Peace Corps Worldwide

Back to Pakistan: A Fifty-Year Journey by Leslie Noyes Mass (Pakistan 1962–64) Rowman and Littlefield Publishers $32.95 212 pages (paperback) 2011 Reviewed by  David Day (Kenya 1965–66; India 1967–68) IN THIS ACCOUNT of her initial Peace Corps assignment in rural western Pakistan from 1962 to 1964, and a return visit forty-seven years later, in 2009, Leslie Mass gives us tightly-focused access to the lives of women and a range of attempts to educate them in arguably one of the world’s most dangerous countries. It’s a glimpse not often seen in terrorism-haunted media coverage of this troublesome, strategically important Muslim nation. As part of her titular “journey,” we are taken — with the aid of numerous excerpts from letters written to George (a close friend and later, husband), and verbatim transcripts from tape recordings of conversations — from the dusty alleys of small villages to the snow-capped peaks of the Karakoram . . .

[Another RPCV, Ed Gruberg, wrote me about Alan Weiss and his thoughts of Alan as a person and a writer.] I always expected Weiss to become a famous writer. How could he not be? He was smart and witty and was a great storyteller. He had a fine ear and he relished pointing out other people’s flaws. He worked very hard, wrote hours every day. All he had to do was get it down on paper. In his short life he published very little: one novel; one extended soliloquy to Ibadan that I published in Voyeur, a small magazine I ran; and one scholarly mathematical article on totitives, co-authored with a Yoruba colleague, Victor Olunloyo that was published twice – in an American mathematics journal and a British mathematics journal. He left unfinished a novel about Nigeria as it unraveled in the sixties. A piece about Malcolm X’s speech at the . . .

Robert Cohen (Nigeria 1962-64) was an Associate Peace Corps Director in Liberia from 1965 to 1967, and is today an educational consultant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and cabaret singer. He has also been on the board of Friends of Nigeria. In 1963, he was Alan’s roommate in Nigeria. As his roommate in Africa, what do you remember most about Alan in Nigeria? His “wedding,” a rag-tag affair that took place at a Yoruba Magistrates Court, in midday, all of us suited and tied for the occasion and sweating mightily as we all awaited our group’s turn before the magistrate. This was one event that Alan could NOT simply OBSERVE. He was the main character, along with fiancee Judith, and unaccustomed to that role, despite his writing. Also, I remember the going-away party Weiss and Judith held for at least a dozen of us. Weiss sat at the end of a long banquet table . . .

Page 255: The sick circus of training behind us, we would go to Africa. But we couldn’t have been more disaffected, more fragmented into our basic globules of personality; and if wave after wave of new Volunteers followed us over there, and gave us the big hello, we would certainly hello in return – but tied to that fellow as participants in a great movement to revolutionize the quality of American life, well, don’t be silly. Each of us would fall in love with Africa, bits and pieces of that bedeviled continent, and make friends, small friendships in our own way, one or two, a handful, except JZ, who would make hundreds, thousands, who would conquer a town, riding maverick over the laterite roads on her blue Honda, this blonde giant of a white girl, crazy and loving and finally at peace, momentarily at peace, in a great sprawl of . . .

Page 235-237: I don’t recall a blare of trumpets and a silver leaping flash of mercury, but there might as well have been. He wasn’t there. And suddenly he was. Moving effortlessly, like a gleaming thoroughbred trotting into the winners’ circle. You got the feeling he always moved like that: like a fighter waltzing across a ring, or an Olympian surging victory-foamed out of a pool, a dancing golden boy, the world’s greatest . . . The roar rose as if the cement were splitting under our feet, it rose in stages, in tiers, until it shook the rafters, till it fluttered Palmer’s necktie, a leaping frenzy of noise, as people roared and whimpered and climbed high on the backs of chairs to shout their inspiring gratitude. It was everything: the end of a long summer, the heat, the bursting tension, the wait, the golden boy appearance, that dance, smile, aristocratic wave, . . .

Pages 31-33: There followed a briefing by the Peace Corps Field Assessment Officer, a psychiatrist. Now in sections, we met in a reverberatingly hot classroom of Teachers College. The psychiatrist was a ruffle-haired, soft-cheeked young guy, trying to – suck! suck! – get his pipe lit. Off to one side, half sitting against the desk, was presumable a colleague, a haggard-looking creature with a large balding dome of a head and jutting elbows. The spitting image of Raskolnikov. “We’re meeting today,” said the psychiatrist, “to tell you what to expect in the way of selection procedures. It would be disingenuous of us to pretend that you won’t be observed and assessed throughout training. Most of you will be judged acceptable and sent to Nigeria, but a small percentage will be disqualified. Why disqualified? I will come to that. It shouldn’t surprise you that we want emotionally mature, competent individuals who . . .

