Peace Corps writers

  Tasha Prados is a RPCV, Peru (2011-2013).  She write from her experience in International Development and fighting for racial equality in the United States. The National Peace Corps Association held a conversation about Equity in International Development.  To see the video of that conversation, here is the link:https://www.peacecorpsconnect.org/cpages/home Here is the link to her opinion published by the NPCA   The following is the text of the Tasha Prados article. • We are the problem By Tasha Prados “A second-generation American, I grew up knowing how privileged I was simply by the sheer luck of having been born in the United States. Being multicultural and Latinx, I spent most of my formative years between two worlds, never quite fitting in either, eager to connect more deeply with my Latin American roots. I went to El Salvador with a nonprofit organization for the first time when I was 16 years old . . .

  My brother-in-law suffered a bad stroke about a decade ago and was stricken with aphasia. In the last couple of years before his death in January 2019, he was in therapy and he made this mask. I thought it was a profound struggle of a “soul” shouting out to a world that had “forgotten him.” Jim’s soul must have been desperately wanting to speak to former friends or even family, and the mask reveals to me a plea for a touch of love, or a simple smile from that outer world that he will never see again. I hope the poem speaks for itself. Reading Masks by Tony Zurlo (Nigeria 1964-66   I. We think we read faces and focus on a people’s eyes, “the windows to the soul.” But each  mask speaks a different language, and each mask looks at us with a different set of eyes. Sometimes faces and . . .

  Drew Brees and the Case Against Staying in Your Lane by Richard Wiley (Korea 1967-69) Tacoma News, Jun 14, 2020 • Recently the term “stay in your lane” has been used in identity politics and identity literature to mean something like, “keep to your own culture, don’t usurp my territory.”  Since I have spent 40 years writing about white Americans living in other cultures, learning about other people and other languages, and therefore most emphatically not staying in my lane, I felt the criticism acutely. I grew up as a privileged white kid in Tacoma. I didn’t know jack about anything until I got out of college and joined the Peace Corps. I didn’t know African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, nor native Americans, either, except for a group of Puyallup Indians who performed native dances at the Browns Point Salmon bake every other July. I grew believing that my world was the only world, . . .

  Approximately 32 years ago, Marian Haley Beil and I (both Ethiopia 1962-64) began to identify Peace Corps Writers. It was our Third Goal Project to spread the story of the Peace Corps in developing countries by promoting the writings of RPCVs here at home. We did this on our own as two RPCVs, not connected to the Peace Corps agency or the NPCA. We began in April 1989 with a newsletter Peace Corps Writers & Readers and now on a website: www.peacecorpsworldwide.org. We announce new books, have them reviewed, interview authors, and publish writings by RPCVs online. In 2010 we started the imprint Peace Corps Writers and currently have published 92 books by Peace Corps writers. And we have a list of RPCV Peace Corps books with the Library of Congress. Marian Beil is the creative publishing genius behind these projects. Annually we also give cash awards in different . . .

  Journey with the author to two of the world’s most intriguing countries, presented in over 150 original photos with detailed explanations. Explore the far corners and vast interior of India, visit its historic sites and impressive landscapes, meet its residents and observe their lifestyles, and have interesting experiences along the way. Then, explore the dramatically scenic Kingdom of Bhutan, where the measure that matters most to its people is the Gross National Happiness Index. Incredible India and Boundless Bhutan By Steve Kaffen (Russia 1994-96) SK Journeys Publisher 101 pages $10.oo (paperback), $3.99 (Kindle)      

In the WSJ, September 2-3 Review Section is a long essay by Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65): “The long, improvisational trip by car is an American institution–and no other travel experience especially today, can beat the sense of freedom it brings.” Theroux begins with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald, three months in their marriage and they are living in Westport, Conn. and  Zelda is slightly cranky over breakfast. She hates Yankee bacon and craves Southern biscuits. “I wish I could have some peaches anyhow.” So Scott says, “let’s get dress and go.” And so it begins. They set off in their secondhand 1918 Marmon Speedster for Montgomery, Alabama. All of this tale is told in Fitzgerald’s memoir The Cruise of The Rolling Junk, a 1,200-mile journey to the deep South on bad roads. Theroux goes onto to recount other such road trips, including his own told in Deep South: Four . . .

