Marian Haley Beil – Peace Corps Worldwide

Review | THE COUSCOS CHRONICLES by Azzedine Downes (Morocco)

Dec 05 2023

The Couscous Chronicles Stories of Food, Love, and Donkeys from a Life Between Cultures by Azzedine T. Downes (Morocco 1982-85) Reviewed by Julie R. Dargis (Morocco 1984-87) An old friend of Azzedine and his family, and a close friend of mine, devoured the Couscous Chronicles over a weekend, munching on each story as if she were a guest at a coveted Friday couscous lunch invite. Every Peace Corps/Morocco volunteer can recount various faux pas that ensue during such a visit, but soon enough all volunteers learn the lessons that have been maktub (written) over centuries: only eat from the triangle in front of you, wait for the host to offer you the prime real estate from the center of the mound, say the word sha’bet (truly, I’m full) only when you are ready to burst, and NEVER EVER eat with your left hand! When I began reading my . . .

Review | ST. PETERSBURG BAY BLUES by Douglas Buchacek (Russia)

Nov 26 2023

St. Petersburg Bay Blues Douglas Buchacek (Russia 2001-03) Independently published 201 pages April 2021 $15.00 (paperback) review by Steve Kaffen (Russia 1994-96) St. Petersburg Bay Blues is a lively and engaging account of the author’s experiences as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Russia, and a member of Russia 9, the last Western Russia (Moscow-based) group before the program closed. Of note is the author’s impressive recall, without notes, of people, places, and events. He tells us, “Everywhere I went I carried a composition book, which I titled St. Petersburg Bay Blues. In it I wrote songs, poems, and the odd note or observation.” Unfortunately, the notebook was stolen. “I scrambled to write what I could remember. That’s what I have here, my attempt to document an experience that seems simultaneously alien and essential to my life.” Expectations are dangerous for a book reviewer, and I was looking forward to a . . .

Review | A JOURNEY FOR PEACE: A JOURNAL OF PEACE by Donald Yates (The Philippines)

Nov 12 2023

A Journey For Peace: A Journal of Peace Donald Yates (The Philippines 1962–64) Austin Macauley Publishers 122 pages March 2023 $10.95 (paperback) Review by Douglas Garatina (Ghana 1971-1973) • “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” It didn’t take long for Don Yates to answer this challenge made by President Kennedy. He made the decision to join the recently formed Peace Corps. In 1962 Don transitioned from a recent college graduate living in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, to an elementary school teacher on the very remote Philippine Island of Jolo in the middle of the Sulu Sea. To make things even more interesting, the people on Jolo were Muslims even though 95% of Filipinos were Catholic, so Don’s Peace Corps training did not prepare him for the Muslim traditions and culture he was about to enter. His training as . . .

“Carlos and the Parrot” by Becky Wandell (Ecuador)

Nov 12 2023

A Writer Writes Throughout my service, I lived in the rural outskirts of a bustling city, and sometimes I walked to town. It was a 45-minute stroll, all downhill, which gave me a chance to wave to the shop owners setting out their brooms, their fresh-baked rolls and their publicity boards announcing a new item. If I timed it right, I passed by Luis. His black bowler hat made him look taller than he was as he shuffled up the sidewalk with his large black cow in tow. I’d give him a nod and smile, his coffee-brown wrinkled face always emitting enough sunshine to fill my day. While hopping over the heaved slabs of sidewalk and steering around the sections of mud and litter in the path, I took in the distant vistas, the passing cars and the groans of buses grinding up the hill. After several months of living . . .

New books by Peace Corps writers | September — October 2023

Nov 08 2023

To purchase any of these books from Amazon.com — CLICK on the book cover, the bold book title, or the publishing format you would like — and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance from your purchase that will help support the site and the annual Peace Corps Writers awards. We include a brief description for each of the books listed here in hopes of encouraging readers to order a book and/or to VOLUNTEER TO REVIEW IT. See a book you’d like to review for Peace Corps Worldwide? Send a note to Marian at marian@haleybeil.com, and she will send you a free copy along with a few instructions. P.S. In addition to the books listed below, I have on my shelf a number of other books whose authors would love for you to review. Go to Books Available for Review to see what is on that shelf. Please, please join in our Third . . .

