Search Results For -Eres Tu

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24 New books by Peace Corps writers — July & August 2020
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Bob Frank (Nepal) retires from Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management
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George Packer (Togo) . . . “This Is How Biden Loses”
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See the Documentary, Support the Museum
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Tim McCollum (Madagascar) builds a chocolate factory
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THE UPSHAWS OF COUNTY LINE: An American Family by Richard S. Orton (Liberia)
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Review — EVERY HILL A BURIAL PLACE by Peter H. Reid (Tanzania)
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Review — OWLS OF THE EASTERN ICE by Jonathan Slaght (Russia)
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Review — MARK TWAIN, DETECTIVE by Joseph Theroux (Western Samoa)
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2020 Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Peace Corps Memoir — WOVEN by Nancy Heil Knor (Belize)
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2020 Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Travel Book — EUROPE BY BUS by Steve Kaffen (Russia)
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2020 Peace Corps Writers’ Rowland Sherman Award for Best Book of Photography — ALTAMONT 1969 by Bill Owens (Jamaica)
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2020 Peace Corps Writers Moritz Thomsen Award for Best Book about the Peace Corps Experience — ERADICATING SMALLPOX IN ETHIOPIA edited by James W. Skelton, Jr. et al
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David Jarmul (Moldova) “When COVID-19 Forced Peace Corps Volunteers to Evacuate”
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Colin Rule (Eritrea) — “Separating the People from the Problem”

24 New books by Peace Corps writers — July & August 2020

  To purchase any of these books from Amazon.com — CLICK on the book cover, the bold book title, or the publishing format you would like — and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance from your purchase that will help support the site and the annual Peace Corps Writers awards. We now include a one-sentence description — provided by the author — for the books listed here in hopes of encouraging readers  1) to order the book and 2) to volunteer to review it. See a book you’d like to review for Peace Corps Worldwide? Send a note to Marian at marian@haleybeil.com, and we’ll send you a copy along with a few instructions. • Mystics and Warriors Michael Ellis Banister (Ethiopia 1972–74) Independent March 2020 179 pages $10.99 (paperback) When Shamsuddin, the “Mage of Malta” encounters five young merchants from Persia, neither he nor the young men have any idea of the conflict their . . .

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Bob Frank (Nepal) retires from Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management

  Robert H. Frank (Nepal 1966–68) taught his first college course before graduating from Georgia Tech in 1966. A Cornell professor and influential teacher of economics since 1972, Frank retired from Cornell on July 1, 2020, after more than a half-century of teaching. A pioneer and champion of behavioral economics, Frank has written and spoken extensively in his many books, essays, and media interviews about moral sentiments, positional goods, expenditure cascades, the ever-widening income gap, the role of luck in our lives, and, most recently, the power of behavioral contagion. •   Bob Frank’s Legacy as a Teacher, Behavioral Economist, Economic Naturalist, and Author by Janice Endresen Ethical Systems August 25, 2020     In 1966, when Robert H. Frank arrived in Nepal to teach high-school math and science as a Peace Corps volunteer, he was surprised at how quickly he felt comfortable in his modest new home, even though conditions . . .

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George Packer (Togo) . . . “This Is How Biden Loses”

George Packer (Togo 1982-83) Staff writer for The Atlantic   Here is a prediction about the November election: If Donald Trump wins, in a trustworthy vote, what’s happening this week in Kenosha, Wisconsin, will be one reason. Maybe the reason. And yet Joe Biden has it in his power to spare the country a second Trump term. Events are unfolding with the inevitable logic of a nightmare. A white police officer shoots a Black man as he’s leaning into a car with his three sons inside — shoots him point-blank in the back, seven times, “as if he didn’t matter,” the victim’s father later says. If George Floyd was crushed to death by depraved indifference, Jacob Blake is the object of an attempted execution. Somehow, he survives — but his body is shattered, paralyzed from the waist down, maybe for life. Kenosha explodes in rage, the same rage that’s been igniting around the . . .

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See the Documentary, Support the Museum

  The Museum of the Peace Corps Experience will host a screening of “A Towering Task,” the award-winning Peace Corps documentary, viewable September 18 – 30, 2020. Income from ticket sales will allow us to create Museum exhibits next year during the 60thAnniversary of Peace Corps. Please help us get the word out. Distribute this message as widely as possible. Help us expand public awareness of the Peace Corps and its history-making impact. By selling tickets for an online showing, Cinema 21 theater in Portland, Oregon will donate all its earnings to the Museum. Ticket purchases will begin after September 1. Then you’ll receive another message including links to purchase $10 tickets from Cinema 21 for online streaming. The message will also invite viewers to a Zoom panel discussion on September 30 with Alana DeJoseph, documentary Producer, Glenn Blumhorst, President, National Peace Corps Association, and other returned Peace Corps Volunteers. It’s a win-win proposition—but . . .

