Fall 2019: Cloud Economics Vol. 32 No. 3

WorldView NATIONAL PEACE CORPS ASSOCIATION CELEBRATES

YEARS

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worldviewmagazine.org

Layering for Clean Water in The Gambia p20

Asylum Worker on Lesvos Island p32

Cloud Economics China dials up a cashless economy

The Trash Collector of Zamalek p28

CONTENTS

WorldView

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F E AT U R E S 20 Layering The Gambia

Water Charity gets the job done with cloud technology

BY AV E R IL L STRASSE R

28 The Collector of Zamalek In Egypt, digging up and recycling the present

BY PET ER H ESSLER

24 Life Under the Cloud

32 Asylum at 30 Degrees Latitude

BY A N DR E W SCHA FE R

BY EIREN E CH EN

An RPCV returns to China and change

20

The life of a refugee worker on Lesvos

D E PA R T M E N T S PRESIDENT’S LETTER

PEACE CORPS NEWS

2 Bring the World Home

15 Pulling Together in Tonga

BY G L E NN B LUM HORST

BY PAU L JU RMO

EDITOR’S NOTE

GROUPS

4 Writers in China

18 Breaking Barriers for LGBTQ

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BY DAVID A R NOL D

LETTERS

5 Ebola Crisis, Rio Bravo, Soulful Reporting, Pulling on Guatemala F O R WA R D

6 ‘Towering’ Premiere

BY MAN UEL CO LÓN

FICTION

35 The Price of a Wife

Negotiating a Somalia wedding over quat

BY JEAN N E D’H AEM

BY J O E SHA FFNE R

GALLERY

6 Ruppe Honors

38 Mongolia Blue Skies

BY L AUR E N JE TT

7 Slowdown in El Paso

BY E D I TORS

7 Thanking Armenia WHY I G I V E

8 Focused Energies

A big country landscape in which to find a son

BY MARK CURRY

BOOKLOCKER

41 Trying to Understand Thai

WI T H G LORIA L E V IN

41 Youth in the Northern Triangle

ADVOCACY

REVIEW BY D.W. JEFFERSON

10 Update on National Service Hearings

43 A Guide for Selling Your Travel Stories

BY M A RK G E A RA N

NPCA MUSEUM

12 Your Permanent Exhibition

BY A L I SON KA HN

35

REVIEW BY JIM SKELTON

REVIEW BY DAVID ARN OLD

ACHIEVEMENTS

45 Bryn Mooser & Nina Waszak

ON THE COVER: Several decades of economic boom in Beijing have created

the popular residential and commercial Sanlitun Soho district where consumers leave their yuan at home and use their phones to buy through cloud technology. Photo by Jason Lee/Reuters

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PRESIDENT’S LETTER WorldView magazine is published by National Peace Corps Association, a national network of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, former staff and friends. NPCA is a notfor-profit 501(c)(3) educational and service organization which is independent of the federal agency, Peace Corps.

Bring the World Home n

BY GLENN BLUMHORST

I believe the Peace Corps community is at a historic turning point. At a time when achieving the Third Goal is more important than ever, big things are about to happen that will elevate our primary goal of greater cross-cultural understanding and raise high the banner of the Peace Corps.

It all starts on September 22 as we host a celebration of the opening — most appropriately — of a major expansion of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in their new REACH living theater. The day’s events include the premiere of “A Towering Task — The Story of the Peace Corps,” as well as interactive Peace Corps exhibits and presentations in venues throughout the complex.

This is the beginning of two years in which we will publicly celebrate the power of Peace Corps and its mission of service around the world.

NPCA and In the Cause of Peace, the producers of “A Towering Task,” will take the documentary film on the road for 1,000 screenings at film fests and community events co-hosted by our local affiliate groups across the country. It’s your opportunity to bring friends from outside the Peace Corps community to share the Peace Corps experience and to prove why Peace Corps is even more relevant today.

Next February the NPCA and its affiliate groups will move into Peace Corps Place, a gathering place and resource center for the entire Peace Corps community. Our new threestory home will include WorldView 2

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ADVISORY COUNCIL Carol Bellamy, Chair, Education for All—Fast Track Initiative

Café, a sampling of the new Museum of the Peace Corps Experience and room for meetings and programs that will bring the world home to nearby schools, Capitol Hill, and our new Truxton Circle neighborhood.

We also hope for final approval by U.S. Commission of Fine Arts of the long-awaited Peace Corps Commemorative, a Peace Corps Park being proposed by our RPCV friends from the Peace Corps Commemorative Foundation. We look forward to a 2021 groundbreaking on a prime spot just one block from the Capitol and the National Mall. The commemorative symbolizes America’s embrace of the world in the name of global peace and prosperity and an homage to the American ethos that motivated the creation of the Peace Corps.

These public events will culminate in a year-long celebration of Peace Corps’ 60th anniversary in 2021. In September of that year, and on the eve of our national elections, Peace Corps Connect will come to our nation’s capital for what is anticipated to be the largest gathering ever of the Peace Corps community. This is an event that can impact the future of the Peace Corps.

I look forward to seeing many of you at these events as we lift high the banner of the Peace Corps.

There is no better time than now to bring the world home to your nation’s capital.

In service, Glenn 1 Glenn Blumhorst is NPCA president and chief

executive officer. He served in Guatemala from 1988 to 1991 and welcomes your comments at president@ peacecorpsconnect.org.

Ron Boring, Former Vice President, Vodafone Japan Nicholas Craw, President, Automobile Competition Committee for the United States Sam Farr, Former Member, U.S. House of Representatives, California John Garamendi, Congressman, U.S. House of Representatives, California Mark Gearan, Director, Institute of Politics, Harvard Kennedy School Tony Hall, Former Member, U.S. House of Representatives, Ohio; Former U.S. Ambassador to UN Food and Agriculture Organization Sandra Jaffee, Former Executive Vice President, Citigroup William E. “Wilber” James, Managing General Partner, RockPort Capital Partners John Y. Keffer, Chairman, Atlantic Fund Administration Virginia Kirkwood, Owner/ Director, Shawnee Holdings, Inc. Richard M. Krieg, President and CEO, The Horizon Foundation Kenneth Lehman, Chairman

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Emeritus, Winning Workplaces Dennis Lucey, Vice President, TKC Global Bruce McNamer, President & CEO, The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region Gordon Radley, Former President, Lucasfilms John E. Riggan, Chairman Emeritus, TCC Group Mark Schneider, Senior Advisor, Human Rights Initiative and Americas Program, CSIS Donna Shalala, Congresswoman, U.S. House of Representatives, Florida Paul Slawson, Former CEO, InterPacific Co. F. Chapman Taylor, Senior Vice President and Research Director, Capital International Research Inc. Joan Timoney, Director for Advocacy and External Relations, Women’s Refugee Commission Ronald Tschetter, President, D.A. Davidson & Co. Gaddi Vasquez, Senior Vice President, Government Affairs, Edison International Aaron Williams, Executive Vice President Emeritus, RTI International Development Group

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Maricarmen Smith-Martinez, Chair Rhett Power, Vice Chair Chip Levengood, Treasurer Mary Owen-Thomas, Secretary Mariko Schmitz, Affiliate Group Network Coordinator Glenn Blumhorst, ex officio

Nikole Allen Daniel Baker Elizabeth Barrett Keith Beck Bridget Davis Juliana Essen Evelyn Ganzglass Corey Griffin Katie Long Jed Meline Robert Nolan Thomas Potter Gretchen Upholt Faith Van Gilder

n STAFF Glenn Blumhorst, President

David Fields, Special Projects Coordinator

Anne Baker, Vice President

Kevin Blossfeld, Finance & Administrative Assistant

Jonathan Pearson, Advocacy Director William Burriss, Government Relations Officer

Elizabeth (Ella) Dowell, Community Technology Systems Coordinator

Ana Victoria Cruz, Digital Content Manager

n CONSULTANTS David Arnold, WorldView Editor

Marvin LeRoy, Fundraising

Dawn Cacciotti, Human Resources

Scott Oser, Advertising

Lollie Commodore, Finance David Herbick, WorldView Art Director

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INTERNS Ophelia Adjei-Awuah, Lauren-Nicole Taylor

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VOLUNTEERS Peter Deekle, Harriet Lipowitz, Betty & K. Richard Pyle

N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

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WorldView

EDITOR’S NOTE

Publisher Glenn Blumhorst Editor David Arnold

Writers in China

Contributing Editor John Coyne

BY DAVID ARNOLD

Contributors

Peace Corps has since 1993 sent more than 1,300 Volunteers to teach in China’s technical schools, colleges and universities. While that may cause a stir among a few members of Congress, both countries have benefitted. I can name at least four of those teachers whose books and journalism have allowed American readers to understand China: Mike Meyer, Craig Simons, Rob Schmitz, and Peter Hessler.

We can now add Andrew Schafer, who just started working for the new Beijing branch of Cloudflare, a tech start-up in San Francisco. Read on Page 24 about what the virtual Great Cloud of Google, Amazon, and company did to China’s use of the yuan. It was a surprise to Schafer, who taught school in China just five years ago.

Peace Corps China writers have captured China’s transformation for over 25 years. In assigning this magazine’s first China story in 2002 I kept a pre-internet telephone appointment with Hessler. When I dialed his cell phone one evening, his voice buried beneath the din of jingling bells.

He raised his voice, “I’m on the way to work on my bike.”

I pictured a riptide of men and women peddling briskly forward, plunging eager thumbs down on those little handlebar claxons, as children wearing book bags clutched their arms around their cycling parents, all inexorably plunging toward the center of the Chinese capital.

After many years in The New Yorker’s Beijing bureau and publishing four books about China, “River Town,” “Oracle Bones,” “Country 4

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Driving,” and “Strange Stones.” Schafer has read all of those China books.

Hessler then relocated to Cairo for five years and Schafer recently listened to a Kaiser Kuo podcast of glowing praise for Hessler’s new Egypt book. Take a look on Page 28 at an excerpt from “The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution.”

RETURNING TO CHINA

In August, Hessler and his family— wife Leslie and two twin daughters, Ariel and Natasha—moved from their recent Colorado home back to China. Peter will teach writing and journalism at Sichuan University and Leslie, the author of the book “Factory Girls” will continue her writing career there.

“I’ve been in touch with almost 100 of my former students during the past two decades,” Hessler writes.

“So I’m also going to be visiting them.

Most of them are either in Sichuan province or Chongqing municipality, which is another reason I want to be based in Chengdu.

“Universities have changed so much since I was a teacher in Fuling, and of course the generations move quickly in a country like China. I’m curious to see what my young students are like.”

“Another reason for the move is that we want our daughters to learn Chinese, and this is a good age to start. We want them to attend a Chinese-speaking school…” 1 David Arnold is the editor of WorldView maga-

zine. He taught math, social studies, and English as a second language when he served in Asbe Teferi, Ethiopia from 1964 to 1966.

Art Director David Herbick

Glenn Blumhorst John Burnett Eirene Chen Manual Colón Mark Curry Jeanne D’Haem Mark Gearan Peter Hessler Michael Honegger D.W. Jefferson Lauren Jett Paul Jurmo Alison Kahn

Jason Lee Emily Lundberg Ebrima Marong Stefania Mizara Sue Patterson Thomas Peter Ed Rowley Joe Shaffner Andrew Schafer Jim Skelton Averill Strasser Angene Wilson

n WORLDVIEW ADVERTISING Address all questions regarding interest in advertising in WorldView or NPCA social media and other online opportunities to Scott Oser at advertising@ peacecorpsconnect.org.

WorldView (ISSN 1047-5338) is published four times per year (Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter) by National Peace Corps Association (located at 1900 L Street, NW, Suite 610, Washington, DC 20036-5002) to provide news and comment about communities and issues of the world of serving and returned Peace Corps Volunteers. WorldView © 1978 National Peace Corps Association.

Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. & additional mailing offices.

n POSTMASTER Please send address changes to: WorldView magazine, National Peace Corps Association,1900 L Street NW, Suite 610, Washington, DC 20036-5002

n EDITORIAL POLICY Articles published in the magazine are not intended to reflect the views of Peace Corps, or those of National Peace Corps Association, a nonprofit mission-driven social impact organization mobilizing those whose lives are influenced by Peace Corps. NPCA is independent of the federal agency, Peace Corps.

n EDITORIAL SUBMISSIONS Send all communications regarding WorldView magazine to worldview@peacecorpsconnect.org. We will consider article proposals and speculative submissions.

We also encourage letters to the editor commenting on specific articles that have appeared in the magazine.

All texts must be submitted as attached Word documents. For more details on writer guidelines go online to https://www.peacecorpsconnect.org/cpages/ submission-guidelines or email the editor at darnold@ peacecorpsconnect.org.

n SUBSCRIPTIONS In order to receive WorldView magazine go online to www.peacecorpsconnect.org and click on Join Now. If you need to contact NPCA regarding a magazine subscription or other matters, call (202) 293 7728 ext. 18

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LETTERS

Readers continue the conversation about migrants detained in Albert Lea, what’s driving Guatemala’s exodus, roles played in the last Ebola crisis, and compliments from an NPR correspondent Rio Bravo Reading the Summer 2019 issue of WorldView, I feel the tremendous strength of the returned PCV community in non-judgmental assistance to their sisters and brothers.

The reporting on the Northern Triangle and the crossing of the Rio Bravo were beautifully expressed. Just to see “Rio Bravo” mentioned means so much to me. The articles are current and relevant. None of the old bland articles of many years past.

I spend two Sunday evenings each month visiting with migrants in a detention camp 50 miles west of Rochester in Albert Lea, Minnesota. I hear their stories, mostly in Spanish. There is much esperanza in the heart of each migrant. There is much to admire in their will to improve their lives.

Thanks again to you, Glenn and all who make the NPCA so good.

Ed Rowley Colombia 66-68, Swaziland 81-86

Pulling on Guatemala With profound interest, I read in the Summer issue Mark Walker’s article, “Trouble in the Highlands,” about the increasing level of migration out of Guatemala. I retired to Guatemala over 20 years ago after a full career in the Foreign Service. Mark’s knowledge of Guatemala is shown in the very well-researched article that is validated by his own personal experience here. He certainly captured the main drivers of Guatemalan migration. Particularly worrisome is the increased influence of narco-money to the point I believe Guatemala is now a narco-state.

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I would emphasize two issues. First the main push factors: the exorbitant growth of population, the highest of any Latin American country, from under 3 million in 1950 to well over 17 million now. The growth is due principally to (a) more child survival due to the advent of antibiotics and vaccinations combined with (b) overwhelming conservative Catholic influence over the population and government saying contraception is widely seen as a sin. This, combined with vast under- and unemployment, lead to increasing levels of poverty, now affecting over 60 percent of the population.

Second is the pull factor: the ease of finding jobs in the U.S. which, however menial, pay at least 10 times an hour what can be earned in a day here. The hard-working Guatemalans are sending back home enormous amounts of remittances, now over $30 million per day—a sum that is estimated now to support one-third of Guatemala’s population and dwarfs the level of foreign assistance.

There are no easy answers to migration.

It’s an issue, like drug use, that we can try to manage but cannot expect to solve.

Sue H. Patterson Colombia 65-68

Ebola Crisis I found Douglass Teschner’s article in the summer issue, “Beating Ebola,” about the Peace Corps Guinean staff response to the last Ebola crisis informative because I knew more about the situation in Liberia and Sierra Leone, having lived in both countries in the 1960s.

My husband, Jack, and I contributed to the 2014-15 fundraising that was devel-

oped by NPCA staff when they gathered a group of RPCVs from the three countries to raise more than $91,000 among 17 affiliate groups and 400 individuals. That campaign supported about 30 project grants to vetted NGOs providing health awareness, tracing of victims, burial teams, and vulnerable populations of orphans, women and children.

We followed Liberia’s Ebola crisis because we were American parents for Mosoka Fallah while he earned his PhD in epidemiology at the University of Kentucky. We serve as directors for his expanding Refuge Place International that built a maternal health clinic in a slum community in the capital Monrovia while he was a graduate student.

Mosoka returned home to open the clinic a few months before the Ebola crisis began. He was instrumental in involving communities in crucial contact tracing and for that he was honored as one of the Ebola fighters named in Time magazine’s 2014 Person of the Year.

Just this July Mosoka flew to Kinshasa to share his community engagement model with the Democratic Republic of Congo as they confront their own Ebola crisis.

Angene Wilson Liberia, 62-64

Soulful Reporting I finally read your four WorldView Summer issue dispatches from the Northern Triangle.

Very insightful and soulfully written by people who didn’t just parachute in (like journos).

I’m interested now to see if Guatemala signs a third-country asylum law with Trump.

Thanks again for asking me to join the Peace Corps Connect panel to discuss our country’s immigration problems. Afterwards, I took Luis Argueta and company out for some Texas barbecue—they were favorably impressed.

Saludos cordiales.

John Burnett, Southwest correspondent for National Editor’s Note: What are you thinking? Do you disagree with something we’ve printed in WorldView. Is there something more to a story? What’s your view? Send 200 words or less to the editor at worldview@peacecorpsconnect.org.

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F O RWA R D

Ruppe Honors

Videographer Vanessa Carr and director Alana deJoseph meet with high school math and 3 science teachers Chris Gozdziewski and Kayla Gonzalez at their Liberia site during filming of the Peace Corps documentary, A Towering Task.

‘Towering’ Premiere The long-anticipated “A Towering Task,” a film documentary that captures the early voices of the Peace Corps and delves into the existential question of what the Peace Corps still means to the U.S. and the world, will premiere at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, September 22.

An in-depth look at Peace Corps’ 55year-history, the film is directed by Alana DeJoseph (Mali, 92-94) and narrated by actress Annette Bening. DeJoseph’s career in video and film production includes earlier work on award-winning PBS documentaries on the U.S. Forest Service and conservationist Aldo Leopold. “A Towering Task” was five years in the making and has been supported by donations from the Peace Corps community.

The documentary is an interwoven collection of stories told by historians, political scientists, sociologists, journalists, and those who helped mold the agency since its inception in 1961. A few who are featured in the documentary are President Jimmy Carter, Senator Harris Wofford, climate activist Mike 6

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Tidwell, Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Representatives Donna Shalala, Joe Kennedy, Sam Farr and John Garamendi, journalists Bill Moyers and Maureen Orth, community activist Juana Bordas, and current Peace Corps Director Jody Olsen.

The Kennedy Center premiere takes place in the Terrace Theater and during that day’s opening of the center’s new addition, The Reach. It’s a full day of RPCV-led events and is the kickoff for global distribution of the 105-minute documentary. This is where we, as members of the Peace Corps community, can help. The backbone of our distribution plan is broadcast, streaming, and more than 1,000 U.S. community screenings and at least one screening in each of the 141 countries where Peace Corps has served.

Help us bring the Peace Corps back into the American discourse, not as a dream from ages past, but as a real, tangible effort that allows all of us to reevaluate who we are as both American and global citizens. To learn more or to suggest screening venues, contact us at info@peacecorpsdocumentary.com or check out www.peacecorpsdocumentary.com.

Joe Shaffner, Uzbekistan and Suriname, 05-08

The annual Loret Miller Ruppe Award for Outstanding Community Service was presented at Peace Corps Connect in Austin, Texas, to two NPCA affiliates, the New York City Peace Corps Association and Peace Corps Iran Association.

The president of the New York group, Sarah Porter (Macedonia 05-07), received the award for NYCPCA for the success of their annual art exhibit, ‘Peace Corps Creates...Art by Returned Volunteers’. This free event featured photographs, sketches, paintings, and mixed media, in order to share with the New York community the vibrant communities where RPCVs have lived and worked in the developing world and the personal and unique experiences of living outside their country, culture, and comfort zones. Last year’s exhibit displayed the work of 15 RPCVs from the tri-state area for five weeks.

Peace Corps Iran Association president Jeanette Gottlieb (Iran 65-67) and vice president Jackie Spurlock (Iran 74-76) accepted the Ruppe award for PCIA. The Iran RPCV group has advanced peaceful dialogue between citizens of the two countries for many years, conducting outreach, advocacy and maintaining the legacy of Peace Corps service in Iran even though the program officially closed in 1976. Since then, the efforts of Iran RPCVs have increased with PCIA’s creation of their Impact program, focusing on cultural and

Terese Maineri de Velasquez’ “El Sueño 3 Americano” was displayed in the New York City PCA’s award-winning exhibition.

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political outreach and involving conferences, festivals, cultural exchanges, newsletters on current events in Iran, and the hosting of a discussion of current events facilitated by the PBS Frontline feature, “Our Man in Tehran.”

The Ruppe honors demonstrate the strong leadership these groups have enjoyed.

Lauren Jett, NPCA intern

Slowdown in El Paso Four months after RPCVs rushed to the aid of Central American asylum seekers at the Southern Border city of El Paso, Texas, much has changed, according to Bishop Mark J. Seitz.

The bishop of the Catholic Diocese of El Paso wrote to thank NPCA’s president, Glenn Blumhorst, and the dozens of other RPCVs who answered the prelate’s call to help manage the flow of refugees through several El Paso shelters in May and June.

The White House negotiations with Mexico have been effective, the bishop reports. “Mexico has been using its military to turn back asylum seekers all through the country without offering them any recourse.“ Populations in the El Paso shelters “dropped off overnight from around 1,000 a day to less than 100” while about 10,000 refugees are stuck over the border in Ciudad Juarez.

“The U.S. court process for these asylum requests could take more than a year,” the bishop wrote. Similar U.S. negotiations with Guatemalan government officials may have an increasing impact on reducing refuge traffic to the United States.

Bishop Seitz, who has been a strong critic of White House immigration policies, opened a GoFundMe campaign at the elpasodiocese.org web site to raise funds for housing in Ciudad Juarez for hundreds of refugees now unable to cross into El Paso. “They are completely overwhelmed and many refugees are on the streets of Juarez,” he writes.

“In time we may figure out a way to organize volunteer efforts. I remain extremely grateful to you and to the returned Peace Corps members. You all were a tremendous help. Clearly the volunteer spirit lived on in you long after your return.”

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Thanking Armenia National Teacher of the Year Mandy Manning has spoken up for public education at the White House, in Buffalo, Orlando and along the Southern border, giving her message of racial inclusion in education.

She gave a 10-minute talk in late May at a banquet hall in Burbank, California. The hall was filled with Armenian-Americans and Manning wore the same array of cause buttons—Peace Corps, National Education Association, the Woman’s March and Transequality Now—she wore at her White House announcement a year ago.

“Some of you might wonder why I have been invited to speak to you today,” she said.

“I served for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer teaching English in Armenia. But I’m not here because of what I did in Armenia.

“I’m here because of what I learned and how I’ve taken those lessons with me throughout my 20-year career in education to my classroom and to my community…”

And then the words did not flow. There was a long silent, “…and I’m getting a little choked up because…” In the next silence, the audience supported her with applause, “… because I haven’t been in a room surrounded by beautiful Armenian people in so long.”

She recovered her message. “I learned patience, to be creative in order to engage students, and how to start exactly where my students were instead of where I thought they should be. That has been the foundation for 20 years of how I teach.”

Manning thanked her audience for rebuilding their culture in the independent Republic of Armenia after the genocide of the early 1900s and following the fall of the Soviet Union. “Thank you for fighting for those who cannot fight for themselves.

Thanks for teaching us and being a positive example for all nations around the world.”

Manning is now back to start another school year as a specialized English language development teacher of newly arrived immigrants in Spokane, Washington. 1

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WHY I GIVE

NPCA asks Gloria Levin why she gives time, talent, and treasure to this community

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hile serving as a Peace Corps selection officer at headquarters from 1965 to 1966, Gloria Levin was inspired by returning PCVs, especially B.J. Warren, who had served in Peru. Gloria served in Peace Corps as a community development volunteer in a squatter settlement in Arequipa, Peru from 1966 to 1968. After several years organizing in U.S. communities, she earned a University of Michigan Ph.D. in community psychology in 1975. She spent the rest of her career until her 2002 retirement at the National Institutes of Health as a research administrator and policy planner.