“The Volunteer Who Published on Contemporary Life in America” — Laurence Leamer (Nepal)

Nov 04 2023

Jeremiah Norris (Colombia 1963-65) (The materials for this Profile were drawn heavily from Wikipedia) • In 1964, after graduating with a B. A. in History from Antioch College, Laurence spent a year in France at the University de Besancon and worked in a factory. He then joined the Peace Corps and was stationed in the mountains of Nepal. After returning home, he studied at the University of Oregon and Columbia University’s School of Journalism. When he graduated from Columbia second in his class in 1969, he was named a Pulitzer International Fellow. Laurence then worked as an associated editor at Newsweek before turning to writing magazine articles for a range of other publications, including Harper’s The New York Times Magazine, and Playboy. During this period, he also worked in a West Virginia coal mine while researching an article. During the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, he was the only journalist . . .

The Volunteer who wrote songs for Korean children — Mary Kim Joh (Liberia)

Oct 27 2023

Mary Kim Joh, also known as Che Sik Chu, was a Korean-American music composer and medical research specialist. She is best known for writing “School Bell” in 1945. This children’s song is taught to pre-school students in South Korea. It is often referred to as a “Korean National Anthem”. Joh was born in Seoul in 1904. She was the daughter of Kim Ik-seung, founder of Korea’s first joint stock companies, and a niece of Kim Kyu-sik. She graduated from Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, South Korea, and in 1930, she was awarded a Master’s degree in music at the University of Michigan. Later, while teaching in the music department at Ewha, she was asked by the South Korean government to compose children’s songs after the end of Japanese rule over her country in 1945. At the end of WW II, the Koreans had no Korean-language school materials. Her 1950 . . .

Review | IN THE AMBER CHAMBER by Carrie Messenger (Moldova)

Oct 08 2023

In an Amber Chamber, Stories Carrie Messenger (Moldova 1994–96) Brighthorse Books 260 pages August, 2018 $16.95 (paperback) Reviewed by Eugénie de Rosier (Philippines 2006-08) Carrie Messenger’s short stories paint dark and disturbing settings for people who lived in Eastern Europe under strangling communism. Romania and Moldova are noted. The former’s Ceaușescu brutalized his country. Famine was a scourge in the 1940s and in the 1980s, deprivation was widespread; and state enforced-pregnancy led to too many children that couldn’t be supported by their parents. The government opened orphanages which were run by people who seemed unaware of children’s needs. Themes of despair, loss, and vulnerability run through these 18 stories, but there are also uplifting moments . . . when a child’s laugh can be heard, a dog’s bark echoes in frolic, the surprise of a holiday in a new free country. About the stories In Edgewater, three Romanian . . .

“Monadnock”

Oct 07 2023

A story by Giles Ryan (Korea) Here in New England, about forty of us, old friends, have come together again to mark the fifty years since we all first gathered for Peace Corps language training, a shared experience followed by another, our time in Korea as school teachers, after which we were never the same. Tolstoy long ago observed that there are only two kinds of stories — someone goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. All of us have done both. We all went on a journey long ago and far away, and then we spread out across Korea, each one of us a stranger come to town. The towns were all different and we each had our own experience, and we were all marked by it for the rest of our lives. We are so pleased to reconnect like this, making eye contact . . .