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Tim McCollum (Madagascar) builds a chocolate factory

  Breaking the mold: How Beyond Good is reinventing the chocolate business   Building a chocolate factory has been part of Tim McCollum’s  (Madagascar 1999-2011) plan since he founded Beyond Good, formerly Madécasse, in 2008. On its own that’s not an easy feat, but the location for the company’s first state-of-the-art production facility added another layer of difficulty. Beyond Good set up shop in Madagascar, where it sources rare, wonderfully fruity Criollo cacao directly from farmers. Though Africa — West Africa, in particular — supplies 70 percent of the world’s cocoa, the “statistical equivalent of 0 percent” of the world’s chocolate is produced there, McCollum says. There are several reasons for that, ranging from a lack of infrastructure, the need to ship and install manufacturing equipment, employee training, and ultimately, the distribution of profits. “They all add up to it being a very difficult proposition,” McCollum says. “But creating serious value . . .

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THE UPSHAWS OF COUNTY LINE: An American Family by Richard S. Orton (Liberia)

    Guss, Felix, and Jim Upshaw founded the community of County Line in the 1870s in northwest Nacogdoches County, in deep East Texas.  As with hundreds of other relatively autonomous black communities created at that time, the Upshaws sought a safe place to raise their children and create a livelihood during Reconstruction and Jim Crow Texas. In the late 1980s photographer, Richard Orton visited County Line for the first time and became aware of a world he did not know existed as a white man.  He met some remarkable people there who changed his life. The more than 50 duotone photographs and text convey the contemporary experience of growing up in a “freedom colony.” Covering a period of twenty-five years, photographer Richard Orton juxtaposes his images with text from people who grew up in and have remained connected to their birthplace.  Thad Sitton’s foreword sets the community in historical . . .

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Review — EVERY HILL A BURIAL PLACE by Peter H. Reid (Tanzania)

  Every Hill a Burial Place: The Peace Corps Murder Trial in East Africa By Peter H. Reid (Tanzania 1964-66) University of Kentucky Press 332 pages September 2020 $35.10 (Kindle); $36.95 (Hardcover) A review by John Ratigan (Tanzania 1964-66) • Fifty-four years ago, in March 1966, in a small village in Tanzania, a young American woman died when she fell from a rocky hill where she and her husband of 16 months were picnicking. Peverly Dennett Kinsey, known to everyone by the descriptive nickname of “Peppy,” was a Peace Corps upper primary school teacher from Riverside, Connecticut, who had met and married her husband, Bill Kinsey, also a PCV upper primary school teacher, while they were in Peace Corps training at Syracuse University. Peppy had graduated only a few months before from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Bill was a ‘64 graduate of Washington and Lee University. At first, . . .

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Review — OWLS OF THE EASTERN ICE by Jonathan Slaght (Russia)

  Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl By Jonathan Slaght (Russia 1999—02) Ferrar, Straus and Giroux August 2020 358 pages $28.00 (Hardcover)   Reviewed by Fuller Torrey, MD (Staff/Ethiopia 1964-66) For those of us whose Peace Corps experience involved villages in countries such as Bolivia, Ethiopia, India and Thailand, placing Peace Corps volunteers in Russia seems like a disconnect. But indeed between 1992 and 2003 722 Peace Corps volunteers served there, including Jonathan Slaght, the author of this most interesting book. He spent three years in Russia’s Far East, 4,000 miles from Moscow in remote villages, a full day’s drive north of Vladivostok. In fact, he was among the last volunteers to leave when Russia kicked the Peace Corps out after accusing it of using volunteers as spies. The only disappointing thing about this book is that the author writes almost . . .

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Review — MARK TWAIN, DETECTIVE by Joseph Theroux (Western Samoa)

  Mark Twain, Detective by Joseph Peter Theroux (Western Samoa 1975 – 78) Self Published 212 pages June 2020 $10.00 (paperback), $0.00 (Kindle)   Reviewed by Sue Hoyt Aiken (Ethiopia 1962-64)  • The author provides a look back to a period of history involving famous good guys and the famous not so good guys.  The Editors Note: Introductory is as interesting as the story itself leaving the reader eager to unearth more about Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson and the whole sugar-dominating force, the Speckles’ family. Their flamboyance is in stark contrast to the undercurrent of trafficking in human souls, opium and more. The mystery unfolds and plays out in Hawaii in the late 1800s when Twain sails to Hawaii to give a lecture. While a pandemic supposedly prevented him from coming ashore to deliver the lecture, materials later discovered would say otherwise. Did he join Lloyd Osborne, did he witness the Georgia . . .

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2020 Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Peace Corps Memoir — WOVEN by Nancy Heil Knor (Belize)

  Woven: A Peace Corps Adventure Spun with Faith, Laughter, and Love Nancy Heil Knor (Belize 1989-91) Peace Corps Writers November 5, 2019 322 pages $12.95 (paperback)   • Talking with Nancy Heil Knor (Belize), author of Woven an interview by Marian Haley Beil (Ethiopia 1962-64) Nancy, where and when did you serve in the Peace Corps? I had the privilege of serving in the village of San Pedro Columbia in Belize, Central America, from 1989–1991. I loved it! The village is inhabited by K’ekchi Mayan families who are mostly subsistence farmers. When I lived there, the population was about 1,000 people; it was one of the larger Mayan villages in the southernmost district of Belize. What was your Peace Corps project assignment? Originally, I was sent to the village to teach the villagers how to plant carrots in order to increase their intake of Vitamin A. Vitamin A helps prevent vision . . .

