Peace Corps writers – Page 21 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Maureen Orth (Colombia 1964-66) Writes About the Virgin Mary in National Geographic Magazine

Nov 09 2015

In its December 2015 issue National Geographic carries a cover story by Maureen Orth (Colombia 1964-66) that calls the Virgin Mary, “the most powerful woman in the world”. Award-winning journalist Orth, also a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, has been wandering the world and telling unexpected stories since her days as a PCV. In this article, she has taken a journey through some of the most famous Marian apparitions (including the alleged apparitions of Medjugorje) while mixing the stories of those who benefit from such intercession of the Virgin Mary as well as the process followed by the Church to recognize the supernatural occurrences or not. At one point in the article, Orth also includes a brief reference to the role of Mary in Islam because, although it is little known in the Muslim world, there is also a reverence for whom they also considered the holiest woman: Mary. You can read the whole story here: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/virgin-mary-text

A Writer Writes:The Lesson of the Machi by David C. Edmonds

Nov 09 2015

A Writer Writes The Lesson of the Machi By David C. Edmonds (Chile (1963-65) Mapuche village near Chol Chol, Arauca, Chile September 1964 Friday-The drums wake me again. Now what? Another funeral for some poor child? A wedding? No, the village Machi, who performs all healing and religious rituals, is going to offer another lesson for the young girls. I don’t know the details because things that happen here don’t always make sense. So when I see the Machi’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Ñashay, passing by my little dirt-floor ruca with a pale of milk, I ask her what is going on. “It is called the Lesson of Two Loves,” she tells me in her broken way of speaking Spanish, standing there on the mud walkway in her head dress and shawl, all four feet, ten inches of her. “What is the Lesson of Two Loves?” “Yes, the Lesson of Two Loves. . . .

Our RPCV Trappistine Martha Driscoll (Ethiopia 1965-67)

Nov 07 2015

Mother Martha Driscoll, O.C.S. O., (Ethiopia 1965-67) graduated from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service (at that time, women were not allowed in the undergraduate A&S College) and joined the Peace Corps. After Training at the University of Utah, she went to Ethiopia as a secondary school teacher in Addis Ababa, where, as a wonderful singer and actress, she also “starred” in several play productions staged by British Ex-pats in the city. After her tour, she returned to New York City and Staten Island where she had grown up, and worked for awhile in New York before going to Boston and earning an MFA in Theater from Brandeis University. It was during this period, she told me, that she began to question what she wanted to do with her life, and on a trip to Europe she visited and then entered a monastery in Italy where she took her religious . . .

Review: Breathing the Same Air by Gerry Christmas (Thailand 1973–76; Western Samoa 1976–78)

Nov 01 2015

Breathing the Same Air: A Peace Corps Romance Girard R. Christmas (Thailand 1973–76; Western Samoa 1976–78) Lulu April 2015 366 pages $22.99 (paperback), $8.99 (Kindle) Reviewed by Tino Calabia (Peru1963–65) • “I never looked at the Peace Corps as a two- or three-year excursion into the Valley of Riotous Romance,” writes Gerry Christmas, a Volunteer in the late 1970s. And from Christmas’ epistolary memoir Breathing the Same Air: A Peace Corps Romance, his three-year tour in Thailand followed by two years in Samoa proved neither riotous nor a steamy, bodice-ripping romance. In 330 pages, 68 letters (49 to his mother and father) trace the on-again, off-again travails of Volunteer Christmas’s love sparked by a woman named Aied in Thailand. Later, 6,200 miles away in Samoa, his heart still pines for her. Through it all, his mounting success teaching English would match his success as a writer, one especially adept in . . .

HOBGOBLIN IS REPUBLISHED (Just When You Thought You Were Safe After Halloween)

Nov 01 2015

Hobgoblin (reissued) John Coyne Dover Publications September 2015 330 pages $11.99 (Kindle) $14.95 (paperback) coming in November To purchase Hobgoblin 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 that will help support this site and its annual writers awards.

