Short Works by PC Writers

  Tolerance, Freedom, and Peace by Julie R. Dargis (Morocco 1984–87) • Pitch with us tolerance, freedom and peace In churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques. Stand up with our friends at home and abroad. Let respect choose the words we use wisely. In Morocco, Mali, throughout Asia, Eastern Europe, across the Middle East, Peace Corps volunteers are welcome in homes. We live together as one in global Communities, Humanitarians Working in Turkey, Greece, and Syria Attest to the same. Islamophobic Rhetoric, spinning in news cycles, is Staining our communities with chatter. Can you not hear all our cries to stand down?     Julie R. Dargis is a poet, a writer, and an intuitive. “Tolerance, Freedom, and Peace” was taken from her recently published collection of “memoirs, sonnets and prose,” White Moon in a Powder Blue Sky. Previously she published a creative non-fiction book drawing on her Peace Corps experience, Pit Stop in the . . .

I first went to Menorca in the fall of 1967 having just finished a tour as an APCD in Ethiopia. I was looking for a place to live while working on my novel. In my last months in-country I combed the back pages of advertisements in the old International Herald Tribune looking for a place to rent, and it was Mark Foster (Ethiopia 1965-67), reading over my shoulder one day, who spotted an ad for an apartment in Mahon, Menorca, that was renting for $1 a day. “I’ve been to this island with my mother,” Mark said. “We sailed over from Mallorca. No Americans ever go there.” That was just what I wanted to hear! I left Africa in early September and spent the fall of that year on the island. I have been returning to Menorca ever since. Here’s why.     MENORCA From the red tile terrace of the Port Mahón Hotel I . . .

  I’ve lived all over the world, and I’d never be able to explain to my foreign friends how important summer is to my American identity. Lots of them don’t even have summer. In West Africa where I was in the Peace Corps, the only seasons were hot and hotter. Central America was like that, too; and in far northern Japan, where I studied the Utari indigenous people, summer was a starving time when the sea ice melted and the seals and whales they hunted headed farther north, leaving them with nothing to eat. But when I was a child in Chicago, summer was a golden season. It meant release from school, from long underwear, from interminable evenings in front of the TV with the world outside dark and frozen and nothing else you dared to do. Summer was like someone had turned the lights back on and we were . . .

  Not John by Mark Jacobs first published in The Critical Pass Review • Three minutes into his conversation with Weather Woman, Marco Slivovitz knew it was a test. It took two Bushmills and thirty more minutes of talk to be sure that the test had nothing to do with sexual conquest. An objective observer of Marco, looking down from a safe location, would have said it was about escaping. Marco knew better. He was being tested, all right, but the subject of the exam was his shifting self. The Tangiers was the kind of bar Marco gravitated to any time he found himself in a new city. Small, one of a kind, protected from the hard-knocks crowd by high-priced drinks, it took up just enough space on the ground floor of a boutique hotel called The Craddock. The Craddock’s website used the word “cognoscenti” to describe its clientele. A bit . . .

• Sirens’ Sweet Song by Gerald Karey (Turkey 1965-67) • The Sirens, Homer tells us, enchant all who come near. Anyone who draws to close to their island and hears their singing will never be welcomed home again. The Sirens sit in a green field and warble to death men who try to join them, with the sweetness of their song, Homer says, or words to that effect. Odysseus sailing home from Troy after the Trojan War orders his crew to put wax in their ears so they cannot hear the Sirens. But he has himself lashed to his ship’s mast, so he may hear them. Their song is irresistible and Odysseus begs to be freed from his bonds so that he may join the Sirens. His pleas are ignored, or perhaps his crew simply cannot hear, and Odysseus is borne safely past on the waters of the wine-dark sea. . . .

Living with the Bomb Gerald Karey (Turkey 1965–67) • Duck and Cover Miss McGinn rapped her desk with a ruler to quiet her sixth graders as a bell sounded throughout the school. “This is no joke,” she said sternly. “It’s a drill. If this was a real attack, your lives could depend on it.” We knew the drill. “Duck and Cover.” We scrambled under our desks, crouched down, and covered our heads with our hands. Miss McGinn turned off the lights and hurried to the three tall windows in our classroom to close the shades. It was something of a lark, getting on the floor under your desk. But after several monthly drills it was boring routine — until I caught a glimpse of Sandra Epstein’s white panties. At that precise moment, Sandra turned her head and looked at me. She smiled and hiked her dress, revealing even more of her . . .

Ellen Urbani (1991–93) emailed me this article and note: Not that this has anything to do with Peace Corps, but an essay of mine came out in The Rumpus yesterday. It’s one that was almost 15 years in the making; hard to tell, but important, I believe. Please feel free to share if you’re so inclined. http://therumpus.net/2016/03/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-true-story/ • THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A TRUE STORY BY ELLEN URBANI. There is no such thing as a true story. I know this because my daughter insists I told her to put her dirty dishes in the sink when I know I told her to put them in the dishwasher, and because my sister swears that on a late summer night in 1990 I deliberately flicked a Japanese beetle into her mouth when—cross my heart and hope to die—I only intended to swat it off my mother’s shoulder. I know this because my . . .

St. Pete Gerald Karey (Turkey 1965–67) • Death was a frequent visitor to the Ebb Tide Retirement and Nursing Home in St. Pete. It usually arrived during the night – perhaps there was a biological or psychological reason for that – but whatever the reason it allowed the staff to deal quietly and discretely with it, in order shield the residents from the grim reality that death had taken another. Not that it made much difference to the residents who knew Ebb Tide would be their final stop on what Mrs. Daphne Delacourt from Piscataway, New Jersey – who as a young woman appeared in a number of amateur theatricals and was given to dramatic gestures and phrases – liked to call life’s great journey. But while the residents didn’t dwell on dying or talk much about death, most shared a resigned acceptance about its inevitably and it was never . . .

Jon Anderson is a liberation ecologist intent on empowering the impoverished through expanding their bundle of rights over resources; making markets work better for the poor; and linking to technical solutions and problem-solving. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in school construction in Gabon (1974 – 77) and was a rural animation volunteer in Mali in 1977.  He served with USAID, USDA, FAO, the MCC (Resident Country Director for Mali) and with the private sector in the US and Africa. He has taught at both Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. One of his favorite biological processes is fermentation.  This process helps him write. Almost Perfect By Jon Anderson As soon as he awoke and went downstairs, he saw a young, grubby kid at the door.  Here, kids replaced telephones – they seemed to be the most frequent means of . . .