Peace Corps at 50 – serie

Africa is a complicated place, and the Peace Corps Volunteers who have worked in 43 African nations have seen it all: from public executions to public celebrations to life in a time of AIDS. This heartfelt collection is the first of its kind to chronicle 50 years of Peace Corps service. Stories range from poignant to hilarious, involve political intrigue and cultural missteps, illuminating the joys and agony of volunteering abroad and representing the United States in the process.Sixty stories provide a broad overview and give readers a glimpse into the life and times of these brave volunteers, who each learned at least one new language and went to work in the villages and cities from Morocco to South Africa. They worked hard, too. But in these stories you will see that they also danced, faced death by elephant, and witnessed unbearably grim events. One is admired for her “big butt,” another reminded that he had taught proper police procedure in a time of civil unrest. Saying “I was there” is sometimes a bittersweet declaration.

Take some Inca, Aztec, Maya, and Moche, mix in Spanish, French, English, Dutch and Danish, stir it to the rhythmic beat of Africa and what do you get? A zesty brew, expressed in a callaloo soup of language, food, music, and religion. So much passion, so much sorrow. What seems familiar in the Americas often is not. For Peace Corps Volunteers, there is nothing to do but learn the language, roll up their sleeves, and get busy working alongside strangers who steal their hearts away. These stories take you on overland journeys to the Amazon Basin, into a village in Honduras terrorized by insurgent forces, and to the ball fields of Ecuador for an unusual game of "beisbol."

From land-locked Afghanistan to the smallest of islands in the far reaches of the Pacific Ocean, stories by peace Corps Volunteers from this region come from (mostly) Hindu India—1,269,210 square miles worth of democracy patched together from princely states—Confucian Korea, Muslim Indonesia and Buddhist Thailand.Imagine delivering a baby—with the help of the handy Peace Corps first aid kit—on a rust bucket of a passenger ship in the Pacific or practicing agriculture with armed Pathan farmers in the Pashtun region of Pakistan. How about trekking into the far reaches of Afghanistan to inoculate women and children for small pox, or returning 25 years later to your school in India to find that, yes, your students do remember you? These stories say. “I Was There.”