Peace Corps Worldwide – Page 345 – promoting Peace Corps writers since 1989

Review: COLOMBIA: PICTURES AND STORIES by Sandy Fisher (Colombia)

Aug 15 2011

Colombia: Pictures and Stories Sandy Fisher (Colombia 1962–64) Brookview Farm January, 2011 212 pages Hardback $60 (autographed) Order from TheMarket@brookviewfarm.com Reviewed by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975–77) THIS IS A VISUAL KALEIDOSCOPE of historical images and corresponding stories told by someone who went to serve, then stayed. A member of the second group of Peace Corps Volunteers to arrive in Colombia, Sandy Fisher and 59 other PCVs “sang out the Colombian national anthem (and) Alberto Lleras Camargo, the country’s president, cried.” A half century ago, the world was different and so was the Peace Corps. Like so many, Fisher was young — 21 — and inexperienced. His first mission was to “develop the community of Tenjo,” a village located in a valley between Andean mountain ranges in central Colombia. He “built a house, cleared a road, rescued machines,” worked on school water systems and helped organize a vegetable cooperative garden. . . .

Tony D'Souza's next novel–Mule

Aug 12 2011

Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000-02; Madagascar 2002-03) has contributed to The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, Outside, Salon, Granta, McSweeny’s and other magazines. He is a recipient of the Sue Kaufman Prize, the O. Henry Award, the Florida Book Awards gold and silver medals for fiction, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His novel The Konkans, was a Best Book of the Year in Washington Post Book World, Christian Science Monitor and Publishers Weekly. Tony was nominated for a National Magazine Award for coverage of Nicaragua’s Eric Volz murder trial, all after he spent three years in Africa. He lives now in St. Louis with his wife, a graduate student in creative writing, and their two young children. In September Mule: A Novel of Moving Weight, Tony’s third novel, will be published by Houghton Mifflin. It is a story of a young couple hard hit by . . .

Emily Arsenault (South Africa 2004-06) new novel is a psychological thriller

Aug 10 2011

Emily Arsenault (South Africa 2004-06) first novel, The Broken Teaglass, was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Crime Book of 2009. She has now just published In Search of the Rose Notes, a psychological mystery about broken friendship and the unease of revisiting adolescent memories. Emily writes, “My initial intention was to write a suspense novel that dealt with some of the darker aspects of adolescence. I wanted to write about a female character in her twenties who, while relatively content as an adult, had a difficult adolescence that she still struggles to understand. I started with that character–Nora–and built the other aspects of the book (the friendship with Charlotte, Rose’s disappearance, the Time-Life books) around her.” Before the Peace Corps and South Africa, Emily worked as a lexicographer and an English teacher. While she grew up in Connecticut, today she lives with her husband, who served with her in . . .

Words of Writers’ Wisdom

Aug 09 2011

The current issue of the Authors Guild Bulletin has a column, “Along Publishers Row” by Campbell Geeslin that has a number of great comments and remarks that I want to share with all of the writers out there! We might find some wisdom here. For example: Jessamyn West believed “Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.” F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.” Raymond Carver had this to say: “I made the story just as I made a poem, one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story–and I knew it was my story, the one I had been wanting to write.” The late Sinclair Lewis said, “It is . . .

RPCV Arrested in Connecticut for sexually abusing children in South Africa

Aug 07 2011

Peace Corps condemns alleged abuse by volunteer By JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN | Associated Press The Peace Corps said Friday that a former volunteer’s alleged sexual abuse of young girls in South Africa is “reprehensible” and the agency supports the vigorous prosecution of the case. Thirty-one-year-old Jesse Osmun of Milford was arrested Thursday in Connecticut on federal charges of sexually abusing children at a center in Greytown, which helps AIDS victims. Authorities say Osmun molested five children under the age of 6, some multiple times, and gave them candy during a period between 2010 and this year. Mr. Osmun is charged with a shocking breach of the power entrusted to him as a Peace Corps volunteer,” Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said upon Osmun’s arrest. The Peace Corps said it was made aware of the allegations after Osmun resigned in May. The humanitarian agency, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, said it . . .