“I often wonder what my life would have been had I chosen to work overseas, like many RPCVs,” she says. “But NPCA affords me opportunities to stay connected with and contribute to international development.”

provide my “time, talent and treasure” to the Peace Corps family.

Why did you increase your financial support beyond $1,000?

What is your history of financial I upped my annual contributions to $2,500 contributions to NPCA? when NPCA made a radical change in direction Because I was an outspoken critic of NPCA for from the traditional paid-membership model many years, complaining about its insularity to a community- and mission-oriented model. and relegation of the RPCV community to Frankly, I was fearful that making membership marginal roles, I made only modest financial free would hobble NPCA financially and would lead to its demise. My increased donation was motivated by acute anxiety. Also, six months after I turned 70, my IRA account began to be drawn down by the Required Minimum Distribution. Instead of taking my RMD as taxable income—and possibly raising my tax bracket—I designate much of my RMD for nontaxable donations, including to NPCA. That’s because under the so-called tax reform law and the RMD, I’m better off claiming the standard deduction 3Gloria Levin was a community development organizer in a Peruvian squatter rather than itemizing deducHow did you become active settlement called Clorinda Malaga de Prado tions, including charitable in returned Peace Corps contributions. activities? contributions to the organization. That Also, concerned about the future sustainPeace Corps is a significant self-identifica- changed five years ago when I met NPCA’s ability of NPCA, I was motivated to join the tion and focus for my energies. I have been newly-hired CEO, Glenn Blumhorst, whom Legacy of Peace Fund by Tim Resch, a truly an active member of RPCV/Washington, I found to be refreshingly but realistically devoted RPCV activist. I designated NPCA NPCA and its predecessor organization for visionary, socially skilled and candid. At and four other international nonprofits as decades. When I retired, I became and remain that time I was reviewing my charitable beneficiaries of my IRA account after my president of the NPCA affiliate, Amigos de and political contributions, deciding to death. Not only does this build an endowBolivia y Peru. substantially increase them while I’m still ment for NPCA, but it also has favorable tax I am proud of being a RPCV. I tell people alive. At first, I tapped into two mutual funds implications for me. I informed Glenn of the that I’m an RPCV, often wear PC t-shirts, that had substantially grown over decades details concerning the then-current balance and have a Peace Corps magnet on my car of accrual and would subject me to capital of my IRA account and contact information bumper. My payback to Peace Corps is to gains taxes if sold for income. I transferred for my financial planner.

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Carl Purcell/Peace Corps

Focused Energies

partial withdrawals from these two funds to my donor-advised charitable fund and designated NPCA as a recipient, starting at $1,000 a year. That donation level qualified me for enrollment in the Shriver Circle.

Several other members sent me personal notes of welcome. I receive advance notice of NPCA’s plans, my advice is sought, and I am invited to informative briefings. I am delighted to see the recent increase in Shriver Circle memberships.

What are your observations of the new NPCA model?

My community-organizer heart is thrilled with the success of NPCA’s community model. I greatly underestimated the Peace Corps community; the new model has unleashed incredible energy and creativity, while at the same time stabilizing NPCA’s treasury after years soaked in red ink.

I have never understood why the community-based strategy has worked so well, but I give full credit to Glenn and the NPCA staff and board members for having nerves of steel.

I have first-hand experience with NPCA’s new dynamism. I serve on NPCA’s Community Fund advisory committee. We established procedures for reviewing applications for and tracking of grants and have approved funding of interesting, diverse projects, all paid for by the generosity of our community. I am also participating in a new NPCA direction that would provide transition services to returning PCVs. I long mentored RPCVs in job searches through PC/Washington’s Career Center and NPCA’s affiliate group matches as well as RPCV/Washington’s mentoring program. The first two are no longer active, so NPCA will be stepping forward to meet the obvious need.

A D o c u m e n ta r y n a r r at e d b y a n n e t t e be n i n g

start a conversation about global citizenship in your communit y Learn How | Host a screening | Support our work

Learn more: https://www.peacecorpsdocumentary.com Contact us: info@peacecorpsdocumentary.com

What advice do you have for other RPCVs in relating to Peace Corps?

I have worked with training groups from my era to find inactive, missing RPCVs and assisted them in organizing reunions. In my conversations with “long-missing” RPCVs, I’ve been impressed with the extent to which their lives have been impacted by Peace Corps, even when they, themselves, do not acknowledge this. My own life, starting out as an unwoke and untraveled young woman, has been positively impacted by Peace Corps.

We all owe the Peace Corps enterprise a portion of our time, talent or treasure.

NPCA will soon be facing very large expenses so now is the time to dig deep.1 Note: To consult about making your financial commitment to the growth of NPCA programs and services, contact the office of the NPCA president at president@peacecorps connect.org.

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ADVOCACY

An interim report on the commission hearings

BY MARK GEARAN

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he bipartisan, 11-member National non-profit organizations (including with Commission on Military, National, appropriate faith-based organizations), that and Public Service was created by pursues and enhances the common good and REDUCING BARRIERS TO SERVICE Congress to find ways to increase meets the needs of communities, the states, A study commissioned by Service Year Alliparticipation in military, national, and public or the nation in sectors related to security, ance in 2015 demonstrated that fewer than service and to review the military selective health, care for the elderly, and other areas one third of 14 to 24-year-olds are aware of service process. Our goal is to ignite a national considered appropriate by the Commission.” service year options. The Commission wants conversation about the importance of service National Service includes programs to assure access to these opportunities for as we develop recommendations for the such as Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Senior all Americans. To do this, the Commission Congress and the President by March 2020. Corps, and YouthBuild. The Commission is is interested in minimizing barriers to serve, I am honored to serve as vice chair also considering ways to include faith-based, such as stipends and benefits. Improving for national and public service and was non-profit, and private-sector organizations access to national service will ensure that privileged to deliver opening remarks in creating and promoting national service the diversity of national service volunteers during two national service hearings held opportunities. reflects that of the nation. by the Commission in March 2019. From As the vice chair for national and public When the Peace Corps was established my years as Peace Corps director, I know service, former Peace Corps director, and a in 1961, it was an innovative and bold idea.

RPCVs will have a strong interest in our former college president, our hearings on Today, more than 230,000 Returned Peace work and I appreciate this opportunity national service were close to my heart, Corps Volunteers demonstrate the enduring to update the community on our efforts. especially as we hosted them at the Bush strength of that idea. Peace Corps Volunteers From February to June have represented the United of this year, the commission States in 141 countries and held 14 public hearings and have left behind a legacy of released eight staff memoranda peace and friendship. on various topics related to our At our hearing, Michelle mission. In March, the comBrooks, Peace Corps chief of mission held two hearings on staff, testified and argued that national service and released federal government investment a staff memorandum summain programs such as Peace rizing research and outlining Corps and the various propotential policy options the grams of the Corporation for commission is considering National and Community on increasing Americans’ Service ultimately results in propensity to participate in the development of passionate national service. and informed global citizens.

National service is defined Each Peace Corps Volunteer in the commission’s mandate returns to the United States as “civilian participation in any with a proven track record of non-governmental capacity, 3 Final hearings on national service will include recommendations regarding working in a cross-cultural support for Peace Corp service. Above, Darlene Moreno walked in the including with private for- greater setting and appreciating and Armavir region of Armenia with some of her students in 2016. profit organizations and respecting the richness of 10

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Photo by Peace Corps

National Service

School of Government and Public Service.

President George H.W. Bush lived his life in service to others and as a leader who believed service could unite Americans. He served as a champion of national service, and it was an honor for the commission to host both hearings at the school that honors his legacy. And I note with pride, that Texas is fourth in the list of top Peace Corps volunteer-producing states with 350 individuals serving in the Peace Corps in 2018.

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working across differences.

Brooks also shared recommendations the agency would like the commission to consider. Two of those suggestions were: extending Noncompetitive Eligibility status to three years for RPCVs, bringing it in line with most other authorities granting that status; and an NCE Service Registry, an idea Peace Corps is piloting with two federal agencies.

Ms. Brook’s full testimony can be found on the Commission’s website at www. inspire2serve.gov. Do you have additional recommendations to those provided by the Peace Corps during our March hearings on national service?

Join the

RPCV Portal www.peacecorps.gov/rpcvportal

JOIN THE DISCUSSION

I invite you to join us in this important conversation. Our hope is to spark a movement: every American—especially young Americans—inspired and eager to serve. Talk to your friends, family members, neighbors, colleagues and fellow returned Volunteers about the commission, your service experience, and how we can create more national service opportunities for Americans. We want to hear from all of you!

Share your ideas with the commission through our website on any aspect of the commission’s mission. For example, how can we create more national service opportunities for Americans, and how can we improve the current national service policies and processes?

Stay up to date on the commission’s activities and download the Interim Report at www.inspire2serve.gov. Our final report will be released in March 2020 with recommendations for the national service community—and that includes Peace Corps.

Stay tuned! We also invite you to follow the commission on Facebook and Twitter via @Inspire2ServeUS and join the digital conversation on service by using the hashtag #Inspire2Serve. 1 Mark Gearan currently serves as the vice chair for

National and Public Service for the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service. He is director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School and served as the 14th director of the Peace Corps from 1995 to 1999.

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Access official Peace Corps documents regarding your service.

Verify your contact and service information is correct.

Share your story with classrooms and community groups.

WWW.RPCV.ORG

Your causes. Your affiliate groups.

Your events. Engage for impact.

Become a Mission Partner today.

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NPCA MUSEUM

Your Permanent Exhibition RPCVs are building a museum of our Peace Corps experience in Washington, D.C.

BY ALISON KAHN

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he nation’s capital will soon see a new exhibition space. The Museum of the Peace Corps Experience will make its national debut early next year on the first floor of the three-story offices of the National Peace Corps Association when they move into a new headquarters building in the trendy Washington, D.C. “NoMa” neighborhood.

Development of a web-based virtual museum is the first major step of this longterm, multiphase project. Pending a successful fund raising campaign, future plans include acquisition and renovation of a nearby historic school building to permanently house the museum. Eventually, with a sophisticated virtual presence online and a state-of-theart physical space, the museum will extend the global reach of Peace Corps, showcasing cultural artifacts donated by volunteers, stories behind those objects and of individual experiences, interactive exhibits, virtual reality and multimedia features, and educational and public programs.

A partnership with American University’s Peace Corps Community Archive supports the collection and preservation of primary source materials—letters, journals, photos, audio and video recordings, and other documents donated by former volunteers—for the benefit of researchers.

No one will argue that these times call for greater understanding of “the other.”

The museum, as it evolves over time, will introduce Americans to different cultures and world views, and the value of service.

Through the web-based virtual museum, an 12

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international audience—particularly Peace Corps country hosts—will see themselves reflected positively in the objects and stories and lessons that American volunteers carry home and share.

How many RPCVs does it take to create a museum from scratch? Answer: A virtual village of committed and multitalented volunteers from around the country. It also takes money. And time. Twenty years ago, a few RPCVs based in Portland, Oregon, formed a committee to develop a museum.

They saw triumphs and setbacks, and they

Early Museum donations.

3 Top row: Sandals from

Colombia, hand-carved wood stool from Ethiopia, copper pitcher from Iran, stone leopard mask from Chad.

Bottom row: Suriname ankle shakers, Afghan doll, Sierra Leone shirt, and purse from Thailand.

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made a solid start. Twenty years later, the project continues to build on and evolve from their dreams and grassroots efforts.

THE PORTLAND CONNECTION

In 1999 Martin Kaplan (Somalia 62–64) of Portland had a big idea. Why not preserve and exhibit the memorabilia that returned Peace Corps volunteers bring home from their countries of service? “I knew from my own experience that all the stuff you brought back with you would just stay in boxes, and nobody would ever look at [it].

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And then as people started to get older, the things would just disappear, and I didn’t see any reason for that to happen.”

Kaplan proposed his big idea to Bill Stein (Niger 90–93) at a local Peace Corps association potluck. Stein was intrigued.

