Peace Corps Volunteers

      The founders of Singing Frogs Farm, Elizabeth and Paul Kaiser, met in the Peace Corps in Gambia, West Africa in 2003. Paul has a background in Agroforestry and Sustainable Land Management and Elizabeth in Nursing and Public Health. They’ve been farming together since 2007 in Sebastopol, CA, where they’ve been raising their two children while developing their innovative no-till soil management system for intensive vegetable production. Singing Frogs is a small farm—just three cultivated acres—but they are reaping BIG results using Regenerative Farming methods. They’ve increased the organic matter in their soil by 400% in just six years, without nutrient leaching, while almost tripling the total microbial life in the soil. They’ve also dramatically reduced their water usage per crop, starting at three hours of drip irrigation every other day and now down to about 20-30 minutes per week (when they need to irrigate at all). But . . .

From Daily Beast Thanks for the ‘heads up’ from Marnie Mueller  (Ecuador 1963-65) Trump loyalist Peter Navarro has made “numerous false statements” about his arrest, federal prosecutors wrote in a new court filing Thursday urging a judge to reject Navarro’s request for more time until his next court hearing. Navarro was arrested last week for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House committee investigating the Capitol riot. He was not denied food, water or a call to a lawyer, prosecutors said in the new filing shared by Politico. In fact, “At the time of his arrest, the Defendant first requested to call the press, which was denied,” it says. The feds say Navarro’s arresting officers — who Navarro called “kind Nazis”— told him he could call an attorney, but he instead said he needed to go on live TV that night and had to call to say he wouldn’t be there. Navarro . . .

  KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Two Kansas City Peace Corps volunteers, Amber King who served in Ukraine, are hosting a fundraiser for the country Friday, May 27. Money raised at the event Friday night in Kansas City, Missouri, will benefit Ukrainians on the front lines of Russia’s invasion. “It’s terrifying because this is one of the biggest, powerful countries in the world attacking a peaceful country that’s just minding its own business with families just living and working,” Paige Barrows said. Barrows is organizing the event called “Our Village: A Kansas City Benefit for Ukraine” alongside Amber King. The two women spent years in Ukraine serving with the Peace Corps. In the days after the invasion, Barrows began raising money to send to her contacts in the country. Her efforts snowballed as Kansas Citians caught wind. Soon, she had raised more than $15,000 and sent more than 100 pounds of . . .

  A tribute to Bill Dunn compiled by his colleagues and friends   William N. (Bill) Dunn received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his masters and doctoral degrees from the Claremont Graduate School. Upon completion of his studies in 1969, he joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) where he spent the next 50 years teaching and conducting research on a wide range of topics on public policy analysis, research methods, and public administration. He was an interdisciplinary and globally respected scholar, broadly interested in the application of logic and reason to policy analysis, decision making, and public discourse. He collaborated with and was admired by accomplished scholars in fields such as political science, philosophy of science, economics, sociology, public health, systems theory, and business. Dunn also served in a variety of leadership and administrative . . .

San Diego filmmaker Ron Ranson, right, is shown with truck painter Kunil Kumar Choudary on location in Nepal during the filming of Ranson’s documentary, “Tattooed Trucks of Nepal – Horn Please.” (Sudarson Karki)   UC San Diego’s Ron Ranson documents Nepal’s arty trucks in the award-winning documentary ‘Tattooed Trucks of Nepal – Horn Please’ BY KARLA PETERSON SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE MAY 12, 2022 10:39 AM PT Before he fell in love with the elaborately decorated, philosophically minded freight trucks of Nepal, filmmaker and UC San Diego lecturer emeritus Ron Ranson fell in love with the delightful, resilient and inspirational people of Nepal. It was the spring of 1964, and Ranson was beginning his two-year stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Nepalese town of Narayangarh. He was the first Peace Corps volunteer the locals had ever seen, and they were like no one he had ever met. It was delight at . . .

