Mongolia

1
RPCV Darlene Grant (Cambodia) now shaping Peace Corps efforts on diversity, equity and inclusion
2
Once Again: Five Great Short Stories About the Peace Corps Experience
3
RPCV Writer, Publisher & Southerner Jason P. Reed (Mongolia)

RPCV Darlene Grant (Cambodia) now shaping Peace Corps efforts on diversity, equity and inclusion

By Adrienne Frank June 23, 2023 • Darlene Grant became a Peace Corps volunteer at 49; 11 years later, she joined the agency’s top ranks. In seventh grade, with a bully on her heels, Darlene Grant slipped through a door at her Cleveland junior high school and found herself in the music room, staring at a line of students. Wanting to avoid a beating, she got in line, “like I was supposed to be there,” she said, and the music teacher handed her the last instrument in the closet: a bassoon. “That moment when you realize you’re where the universe needs you to be? That was one of them,” said Darlene Grant, PhD (SAS ’84). Today, Grant is senior advisor to Peace Corps Director Carol Spahn, with a mission to cultivate diversity in the worldwide agency and help remove barriers for underrepresented volunteers and staff and create a more just and equitable . . .

Read More

Once Again: Five Great Short Stories About the Peace Corps Experience

Five Great Short Stories About the Peace Corps Experience   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 . . .

Read More

RPCV Writer, Publisher & Southerner Jason P. Reed (Mongolia)

  Jason P. Reed came of age in Eunice, Louisiana, in the 1980s. He studied English at what was then the University of Southwestern Louisiana in the mid 90s and worked as a technical writer in Houston after graduation, when it became apparent his masterpiece comic novel, which remains unfinished on a floppy disc somewhere, would not write itself. A short while later, he joined the Peace Corps and spent the turn of the century in Mongolia, (1999-01) having a really good time. Returning to the U.S., Jason sidestepped a historically rigorous screening process and was commissioned into the Air Force. Two decades later, he remains in the public sector, though he has long since traded in the uniform for a sport coat. Eager to accelerate into the next stage in his life, Jason started New Bayou Books in 2020 and wrote his first two novels, both set in South-Louisiana, . . .

Read More

Copyright © 2022. Peace Corps Worldwide.