Peace Corps writers – Peace Corps Worldwide

Paul Theroux on mass travel, British B&Bs and why flying is like ‘being at the dentist’

Mar 24 2023

Sally Howard Wed, March 22, 2023 The democratisation of world travel has its downsides. Paul Theroux, that most celebrated of postwar travel writers, is often collared by readers who have read his landmark works – The Great Railway Bazaar, which recounts Theroux’s 1972 journey by rail from Great Britain to Japan, for example; or Riding the Iron Rooster, on his clattering passage through 1980s China to Tibet – and found his accounts at odds with their own experience of, say, a resort-littered Kenyan coastline, or a modern-day Singapore awash with super-malls and 7-Elevens. “Readers will say to me, ‘Well, you know, I went there and it wasn’t like that’,” Theroux tells me from his home in Hawaii, where I’ve interrupted the venerable writer feeding his gaggle of pet geese. “What they forget,” he continues, “is that these books are historical artefacts. In the case of The Old Patagonian Express, I . . .

JUST KEEP PEDALING by Connie Ness (Uruguay)

Mar 24 2023

Just Keep Pedaling is a fast-paced book about life in a slow-paced town. Connie Ness was the first and only PCV to live in the tiny pueblo of Baltasar Brum in Uruguay, the second-smallest country in South America. Ness writes honestly about her conflicted feelings toward the rewards and disappointments of living and working in a culture with different ideas on time and personal responsibility, and about the frustration and isolation of trying to communicate in a different language. In the end she discovered, as so many Peace Corps volunteers do, that doing service work in a developing country is not a one-way street. Her time in Uruguay was a soft clash of cultures, with a little bit of each rubbing off on the other. With over 80 photos of life and work in Uruguay, reading Connie Ness’s engaging account is like listening to a friend who just returned . . .

A Cold War Tale That Ended Peacefully by George Brose (Tanzania)

Mar 15 2023

. . . or I’ll Show You My Country’s Nobel Laureate if You Show Me Yours by George Brose (Tanzania 1965-67) After my two years of Peace Corps service in Moshi, Tanzania and Loitokitok, Kenya, I was drafted into the US Army in April, 1968. We had been told in Peace Corps training that former Peace Corps Volunteers could not serve in intelligence units and likewise former intel specialists could not go into the Peace Corps for a number of years after leaving either service. It was supposedly federal law. After a year of training in German at the Army Language School in Arlington, VA, I was sent to Germany, but not yet assigned to a unit over there. When I got to Heidelberg I was told I would be sent to an intel unit on the East German border. When I heard that I politely told the . . .

Once Again: Five Great Short Stories About the Peace Corps Experience

Mar 13 2023

Five Great Short Stories About the Peace Corps Experience The Mending Fields by Bob Shacochis (Eastern Caribbean 1975–76) I WAS ASSIGNED to the Island of Saint Kit in the West Indies. Once on an inter-island plane, I sat across the aisle from one of my new colleagues, an unfriendly, overserious young woman. She was twenty-four, twenty-five . . . we were all twenty-four, twenty-five. I didn’t know her much or like her. As the plane banked over the island, she pressed against the window, staring down at the landscape. I couldn’t see much of her face, just enough really to recognize an expression of pain. Below us spread an endless manicured lawn, bright green and lush of sugarcane, the island’s main source of income. Each field planted carefully to control erosion. Until that year, Saint Kit’s precious volcanic soil had been bleeding into the sea; somehow they had resolved . . .

“Poets Take Note” — Philip Dacey (Nigeria)

Mar 06 2023

by Philip Dacey (Nigeria 1963-65) • Peace Corps Volunteers, returned or current, who are turning their experiences into poetry and looking for appropriate publishing outlets, ought to know about WordTech Communications of Cincinnati, publisher of my most recent book. Owned and operated by Kevin Walzer and Lori Jareo, WordTech specializes in poetry, utilizes print-on-demand technology, but — and this is important — is not a vanity press. The publishers are determined to make poetry profitable for all concerned without requiring subsidization by the poets themselves. One sign of their seriousness is their ability to attract contemporary American poets who have a significant following already. Their list includes Barry Spacks, Allison Joseph, Frederick Turner, Rhina K. Espaillat, and Nick Carbo. Jareo and Walzer are in fact well aware of the automatic association of p.o.d. technology and vanity publishing. They aim explicitly at severing that connection, demonstrating by their own example that . . .