More About Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65)

Oct 14 2015

(This is a short essay I wrote years ago about Theroux and his ‘Peace Corps Experience’ and I am reposting it now to continue the discussion of his latest book.) Living on the Edge: Paul Theroux • He went — in the way the Peace Corps rolls the dice of our lives – to Africa as a teacher. “My schoolroom is on the Great Rift, and in this schoolroom there is a line of children, heads shaved liked prisoners, muscles showing through their rags,” he wrote home in 1964. “These children appear in the morning out of the slowly drifting hoops of fog-wisp. It is chilly, almost cold. There is no visibility at six in the morning; only a fierce white-out where earth is the patch of dirt under their bare feet, a platform, and the sky is everything else.” How many of us stood in front of similar classrooms . . .

Bob Shacochis (Eastern Caribbean 1975-76) "The Mending Fields"

Oct 14 2015

This is one of my favorite short pieces written by an RPCV….a wonderful writer, Bob Shacochis (Eastern Caribbean 1975-76)! He wrote this piece years ago for an NPR “All Things Considered” segment I managed to arrange to recognize the 25th anniversary of the Peace Corps. • 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, over-serious 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. . . .

Rachel Schneller's (Mali 1996-98) "Water"

Oct 13 2015

This lovely piece is by a very fine writer, Rachel Schneller (Mali 1996-98). She recreates a scene many of us have marveled at during our Peace Corps years. Water When a woman carries water on her head, you see her neck bend outward behind her like a crossbow. Ten liters of water weights 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 the head height, you duck underneath the pot and place it on the wad of rolled-up cloth you always wear there when fetching . . .

Kathleen Moore (Ethiopia 1964-64) Letters Home

Oct 12 2015

The Peace Corps has produced some amazing writers. Here is a short piece by another fine writer who served in Ethiopia years ago. In this short slice of life, Kathy distills the Peace Corps experience that I am sure is shared by many RPCVs throughout the decades of the Peace Corps, in all the villages where Volunteers lived and worked. Letters Home When I read the letters that I sent home from Ethiopia, letters that my mother saved, I wonder at the ordinariness of these letters sent from a place as extraordinary as my village. How quickly I became accustomed to the life there. How mundane it all seemed so that there was nothing to write home about. Keeping live chickens locked in my shint-bet (outhouse) so the hyenas wouldn’t eat them was normal. Standing on my bed and throwing a sixty-pound butane gas tank at a scorpion crawling toward me was not a . . .

Review — Marrying Santiago by Suzanne Adam (Colombia 1964–66)

Oct 08 2015

Marrying Santiago by Suzanne Adam (Colombia 1964–66) Peace Corps Writers May 2015 $15.00 (paperback), $3.49 (Kindle) Reviewed by Bob Arias (Colombia 1964–66) • A Journey within a Journey I feel that Suzanne is very much the same beautiful individual that she was when she became a Peace Corps Volunteer along with me in 1964 in Colombia. And like her move in 1971 to Santiago, Chile to be with her soon-to-be husband, Santiago, Suzanne took California with her when she went into the Peace Corps. One tough lady, always proud of who she was, and ready to go over the next hill to see if things are different, or perhaps to find a new flower or one of natures creatures. I agree with her, she would have made a great California Forest Ranger with a Smokey the Bear hat! Moving to Chile to follow Santiago was much more than changing homes . . .

Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65) on the Air and in the TIMES

Oct 07 2015

In case you missed it, Brian Lehrer on WNYC had Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65) on his show this morning (see link below). He talked about his new book on travels in the South and mentioned the Peace Corps. (Thanks to a “Heads Up” from Bill Preston (Thailand 1977-80) http://www.wnyc.org/story/paul-theroux-american-south/ In case you missed it, Paul had a piece in the New York Times on Sunday, October 4, 2015. Thanks to a “Heads Up” from William Evensen (Peru 1964-66) A factory in Toccoa, Ga., that was closed in 2010 by the manufacturing company SundayReview | OPINION The Hypocrisy of ‘Helping’ the Poor By PAUL THEROUX OCT. 2, 2015 EVERY so often, you hear grotesquely wealthy American chief executives announce in sanctimonious tones the intention to use their accumulated hundreds of millions, or billions, “to lift people out of poverty.” Sometimes they are referring to Africans, but sometimes they are referring to Americans. And . . .