He went home and wrote up a concept plan to form what became the Committee for a Museum of the Peace Corps Experience.

“We wanted to be able to tell the real stories,” said Stein. “This was in an era when [the] Peace Corps [agency] would put out, for recruiting purposes, these little paperback

books that had really rah-rah stories. They were all rated G, and they didn’t read at all like what our experiences were.”

Kaplan, a lawyer, got 501(c)3 nonprofit status for the organization. He wrote the grants and the bylaws, negotiated with the federal government over use of the Peace Corps name, and hired a consultant to train the group in the basics of museology. “We knew so little about museums and how to get started,” said Kaplan. “We didn’t even know what these words were—‘strategic plan?’

What the hell was that? ‘Case statement?’

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More donations include a painted gourd from 3 Haiti and nesting dolls from Russia.

We got educated, and that was great.”

The group organized a series of temporary exhibits. Biggest by far was the 50th anniversary show at the Oregon Historical Society in 2011.

“Our vision at that time was to have the museum in Portland because we didn’t think that anybody else shared our vision of a big museum,” said Stein. “But to build something like this, you need several million dollars, and we didn’t have the oomph to get people’s legacy gifts and things that would bring in several million dollars, so that vision was never realized.”

GOING NATIONAL: A MUSEUM IN WASHINGTON, DC

Meanwhile in Washington, DC, Patricia Wand (Colombia 63–65) was fielding inquiries about the need for a museum after helping launch the Peace Corps Community Archive. She invited Nicola Dino (Ecuador 94–97), then committee president and current co-chair, to Washington, D.C. to promote the Oregon group’s vision at the 2016 Peace Corps Connect conference.

People were interested. “From that day,” said Dino, “we went national, and the ball really got rolling. We realized as a small committee in Portland we had a great idea, but we needed help.”

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In 2017 the NPCA’s president and chief executive, Glenn Blumhorst, told the committee if they decided to have a physical presence in Washington, D.C., NPCA would give them space in the new NPCA headquarters. That was a game changer. “Suddenly,” said Wand, committee co-chair, “we had the option of creating physical exhibits in Washington, D.C. We hadn’t imagined that would be possible so soon. We were really only thinking of a virtual museum. We didn’t know how we could do a physical museum because of how much infrastructure that takes.”

FUNDING

The most critical challenge is to find financial support. Fund-raising efforts include solicitations from individual donations via the website to writing grant proposals. The museum’s recent memo of understanding with NPCA enables it to meet the requirements of more grantors and widen its application sphere. Now all bets are on the NPCA’s launch of a major combined capital campaign—the first in its 40-year history—to raise funds for five formerly independent efforts, of which the museum is one.

“We’re talking big time,” says Dino.

That fuels the fantasies of Robyn King Filonczuk (Niger 09–11), the lone museum professional on the committee who manages the collections. She wants to create “meaning-making” immersive experiences that

will inspire patrons to say, “Wow, I had no idea.’” That, she said, is how you get people to feel empathy.

“If the committee could receive two or three legacy gifts from people who want to support something like this, they could do so much with that money,” said Stein. “If I ever won the lottery, I would put my own money toward this, because I think it’s an important story to tell—of this experiment in people helping people that came out of a certain era in the 60s. I don’t think this era would spawn a program like Peace Corps today, so I’m glad it’s still around.”

The approach of the federal agency’s 60th anniversary in two years brings greater urgency to the work of the Museum of the Peace Corps Experience to assemble significant material collections and capture the stories and experiences of generations of volunteers. If you have an item to donate to the museum and a story to tell—or you would like to make a monetary donation—please visit museumofthepeacecorps experience.org. 1 Alison Kahn is a writer, editor and folklorist. She taught

English in Benin from 1976 to 1977 and is a member of the Museum of the Peace Corps Experience Committee.

She is the author of three books, her writing has appeared in Time-Life publications and Smithsonian exhibitions.

Note: Donate artifacts and stories from your Peace Corps experience and give your dollars to make it all possible: museumofthepeacecorpsexperience.org

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PEACE CORPS NEWS two-year tour. New training groups arrived each of the next four years to build on their predecessors’ contributions. With schools, communities, and governmental and non-governmental organizations, Peace Corps staff provided an integrated support system of site preparation, training, and safety, medical, and administrative resources PCVs helped reform Tonga literacy education to help the Volunteers perform their jobs as English literacy facilitators.

BY PAUL JURMO For five years, Volunteers worked with each other and with partners to develop literacy teaching and assessment materials and activities designed to ensure success for all students, including those with special needs. With local partners, Volunteer groups also created a multi-village after-school basketball program, a girls’ hiking club, a school water tank upgrade project, and leadership camps for teen girls and boys. Volunteers adapted collaborative strategies in their villages to establish women’s walking groups and a community waste-management system.

To support each other in this work, Volunteers worked collectively to establish an advisory council and a com3Kelli Fierro used music and drawings on cards to work with a small group of students on Vava’u island. mittee to help Volunteers n the aftermath of the 2008 financial strengthen family and community support respond to challenges of gender and racial crisis, small, remote Peace Corps posts for basic education. Primary school students diversity on the archipelago. in the Pacific like Tonga were threat- needed English for success in secondary and The results of the Volunteers’ literacy ened with closure. Peace Corps sent post-secondary education and in civic and work were embraced by their Tongan counno trainees to Tonga in 2011, only 15 in family roles where English was required, terparts. PCV Carrie Lee Pugh says, ”The 2012. But based on an evaluation at Peace and as workers in Tonga and countries to teachers preferred using our tools because Corps headquarters and a request of by which they might migrate. they were simple and used topics the teachers Tonga’s Ministry of Education, Peace Corps Our project came to be guided by the understood and could talk about.” decided to continue the Tonga post for at spirit of the traditional Tongan saying Takanga Given these positive results, Peace Corps least five more years. To enhance efficiency, ‘etau fohe, Our Oars, Together. This collective decided to continue the Tonga literacy the post established a single project with mindset reflects how the early seafarers project. It is is now in its seventh year with an ambitious goal: help modernize how who founded the nation depended on one 55 Volunteers, all serving as English literacy Tongan primary and middle school children another for safe passage across long stretches facilitators. build their English literacy. of open Pacific waters and then for survival Volunteers would help Tonga’s teachers in near-isolation for thousands of years.

CLASSROOM PIONEERS use modern, student-centered practices and In September 2012, 15 trainees began a The innovative and professional work of

Pulling Together

All photographs by Paul Jurmo

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PEACE CORPS NEWS

the Volunteers was a key ingredia background in theatre and workent in the project’s success. They ing with individuals with special relied heavily on the technical needs, met with staff to identify strengths in basic education and themes for more-relevant reading the cultural navigation strategies materials. They formed a Sight they brought with them. The VolWord Book (SWB) Subcommittee unteers showed respect for others which decided to produce a series and for themselves, responsibility, of easy-to-read books that could be resourcefulness and resilience, and used for instruction and could be reflective and realistic reasoning. easily reproduced. The books would They also had a supply of humility contain simple words, phrases, and humor, and a good deal of and sentences organized around creativity, communication, colillustrated themes such as “at the laboration, and courage beach,” “healthy foods,” “animals,” In the first two years, 30 Vol“school” that were familiar — and unteers used these strengths to inviting — to Tongan children. explore what for them and the post Kelsey Smith and another was uncharted territory. In addition trained teacher, Megan Smith, to learning how to stay safe and developed a model of guided-readhealthy on a cluster of islands, the ing lesson plans for the books. Other Volunteers had to figure out the parVolunteers contributed sample ticular English skills they and their plans and Volunteers trained each counterparts should be teaching and other in how to use them and train what student-centered methods Tongan counterparts in their use. would work in Tongan schools.

Volunteers with an art backOnly a few of the trainees had ground illustrated the books. Renee teaching experience. Most were Fern and others contributed line generalists before they arrived. drawings of village life. Samantha They had to learn how to respond Bailo and Abrham Castillo-Ruiz to the Tongan realities of low stuprovided photographs. They dent English skills, schoolteachers recruited Tongan writers and artunfamiliar with student-centered ists to join the team. methods, unrealistic or unclear Gurkeert Bagri figured out how expectations of principals and their to format the books for printing.

Top: Red uniformed students wait to enter the Vaini school library, ministry’s curriculum, and com- 3 Kelsey Smith, Kayla Callicutt, a former storage room turned into a model library by Emily Merchant Jason Connors. Above: Corinne Schillerstrom, right, greeted munities where oral and written and and Atkins Trout wrote funding three new Volunteers arriving on the Eua Sea Transportation ferry to create the Eua Girls Outdoor Club. From the left, Samantha Bailo, English was uncommon. proposals to cover printing costs Bailey Bollinger, and Samantha Lucci.

Through trial and error in their and stipends for local artists. schools and communication with Trout, who was trained to teach fellow Volunteers and Tongan counterparts, had few reading materials suitable to students’ English as a Foreign Language and extended they began creating practical resources they language and cultural backgrounds. School for a third year with other members of this and co-workers could use. Peace Corps staff libraries were under-equipped, not well used, pioneering group, says, “By the time I left asked the more-experienced Volunteers or non-existent. Peace Corps Volunteers and Tonga (in November 2018), more than 60 (whom we affectionately called “super-stars”) Tongan teachers lacked relevant, easy-to-use separate SWBs had been produced. They to share their insights in training sessions, and student-centered teaching activities. With sup- covered themes as simple as ‘big vs. small’ to officials of the Tonga Ministry of Education port from Peace Corps staff, Volunteers took complicated titles related to environmental invited them to run workshops for teachers a major step in a new direction. They created protection.” and principals. a Library Committee with subcommittees to A Library Development Subcommittee develop the needed resources. researched existing local libraries, developed SHIFTING TO PROJECT TEAMS Trained teachers Emily Merchant and a system of ranking books by levels of difBy the second year, we realized Tongan schools Kelsey Smith, with Jason Connors who had ficulty and guidelines for effective school 16

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library operation, and trained Volunteers and Tongan counterparts to adapt those guidelines in their schools. Subcommittee member Carrie Lee Pugh drew on her experience working in the library at Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina BEYOND GOOGLE

Trained teacher Abby Kloberdanz and generalist Ryan Kloberdanz, who were approaching the close of their service in their small, remote school in Tu’anuku on the island of Vava’u, developed a way to store and share teaching plans and materials they and other Volunteers had found useful. They collected, organized, and posted the resources to a Google online file-sharing system.

Their efforts led to the creation of the Information and Technology Subcommittee that developed a system of flash-drives Volunteers shared with counterparts. Volunteers also contributed materials to Arizona State University’s SolarSPELL digital library that provided teaching resources to Volunteers

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and counterparts working in Internet-limited schools.

Abrham Castillo-Ruiz and his Book Distribution Subcommittee gathered books donated by foreign organizations through the Rotary Club of Nuku’alofa, the capital city, sorted and distributed them to PCVs and other schools, and created book-selection guidelines for donors.

The Volunteers were assured that their pioneering work would be sustained long after they left Tonga because our staff and Volunteers built partnerships with the University of the South Pacific, Tupou Tertiary Institute, Tailulu College, and the Education Ministry’s curriculum, teacher training, and inclusive education units. The Library Committee’s work was gradually taken under the wing of the respected Tupou Tertiary Institute, whose leadership in school/community library work had inspired the Volunteers.

WHEN THE PIONEERS LEFT

The groundwork by these English literacy

facilitators resulted in increased use of books and libraries at their schools and higher reading skills among their students. In one example, Volunteer Gurkeert Bagri had helped to develop an attractive library equipped with an outstanding book collection and literacy-software-equipped laptops. These resources were well used by teachers and students. Bagri reports: “The Class 6 students achieved the highest test scores across the country at the end of my service. I know that the library and computer resources played a large factor in getting those results.”

Thoughtful, creative Volunteers collaborated with their forward-thinking Tongan educational partners to build a successful literacy reform initiative. It has benefited our host country Tonga and our own nation as these Volunteers come home with valuable skills in education and inter-cultural navigation. 1 Dr. Paul Jurmo was program and training director for

Peace Corps/Tonga from 2012 to 2017. His career in basic education for development began as a Volunteer in a national farmer literacy project in The Gambia from 1976 to 1979.

