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Peace Corps Writers — November 2000
PeaceCorpsWriters.org receives 25K grant
WE ARE PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE that The Florence and John Schumann Foundation has given our on-line newsletter: PeaceCorpsWriters.org and its founding organization, RPCV Writers & Readers, a grant of $25,000 to organize a series of readings by Peace Corps writers during the Peace Corps 40th anniversary year of 2001. Working with the eleven regional recruiting offices of the Peace Corps and the National Peace Corps Association (NPCA), readings by RPCVs will be held throughout the year in bookstores, high schools, and colleges across the United States. It is our belief that through these readings we will educate Americans about the developing world, and help encourage people to volunteer, not only for the Peace Corps, but within their communities. Grant money will be used for the following expenses:
- Honoraria for Peace Corps writers.
- Travel & hotel expenses for writers.
- Placement of ads in school and local papers.
- Part-time salary for coordinator working out of the NPCA.
We are establishing a special page (The 40th — Celebrating a Peace Corps Anniversary through the Written Word) on our website that will have the most current information to update everyone as to where readings will take place and who will be reading. To get to it easily, click on “The 40th” logo in the upper left-hand column of our home page.
If you would like to help host a reading and/or would like to read, please email me at: jpcoyne@cnr.edu.
For many years, we have hosted readings and writers’ panels at each of the RPCV conferences, and we are extremely grateful to the Schumann Foundation for their support of this new expanded venture by our small organization as we continue to support and promote writers who served as Peace Corps Volunteers.
Another generous gift
We are also happy to announce having received a gift of $500 from Ted Stanley, a long time supporter of the activities of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers.
Everyone has a postcard tale to tell
Following up on the To Preserve and to Learn article “The Infamous Peace Corps Postcard” we published in January of 2000, Karl Luntta (Botswana 1978-80) writes:
I, too, was involved in a postcard incident. It was so boneheaded and obviously insensitive on my part that I later used the incident in cross-cultural training exercises while on Peace Corps staff — keeping the postcard writer anonymous of course.
I’d found a postcard of a Cape buffalo drinking at a veld pond, flies on his eyes and water dripping from his bovine lips, and wrote on the back of the card, something like, “Here’s my headmaster at the local watering hole after a long staff meeting.” Yeah, yeah, go ahead. It was unkind, racially loaded (what was I thinking?), and I was stupid and young, and even more stupid when I incomprehensibly sent it through the school post bag.
Of course the secretaries read it, and passed it along to the HM, who then sent it to the Ministry of Education. It was the first and only time during my Volunteer career that I actually met a government minister, so that was interesting at any rate. The upshot was that some disparaging comments were entered into my teacher file, and my relationship with the HM degenerated into a vortex of suspicion and cynicism.
Of course, the Peace Corps/Botswana Directors, Norman and Elsa Rush, were informed about the whole thing as well. They called me what I was — which was very dumb, and then the whole thing passed into history. Except when I used it in training exercises.
In our November 2000 issue
Talking with . . .
This issue we interviewed Jeffrey Tayler, who served in Morocco as a Peace Corps Volunteer and later was on the Peace Corps staff in Eastern Europe. He lives now in Russia and is a frequent contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, as well as many other national magazines. We interviewed Jeff about his new book, Facing the Congo about traveling down that river by piroque.
The Spy Who Was a PCV
Lee Howard (Colombia 1972–1974) was a CIA agent who betrayed his country’s secrets and escaped to Moscow in 1985. He was also the first CIA defector to the Soviet Union. Before that, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic and then in Colombia. Read about him in “A Closer Look.”
Travel
We have in this issue another wonderful piece by Mike Tidwell (Zaire 1985–87) from his new collection of travel essays In the Mountains of Heaven: Tales of Adventure on Six Continents published by Lyons Press. This travel piece fits nicely into the Holiday Season — it’s his tale of a “Christmas Miracle in the Andes.”
Letter Home
Kathleen Coskran (Ethiopia 1965–67) has written movingly in fiction and non-fiction of her life in Ethiopia and Kenya where she was a Volunteer and a Peace Corps staff wife. But perhaps she never wrote with as much need and urgency and love as she did in 1966 when she wrote home to her mother and described one of the most horrific accidents to befall a group of Peace Corps Volunteers. Her letter is reprinted here in full.
A Writer Writes
In this issue we have a poem by Sheila Crofut who served in the Czech Republic from 1994 to 1996 and taught English and edited environmental documents for the Ministry of Environment’s International Relations Section. Today she lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington and teaches writing and literary analysis at the college and university levels.
And much, much more . . .
Check out two new items in Resources — on the Links page we have a new listing of where to look on the web for writer sites, and on the Opportunities for Writers page how to get published in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Our Peace Corps History takes us all back to the very early days of the agency when Volunteers prepared for their overseas assignments by undergoing Outward Bound Training. Besides all that there are new books reviews, new books, and simply news in Literary Type. See Current Issue to read it all.
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