Author as promoter — David Edmonds and his LILY OF PERU

Oct 07 2015

In January of this year David Edmonds (Chile 1963-65) published his “romance thriller” Lily of Peru with the Peace Corps Writers imprint. David has written that since then the book has received a “good deal of love.” The attention that the book has received includes: Latino Literacy: International Latino Book Awards – Honorable Mention: Best Novel – Adventure or Drama – English Article on the Tampa Bay “Creative Loafing” website, “Local author named an International Latino Book Awards finalist“ 2015 Readers’ Favorite: Silver Award for “Fiction – Thriller – Terrorist” category . Florida Writers Association‘s 2015 Royal Palms Literary Awards: Finalist in the fiction category. (winners to be announced Oct 15-18) Latino Literacy: Latino Books into Movies Awards: Finalist. Favorable reviews and interviews in blogs, newspapers and writers’ magazines. One of those reviews of Lily of Peru, written by Tracy A. Fischer for Readers’ Favorite, follows: Sigh. That was my . . .

New books by Peace Corps writers — September 2015

Oct 06 2015

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 that will help support the site and the annual Peace Corps Writers awards. • Dog Rescue A to Z: A Beginner’s Alphabet Mary Blocksma (Nigeria 1965–67) Beaver Island Arts 2015 116 pages $15.00 (Beaverislandarts.etsy.com) . • Venezuela Sojourn: The Peace Corps Diary of Jon C. Halter Jon C. Halter (Venezuela 1966–68) CreateSpace September 2015 264 pages $12.00 (paperback) . • The Italian Summer: Golf, Food, and Family at Lake Como Roland Merullo, Jr. (Micronesia 1979–80) PFP September 2015 280 pages $15.85 (paperback), $7.85 (Kindle) • King of the Gypsies: Stories Lenore Myka (Romania 1994-96) BkMk Press September 2015 215 pages $15.95 (paperback) • The Awareness Gene Stone (Niger 1974–76) and Jon Doyle The . . .

Andrew Tadross (Ethiopia 2011-13) publishes The Essential Guide to Amharic

Oct 05 2015

Talk about the ultimate Third Goal Project! Andrew Tadross (Ethiopia 20011–13) writes about co-authoring language guides for two Ethiopian languages, Amharic and Tigriyya: The Essential Guide to Amharic: The National Language of Ethiopia [Peace Corps Writers, September 2015] is the second project I’ve worked on with my friend Abraham Teklu, the first being The Essential Guide to Tigrinya. I began both of these projects within a few months of arriving in Ethiopia as a Peace Corps Volunteer, not knowing that my ever-growing vocabulary list would become, what I believe now, are the best resources available on either language. I met Abraham, an outgoing Ethiopian man in his early 50s, on one of my first visits to Mekele in northern Ethiopia. His wife, Hruti, owned the simple hotel I wandered into one sunny day. Both had lived in America for many years and had returned to their homeland for a simpler . . .

Peace Corps Writers–Friedman & Theroux In The News

Oct 03 2015

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal ran a long article about “Songster, writer and Texas troublemaker Kinky Friedman” (Borneo 1967-79) who has just released his first studio album in 32 years. Kinky is best known for, as the WSJ writes, “his sharply satirical, sure to offend cowboy songs like ‘Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed’ and ‘They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore’.” His next mystery novels, all narrated by a musician-turned-private-detective named Kinky Friedmen, will be his 20th. It is due out next year an entitled, The Hardboiled Computer. Kinky’s next tour begins on October 9th. It will be 35 consecutive shows without a night off. Sunday’s 10/4/15 New York Times, runs a review of Paul Theroux’s (Malawi 1963-65) new travel book Deep South Four Seasons on Back Roads published by Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In the review, Geoffrey C. Ward writes, “Theroux’s remarkable gift for . . .