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GROUPS

Breaking Barriers How RPCVs advocate for LGBTQ Volunteers here and overseas

BY MANUEL COLÓN

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ay and lesbian RPCVs and staff joined together during Peace Corps’ 30th anniversary celebration in Washington, D.C. in 1991 to advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer rights in the Peace Corps community and around the world.

What we knew but many others did not realize was that when John F. Kennedy created the Peace Corps in 1961 as a federal agency it explicitly barred people with “homosexual tendencies” from service in a federal agency.

That’s a far stretch from where the agency is now, placing same-sex couples and transgender Volunteers in service in many countries.

The change is due to the work of a great many folks. The road from then to now has surely been bumpy and there is more work ahead.

Last year Peace Corps Volunteer and classroom teacher Romany Tin was separated from service in Cambodia after he seroconverted to an HIV-positive diagnosis. When Peace Corps announced that decision, it went viral and garnered attention on BuzzFeed, Them, and Poz. We elevated Tin’s story on our social media and our email listserv. Our lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer community was concerned for obvious reasons.

To our members, it was déjà vu because a decade ago we successfully argued that same issue in the case of Jeremiah Johnson and we had won.

People living with HIV can and do serve successfully in Peace Corps. Like all medical considerations, there are many individual and personal circumstances to factor in. In Tin’s case, the agency wasn’t aware of the preceding policy because Peace Corps staff usually serve under a five-year term limitation. Like 18

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many long-established RPCV groups ours can and sometimes does help Peace Corps maintain some of its institutional memory, especially when advocating for change at the individual or community level.

We communicated to Peace Corps staff about these earlier Peace Corps policies that could have prevented that decision from being made in the first place. Under similar circumstances, Jeremiah Johnson (Ukraine 07-08) was separated from service in 2008. With support from the American Civil Liberties Union, Peace Corps legal counsel decided to accommodate HIV-positive Volunteers under existing federal law. In the Tin case, Johnson, who later became HIV project director for New York Treatment Action Group, circulated

The mayor of Areguá, Paraguay, Osvaldo 3 Leiva, gives Manuel Colón a helping hand for a 2011 tree planting celebration.

a demand for clarification of the agency’s current policy on HIV-positive Volunteers and their de facto separations. Johnson’s demand ended up on the desk of Peace Corps Director Jody Olsen.

His letter led to a 2018 face-to-face meeting between he and Peace Corps Director Jody Olsen. Four days after the meeting Olsen released a response to Johnson’s letter that, among many things, reported the following: 18 countries are medically cleared to support HIV-positive Volunteers, how selections are made, and how Volunteers can access a pre-exposure prophylaxis to prevent HIV. Our memberships remains vigilant to ensure that discriminatory practices aren’t influencing decisions on a person’s ability or desire to serve in Peace Corps. We remind all PCVs and applicants that they can report any alleged discrimination to Peace Corps’ Office of Civil Rights and Diversity which investigates complaints regarding staff and Volunteers, trainees and applicants. We have not learned, however, if Romany Tin’s case has been resolved.

HOW WE OPERATE

Like many other NPCA affiliates, LGBT RPCV has evolved with the times. Our steering committee and members are all over the world and most of our operations are carried on digitally. Depending on what criteria you measure—you can register with NPCA, follow us on Twitter, or join our Facebook group, for example—we have about 500 members. And our reach truly is global. In 2018, our website received over 77,000 views from 83 countries.

We include “RPCV” in our name but we’re equally interested in the PCVs and in recruiting them. I would argue that the crux of our work is about motivating and inspiring the next generation of LGBTQ Volunteers for Peace Corps service and to support those who are in the field. We collect stories from RPCVs and staff about their experiences in various countries. These serve as great references for people considering the realities of joining Peace Corps and the impact and influence their sexual orientation or gender N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

identity might have on that decision.

We collaborate with Peace Corps recruiters to publicize and attend Pride events across the country and we collect safe zone/ ally trainings from Volunteers in the field.

Over the years, we’ve maintained a good working relationship with Peace Corps staff.

Those ties make our advocacy easier and more effective and we have assured them we are listening.

There are still Peace Corps host countries whose governments have laws that discriminate in areas of sexual orientation and/or gender identity. However, Peace Corps’ current application process allows applicants to choose where they want to serve and that has shifted our mentorship and resources to other issues. Applying for a specific country and project gives a prospective Volunteer the ability to investigate their country of service to assure a good fit, which has refined our group’s role in mentoring applicants.

Nine years ago when I was invited to serve in Paraguay as an environmental educator I had only two months to search the internet for everything I could learn about the country. Now there is a global LGBTQ chat group that can lead applicants to several Facebook groups for many of those countries where PCVs serve. Applicants can connect directly with an LGBTQ Volunteer in service and lead to valuable friendships and create a community before getting on the plane.

IT TAKES MORE THAN PRIDE

It may be chic to be an ally and hang rainbow flags during the June Pride celebrations, but there are definitely struggles to being an LGBTQ Peace Corps Volunteer. For starters, there are dozens of countries where Volunteers serve that criminalize homosexuality. In others without formal legislation, conservative socio-cultural tradition make our service difficult.

For example, in my case Paraguay had no official laws against homosexuality, but it certainly was not a safe place to be out. No volunteers I knew could be open about their sexual orientation in their community and expect to be able to work. In fact, a handful of Volunteers had to change sites when someW W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

one in their communities either discovered or suspected that they were LGBTQ and requested that Peace Corps remove them.

For some of the same reasons, there are only a limited number of countries where same-sex couples can be placed. There is no official list but Peace Corps recruitment staff does work with interested couples to identify which countries will meet their skill set and be open to their placement.

We collaborate and advocate with many partners: In addition to the Peace Corps community, we worked with It Gets Better (IGB) on a video titled “Queer and Abroad” where RPCVs shared their stories about life beyond our borders and their LGBTQ identities. IGB’s story-telling mission uplifts, empowers, and connects LGBTQ youth around the world and the videos resonate with the work we do and the change we hope to see.

In the Third Goal spirit, we contributed a story about Ethiopia to Griots Republic Magazine, an urban Black travel brand that is interested in the range of countries and experiences that our site has collected over the years. We have also partnered with AsylumConnect, a nonprofit that hosts the first website and mobile app and features an online, centralized database of service providers for LGBTQ asylum seekers in the United States.

We are always looking for collaborators and conspirators. Primarily we encourage RPCVs to contribute stories to our website, formally join us through the NPCA (it’s free!), and engage with us on our Facebook group and Twitter account. We also encourage our members to make sure their contact information is up-to-date with Peace Corps, specifically their Speakers Match program, where people can identify that they are interested in helping with recruitment activities and speaking about their LGBTQ identity.

We have come a long way since our founding 28 years ago and we look forward to seeing where the future takes us. 1 Manuel Colón served in Areguá, Paraguay as an

environmental education teacher from 2010 to 2012 and is national coordinator for the LGBT RPCV Association.

He received Peace Corps’ 2014 Franklin H. Williams award for his dedication to the Third Goal.

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THE GAMBIA

Layering The Gambia Water Charity delivers clean water through a cloud of data

M

BY AVERILL STRASSER

embers of our Gambia team mount their shiny all-terrain Yamaha 100cc motorcycles and ride off to the outermost reaches of The Gambia to gather data about the water and health needs of the country. Shouldering brief cases of web-enabled tablets, they ride to even the smallest villages—some that aren’t even on a government map—to record and send fresh census data to our Global Information System (GIS) database. This is the heart of our innovative Water for Everyone to provide clean water for every person in The Gambia and nearby Togo by the end of 2023.

“Data is the new oil,” says Water Charity’s country director, Emily Lundberg. “Location intelligence is the process of deriving meaningful insight from geospatial data relationships to solve a particular problem, such as lack of access to water or lack of a water management system.”

Lundberg’s doctorate in communications from Columbia University embraces research on international development, behavior change, social marketing and development economics conducted in the School for International and Public Affairs under Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. Since joining Water Charity in 2018, she has directed two dozen projects in the country—building, fixing or replacing entire water systems, borehole wells, and making pump repairs for clinics, schools, and communities.

These projects laid the groundwork for cooperation among governmental organizations, businesses, other NGOs, village leaders, and resource providers.

Water for Everyone is a visionary new strategy of Water Charity and the NPCA that uses the latest technology to map the terrain and the needs of each of the villages in order to create a coordinated strategy for reliably and efficiently delivered clean water to an entire country.

Lundberg relies on her Gambia program manager, Ebrima Marong, and his crew to implement the field work in coordination with Mike McConnell, a former Peace Corps Gambia country director whose NGO, GambiaRising, supports education through scholarships at all levels. As we improve access to clean water, girls can spend more time in school, and less hauling water long distances for their families.

The man in the red hat is Ebrima Marong, program manager in The 3 Gambia for Water Charity’s ambitious effort to provide or repair clean

water systems for hundreds of villages, some of which are not even on the nation’s official map.

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DANCING OXEN

A villager once told Emily what a difference our work was making in The Gambia. “Diarrhea and sickness were the order of the day in our community. Now our donkeys and ox carts can dance, because they won’t have to carry a sick person to the clinic on a daily basis.

Clean water truly saves the day.”

Three years ago Water Charity engaged in the concept of collaborative border-to-border programming in Liberia. We joined with 12 major partners to bring water to everyone in that country by the end of 2020. As we push to a conclusion of the final Liberia projects, the effort is wildly successful, on schedule, and within budget.

Water Charity decided that Togo and The Gambia, two nearby countries in need, were next. Our network on the ground and our past record of implementing projects in the two countries impelled us to step up our game and become the lead partner for a new consortium. We worked with the Liberia team to ramp up our deployment of the GIS technology and started bringing on other implementing partners, consultants, funders and materials and labor resource providers. At the same time, we reached out to business and government entities to encourage their participation.

The initiative is comprised of parallel programs to bring safe water to every person in Togo, a country of about 7.3 million, and The Gambia, with over 2 million people. The process begins with a complete assessment of the water needs, and is carried out by going to every village in the country. The initiative includes obtaining certification from oversight agencies in each geographic district, and final country-wide certification of completion.

LAYERS OF DATA

The GIS cloud-based technology is a framework for gathering, managing, and analyzing data. Rooted in the science of geography, GIS integrates all types of data, analyzes spatial location, and organizes layers of information into visualizations using maps. ​The result gives us deeper insights into data, such as patterns, relationships, and situations that enable us to make smarter decisions.

Maps are the geographic container for the data layers and analytics we want to work with. GIS maps are easily shared and embedded in apps, and accessible by virtually everyone, everywhere. Each community represents a dot on the map, and contains information, WO R L D V I E W FA L L 2 0 1 9

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graphics, and videos. Data entry is validated, and the database is continually updated and checked, leading to complete security and creating confidence in the outcomes.

The GIS system provides the basis for our planning and decision-making. We are able to sequence our priorities and implement projects taking advantage of economies of scale, location of materials and personnel resources, and work being done by others in the country. Our team of data collectors spans the countryside with cellular telephones and tablets to send the data on GPS-enabled mobile technology so we can gather, mobilize and combine information and data for making our development decisions.

Once we sign a memorandum of understanding with a regional government, Ebrima hires a dozen surveyors from among local government workers and teaches them how to make village assessments using census-taking techniques and the GIS software.

“We analyze the existing water resources and determine the improvements needed in the community.” Ebrima says. “We ask for the community name, estimated population, and the community leader’s contact information.”

ASSESSORS ON WHEELS

We began our assessment in The Gambia when Ebrima selected and trained a dozen government employees to survey every village using a tablet-based questionnaire to assess existing water sources, schools and clinics and get baseline health information and the contact information for community leaders.

Ebrima knows well the rural terrain of his country and has seen the hardship of lives spent without clean drinking water. “I always Each dot on the map represents a cluster of villages and contains 3 information, graphics, and videos. Water Charity is surveying hundreds

of villages along the Gambia River. Most of their work has been devoted to mapping the rural eastern part of the nation where 60 percent of The Gambia suffers from a severe lack of clean water.

