024