Peace Corps staff

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Bill Josephson remembers Charlie Peters
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Former Nigeria & Uganda Country Director Delano Lewis Dies at 84
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RPCV Darlene Grant (Cambodia) now shaping Peace Corps efforts on diversity, equity and inclusion
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REVIEW — THE CALL by Jamie Price
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Review | THE CALL: The Spiritual Realism of Sargent Shriver
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The Peace Corps staff member who became the first Peace Corps photographer | Rowland Scherman
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THE PANDEMIC PROPHET about early Peace Corps CD Reginald E. Petty
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Rowland Sherman (PC first photographer) exhibit at Provincetown gallery
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School to use iconic ’60s photos by Rowland Scherman (PC staff) to educate students about race
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Norm Rush (Botswana) — MATING at thirty years

Bill Josephson remembers Charlie Peters

    All too frequently these days I sit down to write a remembrance of a key, original Peace Corps person.  The challenge posed by Charles G. Peters, Jr. is that he was not a headliner like Sarge, or Bill Moyers or Harris Wofford.  Charlie was an incredibly innovative critic.  His insight was that what the Peace Corps Director truly needed to know was what was actually happening in program y in country x, not necessarily what the country director or the regional director or the assistant director for program and operations said.  Charlie’s other insight was who were the best people to do this?  Investigative journalists whose irreverent curiosity would lead them to where no one else had gone and who could write. Charles G. Peters, Jr., a trial lawyer from West Virginia, and Sargent Shriver encountered each other in the 1960 Democratic presidential primary in that state.  That . . .

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Former Nigeria & Uganda Country Director Delano Lewis Dies at 84

Former NPR President and U.S. Ambassador Delano Lewis has died at 84 By Natalie Escobar Published August 2, 2023 Delano Lewis, a former president of National Public Radio and U.S. ambassador to South Africa, is dead at 84. He died on Wednesday while in hospice care in Las Cruces, N.M., according to the Las Cruces Bulletin. Lewis was named president of NPR in 1993, becoming the first Black person to take the role. He came to the job with a long resume, including many leadership positions within Washington, D.C.’s politics and business circles. Born in 1938 in Arkansas City, Kan., Lewis grew up in a segregated community, and became interested in civil rights law at a young age, according to the Bulletin. After graduating law school from the Washburn University School of Law in Topeka in 1963, he eventually took positions at the Justice Department and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Thus began a long . . .

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RPCV Darlene Grant (Cambodia) now shaping Peace Corps efforts on diversity, equity and inclusion

By Adrienne Frank June 23, 2023 • Darlene Grant became a Peace Corps volunteer at 49; 11 years later, she joined the agency’s top ranks. In seventh grade, with a bully on her heels, Darlene Grant slipped through a door at her Cleveland junior high school and found herself in the music room, staring at a line of students. Wanting to avoid a beating, she got in line, “like I was supposed to be there,” she said, and the music teacher handed her the last instrument in the closet: a bassoon. “That moment when you realize you’re where the universe needs you to be? That was one of them,” said Darlene Grant, PhD (SAS ’84). Today, Grant is senior advisor to Peace Corps Director Carol Spahn, with a mission to cultivate diversity in the worldwide agency and help remove barriers for underrepresented volunteers and staff and create a more just and equitable . . .

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REVIEW — THE CALL by Jamie Price

  The Call: The Spiritual Realism of Sargent Shriver by Jamie Price, introduction: Charles Hefling 336 pages SSPI Press March 2023 $11.49 (Kindle); $22.00 (Paperback) Review by D.W. Jefferson (El Salvador 1974–76; Costa Rica 1976–77) • I think of Sargent Shriver as one of the all-time greatest examples of the truth of the saying, “If you want something done give the task to a busy person.” From his anti-racism work with the Catholic Interracial Council of Chicago, to his leadership role in designing and directing the Peace Corps, to his role in running the War on Poverty under President Lyndon Johnson, to his work with Special Olympics International, Shriver was always busy building peace. This book is not a biography or a historical account. This book attempts to answer the question of why he did what he did and how he discerned what could and should be done. The Call . . .

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Review | THE CALL: The Spiritual Realism of Sargent Shriver

  The Call: The Spiritual Realism of Sargent Shriver by Jamie Price 336 pages SSPI Press March 2023 $11.49 (Kindle); $22.00 (Paperback)   The Call looks at the role of the spirit in the life and work of one of the most accomplished American peacebuilders of the 20th twentieth century, Robert Sargent Shriver (1915-2011), founder of the Peace Corps and architect of the War on Poverty. Author Jamie Price knew Shriver personally and served as the Founding Director of several programs dedicated to understanding and advancing Shriver’s approach to leadership and peacebuilding. The Call is an imagined dialogue between Sargent Shriver and the character of Didymus about the role of the spirit in Shriver’s efforts to build peace. Its title alludes to the pivotal moment when Shriver received the phone call from his brother-in-law, the newly-inaugurated President John F. Kennedy, asking him to be Director of the as-yet-nonexistent Peace Corps. . . .