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dreamed that one day I would have a chance to find a program that had both a vision and funding to begin to help my people.” He is dedicated to the technology we use and the need to create partnerships across The Gambia to make sure it works. Ebrima says “these are not one-time fixes, but part of truly sustainable development that includes maintenance and repair, strong village water committees, a voice for women, getting girls back into school, and making sure that rural clinics and schools have water so that the cycle of health and development can continue.”

Ebrima sends his corps of surveyors out on their Yamahas to canvass the needs of each village in the region, recording the data on their tablets and uploading the data through the GIS cloud.

They count the number of functioning wells, wells that need major rehabilitation, those that need minor repairs, abandoned wells, types and number of latrines available, and types of surface water available. They photograph each site and geotag each photo.

They also photograph and geotag each school, health clinic, and religious institution in the community. “We ask whether these institutions have water and whether that water is available to the community,” Ebrima says. “We ask how many people have been affected by diarrhea in the last two weeks, and we record other useful data.”

As Lundberg and the Water Charity staff receive the data, they use GIS to schedule the projects, develop work plans and timetables, direct manpower, and secure tools, equipment, and materials.

RURAL PRIORITIES

The Gambia is one of Africa’s smallest countries, a long narrow nation whose undulating borders are defined by the twists and turns of the Gambia River. Its five administrative regions are surrounded

by Senegal on three sides as the broad river meanders west to feed into the Atlantic Ocean at the capital city, Banjul. Approximately

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An ambitious Water Charity project in The Gambia depends on cloud3 based GIS technology to compile the water problems that plague this

Ebrima Marong/Water Charity

rural nation, but they depend on surveyors like Arabiatou Sambou (left) and Khadijat Suso to collect tablets of data.

40 percent of the country is served by the National Water and Electricity Company, leaving about 1.26 million people in rural areas of The Gambia without services.

Water Charity began in the east. “In the two districts of the Upper River and the Central River Regions,” says Lundberg, “we have surveyed a little over 65 percent of the population not served

by NAWEC.” The unserved areas of these two regions represent more than 1,000 communities, 840,000 people, 3,000 wells, 320 schools, and over 60 health clinics.

Their next survey region will be North Bank which, according to a 2013 census, has a population of more than 220,000. The final survey will include 100,000 people in the Lower River region and unsurveyed parts of the Western region closer to the capital and limited public services.

We started with mapping based on the work of the nation’s Department of Water Resources and local governments. We prioritize those villages that either do not have water, or those that have an ample supply but the water is contaminated and is causing illness. We make immediate fixes for important but simple problems, such as the installation of water filters. Where we find pumps that need minor repairs, we create detailed lists of the parts the village needs.

To reach our goals and ensure that our projects remain sustainable, individual projects are planned from the ground up, working with the water committee of the village or the management of the clinic or school. The assessment of the needs becomes the basis for W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

the development of each unique project.

As the villages receive improvements, the residents become the owners of the facilities and must create a plan for ongoing maintenance and repairs. This is usually accomplished through the establishment of an ongoing fund to collect money from the water users.

Working with the Department of Rural Water, we’ve begun integrating project plans from the Saudis, Japan International Cooperation Agency, and the African Development Bank which have in-country water development projects. This coordination greatly improves our planning effort.

We are also beginning to work with water system contractors on a system of warrantied repairs, and recently reached an agreement for a five-year warranty on work in the Central River Region. We require at least a three-year warranty from every contractor we work with. In addition, we are developing lists of authorized equipment and materials suppliers, which we specify for all work.

The systems we’re establishing in The Gambia will be passed on to local institutions addressing problems in the delivery of health services, development of educational facilities, agriculture and food security, business development, and preparation for the remediation of changes resulting from climate change. We’re working with businesses, governmental organizations, other NGOs, philanthropies, and the general public in this game-changing endeavor.

We strongly believe our innovations for Water for Everyone will serve as a model for many developing countries in the years to come. Our assessments in Togo are well underway. 1 Averill Strasser is founder and chief operating officer of Water Charity, a nonprofit that

has conducted water, sanitation and environmental projects in 76 countries. He is an attorney and engineer who served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Bolivia from 1966 to 1968. Water Charity is a partner of the National Peace Corps Association.

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CHINA

Life Under the Cloud Scanning through the China’s new cashless economy

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BY ANDREW SCHAFER

alking past the Gucci and Balenciaga stores in Beijing’s most fashionable area, Sanlitun, I’m having culture shock on top of culture shock. I’m back in China but this area which is 三里屯, or Three Kilometer Village, is a pocket of wealth in China’s capital that’s so far from the rural Sichuan province I came to know and love as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Everything in China is different from the United States I just left, and everything in Sanlitun is different from the China I remember. But what could I possibly know about China having been gone for five years?

Since my Peace Corps service, I’ve been working for a fast-growing tech firm called Cloudflare in the heart of Silicon Valley—San Francisco. We’ve been opening offices around the world, and when it came time to open our China office, thanks to Peace Corps China, I had the skills for the job. So here I am back in China, trying to figure things out and it feels like pre-service training all over again.

I keep walking and up ahead, past a hotel portes-cochère where a few Ferraris are parked, I see a familiar sight: a man with weather-worn skin, military fatigues, a blue button-up work shirt, and simple black slippers with no socks—the type of garb worn by many folks in rural areas. Amidst the wealth of Sanlitun he seems as out of place as I feel, but he connects me to what I remember about China. He is familiar, almost comforting. As I approach he holds out his calloused hands and asks for money. I tell him, honestly, that I don’t have “now gold.” The term in Mandarin is 现金, the literal translation for cash which, in fact, no one in modern China has now.

Anticipating my response this man tugs on a plastic string around his neck and out pops a plastic WeChat card with one of those square designs of bar codes—the quick response or “QR” symbol—printed on the front. I don’t know what to say. I keep walking, too confused to respond. Living in San Francisco, I’ve grown accustomed to being asked for cash on a daily basis. It is hard to use the BART system without being propositioned for spare change. As I walk on, I start to wonder if in the future will people say, “Sorry, my phone is dead” instead of “Sorry, I don’t have any cash on me.”

And then it hits me—I am living in that future. It is now in China.

My tech savvy friends working and living in Silicon Valley love being early adopters of new technology. They walk around with 24

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N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

Photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters

AirPods dangling from their ears connected to an iPhone X, run all the latest software and apps, and have likely used a cryptocurrency to purchase something online. So, of course, most of the folks I work with have their credit cards loaded into their iPhones and Apple Watches and look for the Apple Pay symbols at any cash register they come across. Electronic payments will get you pretty far in the Bay Area, but there are trendy establishments in San Francisco that still demand “cash only.”

Good luck showing up in China with a wallet full of pink 100 yuan notes that you got from your bank before leaving or took out The leading tech firms around the globe maintain a large presence in 3 Beijing’s Wangfuljing district.

of the ATM at the airport. WeChat Pay and AliPay are so pervasive here that many places don’t bother having change on hand in case some weirdo wants to use some of that old fashion now gold.

Last week I asked a Chinese friend of mine about the last time she used cash. She couldn’t really remember the time period, and it had been long enough to forget what the lowest bank note was in China. I do. It’s 1 jiao (角) which is one-tenth of 1 yuan (元), the equivalent of $0.015. I know that because I used to save up 35 jiao over a month or so and buy a bowl of noodles. With WeChat I can pay for a haircut, a new motorcycle, groceries, utility bills, and a bottle of water for 14 cents off a wooden cart in a back alley. In fact, one of the first new vocabulary words I had to learn upon arriving back in China was “scan” (扫) because several times a day I’ll ask or be asked, “Will you scan mine, or should I scan yours?”

The question is how we will use WeChat Pay to exchange funds. I can either use my phone to scan their QR code, or they can scan the QR code on my WeChat Pay account and receive payment this way.

PINK NOTES GO IN THE SOCK DRAWER

Last month a close friend and fellow China RPCV came to visit me in Beijing. Having served in rural Guizhou province for two years, he is no stranger to China; however, having also been gone for five years, he showed up with that wad of pink 100 yuan notes.

After two days of being told he can’t use now gold, I ended up with those pink notes stuffed in my sock drawer and transferring funds via WeChat Pay for him to use on his phone during his travels.

To give a sense of how fast WeChat was adopted in China and how big it is, here are some numbers for comparison: it took the telephone 75 years to reach 50 million users, the television 13 years, Facebook two years, and YouTube 10 months. WeChat was adopted by 50 million users in just three months in 2011, and since then it has ballooned to W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

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IT’S NOT ABOUT THE WEATHER

Here’s a story to help everyone get up to speed on cloud computing.

Don’t feel left behind about this because it took me five years of learning in Silicon Valley to understand these cloud basics. You may have heard of Amazon. The year was 1999 and Amazon was growing fast. Every time a new business unit was launched, they hired a 26

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The vendor of grilled pork, beef and duck at this streetside takeaway 3 shop doesn’t need to make change because most customers pay through a scan of the the bar code to pay through the cloud.

new team of engineers to build out the computing infrastructure that each new business unit needed to operate. Amazon would buy huge computer servers that everyone in the office would pull information from. This was not only costly, it was inefficient since each business unit might have their infrastructure set up differently, making it hard for these teams to share information. More importantly it was inefficient because machines were often sitting idle. It was like everyone at the company owned a car, but not everyone needed to drive all the time, so many cars would be sitting around unused most of the time. The trick was to find a way to efficiently share resources—cars, bikes, computers, or whatever—so you get higher utilization and need fewer of them.

Amazon streamlined this process by having one engineering team build one big computing infrastructure for use by all the individual business units. It was like an “off the shelf” set up for the computing infrastructure needs of each business unit. This saved time, resources, and was extremely efficient since each new business unit could easily make use of the existing larger infrastructure, one specialized team could look after the whole infrastructure system, and there were far fewer machines sitting around unused. Then someone at Amazon thought, “Hmmmm, if we need this, maybe other businesses also would like to have computing infrastructure as a service.” And, boom, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and a whole list of other cloud computing services were born.

If you want to run a website or ecommerce store now you can run it on the cloud of Amazon’s computing infrastructure, or that N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

Shotshop

900 million users on a monthly basis and Tencent (the company that built WeChat) claims to have one billion daily active users as of January 2019.

Even if you are not in the tech world and don’t get all revved up about app daily active user stats, it is still worth considering how impressive it is to have so many people—across all age groups— pick up this technology so quickly. I’ve read scholars writing about how China is the country most weighed down by history, and also, paradoxically, it is the country most willing to adopt and embrace the future. And because of China’s developmental timeline, it has been able to leap past whole periods of technology.

For example, going directly to mobile phones without having any landlines first, skipping over the quagmire of bank cards, and going directly to WeChat Pay and other mobile payment services.

As I walk through my daily life here in Beijing scanning QR codes for all of my purchases, I can’t help but feel that using a credit card in the United States is archaic. It seems as strange as the thought of going to a bank to cash a check, getting film developed, or unfolding a paper map to get directions.

And how is WeChat Pay possible? How can billions of people all over China and the world use the same app all day every day at the same time? Two words: the cloud. But what the hell is the cloud anyway?

of a competitor. You don’t have to buy your own very expensive servers and hire an expensive engineer to maintain them, and you don’t have to pay for a huge server that sits idle during slow times of day or slow seasons. To put it simply: the cloud is someone else’s computer. And using someone else’s computer is a powerful tool.

Here is an illustration of the power of cloud computing for business: it makes scaling up and scaling down cost effective. Let’s say you run an ecommerce website selling t-shirts. You have two busy seasons: the holidays for gift buying and at the beginning of the summer. To handle huge volumes of traffic for these peak seasons you need to buy and maintain ten servers. But you are using all ten servers for your website traffic for only a few weeks a year.

For the rest of the year one server is enough. These servers (that are sitting around unused most of the year) create a huge cost for your business. Cloud computing allows you to pay for one server when you only need one server and add more servers for short periods of time to handle traffic spikes during busy times.