Page 2: These were momentous times, Pope John died and the only clergyman with the guts to stare a television camera in the face was the old croaker himself, Cardinal Cushing, who eulogized from the heart. Gordon Cooper was lofted into orbit, as I watched with my heart thumping against my ribs, but the public taste for that kind of thing had become so staled that nobody else give a flicker of a damn. The Governor of Alabama stood like a minstrel dandy in the schoolhouse door, while Katzenbach, with immeasurable dignity, supplicated before him. Kennedy took Europe by storm and I felt a twinge of egret that I wasn’t still in Paris to witness it. In Berlin he delivered his most rousing speech, declaring with hoarse passion, “Lass sie nach Berlin kommen!” – and in turning away as the newsreels clearly showed, slipped himself a small smile for the . . .

[Mathematician, graduate of M.I.T., wanderer through Cuba, Paris, Corfu, Alan Weiss (Nigeria 1963-64) joined the Peace Corps wanting “to become part of something for once.” He entered a summer training program at Columbia University in New York City, preparatory to assignment as a teacher. In his book, High Risk/High Gain, he tells the story of that training program. The book, published by St. Martin’s Press in 1968, had as its subtitle: “A freewheeling account of Peace Corps Training.” From time to time in the years following its publication, I would spot small back-page ads in magazines like The New Republic offering the book for sale. Alan had bought from the publisher copies of his remaindered book and was hawking the book himself. Then the ads disappeared. The book disappeared. And Alan Weiss disappeared.  Since then two RPCVs who served with Alan – Bob Cohen and Ed Gruberg – have kept . . .

I Never Intended to Be Brave: A Woman’s Bicycle Journey Through Southern Africa by Heather Andersen (Lesotho 2001–03) Windy City Publishers $14.99 (paperback), $8.99 (Kindle) 260 pages October 2011 • Maya 2012: A Guide to Celebrations in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize & Honduras by Joshua Berman (Nicaragua 1998–2000) Moon Publishing $7.99 (paperback), free (Kindle) 128 pages October 2011 • The Orawan Poems by Gerry Christmas (Thailand 1973–76; Western Samoa 1976–78) Lulu Publisher $14.95 (paperback) 148 pages October 2011 • Running in Flip-flops (Peace Corps novel) by Abigail Fay (Senegal 2007–09) Peace Corps Writers Book $12.75 (paperback) 299 pages September 2011 • Ukraine: Discover the Real Ukraine by Ashley Hardaway (Ukraine 2006–08) Other Places Publishing $22.95 (paperback) 250 pages October 2011 • No Senator’s Son by RJ Huddy (Morocco 1981–82) A Peace Corps Writers Book $17.50 (paperback), $2.99 (Kindle) 377 pages October 2011 • Steve’s Adventure with the Peace Corps: Stories from . . .

[Back in March I wrote a short blog about Lee St. Lawrence who was one of the first ‘mad men’ of the Peace Corps in early ’61. That blog entry came to the attention of Pierre Delva who wrote me about his connection to St. Lawrence, and also to send me the short book he wrote about St. Lawrence, his friend, who he labeled on the title page, “The Man Behind the Peace Corps.” Why, Lee wasn’t  the man behind’ the agency, he was, nevertheless, an important early figure in the Peace Corps. Pierre and Joan Delva knew Lee most of their adult life, and Pierre and Joan, too, have had an interesting and productive life in England and Canada. As Pierre wrote me, “I was a general practitioner for ten years in London’s east end, emigrated  to Canada, did six years training as a pediatrician, (including two at WRU), became an ‘academic’ at . . .

A Life In Time: A Woman’s Journey from Orphanage to Peace Corps by Kaye Stone (India 1966-68) The Stone Publishing Group 212 pages $14.95 (paperback) July, 2011 Reviewed by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) KAYE STONE’S PEACE CORPS MEMOIR is an intriguing personal story by a sheltered young orphan, educated in a Christian college, who served in India during that period when the agency fielded more than 15,000 Volunteers worldwide, and 754 on the Subcontinent. Her account via letters is a reminder of both changing American womanhood and an agency in transition. Raised in an orphanage from the age of six, the author seldom traveled or even dated. Until high school graduation at the orphanage, “Dating was complicated . . . The boy had to ask permission. If the superintendent consented, the girl and boy could sit in the living room of the cottage for several hours on a Sunday . . .

I Never Intended to Be Brave: A Woman’s Bicycle Journey Through Southern Africa by Heather Andersen (Lesotho 2001–03) Windy City Publishers $14.99 (paperback), $8.99 (kindle) 260 pages October 2011 Reviewed by Barbara E. Joe (Honduras 2000-03) WHEN HEATHER ANDERSEN COMPLETED her Peace Corps tour in tiny land-locked Lesotho, she wasn’t ready to go home right away. A seasoned cyclist who first fell in love with cycling 16 years earlier as a teenager, she had brought along her own knobby-tire mountain bike to ride during her service, and on a later exploration of southern Africa. But leery of standing out as a white woman cycling alone, she tries to assemble a riding group via the internet before embarking on her post-service journey. She finds just one taker, an American from Chicago she calls Paul, whom she first meets at the airport when he arrives, an experienced cyclist bringing his own touring . . .