Ethiopia

In 2003 Carol Beddo (Ethiopia 1964-66) returned to Bahar Dar, Ethiopia, her Peace Corps village on the shores of Lake Tana, and overwhelmed with memories of being a PCV teacher there in the mid-sixties she began to wonder: Who was that young woman? While writing about herself as a young woman, she came to understand how the Peace Corps experience provided a foundation for the rest of her life as a community activist and as a consultant in public policy, political campaigns, and elections. Since this 2003 visit to Ethiopia, she has continued to write about her experiences in the Peace Corps and numerous essays have been published in the San Jose Mercury News, as well as in several travel anthologies. Two of her essays were recently selected Solas Award winners by Travelers’ Tales and they can be read at  http://BestTravelWriting.com on the following links: http://www.besttravelwriting.com/btw-blog/great-stories/travel-memoir-gold-winner-fear-and-bitter-justice/ http://www.besttravelwriting.com/btw-blog/great-stories/my-ethiopian-tent/ Congratulations Carol for this, and for all your writing . . .

JUST NORTH OF THE PROVINCIAL CAPITAL of Dessie in the Debub Wollo Zone of Ethiopia is a small road-side town called Haik (or Hayq), wedged between low range hills and Lake Hayq. It is famous for being the home of the Coptic Church’s Istifanos Monastery, and for being the Peace Corps site where Tom Weck taught 7th and 8th grade English and math from 1965 to 1967. Tom was the only PCV in Haik, though a dozen or more PCVs (including his future wife) were stationed in Dessie, 28 kilometers south on an all-weather gravel road that bisected, north and south, the Empire of Emperor Haile Selassie. Haik was a town through which everyone — from missionaries, tourists, lorry drivers, and the Ethiopian government officials — raced. There was nothing in Haik, beyond the monastery and a 1930s Italian graveyard for the bodies of dead Blackshirt soldiers of the brief . . .

Next month Stan Meisler’s book on the Peace Corps When The World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years will be published by Beacon Press, but you can order it now at www.amazon.com (be the first RPCV on your block to own a copy!) We will also have a review of the book next month done by Robert Textor who was an early consultant to the Peace Corps, and editor of one of the first studies about the agency, Cultural Frontiers of the Peace Corps, published in 1966 by MIT Press. Meanwhile….For those who don’t know, Stan Meisler…was a reporter for AP who came late to the Peace Corps.  “I was not there at the madcap, exciting, glorious beginning. I started my work at Peace Corps headquarters just after the election of Lyndon B. Johnson to a full term as president, a year after the assassination of . . .

A few years ago when I first met Mark Jacobs (Paraguay 1978-80) he reminded me of Thomas Wolfe (the real Tom Wolfe of Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again) — big and slightly ungainly with a quiet brooding presence, a thick wedge of dark hair and a massive face. A hulk of a guy. There is something of Wolfe in Mark’s prose, the luxury of his language and the way Mark fills a page with wonderful details, but Jacobs is a much more disciplined writer, and more inventive. We met in Union Station in Washington, D.C. where I had been waiting for him in that beautiful, vaulted marble main lobby and he came in out of the sunlight of the city, a towering figure and I thought: now there’s a guy who looks like a writer! And truly he is one. He joins a small band of first-rate intellects . . .

Dick Lipez (Ethiopia 1962-64) who uses the pen name Richard Stevenson has a new Donald Strachey novel coming out in September. This one is titled, The 38 Million  Dollar Smile. Lipez, who has written for such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Newsweek and The Washington Post, and more importantly, was a Peace Corps evaluator in the early days when Charlie Peters ran that division, writes now in western Massachusetts  and lives with his spouse, sculptor Joe Wheaton. Lipez has written ten titles in this Strachey series, and this novel is based on Dick’s recent trip to Asia. The plot centers on Gary Griswold, the hapless gadfly scion of Albany old money, late of Key West, who goes missing, and his ex-wife, now married to Gary’s brother, wants to know what’s happened to him–not to mention his 38 million dollars in cash. She calls Don Strachey, Albany’s only gay PI.  The rest, as they say, . . .

I could think of no better to review The Man Who Killed Osama by George P. Matheos than RPCV Darcy Munson Meijer. Darcy currently lives with her family in the United Arab Emirates and teaches English at  Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. • The Man Who Killed Osama by George P. Matheos (Ethiopia 1963–65) iUniverse October 2008 256 pages $26.95 Reviewed by Darcy Munson Meijer (Gabon 1982-84) I liked this lively book, though Matheos’ style took getting used to. Some clever American writer had to take on the woeful story of America’s obsession with Osama bin Laden, and Matheos does it with humor and suspense. The Man Who Killed Osama follows Jake and Jo Ann, naïve newlyweds, from Chicago to Beirut and back, as they become involved in tracking down America’s Public Enemy #1. On the way, Matheos weaves subplots that add depth and suspense. Matheos opens the story with one of Jake’s nightmares, . . .