ORDERING YOUR PIZZA OUT

Here is another illustration of the power of cloud computing: it allows for powerful computers to do the hard processing work instead of your laptop or cell phone. Normal computing is like wanting to make a pizza and inviting a pizza chef and their team into your tiny kitchen at home to make pizzas. It will be cramped and messy, you likely won’t have all of the special equipment needed, it’ll be expensive and slow and customizations will be required. Cloud computing is like having a pizza chef work out of a professional kitchen specially designed to handle pizza making at scale. That industrial kitchen and pizza chef can send you small Recently returning to China as Cloudflare’s special projects director, 3 Andrew Schafer has relegated his collection of yuan paper currency to his sock drawer.

pizzas one by one in a manageable way that your tiny kitchen can handle, without your ever having to know how to make a pizza, set up an oven, or understand how to increase capacity if more pizza making is needed. And that industrial kitchen can make pizzas for many people at the same time. Now think of “the cloud” as a gigantic industrial pizza kitchen, and your cell phone or laptop as your tiny personal kitchen. The cloud handles the huge computing power required to run an app and sends a little bit of data to your phone or laptop so you can use the service.

And so it is with WeChat, WeChat Pay and all the other apps you know and love. There are gigantic warehouses filled with racks and racks of computers in China and around the world that we call “the cloud.” It is these buildings full of computers that help handle the spikes and dips in traffic and process all of the information that WeChat users need, since trying to do it on a tiny cell phone would be impossible.

The tech company I work for, Cloudflare, makes websites and apps faster and more secure on the internet. Cloudflare sits between your laptop or cell phone and the cloud—those huge racks of servers in data centers somewhere else in the world. Since it is expensive to run an application in the cloud, most companies have their application in just one data center in one location. That’s great if your laptop is near that particular data center, but what if you have users all over the world? Cloudflare takes an application and pushes it globally to our 180-plus data centers around the world, making sure that the application loads fast. And when the internet traffic for an app goes through Cloudflare, we can filter out bad traffic, protect against cyber attacks, add encryption, and speed up the request.

And so here I am in modern China where billions of people have cell phones connected to the internet and to massive cloud computing infrastructure. The results are really amazing, and WeChat Pay stands out for me as having a huge, and hugely visible, impact on day to day life here. While I was stunned at being asked for money on the street via a QR code, I now casually take in musicians playing in the street with large QR codes set up to receive tips from people passing by, brides with QR codes on their dresses to accept wedding gifts, QR codes on coffins for tithes, and singers on TV that have QR code tattooed on their necks.

It is an exciting time to get a first-hand look at a nation that is reshaping the world.

I am fortunate that my Peace Corps service set me up for this opportunity to keep a pulse on tech in China.

Andrew Schafer taught English as Yibin Vocational

and Technical College in Sichuan province from 2011 to 2013. He is now on the special projects team for Cloudflare helping to build their new Beijing office.

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E GY P T

The Collector of Zamalek Gathering the evidence of life on an island in Cairo

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BY PETER HESSLER

fter Sayyid finished with the morning’s garbage collection, he usually drank tea in the shade at the H Freedom kiosk. The kiosk had been built against the far side of my garden wall, next to the wroughtiron spiderwebs, and I could see it from the windows of my study. If Sayyid telephoned around midday and hung up before I could answer, I knew that I should look outside. Usually he was waving above the garden wall. This was his way of inviting me over without paying for a connected phone call.

When we sat at H Freedom, Sayyid would point out the neighbors who walked past. His descriptions tended to be brief, informative, and grounded in the material evidence of personal consumption.

“She’s a doctor,” he said one day, after a middle-aged woman crossed the street. “She smokes Merit Blue, the ones that cost 30 pounds per pack. But she pays me only 10 pounds every month.” Another time, a foreigner shuffled past. “He lives in that building across the street,” Sayyid said. “His wife is Egyptian. They have money. He drinks whiskey; I find the bottles in the trash.”

Once, a young foreign artist from my building stopped to greet me, and Sayyid discreetly covered his teacup with his hand. “This used to be her cup,” he explained, after she left. He pointed to a chip at the cup’s base—the reason it had been discarded. After deciding that the cup was still serviceable, he had donated it to H Freedom.

He portrayed the artist and her roommate with characteristically broad strokes: “They’re nice. They pay me well. Their trash is full of cigarette ash. They don’t seem to eat very much.”

SAYYID’S ROUTE

After I got to know Sayyid well, I occasionally tagged along for his morning rounds. In every building, he climbed to the top of the fire escape and then descended, filling a huge canvas sack while talking about the inhabitants. These were vertical narratives—each landing introduced a new character. I have changed the names of all the residents.

“Madame Heba,” he said, at the top of a fire escape in a building a couple of doors down from mine. “She’s a good person. Her 28

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husband is dead.” He grabbed her plastic garbage bag, tossed it into his sack, and descended to another story: “This is Dr. Mohammed, an Egyptian. He’s rich. He doesn’t pay me enough. Only fifteen pounds.”

Next landing: “This one’s a priest, Father Mikael. He’s very cheap.

He gives me only five pounds a month.” Sayyid pointed at the garbage of a Coptic Christian; he had twice as many bags as the others. “He says he doesn’t have any money, but I see all the boxes and bags from the gifts that he gets. People give him things all the time because he’s a priest.”

We had started well before dawn, following a twisting, hidden route through the structures.

Many of them, like the spiderweb building, had a fading glory, and Sayyid led me through marbled Art Deco lobbies where the stone had turned gray. We ascended back staircases with wrought-iron railings. Sometimes we climbed to an open rooftop, and the view of the city opened before us. As the dawn came and went, the color of the Nile changed: now gray, now orange, now a sun-dazzled blue. And every rooftop glimpse of the bright Egyptian morning was followed by another climb down a dark metal stairway. Many fire escapes were enclosed within narrow, chimney-like atriums, and the shadows lengthened as we descended, until at the bottom it felt like night.

We reached a gloomy landing full of rotting food and trash.

“This one’s a foreigner,” Sayyid said. “I’m not supposed to touch her garbage. The landlord isn’t happy with her; there’s some kind of fight.” Sayyid explained that in the same way that people paid him to take their garbage away, a landlord could also pay him to allow N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

Sayyid collected the author’s garbage and often repurposed what the 3 dwellers in these Zamalek apartment buildings left behind. In the pro-

Photo by Peter Hessler

cess he gathered intimate intelligence and great respect from his clients.

somebody’s trash to accumulate. The filth was leverage: once the dispute was resolved, the landlord would give Sayyid some money to clean up the mess.

At the next landing, Sayyid dropped his voice: “She’s Muslim, but she drinks too much. There are always bottles in her trash.” He ripped open the woman’s bag and showed me the empties: cheap Auld Stag whiskey and Egyptian-made Caspar wine.

Across the street from the drinker, Sayyid opened another bag. “This is Mr. Hassan,” he said. “He’s sick.” He rooted inside and pulled out a pair of used syringes. “I think he has diabetes.

Every day there are two syringes in the garbage. He takes one in the morning and one at night.” Another time, we came to a landing, W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

and Sayyid whispered that a resident was a sex-crazed Lebanese.

Then he ripped open the trash and found an empty bottle labeled “Durex Play Feel Intimate Lube.”

Sayyid could haul more than seventy pounds in his canvas sack.

Within the atriums, he descended through scattered sounds of morning routines: running water, hissing stoves, crackled voices on the radio. Occasionally, an early riser heard Sayyid’s footsteps and opened the kitchen door to greet him or offer tea. One morning when I was accompanying him, an elderly woman presented him with four hamburger patties in a plastic bag.

Many staircase stories described such acts of kindness. Sayyid introduced one landing as the home of a dentist who had recently arranged to have one of Sayyid’s cavities filled, free of charge.

Another fire-escape door led to the home of a petroleum engineer who once threw away his wallet by mistake. Sayyid found the walWO R L D V I E W FA L L 2 0 1 9

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let and returned it, and the engineer was overjoyed to recover his driver’s license and other documents. The wallet contained only twenty-five pounds, the equivalent of less than three dollars, but the engineer rewarded Sayyid with a pair of hundred-pound bills.

THE ZABALEEN SYSTEM

This spirit of generosity, and the personal touch of zabaleen like Sayyid, were the main reasons that the Cairo garbage-collection system continued to function despite decades of government neglect. As usual, the word “system” was deceptive; garbage collection was better described as a series of layered relationships that had developed without any plan or oversight. In the early twentieth century, migrants arrived from Dakhla, a remote oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert, where the water source had started to diminish.

These environmental refugees became known as wahiya—“people of the oasis”—and they found a niche as trash collectors. They used flammable refuse for street carts that cooked ful, the inexpensive fried beans that are a staple in Egypt.

In those days, much of the trash was flammable, and the wahiya’s dual industries functioned in harmony. But inevitably the city’s population grew at a rate that upset the delicate balance between trash and beans. During the 1930s and 1940s, another wave of migrants arrived from Asyut, a governorate in Upper Egypt. They were Copts who carved out a Christian-specific niche in the garbage world: they raised pigs that ate organic matter. Soon the original wahiya evolved into middlemen, managing access to buildings and collecting fees,

of the waste they collected—more than twice the current rate in the United States. But government officials tended to perceive zabaleen as symbols of backwardness rather than as community resources.

In 2003, the government gave fifteen-year contracts to European waste-management companies, which would supposedly implement cutting-edge practices throughout the capital. Like so many attempts at modernization in Egypt, this reform introduced enough systematization to disrupt native traditions but not enough to result in true efficiency. The plan was underfunded, and the foreign companies had trouble negotiating the complex cultural landscape of the existing wahiya and zabaleen. Company trucks were too big to fit into many narrow streets. When the foreigners installed European-style dumpsters around the city, the zabaleen responded by immediately collecting these metal containers and selling them for scrap.

In 2009, during the worldwide epidemic of swine flu, the Ministry of Agriculture ordered the slaughter of all Egyptian pigs. There was no evidence that the animals were spreading the disease, which in fact had not affected a single Egyptian at the time of the decree. But the government went ahead and killed as many as 300,000 pigs.

Some believed that the decision was driven by a desire to appease the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist opponents of the regime. But even if the Islamists had hated pigs more than they hated Mubarak, this hardly outweighed the costs of disrupting the city’s sanitation system. Hundreds of angry zabaleen held demonstrations, and they started tossing organic waste into the streets, because now they couldn’t feed it to the pigs. The declining hygiene of the capital, and the unrest of the zabaleen, contributed to the growing unhappiness that culminated in the revolution.

As usual, the word “system” was deceptive; garbage collection was better described as a series of layered relationships that had developed without any plan or oversight. and some of them entered the recycling business. Meanwhile, the Christians, who became known as zabaleen, did most of the hauling and sorting of trash, and they earned extra money by selling pork to tourist hotels. These relationships worked well through an era of rapid growth. In 1950, the population of Greater Cairo was only 2.8 million, but it grew six-fold over the next six decades, to more than 17 million.

The garbage network proved to be remarkably flexible, in part because there were always more Upper Egyptian migrants like Sayyid who were willing to work. In 2006, an article in the journal Habitat International declared, “Over the course of five decades the Zabaleen have created what is arguably one of the world’s most efficient resource recovery systems.” The zabaleen recycled roughly 80 percent 30

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MINISTRY OF BEAUTIFICATION

In Cairo, I met with Hassan Abu Ahmed, a spokesman for the Cairo Cleaning and Beautification Authority, a name that rang with the spirit of insha’allah. This government department ostensibly handled waste management, although in practice it had little control over huge swaths of the city. Ahmed acknowledged that the pig massacre had been a disaster. “The government has since said that the pigs had nothing to do with the swine flu,” he said. “It was a mistake to slaughter all of them.” But the government still hadn’t allowed the zabaleen to resume raising animals, probably because now the Islamists were winning elections. Ahmed told me that the economic collapse after the Tahrir Square revolution had resulted in the city’s falling behind on tens of millions of dollars’ worth of garbage bills. In response, the foreign companies had cut back on services, and the recycling rate was dropping. “The companies recycle 40 percent of the trash,” Ahmed said. “They collect fifteen thousand tons every day, and three thousand tons are recycled.”

