Download or read book To Benin and Back written by Chris Starace and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2011-09-16 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just out of college seeking the adventure of his life and an opportunity to do good, Chris Starace joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Benin, West Africa for two years from 1995 to 1997. The challenge was great, and he was pushed to the limit in adapting to a starkly different culture while living on a meager $6 a day. He made many discoveries about himself, as well as an exotic land. Delving into the culture and creating strong relationships with the people led him to appreciate numerous aspects of Benin, while many outsiders are unable to see past its shortcomings. To Benin and Back recounts a variety of unique experiences from an insiders perspective such as living in a remote village, exploring the regional market, harrowing bush taxi rides, odd encounters with Voodoo, having a strange illness diagnosed by a very imaginative traditional healer, being stuck in a sandstorm in the Sahara desert, and humorous anecdotes about adapting to the Beninese culture, insects, snakes, domestic animals and children. When he returned to the United States, he was forced to reevaluate his own culture while dealing with severe reverse culture shock. Traveling back to Benin seven years later allowed him relive, reexamine and assess his long-term contribution.
Download or read book The Color of the Elephant written by Christine Herbert and published by Genz Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An outstanding new voice in memoir, Christine Herbert takes the reader on a "time-machine tour" of her Peace Corps volunteer service as a health worker and educator from 2004-2006 in Zambia. Rather than a retrospective, this narrative unfolds in the present tense, propelling the reader alongside the memoirist through a fascinating exploration of a life lived "off the grid." At turns harrowing, playful, dewy-eyed and wise, the author's heart and candor illuminate every chapter, whether she is the heroine of the tale or her own worst enemy. Even at her most petulant, the laugh-out-loud humor scuppers any "white savior" mentality and lays bare the undeniable humanity-and humility-of the storyteller. Through it all, an undeniable love for Zambia-its people, land and culture-shines through. A must-read for the armchair adventurer, a book about Zambia - a personal Peace Corps Memoir.
Download or read book The Early Years of Peace Corps in Afghanistan written by Frances Hopkins Irwin and published by . This book was released on 2014-02 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Early Years of Peace Corps in Afghanistan: A Promising Time, by Frances Hopkins Irwin and Will A. Irwin, February 2014 In 1962, nine U.S. Peace Corps volunteers arrived in Kabul. Half a century later, at a critical moment of transition in Afghanistan, this book describes what Peace Corps Volunteers learned during the Cold War about how diversity among peoples can be used to enrich cultures, rather than homogenize or destroy them. Before Peace Corps left Afghanistan in 1979, 1650 volunteers had experienced slices of a rapidly changing Afghanistan. This is the story of the first four years, how, under the guidance of first director Robert L Steiner, the volunteers learned to work within Afghan culture and overcame the initial skepticism of Afghans and the Kabul international community, and how by 1966 Peace Corps had grown from a cautious start with five English teachers, three nurses, and a mechanic all in Kabul to 200 volunteers working in all parts of Afghanistan. Fran and Will Irwin frame the story around conversations with Bob Steiner, who brought his ability to speak Persian and his experience growing up and working as a U.S. cultural affairs officer in Iran to building the Peace Corps program in Afghanistan. They draw on their own experience as volunteers, the recollections of other volunteers and staff members, and materials from personal and public records. The book includes 80 pages of writing by volunteers in Afghanistan for now hard-to-find 1960s publications as well as two dozen photographs and a discussion of sources. "The authors have prepared a book of historic significance for the Peace Corps." Foreword by Saif R. Samady, former Deputy Minister of Education in Afghanistan "What makes this book a must-read-for Afghans, Americans, and others interested in international cooperation-is that it provides an example of an appreciated and cost-effective aid program, one that worked." Nour Rahimi, former Editor of the Kabul Times "A Promising Time is thus an essential work for anyone interested in the history of American/Afghan relations." Carl H. Klaus, Founding Director, University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program
Download or read book Environmental education in the schools creating a program that works written by and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Peace Corps Times written by Peace Corps (U.S.) and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Being First written by Robert Klein and published by Wheatmark, Inc.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Klein, one of the initial Peace Corps volunteers who served in Ghana from 1961-1963, describes the creation of the Peace Corps and the experiences of the first cohort of volunteer teachers serving in Ghana.
Download or read book Peace Corps Times written by and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Once In A Blood Moon written by Dorothea Hubble Bonneau and published by . This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heaven's Hill plantation, upriver from Georgetown, South Carolina, 1807: Sixteen-year-old Alexandra de Gambia, daughter of an African-American planter and a mother who passes for white, balances on the tightrope between girlhood and the complicated adult world where one misstep can forever ruin a young woman's prospects. Her dream is to become to an accomplished musician. She will have a chance to impress her first public audience when she plays her violin in the Christmas Concert to be held in her white cousin's famous recital parlor. Alexandra's life turns upside down when her mother dies and her father is murdered by greedy newcomers eager to diminish the status of wealthy free people of color. If the murderers can dispose of Alexandra and her little brother, the only living heirs to Heaven's Hill, they can claim the prosperous estate for themselves. Alexandra and her brother run for their lives.Fearing she will be killed, Alexandra hides and watches as the usurpers capture her brother, lock him in the blacksmith's shop and burn the building to the ground. Guilt haunts her.Alexandra escapes from Heaven's Hill only to be caught by slave catchers from whom she conceals her identity. Sold and placed in a slave cabin, Alexandra befriends John Fowler, a ten-year-old indentured boy who reminds her of her brother. When the overseer threatens to work John to death, Alexandra risks her life to help the little boy to run away and rejoin his family in North Carolina. The secondary plot-line features Alexandra's love affair with a plantation owner's son.