  The 2017 Peace Corps Writers Awards for books published in 2016 were announced at the recent NPCA Conference. Marian Haley Beil and I were pleased and extremely fortunate to have Jane Albritton (India 1967-69) senior editor of four books of essays by RPCVs published by Travelers’ Tales/Solas House present the awards. Here are the 2017 Peace Corps Writers Award Winners. JC   For more about the awards and previous winners — CLICK • The Maria Thomas Fiction Award Judenstaat Simone Zelitch (Hungary 1991–93) Tor Books, June 2016 JUDENSTAAT IS A NOVEL of vast historical imagination — also a fantasy engendered from grief, from love, and from the devastating particulars of Europe’s 20th century tragedy. Simone Zelitch’s page-turning alternate history is the uncanny precision with which she has deftly transformed the threads of actual events into the stunning new fabric of her novel. Judenstaat raises profound questions about the cost of the Zionist . . .

A selection of stories from The New Yorker’s archive George Packer’s World In late 2008, George Packer drove around Florida, one of the places where the financial crisis began. He wanted to understand how the state had become the foreclosure capital of America, and what the “diagram of moral responsibility” looked like. It was shaped, he wrote in “The Ponzi State,” like an inverted pyramid, “with the lion’s share belonging to the banks, mortgage lenders, regulators, and politicians at the top.” The race to build more and more subdivisions-even when the people buying them clearly couldn’t afford them-was essentially a confidence game, with “everyone involved both being taken and taking someone else.” A George Packer piece, whether it is about the housing crisis or Silicon Valley, always provides readers with the rhetorical equivalent of a panoramic shot.These big-picture moments, however, are paired with intimate portraits of individual lives. In “The . . .

In 2005, Josh (Nicaragua 1998-2000) and his bride, Sutay Berman (The Gambia 1996-98), canceled their wedding reception, diverted the money to plane tickets, and applied to volunteer around the world. Crocodile Love: Travel Tales from an Extended Honeymoon brings the reader along to: Explore Sutay’s unique family legacy in Pakistan, opening many strange doors, Experience the world’s great religions through a traveler’s lens, Volunteer for three months on a tea plantation in India and for two months with Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana, Stride unannounced into the mud-hut Gambian village where Sutay had once lived as a Peace Corps Volunteer, ten years before. Crocodile Love was published by Tranquilo Travel Publishing Josh’s independent publishing platform based in Boulder, Colorado. Berman is a columnist for The Denver Post and author of five books with Avalon Travel Publishing, including Moon —  Nicaragua, Moon — Belize, and coming in April, Moon — Colorado . . .

The following review, written by David Strain (Nigeria 1963–65), of Uhuru Revisited: Interviews with African Pro-Democracy Leaders by Ron Singer (Nigeria 1964–67) was first published in the Friends of Nigeria quarterly newsletter. • Readers of Ron Singer’s many articles in this quarterly over the years will be greatly interested in his 2011-2012 interviews with 18 African “pro-democracy leaders.” I should emphasize that the range of people who fall within this rubric is quite wide. For examples, Puleng Matsoeneng, who as a daughter of a rural farmer in South Africa, struggled even to obtain an education, has led the fight to bring teachers and education to rural farm children. Kan Dapaah, abandoned by his father, has proceeded through the efforts of his mother and mother’s village to a career in accounting which led to multiple head of ministry posts in the Ghanaian government – he now leads an anti-corruption non-governmental organization . . .

John Coyne interviewed by Matt Staggs on December 16, 2015 Sometimes you read a book and you just know it’s going to be a part of your life forever. John Coyne’s 1981 horror fantasy Hobgoblin was one of those books for me. It’s the story of Scott Gardiner, a teenager obsessed with “Hobgoblin”: a fantasy role-playing game inspired by Irish mythology. Scott already has a shaky grasp on reality, and after an unexpected tragedy strikes his family he begins to believe that the horrors of the game are real. I read Hobgoblin at just the right age: I was maybe 12 years-old and quite obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons. Like Scott, my home life wasn’t perfect and school was a complete nightmare. I didn’t have trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy, but there were times when I would have given anything to slip away into a world of sorcerers and dragons. I saw some . . .