    Colin Rule is CEO of Resourceful Internet Solutions, Inc. (“RIS”), home of Mediate.com, MediateUniversity.com, Arbitrate.com, CaseloadManager.com and a number of additional leading online dispute resolution initiatives.  From 2017 to 2020, Colin was Vice President for Online Dispute Resolution at Tyler Technologies. Tyler acquired Modria.com, an ODR provider that Colin co-founded, in 2017.  Previously, from 2003 to 2011, Colin was Director of Online Dispute Resolution for eBay and PayPal.  Further, Colin co-founded Online Resolution in 1999, one of the first online dispute resolution (ODR) providers, and served as its CEO and President.  Colin also worked for several years with the National Institute for Dispute Resolution in Washington, D.C. and the Consensus Building Institute in Cambridge, MA. Colin is the author of Online Dispute Resolution for Business, published by Jossey-Bass in September 2002, and co-author of The New Handshake: Online Dispute Resolution and the Future of Consumer Protection, published by the ABA in 2017. . . .

Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978-79) received her BA from College of the Holy Cross and her MFA from the University of Massachusetts. She was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She joined the Department of English and Philosophy at Murray State University in 1992. Professor Neelon is the author of the poetry collection, Easter Vigil, which was chosen by Joy Harjo as the winner of the 1995 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. The poet Denise Levertov wrote of Easter Vigil, “Ann Neelon brings a unique voice to her first book. Her range of personal concerns include the tragedies of the Gulf War, a sojourn in Nicaragua, the Rwandan War, and other episodes of what are called world events, as well as her father’s death, domestic love and the birth of her first child. Throughout, she successfully ignores the current obsession with the confessional. Her long lines, interspersed with very short ones, have . . .

  Brian Norris (Bolivia 1997-00), an associate political science professor at Lincoln University, won a Fulbright Global Scholar Award from the U.S. State Department and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, and will begin researching rural local governments in Colombia and Mozambique this summer. The three-year grant will take Norris, who has worked in foreign countries for more than 25 years, to Colombia in 2022 and 2024, and to Mozambique in 2023. Norris will spend the next three summers conducting research and documenting how successful rural governments are at providing basic services and infrastructure to their communities. “The governments of Colombia and Mozambique have granted more power and autonomy to rural local governments that are often in a better position to provide services than the national government,” Norris said in a university news release. “In practice, though, it is very difficult to decentralize power in geographically large and sprawling countries of . . .

  by Bonnie Black (Gabon 1996-98) May 6, 2022 • Martha Stewart and I go back aways. We’ve never met, but our lives have followed somewhat parallel paths. We’re about the same age (she’s three years older); both from New Jersey; both were models when young, then later became caterers in New York; we were both about the same size, shape, and coloring; both gave birth to one child, daughters, born within days of each other in 1965; both love cooking, homemaking, gardening… The list goes on and on. She’s uber-famous, of course, and I am not. But that’s quite all right with me. There was a time, though, when I achieved a modicum of Martha Stewart-like fame: when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in my early fifties in Gabon, Central Africa. This experience struck me as funny at the time, so I wrote about it humorously in my . . .

  Rob Schmitz (China 1996-98) is NPR’s international correspondent based in Berlin, where he covers the human stories of a vast region reckoning with its past while it tries to guide the world toward a brighter future. From his base in the heart of Europe, Schmitz has covered Germany’s levelheaded management of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of right-wing nationalist politics in Poland and creeping Chinese government influence inside the Czech Republic. Prior to covering Europe, Schmitz provided award-winning coverage of China for a decade, reporting on the country’s economic rise and increasing global influence. His reporting on China’s impact beyond its borders took him to countries such as Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand. Inside China, he’s interviewed elderly revolutionaries, young rappers, and live-streaming celebrity farmers who make up the diverse tapestry of one of the most fascinating countries on the planet. He is the author of . . .

  April 29, 2022 The FBI has joined the investigation into the fatal shootings of a retired couple whose bodies were found last week on a hiking trail near their New Hampshire home, leaving residents in their town fearful for their own safety, authorities said. No suspects have yet been identified and police have released little information on the mysterious double homicide in Concord, New Hampshire, of retired international humanitarian worker Stephen Reid, 67, and Djeswende “Wendy” Reid, 66. “We’ve been able to provide the information that we have, which is that we have no specific information that there’s any danger to the public in general at this point in time, but be vigilant, and those families are going to have to make those decisions for themselves as to what’s best for their family and what they’re most comfortable with,” Geoffrey Ward, a senior assistant state attorney general, said on . . .