Welcome
- John Coyne and Marian Haley Beil are happy to present Peace Corps Worldwide, an online community and resource for Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs), Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs), their friends and families, and all who share a desire for international understanding. Peace Corps Worldwide is a project of the non-profit Peace Corps Fund, and is in no way associated with the Peace Corps.
100 Days (Or Less) Part Eleven: Day Six - Posted 11 hours ago to The Arts: On Writing and Publishing
Day Six The invention of movable type created opportunities for writers that could barely be imagined in Gutenberg's day. The opportunities that await writers in the near future are immeasurably greater. Â Jason Epstein, editor You need a strong protagonist regardless of what you are writing, a novel, memoir, or non-fiction. Most writers have a problem with creating a character who is larger than life, fully developed, and a consistent protagonist. For books of non-fiction, the larger than.. (Read More)
Review Of Cynthia Morrison Phoel (Bulgaria 1994-96) - Posted 12 hours ago to Peace Corps Writers
Reviewer Mark Brazaitis is the author of three books of fiction, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and Steal My Heart, a novel that won the Maria Thomas Fiction Award given by Peace Corps Writers. His latest book is The Other Language: Poems, winner of the 2008 ABZ Poetry Prize. His short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, Witness, Notre Dame Review, Confrontation,.. (Read More)
A Tale of Two Orphanages, Part 2: Kim Long - Posted 17 hours ago to Humor: Off the Matrix
My husband and I, both veterans, returned in 1999 to Viet Nam with a bike tour. In Hue, we hired two cyclos, bicycles with big seats welded on front, and set off for the Kim Long district. Thirty years ago, I was stationed in nearby Phu Bai, and spent days off at an orphanage in Kim Long run by Vietnamese nuns from a French missionary order. It was surely long gone, flattened by bombings or disbanded.. (Read More)
Peace Corps At Day One, # 9 - Posted 20 hours ago to John Coyne Babbles
The only RPCV book that focuses exclusively on Peace Corps Training--that I know about-- is Alan Weiss' (Nigeria 1963-64) High Risk/High Gain published in 1968 by St. Martin's Press. It is Alan's account of training at Columbia University in the summer of 1963. It is a funny, outrageous, and a sad book. In his book, Alan focuses on the elaborate system 'someone' at the Peace Corps had created, a series of rating from High Risk/Low Gain to Low Risk/High Gain. All of the PCVs in.. (Read More)
Who Dat? Or, My Day Too Will Come - Posted 20 hours ago to Homesteading: Starting from Scratch
New Orleans Saints win, and I have decided that since this is the first sporting event I have watched in over a decade, it will be a metaphor for my own forthcoming triumph. The Saints almost left New Orleans for good after Katrina. We had to beg them to stay, and finally they did. As a newcomer to NOLA I was disgusted how quickly they were ready to abandon ship. I must admit, I know.. (Read More)
How Proust can change YOUR LIFE--Seeing the world differently by reading outside of our field - Posted 1 day ago to You Call Yourself A Teacher?!
How Proust can change YOUR LIFE--Seeing the world differently by reading outside of our field When I studied to be a teacher in the sixties, MA candidates in teaching at many schools of education were required, both the institution and the state the teacher preparation institution was in, to take at least 3 courses outside their area of study. So whether you were going to teach science, ESOL, history, English, elementary school or math, you.. (Read More)
Review of RPCV Jesse Lonergan's Joe & Azat - Posted 1 day ago to Peace Corps Writers
Born in Manhattan, Ian Kreisberg is older than MTV but younger than Etch-A-Sketch, making him contemporary with Lite-Brite. Like his contemporary, Ian exists to entertain others; a skill he has been honing for over 2 decades. Ian is a calligrapher, graphic designer, comedian, and amateur maker of comics. He lectures on the subject of comics as a medium at colleges and art galleries. While he has never been in the Peace Corps, his best friends.. (Read More)
Peace Corps At Day One, # 8 - Posted 1 day ago to John Coyne Babbles
Early training for the Peace Corps--this was in 1961--was on college campuses like the University of Michigan, but for some Trainees it also meant "field training" in Puerto Rico, the Rocky Mountains, and other locations. The first Puerto Rico site ws located in the mountains south of Arecibo. This training came about, or so it seems, because Shriver in February and March of '61 reviewed the British Volunteer Service Overseas (VOS) program. These schools exposed their student to unexpected challenges and the.. (Read More)
What is the New Normal? - Posted 2 days ago to Your Money: Popular Freakonomics
Popular Economics Weekly What will economic growth be in 2010? Will it be enough to bring down the unemployment rate, for instance, or bring back the housing market? Does that mean we are really out of the Great Recession? Much of it may depend on how we feel about what has happened. There is talk of a ‘new normal’ growth rate that will.. (Read More)
100 Days (Or Less) Part Ten: Day Five - Posted 2 days ago to The Arts: On Writing and Publishing
Day Five You can never know enough about your characters. W. Somerset Maugham Get a stack of 5 X 7 cards and put each character's name at the top on a card. Next, think about the role each plays in your story, and what kind of person each is: age, education, place of birth, hot-headed, funny, fat, ugly. What are their quirks? Do they wash their hands 500 times a day? Do they hear voices? Are.. (Read More)
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Recent Comments
- Leo Cecchini: I bet the Saints to win the Superbowl last October at 13 to 1 when few believed they could do it. I will be celebrating the win at Mardi Gras this coming weekend. [more...]