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The Peace Corps staff member who became the first Peace Corps photographer | Rowland Scherman

This Profile benefited greatly from a Peace Corps WorldWide publication. by Jeremiah Norris (Colombia 1963-65) • Rowland Scherman writes: Like so many others, I was thrilled by JFKs inaugural speech. Although I wasn’t a professional photographer, I made a few dollars doing portraits out of a makeshift studio or ‘on location’ on the streets of New York City. I shared a crappy little darkroom with a friend. But JFKs words made me think that I could do something more, and could reach a higher potential if I volunteered my work, and myself to the betterment of my country, instead of simply chasing a buck. I thought my services just might somehow be useful to the new administration.” Rowland took a bus to Washington, D. C. to seek work with the Peace Corps, announcing his potential availability as an official photographer. He went to Peace Corps headquarters, then a jumble of . . .

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THE PANDEMIC PROPHET about early Peace Corps CD Reginald E. Petty

  Left Bank Books  at 399 N. Euclid Street, St. Louis, presents St. Louis author Jaye P. Willis, with Reginald E. Petty in our store on November 21st at 6 p.m. Join us in the store or on YouTube Live Page. This is a poetic and prose praise song to Mr. Reginald E. Petty. He is from a small town in Southern Illinois called East St. Louis. It is now considered an economically deprived city, but it never stopped his drive and passion to make it better, as well as himself. The book speaks to his upbringing and what makes him a legend to not only the citizens of his hometown, but throughout the world — particularly in Africa. Mr. Petty was one of the first African American Peace Corps Country Directors, appointed by the U.S. President John F. Kennedy. He served in several African nations and went on to . . .

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Rowland Sherman (PC first photographer) exhibit at Provincetown gallery

  “Spirit of the 60’s” Provincetown Art Association Museum 13 May to June something.   Forever Young; Rowland Scherman – Profile Of An Iconic 1960s Photographer The article (above) in the March 15 issue of  Cape Cod Wave  carries the story by Brian Tracy of photographer Rowland Sherman (PC staff) from the time he was 9 and met Babe Ruth, through his years with the Peace Corps, and up to the opening of the show of his work at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum opening on May 24th. And it’s filled with great shots and stories including the famous blue Bob Dylan halo photo that ended up on his Greatest Hits album.    

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School to use iconic ’60s photos by Rowland Scherman (PC staff) to educate students about race

The Cape Cod Chronicle 3 February 2021 by Susanna Graham-Pye     HARWICH – Educators at the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School are eagerly exploring ways to use a recent gift of photographs, many depicting iconic moments from the civil rights movement. In one photo, the leaders and organizers of the August 1963 March on Washington sit at the feet of the sculpture of Abraham Lincoln in his memorial; in another Marlon Brando stands with his arm slung over James Baldwin’s shoulder, as the pair looks out over the National Mall on that same day. Faces from the crowd fill other photos: of volunteers at workstations, of college students painting signs and children earnestly watching it all. Pictures show Jackie Robinson at the march, hugging his son David, and Harry Belafonte speaking; Peter Paul and Mary singing and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. flanked by Floyd McKissick, Matthew Ahmann and Reverend Eugene . . .

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Norm Rush (Botswana) — MATING at thirty years

Thanks for the ‘heads up’ from Bill Preston (Thailand 1977–80)   Incorporate Everything, Understand Everything Norman Rush’s Mating Scott Sherman The Point Magazine • “In Africa, you want more, I think.” With that laconic affirmation begins one of the strangest and most sublime American novels of the last half-century. The protracted monologue of a 32-year-old Stanford University anthropologist who is adrift and loveless in Botswana at the dawn of the Reagan era, Mating was published by Knopf in 1991 and went on to win the National Book Award for fiction. John Updike, writing in the New Yorker, hailed it as “rather aggressively brilliant.” It was Norman Rush’s (CD Botswana 1978-83) first novel. He was 58 when it appeared. All through the 1960s and 1970s, Rush, who was born in San Francisco in 1933, had written experimental fiction with negligible success. In 1978, he and his wife Elsa moved from Rockland County, New York, where he . . .

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