The Volunteer who became an acclaimed novelist of small-town life — Kent Haruf (Turkey)

Sep 24 2023

by Jeremiah Norris (Colombia 1963-65) Kent Haruf served as a Peace Corps Volunteer English teacher in Turkey from 1965 to 67, after graduating from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1966. Before becoming a writer, Kent worked in a variety of places, including a chicken farm in Colorado, a construction site in Wyoming, a rehabilitation hospital in Denver, a hospital in Phoenix, a Presidential library in Iowa, an alternative high school teacher in Wisconsin, and various colleges in Nebraska and Illinois. Undoubtedly, these hardcore working experiences served as inspirational foundations to his later life as a novelist focused on the broad subject of small town America. All of Kent’s subsequent novels take place in the fictional town of Holt in eastern Colorado. Holt is based on Yuma, Colorado, one of Kent’s residence in the early 1980s. His first novel, published in 1984, The Tie That Binds, received a Whiting Award and a . . .

“Staying” by Giles Ryan (Korea)

Sep 14 2023

In the winter of 1970 I went to Korea, a country still recovering from a terrible war. The Peace Corps sent me there to teach English at a middle school in the central mountains, near the DMZ (demilitarized zone), where a fragile armistice was not always honored. The winter was colder than what I had known, learning the language was difficult, and in those early months I was often ill. But the true challenge was witnessing a kind of cruelty that most Americans today would call child abuse. For my part, I had been raised in an Irish Catholic environment, so I was no stranger to corporal punishment; indeed, I had my own vivid experience, both at home and in school. But nothing prepared me for what I saw at my school in Chunchon, and I reached a moment when I doubted I could stay. The students were . . .

The Volunteer Who Discovered the First Area of Human Occupation in Costa Rica

Sep 09 2023

by Jeremiah Norris (Colombia 1963-65) Michael Snarskis attended the University of Iowa, graduating in 1964, then Yale University majoring in Spanish in 1967. After one year of law school, he joined the Peace Corps as a Volunteer in Costa Rica, 1967-69. There his interest in archeology was awakened and on his return to the U. S. he studied archelogy at Colombia University. After three years of field work in Costa Rica, he received a Ph. D. in 1978 with a dissertation on the Archaeology of the Central American Watershed of Costa Rica. When he received his doctoral, there was almost no scientific archeology in Costa Rica. Michael founded the archeology department at the Museo National de Costa Rica in San Jose, Costa Rica, and directed it for ten years. As an archeologist and conservationist, Michael worked for the Tayutic Foundation which seeks to preserve and explore the Guayabo . . .

New books by Peace Corps writers | July–August 2023

Sep 04 2023

Talking with Marnie Mueller (Ecuador) about her new book THE SHOWGIRL AND THE WRITER

Aug 27 2023

PCW: The Showgirl And The Writer is an unusual book about an unusual friendship. What initially drew you to your subject? Marnie: For fifteen years I was friends with Mary Mon Toy, a Japanese American showgirl who had been incarcerated in an America concentration camp during World War II. Our bond was the fact that I, though Caucasian, was born in the Tule Lake Japanese American High Security Camp in northern California, where my parents, young leftists, had gone to work . . . much as I joined the Peace Corps decades later, As Mary aged, I became her Power of Attorney and, when she died, the Executor of her estate, and it was only upon her death that I learned that during her entire theater career, after being released from camp, she had passed as Chinese American. She had often regaled me with the story of her Chinese father, though she did . . .

“Vamos, Let’s Win a Borrego!”

Aug 22 2023

by Becky Wandell (Ecuador 2018 –20) One afternoon, I overheard Margarita, my host-mom, talking on the phone. I usually didn’t understand much of what she said — or much of what anybody said during my first weeks living in Ecuador — but on this day, I clearly heard “Becky is a good baker, she can make the cakes.” Ummm… Margarita? What am I going to do? After finishing her conversation, she pulled me over to the table and patiently explained that her husband Jose’s Dad, Victor, was having a birthday this weekend and they needed some cakes for the celebration. I had been around long enough to know that usually the family just goes to Tio Sam’s bakery for saccharine sweet gelatinous cakes, so if they were asking me to bake them, this was a big deal! And besides, I would do anything for Victor who had welcomed me to . . .

Author - Marian Haley Beil