August 24, 2024 – Peace Corps Worldwide

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 . . .

Archive - August 24, 2024