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2020 Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Travel Book — EUROPE BY BUS by Steve Kaffen (Russia)

  Europe By Bus: 50 Bus Trips and City Visits Steve Kaffen (Russia 1994-96) 371 pages SK Journeys Publisher May 2019 $16.00 (paperback)   Reviewed by Craig Storti (Morocco (1970-72) Europe by bus? Really? Does anyone travel by bus who doesn’t have to? Aren’t buses for commuters? OK, tour buses, for sure. But Steve Kaffen is not talking about tour buses; he’s talking about buses as in the way go to from one city to another—all across Europe, for heaven’s sake! Who would do that when you can take a nice, comfortable train? I was skeptical. Can you tell? But then I’m an American, and intercity bus travel is not nearly as common in the US; we have cars for that sort of thing. But one of the revelations in Kaffen’s book is how well-developed intercity bus travel is in Europe, within the same country and from one country to . . .

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2020 Peace Corps Writers’ Rowland Sherman Award for Best Book of Photography — ALTAMONT 1969 by Bill Owens (Jamaica)

  Rowland Scherman was the first photographer for the Peace Corps in 1961, documenting the work of Volunteers all over the world. His photos helped define the image of the agency we know today. He became a freelance photographer in 1963. His photographs have appeared in Life, Look, National Geographic, Time, Paris Match, and Playboy among many others.     Altamont 1969 Bill  Owens (Jamaica 1964–66), photographer Damiani Publisher May 2019 $26.99 (Hardcover)     On April 15th of 2019, The New York Times published he following article about Bill and photographing at Altamont: “50 Years After Altamont: The End of the 1960s.”   50 Years After Altamont: The End of the 1960s A reluctant rock concert attendee, Bill Owens nevertheless photographed the disastrous 1969 music festival Altamont and the close of an era. A half-century ago, 1969 capped a radical, idealistic decade that saw the rise of the hippie generation and the . . .

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2020 Peace Corps Writers Moritz Thomsen Award for Best Book about the Peace Corps Experience — ERADICATING SMALLPOX IN ETHIOPIA edited by James W. Skelton, Jr. et al

  THE PEACE CORPS EXPERIENCE AWARD was initiated in 1992, and it has been presented annually to a Peace Corps Volunteer or staff member, past or present for the best depiction of life in the Peace Corps — be it daily life, project assignment, travel, host country nationals, other Volunteers, readjustment. Initially entries were short works including personal essays, storys, novellas, poems, letters, cartoons, and songs. In 1997, this award was renamed to honor Moritz Thomsen (Ecuador 1965–67) whose Living Poor has been widely cited as an outstanding telling of the essence of the Peace Corps experience. Since 2009, memoirs are also considered for The Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award.   Eradicating Smallpox in Ethiopia: Peace Corps Volunteers’ Accounts of Their Adventures, Challenges and Achievements Editors: Gene L. Bartley (Ethiopia 1970–72, 1974–76), John Scott Porterfield (Ethiopia 1971–73), Alan Schnur (Ethiopia 1971–74), James W. Skelton, Jr. (Ethiopia 1970–72) Peace Corps Writers 486 . . .

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David Jarmul (Moldova) “When COVID-19 Forced Peace Corps Volunteers to Evacuate”

  How Volunteers over 50 learned the news and are feeling about it now By David Jarmul (Moldova 2016-18) nextavenue.com August 14, 2020   To do something meaningful Kamana Mathur (Nepal), who’s in her early 60s, had just arrived at her Peace Corps post in Nepal shortly before the end of her training when she was told she needed to return home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For the first time in its history, the Peace Corps was evacuating its volunteers worldwide. “I was busy chatting with my host family,” Mathur recalled. “Then my colleague called and told me we had to leave. I said, ‘You know, I just sat down to lunch.’” Mathur had left her federal job in Hawaii, she said, “to reinvent myself to do something really meaningful at this point in my life.” During her Peace Corps training in the Himalayas, she’d studied the local language and culture, used . . .

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Colin Rule (Eritrea) — “Separating the People from the Problem”

This article from Harvard’s “The Practice,” shines a light on ODR and its evolution using Colin Rule’s career as a guide. In building ODR systems for the world’s largest online marketplace and for court systems across the country, Rule’s career offers a window through which to observe and understand the larger ODR movement—a movement that is all the more important as the world grapples with the continued impacts of COVID-19.   Separating the People from the Problem The Rise of Online Dispute Resolution Colin Rule (Eritrea 1995–97) • When the Apple II was released in 1977, it was among the first computers marketed and mass-produced for businesses and individuals alike. Apple would later adopt the slogan “The computer for the rest of us,” hinting at its technology’s broad appeal among a nonexpert consumer base. It is fitting, then, that as a grade school student in 1980, Colin Rule first dabbled . . .

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