Dan Douglas (Botswana) found the love of his life in the Peace Corps

Mar 05 2023

Dan Douglas first told this story on stage at the Des Moines Storytellers Project’s “Love.” The Des Moines Storytellers Project is a series of storytelling events in which community members work with Register journalists to tell true, first-person stories live on stage. Dan traveled the world in search of adventure. He also found the love of his life. In January 1969, I was sitting in the staff room at a secondary school in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana in southern Africa, waiting for the first staff meeting of the term to start. I was a brand-new Peace Corps volunteer assigned to teach English and history. I had just finished a master’s degree in history at the University of Missouri and decided to take a break from academia and see a bit of the world — hence the Peace Corps. I had spent the previous summer living with my parents . . .

The Dark Side of the Hut, 50 Years Later by John Sundman (Senegal)

Mar 03 2023

As a Peace Corps Volunteer (Senegal 1974-76) assigned to a rural development program I was posted to Fanaye Diery (‘fah-nigh jeery’), a HalPulaar village of about 500 people in the Senegal River valley, arriving there in late spring, 1974. (The HalPulaar people take their name from their language: HalPulaar means ‘Pulaar speaker’.) In Fanaye, most houses were made of adobe. Some had thatched roofs; the larger ones had roofs made of adobe held up by wooden timbers. In anticipation of my arrival, the people of Fanaye had prepared a thatched hut for my residence. It was about 10’ square, with two window openings and a wooden door. Somehow I acquired a small table and a chair. I later hired someone to make a little bookshelf for me. I slept on a mat on the floor. The only other amenity was a terra cotta jug that held about a gallon of water, which . . .

OFF THE RAILS: Weird, Wicked, Wacky & Funny Stories by Jerome McFadden (Morocco)

Feb 27 2023

What happens if no one else sees the creatures calling to you from your back yard? Or your perfect crime is not as perfect as you planned? What if a city-dweller on vacation meets a tribe of head hunters in the middle of the jungle? Or if the best player on the boys’ high school sports teams . . . is a girl? What happens if everything you thought you understood goes . . . OFF THE RAILS? In this eclectic collection of twenty-six stories, multi-award winning author, Jerome W. McFadden, takes a warped view of robbers, gang-bangers, killers, cowboys, dead people (who might not know they’re dead), and the idiosyncracies of rural life in the mythical town of East Jesus, Texas. These fast-paced tales explore the satirical edges of crime, paranoia, human foibles, and the afterlife. Some of the stories are weird, some are wicked, some are wacky, . . .

NAKED poems by Bobba Cass (Nigeria)

Feb 27 2023

From creative writing at Leicester 2/25/23 Bobba Cass is a gay man, father and grandad. He grew up in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. where he benefitted from education for all, not just the selected. He now lives in Leicester. He has a liberal arts degree from Willamette University, and advanced degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and De Montfort University. Transformative was Peace Corps and subsequent life in Nigeria, 1963-1967. In addition to travelling along the cadences of poetry, he has written a collection of creature fables for children in the series, From Gramps with Love, as part of Creatures Creatives Collective. He has completed three semi-autobiographical novels taking himself from childhood in Seattle to being evacuated from Nsukka, Nigeria at the beginning of the Biafran War. His new collection of poems is one of a series of limited editions of poems including four and twenty, fourteen and Leicester Skies. Websites are here and here. About naked by Bobba Cass naked is a collection . . .

John Givens (Korea) — IRISH WALLED TOWNS

Feb 26 2023

Native Californian John Givens teaches fiction writing in Dublin. Givens was a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Korea. He studied art and language in Kyoto for four years. Givens attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and graduated with an MFA in creative writing. He worked in Tokyo as a writer and editor for eight years. Givens also worked at K2 Design in NYC, and at Digitas and Landor Associates in San Francisco. Givens’ published novels are: Sons of the Pioneers, A Friend in the Police; and Living Alone. His short story collection, The Plum Rains, was published in Dublin by The Liffey Press. Short stories have appeared in literary magazines in the US, Europe and Asia. His non-fiction publications include Irish Walled Towns and A Guide to Dublin Bay: Mirror to the City. . Irish Walled Towns John Givens (Korea 1967-69) Liffey Press Publisher August 2008 280 pages $79.98 (Hardback)

HOUSE OF FIRE by Elizabeth Di Grazia (Tonga)

Feb 10 2023

House of Fire shows that thirty years of breaking free from a cycle of violence was not enough to prepare Elizabeth Di Grazia for the trials of starting her own family. Growing up in the 1970s, she suffered repeated sexual abuse, incest, and neglect. Although in the Catholic church, she was forced to have a hushed-up abortion at the age of fourteen. Within a year she was pregnant again, by another brother. Di Grazia gave birth to a son who was quickly taken away and adopted into a family she never knew. Elizabeth’s story traces her healing and the creation of an intentional family. She and her partner, Jody, adopted two Guatemalan babies. They learned that provision and protection were not enough, but refused to allow denial and secrets to go unexposed became critical. Elizabeth di Grazia graduated from Hamline University with an MFA in Writing in 2003. She . . .

