Author - Marian Haley Beil

1
Water
2
Innocence Melts Obstinacy
3
1964 Peace Corps Book Locker
4
Better Remember This
5
The Ballroom
6
Broken English — a song
7
Development is Down This Road
8
Our Man in Romania

Water

The following was the 1998 recipient of the Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award presented by Peace Corps Writers  for the best short description of life in the Peace Corps. • Water by Rachel Schneller (Mali 1996–98) WHEN A WOMAN CARRIES WATER on her head, you see her neck bend outward behind her like a crossbow. Ten liters of water weighs twenty-two pounds, a fifth of a woman’s body weight, and I’ve seen women carry at least twenty liters in aluminum pots large enough to hold a television set. To get the water from the cement floor surrounding the outdoor hand pump to the top of your head, you need help from the other women. You and another woman grab the pot’s edges and lift it straight up between you. When you get it to head height, you duck underneath the pot and place it on the wad of rolled . . .

Read More

Innocence Melts Obstinacy

The 1997 recipient of the Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award presented by PEACE CORPS WRITERS for the best short description of life in the Peace Corps. • Innocence Melts Obstinacy by Leita Kaldi (Senegal 1993–96) IN THE MARKETPLACE OF DAKAR, Senegal, amid the welter of vegetables, chickens, dried fish and shouting women, a small boy leans against a crumbling wall staring into space. His bare toes knead the sand; the rags he wears flop around his skinny frame. A gang of older boys push and shove their way past him, turning to jeer. The boy leaps into a ninja position, hands like scissors, knees bent on rigid legs. He must have studied the nearby movie poster where a ninja film had been showing. His eyes are fierce and belong to the world of warriors. The older boys laugh and walk on as the child glares after them balefully. His . . .

Read More

1964 Peace Corps Book Locker

In mid-May John wrote about the “Fabulous Peace Corps Locker” — Part I, Part II and Part III. For a time Jack Prebis (Ethiopia 1962–64) was in charge of selecting the books for the Book Locker and he shared with us the list of books provided to new PCVs in 1964. • LITERATURE Fiction American Classics Democracy – Henry Adams The Good Earth – Pearl Buck Red Badge of Courage & Four Stories – Stephen Crane Pulitzer Prize Reader – Leo Hamalian & Edmond L Volpe Outcasts of Poker Flat & Other Tales – Bret Harte The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne The Four Million & Other Stories – O. Henry The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway Turn of the Screw & Daisy Miller – Henry James Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis Call of the Wild & White Fang – Jack London Moby Dick – Herman Melville The Fall of . . .

Read More

Better Remember This

The 1995 recipient of the Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award presented by PEACE CORPS WRITERS for the best short description of life in the Peace Corps. • Better Remember This by Meg Sullivan (Kenya 1992–94) YOU’D BETTER REMEMBER THIS. Because people will ask you. Whether you want them to or not, they’ll ask you how Africa was. And though you won’t know where to start, you’re going to have to have something to tell them. A shrug of the shoulders and “Good” won’t be enough. So you’d better remember this. Open the parts of your mind you need, and work them over until you’ve got them just right. Then put what you know in a place the will be easy for you to get to. Deep, but not too deep. Just enough so that even though no one else can see it, you know it’s there, and you can . . .

Read More

The Ballroom

The 1994 recipient of the Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award presented by PEACE CORPS WRITERS for the best short description of life in the Peace Corps. • The Ballroom by Christopher Conlon (Botswana 1988-90) Southern Africa, Kalahari Desert She is the perfect image of a rag doll I saw when I was a child, in a trash can, dirty, ripped abandoned: here in the Kalahari is that same doll, maybe five, eyes huge, legs white with desert dust. Ke Kopa madi, sir, ke kopa madi. Money: I shake my head no, no madi: try to move on. But she stares at me, suddenly transfixed. No longer begging. Her eyes wider than before. My sunglasses: I crouch down, she approaches me, nose to nose, tattered, filthy, she stares at me, at herself. Then her hand moves to her chin and she says Oh, in a tiny, surprised voice. She rubs . . .

Read More

Broken English — a song

Since 1992 Peace Corps Writers has annually recognized the outstanding writing of Peace Corps Volunteers both returned and still in service. One of the awards is the Peace Corps Experience Award given to the writer of a short piece that best captures the experience of being a Peace Corps Volunteer. We are sharing the past Peace Corps Experience Award winners with our Peace Corps Worldwide readers. In 1993 the winner was a song by Greg Horn. Broken English — a song by Greg Horn (Papua New Guinea 1991-92) Now your friends have all gone and the parlor is empty ‘cept for me in this chair with a book full of words and your thoughts and your deeds, they all come back to claim you ’cause no one’s understood anything they just heard. So you try to explain in your broken English ’bout the rivers of pain that keep crossing your . . .

Read More

Development is Down This Road

Since 1992 Peace Corps Writers has annually recognized the outstanding writing of Peace Corps Volunteers both returned and still in service. One of the awards is the Peace Corps Experience Award given to the writer of a short piece that best captures the experience of being a Peace Corps Volunteer. We will be sharing the past Peace Corps Experience Award winners with our Peace Corps Worldwide readers over the next few weeks and begin with the very first from 1992 by Abigail Calkins Aguirre. • • • Development Is Down This Road by Abigail Calkins Aguirre (Cameroon 1987–90) FEW RECOGNIZE ME without my trademark Suzuki. Now I have this red Yamaha DT they gave me to replace it. I’m still white, though, or so they keep insisting as I pass by the shouting voices trying to get me to stop to do a favor, chat, or taste the latest in . . .

Read More

Our Man in Romania

For almost two years Andy Trincia was ‘our man in Romania’ writing charming “Letters From . . .” for the Peace Corps Writers web site from 2002–04. He finished his tour, married his lovely HCN, and came back to the US, only to return again and again to his wife’s family’s village in the heart of Transylvania. Here is a lovely piece of prose that proves you can go home again to your Peace Corps site . . . Going Home to Mama Ana’s Păuca Several peasants stopped working the fields and waved as we pulled into Păuca, a colorful Romanian village in the heart of Transylvania.  Mama Ana’s “kids” were back from America, they noticed, eager to spread word across the little village faster than wild fire. As picturesque as any of the scores of villages I’ve seen across the region, Păuca is a typical Romanian hamlet, inhabited by . . .

Read More

Copyright © 2022. Peace Corps Worldwide.