Groups, Batches, and Pods

Jul 29 2011

As a Volunteer in Colombia when I was asked by a Colombian, “Quien es?” I would reply “Cuerpo de Paz.” When asked the same question by an American, I would say “Colombia XI.” Those were all the IDs I needed; designations I was proud to claim, then and now. One of the unique features of Peace Corps administration that gets too little attention is the organization of Volunteers into groups. Volunteers apply individually, are accepted individually and serve individually; but in between, they are “staged,” “trained,” and “sworn in,” as a member of a group. Everyone in the group goes to the same country; has the same starting and terminating date; usually the same program description; attends classes together; and serves under the same Host Country management. The groups are named by country and then by number; the numbers are sequential within each country, except when they are not.* Taken all . . .

Review of Lawrence Lihosit's Years On and Other Travel Essays

Jul 28 2011

Years On and Other Travel Essays Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975–77) iUniverse May 2011 211 pages Paperback $18.95 Reviewed by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000–02; Madagascar 2002–03) AFTER READING LARRY LIHOSIT’S COLLECTION, Years On and Other Travel Essays, I find myself scratching my head as to why the author subtitled his book “travel essays,” for it was certainly the wrong phrase to use. While these twelve well-crafted and engaging essays — spanning some thirty years of his adventures and work in such places as Mexico, Honduras, and Bolivia — do take us to many foreign locales, to label Lihosit’s experiences as”travel” would be to denigrate what he’s accomplished. Let Theroux claim the word “travel,” for that’s what he does: sips coffee on trains while scrimshawing cribbed and crotchety notes. Lihosit, on the other hand, should have used something like Essays of Reckless Immersion, Essays of Fomenting Revolution, Essays of Giving . . .

Tony D'Souza has something to say about rape in the Peace Corps!

Jul 28 2011

[A thoughtful comment from Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000-02; Madagascar 2002-03)] This drivel was posted by an Illuminati-obsessed conspiracy theory website which regularly publishes anti-Semitic material. The “Great Peace Corps Rape Witch-Hunt of 2011” is revealing its true colors. There is no doubt that Peace Corps Administration mistreated Volunteer rape victims and should be held accountable. But no matter what improvements Peace Corps Admin makes, rape is a crime that happens everywhere, in every country, to every race. No military, police, or governmental force anywhere in the history of the world has been able to stop it. According to a February, 2010 NPR report, research funded by the US Department of Justice says that 1 in 5 US college women will be raped. That means that at a theoretical US university with 8500 students (roughly the number of current Peace Corps Volunteers), where half the students are women (4250), 850 will . . .

Should the Peace Corps be privatized?

Jul 27 2011

Walton Family Foundation Gifts Teach for America $49.5 Million The Walton Family Foundation is run by Walmart founder Sam Waltonâ€TMs three children. First Posted: 7/27/11 09:04 AM ET Updated: 7/27/11 09:14 AM ET NEW YORK — The Walton Family Foundation announced a $49.5 million grant Wednesday to help double the size of Teach for America’s national teaching corps over the next three years. Teach for America is a program for recent college graduates who sign up to teach in some of the nation’s most under-served schools for a period of two years. The Walton Foundation’s gift marks the single largest private donation to Teach for America in the organization’s more than 20-year history. Later this fall, the organization will send 9,300 corps members to 43 regions across the country. Over the next few years, half of the Walton Family Foundation grant will go towards growing that teaching corps to 15,000 by . . .

Another view of the value of the Peace Corps

Jul 27 2011

“Conquer” by Love rather than Force of Arms America Needs to Replace the “Pentagon Approach” with the “Peace Approach” by Sherwood Ross If the United States attempted to “conquer” by love rather than force of arms, it might be respected, not reviled, globally. If the White House took an altruistic approach in foreign affairs—that is, if it rejected greed, exploitation, and war in favor of fair play, charity, and humanitarian assistance—it might enjoy such prosperity as exists beyond the dreams of its misguided rulers. It is no naïve suggestion to urge the Congress to transpose the budgets and numbers of personnel of the Pentagon and the Peace Corps. Naïve is how one would define the Pentagon’s 10-year-long failure to conquer Afghanistan by force of arms. Naïve is how the Pentagon can claim the U.S. has improved Iraq when that country far is worse off today than when the Pentagon first . . .