Review | GROWING MANGOS IN THE DESERT by Katherine Baird (Mauritania)

Jan 16 2023

Growing Mangos in the Desert: A Memoir of Life in a Mauritanian Village by Katherine Baird (Mauritania 1984–86) Apprentice House Press 2022 380 pages $19.99 (paperback), $32.99 (hard cover), $6.49 (Kindle) Reviewed by Lucinda Wingard (Nigeria 1966 – 68) • Among more than two dozen young volunteers trained for agricultural service in Mauritania in 1984, Katherine Baird was one of ten remaining by her second year. She had survived the rigors of wielding her short-handled hoe in blistering heat, had adapted to eating meals from a common bowl with her neighbors, and had successfully threaded through baffling local hierarchies. Mauritania needed Peace Corps to help staff a fledgling initiative funded with foreign money: growing rice along a desolate part of the Senegal River. Baird brought no experience to help her fulfill this work, but her diligent note-taking and detailed records show she pitched into her assignment with a will. “Keyti” . . .

Novels by A. J. Valdois (Republic of Georgia)

Jan 10 2023

Stone of Athaen by A.J. Valdois (Republic of Georgia 2006-08) Independently Published 479 pages September 2021 $14.99 (Paperback), $3.99 (Kindle) “Someone is manipulating Kiara… but who?” Smuggler Kiara Antoria has been living as a drifter and an alien in a foreign country ever since the brutal conquest of her homeland, Beldane. The last thing she wants is to face her past, but abetted by a mysterious mage, a local politician is forcing her to journey back to Beldane on a trivial errand. Kiara will do anything she can to escape his control, but the errand is not as trivial as it seems. As she becomes entangled in the conspiracies of the magical city of Shinar, Kiara must confront her past in order to rediscover a destiny she thought she had lost forever… or die trying. • The Channeler’s Daughter by A. J. Valdois (Republic of Georgia 2006-08) Trelerre Books . . .

The Volunteer Who Became America’s Premier Sports Writer — Arnold Hano (Costa Rica)

Jan 03 2023

by Jerry Norris (Colombia 1963-65) • Arnold Hano served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Costa Rica, 1991-93, after achieving nation-wide recognition for his coverage of the professional baseball sports world as an editor, novelist, biographer and journalist. Both he and his wife Bonnie served as community development volunteers. Arnold earned a Bachelor’s Degree from Long Island University, graduating cum laude in 1941. Shortly after, he became a copy boy for the New York Daily News. He was tasked with providing captions for the photos he brought back from professional baseball games. This afforded the nineteen-year-old, undreamt of opportunities, to chronicle baseball history. Interrupted in these endeavors by the US entry into WW II, he participated in various campaigns in the Aleutian Islands. After his discharge, he returned to New York and a career in book publishing, first as managing editor with Bantam, then as Editor-Chief with Lion Books. In . . .

Review — THE VEGETABLE GROWS AND THE LION ROARS by Gary R. Lindberg (Ivory Coast)

Dec 18 2022

The Vegetable Grows and the Lion Roars: My Peace Corps Service by Gary R. Lindberg (Ivory Coast 1966-68) Self-Published 214 pages March 2022 $ 7.49 (Kindle); $15.67 (Paperback) Reviewed by D.W. Jefferson (El Salvador (1974-76) & Costa Rica (1976-77) • Peace Corps memoirs of 1960s-era volunteers are like precious gems that become more and more valuable as more of those folks pass on. Gary Lindberg wrote this memoir about his Peace Corps service in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) from 1965-68. Lindberg taught primary school students and teachers various gardening techniques as part of a school gardens program. The memoir includes how he decided to apply for Peace Corps, how he trained, his project, his daily activities, and the friends he made while he was there. He also shares highlights from the travels he took when on vacation breaks, such as his experience on a safari and his visit . . .