Search Results For -Mad Woman Part Six

No Ghosts in the Graveyard: The Life-Time Adventures of A Small- Town Oregon Boy by Bob Crites (Brazil 1964-66) Independently Published 2021 428 pages $12.99 (Paperback)     When Bob Crites was in the seventh grade in Drain, his social studies teacher Art Biederman showed the class pictures of his summer travels. It sparked what would become a lifelong passion for helping children in other countries. Crites would grow up to help feed school lunches to children in Brazil, form a charity to provide scholarships for children in Brazil and Tanzania, and bring one young athlete to Oregon, where she trained for the Olympics. Crites recently self-published his memoirs, “No Ghosts in the Graveyard: The Life-Time Adventures of a Small-Town Oregon Boy” on Amazon. Crites was born in 1940 in Drain on a farm that had been in his family since his maternal great grandfather Augustus Hickethier founded it in . . .

One Morning in September by Edwin Jorge (Jamaica 1979–81) Edwin Jorge was the Regional Manager of the New York Peace Corps Office and was at work in Building # 6 of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The building was destroyed when the North Tower collapsed. At a commemoration service held at Headquarters in Peace Corps/Washington a year after 9/11 Edwin spoke about the attack and what happened to the Peace Corps Office. His comments follow. ONE YEAR AGO TODAY, on the morning of September 11, 2001, I sat down at my office desk and turned on my computer. As the computer booted to life, I glanced up and looked out of the windows of my office on the sixth floor of the Customs House in the heart of the financial district of New York. From where I sat, I could see the corner of Tower One of . . .

Thanks for the ‘heads up’ from Bill Preston (Thailand 1977-80)   Writing didn’t serve the purpose I wanted it to, which was to fix the fundamentally broken relationship between myself and other people. By Kristen Roupoenian (Kenya 2003-05) The New Yorker, August 5, 2021   My favorite literary magazine is one you probably haven’t heard of. It’s called Resonance, and it’s a small annual publication featuring a mixture of fiction, poetry, and art. Although a new issue of Resonance has appeared every year since at least the early nineteen-nineties, I have read only six of them, the ones published between 1993 and 1999. I have those issues virtually memorized, as I reread the entirety of each issue, on average, once a year. I’ve probably read my favorite poems and stories in the magazine upward of a hundred times, so I think it’s safe to say that I’ve read the writing in Resonance more carefully than . . .

Appropriations Subcommittee calls for a $430.5 million budget for 2022 – an increase of 5 percent. It points to the first meaningful increase in funding in six years. “By Jonathan Pearson (UPDATE – June 28, 2021, 8:30 PM Eastern Time): On a voice vote, the House Appropriations Subcommittee for State/Foreign Operations approved a $62.2 billion international affairs budget for Fiscal Year 2022. This represents a 12 percent, $6.7 billion increase over the current fiscal year. Included in this budget is $430.5 million for the Peace Corps, a $20 million increase over current funding. In brief remarks, Subcommittee Chairwoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) referenced the Peace Corps as one of several programs that will provide “needed humanitarian assistance” around the world. No amendments to the bill were made, but that could possibly change when the full Appropriations Committee considers this funding package on Thursday morning.”   Here is the earlier Report from the National Peace Corps . . .

    The Mending Fields by Bob Shacochis (Eastern Caribbean 1975–76)   I WAS ASSIGNED to the Island of Saint Kit in the West Indies. Once on an inter-island plane, I sat across the aisle from one of my new colleagues, an unfriendly, overserious young woman. She was twenty-four, twenty-five . . . we were all twenty-four, twenty-five. I didn’t know her much or like her. As the plane banked over the island, she pressed against the window, staring down at the landscape. I couldn’t see much of her face, just enough really to recognize an expression of pain. Below us spread an endless manicured lawn, bright green and lush of sugarcane, the island’s main source of income. Each field planted carefully to control erosion. Until that year, Saint Kit’s precious volcanic soil had been bleeding into the sea; somehow they had resolved the problem. The crop was now being . . .

He went — in the way the Peace Corps rolls the dice of our lives — to Africa as a teacher. “My schoolroom is on the Great Rift, and in this schoolroom there is a line of children, heads shaved liked prisoners, muscles showing through their rags,” he wrote home in 1964. “These children appear in the morning out of the slowly drifting hoops of fog-wisp. It is chilly, almost cold. There is no visibility at six in the morning; only a fierce white-out where earth is the patch of dirt under their bare feet, a platform, and the sky is everything else.” How many of us stood in front of similar classrooms and saw those young faces arriving with the dawn? How many of us could have written the same sentiments — though not the same sentences — home? And how many of us wanted to be the writer . . .

  I Let me start with a quote from Gerard T. Rice’s book, The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps: In 1961 John F. Kennedy took two risky and conflicting initiatives in the Third World. One was to send five hundred additional military advisers into South Vietnam; by 1963 there would be seventeen thousand such advisers. The other was to send five hundred young Americans to teach in the schools and work in the fields of eight developing countries. These were Peace Corps Volunteers. By 1963 there would be seven thousand of them in forty-four countries. Vietnam scarred the American psyche, leaving memories of pain and defeat. But Kennedy’s other initiative inspired and continued to inspire, hope and understanding among Americans and the rest of the world. In that sense, the Peace Corps was his most affirmative and enduring legacy. Historical Framework Gerry Rice, in The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps, . . .

  by Hannah Gaber, USA Today Three women tell their stories of sexual assault while volunteering in the Peace Corps, and how the agency’s bungled response compounded their trauma.   Emma Tremblay, then a 25-year-old Peace Corps volunteer from Seattle, was 4,000 miles from home on an exam table in Ecuador. A physician selected by the Peace Corps loomed over her and firmly placed his hand on her shoulder to keep her still. “Do you feel good?” he asked, then leaned in, pressing his erection against her arm. Tremblay feared he might go further. Half undressed, in pain and unsure whether she could fight him off, she stared him down. I’m fine, she said. When he backed away, Tremblay gathered her things and rushed onto Quito’s crowded streets. Then, another violation of her trust: The Peace Corps had been warned the doctor was a threat. Ashley Lipasek, a fellow volunteer, told . . .

  It’s a fact of Peace Corps life that a volunteer must learn to get by in a world not his own, not her own. It’s never a perfect adjustment, not a completely comfortable fit. Often you make mistakes, some of which can be serious. Others are hilarious. (Once, at the dinner table with our training family in Asunción, as we were learning Spanish, my wife, Anne, commented that she had been taking notes in her diarrhea, which completely cracked people up and may still rank near the top in their hall of conversational fame.) In our case, our Peace Corps experience of feeling our way, doing our best to understand what was going on, turned out to be good practice for the foreign service, which we joined a few years after returning from Paraguay. Our Peace Corps country was nothing like Bolivia, or Honduras, or Spain, despite the common . . .

    Mr. Tidy by Mark Jacobs (Paraguay 1978-80 • The first time Dean Birch watched Mr. Tidy rise up out of the swimming pool in the back yard, he thought it was odd. He assumed he had not read the manual thoroughly, another sin of omission Nancy could hold against him. Once the robot cleaned the pool to its own digitally imprinted standard, it climbed the steps, motored over to the flagstones, and waited for the command to clean again. Whoever had the marketing contract for Convenience Machines, which made the robot, had blown it. They should have advertised the self-parking feature. Dean was at the breakfast nook with a mugful of coffee. He stared through the sun-flooded window at Mr. Tidy; robot rest. He was glad they had sprung for the thing. Who had time to clean the pool? Nancy had left for work. She must have turned . . .