- John Coyne: Leo--I think every group in those early years chaimed their Training Program was the worse ever! Not sure if we rank that high on the list. Hey, we got to go to the White House and meet Kennedy, that was something. John [more...]
- John Coyne: Mishelle--having been raised on a mid-west farm I know how it is to make a living from working the land, but whatever you do, even if you stop farming, keep writing! John [more...]
- Ghebre Selassie Mehreteab: In the summer of 1968 after graduating from High School in Asmara, Eritrea I was s elected to teach Amharic at the Peace Corps Training Program in the Virgin Islands. During my interview for the position, no one asked me if I spoke Amharic. The as [more...]
- charles Ipcar: I've always wonder who composed this Peace Corps training blues songs that was passed on to me in my training program: Anon Ethiopia IV, Salt Lake City 1964 Adapted by Charlie Ipcar, Ethiopia VI Tune: probably one of Bob Dylan's Peace Corps T [more...]
- Amy19: I think it's arresting, because it demonstrate a very academic-focussed attitude. Preserving the honestness of the academic system seems to be a lead, although intelligibly declare illegal reimbursed ads for such a service seems a flaccid response. W [more...]
- jorn: I am not so much interested in sport but fascinated by meaning of it. It gathers people, it gives people hope, it brings people together. That is a very fascinating aspect of sport that have no root in the hierarchy that our society is built up of to [more...]
- Dennis Grubb: May Alan Weiss he rest in Peace... I was an original High Risk/High Gain "selectee".. In fact, I had to write an essay during the final days of training on what I wanted achieve as a 20 year old , college drop during Peace Corps service. I was [more...]
- Leo Cecchini: John Coyne can confirm this, but my understanding is that our training program is considered to have been the worse one ever conducted. There we were, over 300 star struck "do-gooders" being "forged" into volunteer "wunderkind." And no one had a c [more...]
- Joey: Correction: Willie and Joe were the creation of the great Bill Maudlin. [more...]
- Joey: One of the most important and maybe deliberate or maybe inadvertent outcomes from the bizarre and horrific training process was the group bonding/cohension it generated. In country and for years later, the stories of those days kept us laughing and [more...]
- Joey: The SouthWest Research Institute at the University of New Mexico has archives from the training center. The materials include training documents as well as internal memos, correspondence between the field and the training center and much information [more...]
- Dennis Grubb: The University of New Mexico Latin America Training Center at the campus in Albuquerque also operated the "outward bound like" center in Taos, New Mexico at the D.H. Lawrence Ranch. The ranch was ceded to the Unversity by Lawrence widow , Freida . Th [more...]
- Rowland Scherman: This is all so cool. Where are you finding this stuff? I am sending you my PC at Day One essay under separate cover. [more...]
- martyganzglass: PC was still using psychologists in the "deselection"process in 1966 when we trained. We thought of our guy as pompous, heavy handed and incompetent. PC was also still using the FBI for back ground checks.Years later I filed for and received my FB [more...]
- Sabine K McNeill: Well written, Leo! Yes, the National Debt is little understood in its power to erode the value of national currencies and to undermine the power of governments by increasing the power of central banks. That's why I just started the blog on pu [more...]