Download or read book The Boy with Four Names written by Doris Rubenstein and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2021-06-21 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1933 and the end of World War II, over 3,000 Jews from countries all across Europe fled what was an almost certain death there to find freedom and safety in a small country in South America. Most of them had never heard of it before there was nowhere else to run: Ecuador. Some left for the U.S. or Israel after five or ten years. Others decided to make it their permanent home. Today, there are less than 1,000 Jews still living in Ecuador. Why did they decide to stay? Each family’s story is different. Every single person has their own, unique memories of their early days in Ecuador. The Boy with Four Names is the story of one family, and one boy who ended up with four names. You will enjoy this book whether you’re thirteen or sixty-three!
Download or read book The Unheard written by Josh Swiller and published by Holt Paperbacks. This book was released on 1918 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes one young man's efforts to reconcile his deafness in an unforgiving, hearing world by undertaking a two-year sojourn in a remote village in Zambia as a Peace Corps volunteer, where he finds a remarkable world marked by both beauty and violence.
Download or read book The World Book Encyclopedia written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An encyclopedia designed especially to meet the needs of elementary, junior high, and senior high school students.
Download or read book An Indian Among Los Ind genas written by Ursula Pike and published by . This book was released on 2025-04-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback: a gripping, witty travel memoir that offers "a fascinating look at voluntourism from an Indigenous perspective" (Book Riot) "Ursula Pike's memoir is unlike any other I've read, with her perceptive, always-seeking, and lovely narrative voice." --Susan Straight, author of Mecca "This book is alive with a spirit that welcomed mine to meet it." --Elissa Washuta, author of White Magic When she was twenty-five, Ursula Pike boarded a plane to Bolivia and began her term of service in the Peace Corps. A member of the Karuk Tribe, Pike sought to make meaningful connections with Indigenous people halfway around the world. But she arrived in La Paz with trepidation as well as excitement, "knowing I followed in the footsteps of Western colonizers and missionaries who had also claimed they were there to help." In the following two years, as a series of dramatic episodes brought that tension to a boiling point, she began to ask: What does it mean to have experienced the effects of colonialism firsthand, and yet to risk becoming a colonizing force in turn? An Indian Among los Indígenas, Pike's memoir of this experience, upends a canon of travel memoirs that has historically been dominated by white writers. It is a sharp, honest, and unnerving examination of the shadows that colonial history casts over even the most well-intentioned attempts at cross-cultural aid. With masterful deadpan wit, it signals a shift in travel writing that is long overdue.
Download or read book Luxury Arts of the Renaissance written by Marina Belozerskaya and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2005-10-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.
Download or read book African Vodun written by Suzanne Preston Blier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-03-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout, Blier pushes African art history to a new height of cultural awareness that recognizes the complexity of traditional African societies as it acknowledges the role of social power in shaping aesthetics and meaning generally.
Download or read book When the World Calls written by Stanley Meisler and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the World Calls is the first complete and balanced look at the Peace Corps’s first fifty years. Revelatory and candid, journalist Stanley Meisler’s engaging narrative exposes Washington infighting, presidential influence, and the Volunteers’ unique struggles abroad. He deftly unpacks the complicated history with sharp analysis and memorable anecdotes, taking readers on a global trek starting with the historic first contingent of Volunteers to Ghana on August 30, 1961. In the years since, in spite of setbacks, the ethos of the Peace Corps has endured, largely due to the perseverance of the 200,000 Volunteers themselves, whose shared commitment to effect positive global change has been a constant in one of our most complex—and valued—institutions.
Download or read book Peace Corps the Next 50 Years written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Peace Corps, and Global Narcotics Affairs and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mr Ambassador written by Edward J. Perkins and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-12-13 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Apartheid South Africa was on fire around me.” So begins the memoir of Career Foreign Service Officer Edward J. Perkins, the first black United States ambassador to South Africa. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan gave him the unparalleled assignment: dismantle apartheid without violence. As he fulfilled that assignment, Perkins was scourged by the American press, despised by the Afrikaner government, hissed at by white South African citizens, and initially boycotted by black South African revolutionaries, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu. His advice to President-elect George H. W. Bush helped modify American policy and hasten the release of Nelson Mandela and others from prison. Perkins’s up-by-your-bootstraps life took him from a cotton farm in segregated Louisiana to the white elite Foreign Service, where he became the first black officer to ascend to the top position of director general. This is the story of how one man turned the page of history.