What is being said on the Internet about the Peace Corps

Jul 27 2011

Peace Corps Puts Volunteers in Danger July 25, 2011 (left, Peace Corps Volunteer Kate Puzey, 24, was murdered in March 2009 in Benin.) Idealistic young Americans are cannon fodder for the Illuminati-run peace corps. by David Richards (henrymakow.com) Henry Makow is the author of A Long Way to go for a Date. He received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto. henry@savethemales.ca. JFK founded the Peace Corps program 50-years-ago proclaiming it a charitable organization designed to encourage mutual understanding between Americans and other countries. In reality, the Peace Corps is a military organization serving the Illuminati. It sends Westerners into third-world countries to act as NWO “change agents,” Westernizing locals. Another function is to give murderous US foreign policy a charitable face. Since its beginning, 200,000 US volunteers have served the organization in 139 nations. There are now 8,650 Americans working in 77 countries in Asia, Africa, the . . .

Kevin Lowther Writes Book on Sierra Leonean John Kizell

Jul 27 2011

Every once in a while the Peace Corps produces a wonderful writer, and one of them is Kevin Lowther (Sierra Leone 1963-65). He is a former PC/HQ staffer, newspaper editor, and student of the agency who has written on African issues for the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor; he is also the coauthor of Keeping Kennedy’s Promise: The Peace Corps,Unmet Hope of the New Frontier, published in 1978. I first met Kevin through the Volunteer in-country newsletter he edited while a PCV in Sierra Leone. I believe the newsletter was called The Tilley Lamp, and it would arrive (for some unknown reason!) in the Peace Corps Office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It was well written, informative, funny, and the best PCV newsletter produced during those early years of the agency. Now he has a new book The African American Odyssey of John Kizell: A South Carolina Slave Returns to Fight the Slave Trade in His African Homeland. (Kevin . . .

Gallery Cat Editor Jason Boog (Guatemala 2000-02) says…..Sue Fondrie Has Written the Worst Sentence of 2011

Jul 26 2011

By Jason Boog on July 26, 2011 5:14 PM University of Wisconsin Oshkosh assistant professor Sue Fondrie has written the worst sentence of 2011, winning the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with the world’s worst opening to an imaginary novel. Here is the winning (?) sentence: “Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.” This prize is part of an annual bad writing competition that began in 1982 at San Jose State University. The contest was named after Victorian novelist Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton an author famous for writing the opening line: “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Researching RPCVs For An Academic Study

Jul 25 2011

[I received this special academic request for help from Nan Cowardin-Lee in California. Take a look, and see if you have time to help her in her research. Nan is located in Berkeley, attending the university’s branch in San Franciso. ] My name is Nan Cowardin-Lee. I am a PhD student at Alliant International University in organizational psychology. I am conducting research on value and moral challenges experienced by individuals who have lived or studied abroad for more than 6 months. The research has a generational comparison component. Therefore, I am interested in obtaining information from individuals of all generations, and, in particular, I would appreciate hearing from individuals born before 1946. The research data is collected in two parts. In the first part, an on-line survey asks participants to report on a general or specific incident that challenged them while living in a culture that was not their own. A series . . .

A Writer Writes: Peace Corps Training, 1968

Jul 24 2011

Peace Corps Training, 1968 By Jerr Boschee (India 1968-70) January, 2011 . . . I’m listening to a series of Donovan songs from my iTunes archive and it’s carrying me back to my room in an Indian village long ago. I had a three-inch reel-to-reel tape of his music that I played over and over again on a clunky, battery-operated, table-top recorder, along with a dozen or so other tapes I’d inherited from a Peace Corps Volunteer who’d finished his term of service long before. The quality wasn’t great, but the music sure was: Richie Havens, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Simon & Garfunkel, Ray Charles, Mamas & Papas, Peter Paul & Mary . . . and of course The Doors. June, 1968 . . . A cluster of huts and small buildings in a campground in Temescal Canyon, nothing but craggy hillsides between the compound and the . . .