I stopped writing in my notebook. “That’s not 40 percent,” I N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

Photo by Peter Hessler

one more. Another wahi had been dead for a decade, but his son, a government clerk, retained garbage rights, so he collected a monthly fee from Sayyid. Sayyid also sent one hundred pounds every month to the widow of a wahi who had negotiated a deal before his death.

Sayyid kept track of all these relationships, and the tips of more than four hundred residents, by memory alone. There were no formal contracts for anything.

Meanwhile, he also conducted his ongoing public relations campaign in the neighborhood. During Muslim holidays, he went to the mosque on Ahmed Heshmat Street and prayed ostentatiously so that other celebrants might be inspired to give him a bonus. He always wore his worst clothes and stood in prominent locations during the Eid al-Adha festival. One year at Eid, I was talking with Sayyid near the spiderweb building, and a retired diplomat walked by. The well-dressed man greeted Sayyid politely and handed over a twenty-pound bill.

Sayyid became a friend and guide during Peter Hessler’s reporting life in Cairo.

3 Then he looked at me.

The garbage collector often visited the Hessler home where one day he posed to celebrate Halloween with the author’s twins, Natasha (left) and Ariel.

“Mish mehtegu,” I said awkwardly, when the man reached into his pocket and pulled out another twenty. said. “Three thousand isn’t 40 percent of fifteen thousand. Do you “I don’t need it.” He gave me an odd look and continued on his way. mean that they are recycling 40 percent or that they are recycling “He thinks you’re a zabal!” Sayyid said. It became a favorite three thousand tons every day?” story; he often repeated it to the men at H Freedom. He liked to relax “Yes,” Ahmed said. at the kiosk, which was also a place to pick up information about Fortunately, I always brought an interpreter when I interviewed the neighborhood. Occasionally his alertness backfired. Once, he officials. It took a while to establish that Ahmed had intended to was hauling trash at night when he saw the college-age daughter say that six thousand tons were being recycled every day. But who of a doorman kiss a boy. Sayyid immediately told the doorman— knew for certain? Interviews often became entangled in Egyptian he said later that it was out of respect for the family’s honor. But math, and while I always tried to clarify the figures, I wondered undoubtedly he was also motivated by the possible benefits of the about accuracy. Mafeesh nizam, as my teacher Rifaat always said— doorman’s gratitude. This turned out to be a miscalculation: the there’s no system. daughter denied everything, and the doorman was so embarrassed that he barred Sayyid from collecting the building’s trash. Sayyid AIMAN THE CAT told me that he should have minded his own business.

Improved sanitation was supposed to be one of the five main pillars Like so many aspects of Egyptian society, the garbage world of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Renaissance Project. But no detailed involved endless complexities of social class, faith, and language. The plans had been unveiled, and Mohammed Morsi’s public comments first time Sayyid invited me to his neighborhood to watch a soccer were low on practical application. (“Cleanliness comes from faith,” game with his zabaleen colleagues, most of whom were Copts, he he declared in a radio interview, when the topic of garbage collection prepped me carefully. He warned me not to say salaamu aleikum came up.) I asked Sayyid if he was concerned about possible change, to a Christian, and he reminded me to address any priest as abuna, and he laughed. “Kalem bas,” he said. “It’s just words.” “our father.” At all costs I should avoid using Muslim interjections In any case, his attention was devoted entirely to a single section of like la ilaha ill’allah—“there is no God but God.” I enjoyed the a single island in the Nile. He collected from twenty-seven buildings, strangeness of this exchange: the Muslim garbageman instructing which were subcontracted from seven individuals, of whom the most the former Catholic altar boy on how to avoid offending Coptic important was Aiman. Like many zabaleen, he went by a nickname: Christian sensibilities. 1 Aiman the Cat. Sayyid had also worked for Aiman the Cat’s cousin, The subject of journalist Peter Hessler’s first book, River Town: Two Years on the who was part of a three-generation line of zabaleen who went by Yangtze, was his Peace Corps experience living and teaching in Fuling, China from 1966 the nicknames Limoun, Zaitoun, and Filfil—Lemon, Olives, and to 1968. The Collector of Zamalek is an excerpt from his fourth book, The Buried: An Pepper. Sayyid had no idea what had inspired these oddly culinary archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution. He has reported on China and Egypt for the New Yorker magazine, and has received a National Magazine Award for his reporting monikers, and he also couldn’t explain the Beast and the Fox. The and was a 2011 MacArthur fellow. This article is published with permission from PenFox subcontracted seven buildings to Sayyid; the Beast provided guin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC. W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

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GREECE

Asylum at 30 Degrees Latitude Five months negotiating for refugees as the Greek government takes over

T

BY EIRENE CHEN

he northeastern Aegean Greek island of Lesvos evokes for some travelers images directly from the Mamma Mia movies: After a leisurely flight or overnight ferry ride, you arrive at the third-largest of Greece’s islands and its azure Mediterranean waters, vibrant cafés and harbor-front markets, its freshly caught octopi drying on fishing lines in the afternoon sun before becoming part of a resplendent taverna dinner, where ouzo and laïko music flow late into the night. While walking through the central square of its main city, Mytilene, you may notice a mural inscribed with words from the town’s most famous poet, Sappho: I love the sensual.

For me, this, and love for the sun, has a share in brilliance and beauty.

For others, the Lesvos experience is considerably different: Sometime after midnight, you board an overcrowded rubber dinghy on the western Turkish coast and pray to safely cross the choppy Mytilene Strait without losing your backpack or your life. Upon landing you surrender to the Hellenic security forces who take you to a crowded identification center among the olive groves of Moria village. Here you register your asylum claim alongside the approximately 6,000 other refugees in what Doctors Without Borders staff call Europe’s worst refugee camp. If your passport happens to originate from a country with a low Eurostat asylum acceptance rate, you will be immediately detained for at least three months.

For five years Lesvos has been one of the most internationally visible crossing points for asylum seekers hoping to enter Europe from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The island has for millennia been a sanctuary for people fleeing persecution. Many Lesvos residents are descendants of refugees who had been expelled from Asia Minor in the 1920s. At the height of the so-called Mediterranean refugee crisis in 2015 over 6,000 people arrived daily on Lesvos’ northern shores, primarily families from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Readers of WorldView’s Spring 2017 issue profiling the global refugee situation may recall that the Idomeni border crossing between Greece and North Macedonia had just been closed. Between then and the present day, over 1 million people seeking refuge in Europe 32

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have passed through Greece.

All of that ended when in March 2016 the European Union-Turkey Statement was implemented “to end the irregular migration from Turkey to the EU”. In exchange for €6 billion of EU-funded incentives, the government of Turkey agreed to reinforce its borders, reduce the number of migrants crossing from Turkey to Europe, and accept returned asylum seekers sent back from Greece. The resulting derogation of States’ responsibility to fully protect persons of concern is especially evident in Lesvos, where enforcement of the EU-Turkey Statement has created a unique set of procedural particularities that place asylum seekers at further risk of deportation to Turkey or to their countries of origin.

LEADING GREEK LAWYERS

For the past five months, I have had the privilege of closely witnessing the impacts of this shift, courtesy of a volunteer assignment I have undertaken through the Peace Corps Community for Refugees (PCC4R), an NPCA affiliate group formed three years ago. In addition to helping RPCVs participate in U.S. refugee resettlement efforts, PCC4R also actively connects RPCVs to short-term humanitarian service opportunities in Lesvos.

When I learned of PCC4R’s initiative to support the eastern Mediterranean refugee response last autumn, I was living in Europe and making a mid-life career shift towards academic research and advocacy after two decades as an international relief and development practitioner with the UN and NGOs. I looked forward to re-engaging in refugee protection work through Third Goal service and gaining clarity on my PhD research focus. PCC4R’s opportunity inspired me to apply right away.

In Lesvos, I serve as a forced migration and development specialist volunteer at the Greece Country Office of HIAS, an international refugee protection NGO and leading actor in U.S. refugee resettlement efforts. I’m the only longer-term expatriate volunteer in an otherwise all-Greek team of asylum attorneys and refugee advocates who provide free legal aid and integration support to the most vulnerable N AT I O N A L P E AC E C O R P S A S S O C I AT I O N

Stefania Mizara/Le Pictorum

categories of asylum seekers, including sexual minorities, survivors of torture and sexual violence, and disabled people.

Unlike the United States, Greece did not have an operational national asylum system in place before 2011. Until then, most refugees seeking asylum in Greece were Turkish and Iraqi Kurds whose asylum claims were adjudicated by municipal police departments. The first large-scale influx of Syrian refugees in 2014 was what catalysed the rapid ramping-up of the Greek national asylum system, which at that time was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of refugee arrivals. Thus, they sought the assistance of the European Asylum Support Office to help adjudicate asylum claims.

Now, several years later, the Greek government has assumed full responsibility for the entirety of the asylum process. The Greek refugee assistance ecosystem is also increasingly shifting towards establishing longer-term integration structures for recognized refugees and asylum seekers. This is crucial because migrants continue to arrive irregularly to Lesvos by sea from Turkey, albeit in smaller numbers and from a different range of countries.

A graffiti artist decorated the walls of a warehouse in the port of 3 Pireaus where Syrian, Iraqi and Libyan refugees wait for Greek bureau-

crats to process their requests to continue their journey to Athens and possible relocation in Europe.

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Since January 2019, Lesvos has been hosting approximately 7,000 asylum seekers and recognized refugees who now constitute nearly 8 percent of the island’s entire population, with up to 200 individuals arriving weekly. According to the UNHCR, 78 percent are Afghan nationals, many of whom have spent the majority of their lives in Iran or Pakistan, while Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians, Congolese, Cameroonians, Somalis and Eritreans comprise the majority of remaining arrivals.

Women account for 22 percent of asylum seekers and children for 42 percent. Seventy percent of those children are under 12 years old.

THE LESVOS WORK DAY

No two days are the same, but here’s a sample. I arrive at the harbor-front HIAS office by 9 in the morning and discuss the day’s priorities with their Lesvos coordinator over a freddoccino—Greek iced coffee—or Afghan green tea prepared by our Afghan interpreter. By 10 a.m. I’m examining new human rights issues: Afghans who had formerly worked for U.S. armed forces and who are now targeted by the Taliban; survivors of political torture in Iraq or the Democratic Republic of Congo; or survivors of homophobic violence in Cameroon, Occupied Palestinian Territories and Pakistan.

For another hour or so I interpret for a Burundian single mother preparing for her first asylum interview and draft an employment

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Discarded refugee life jackets and chairs for tourists litter the coasts of 3 Lesvos where more than 42,000 people from Syria, Iraq and Libya landed in a single year. About 600 now arrive daily by ferry from nearby Turkey.

Lesvos hosts international and local organizations providing free services to refugees while their asylum claims are adjudicated. I spend much of my time with a few of them: The Hope Project, a refugee-staffed art studio and gallery set up by British artists; a volunteer-run safe space called Lesvos LGBTIQ (the “I” stands for intersex) Refugee Solidarity Group that offers respite from the intensely homo- and transphobic camp environment among refugees, local Greeks and expatriate volunteers; the local Mozaik Cultural Centre that offers free language classes and hosts the Humade and Safe Passage workshops, where Greek 34

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designers and refugee artisans create and sell crafts made from upcycled life jackets; and the PIKPA Open Shelter for highly vulnerable refugees.

THUS SPOKE SAPPHO

Lesvos is also home to a dynamic community of humanitarian volunteers from around the world. During my first months in Mytilene, I shared accommodation with volunteers from Austria, Australia, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania and Switzerland. They were very friendly and collegial, although the noise level of our volunteer house was a contrast to the quiet Uzbek farming town where I had served as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

In many ways volunteering in Lesvos is similar to Peace Corps life in the field, except most expatriate volunteers here do not expect to stay long enough to integrate into local society. Lesvos is still regarded as a protracted crisis of the type that Peace Corps usually does not operate in, and most volunteers in Lesvos are not participating in an international development assistance volunteering program as structured as Peace Corps but are moved by a sense of personal humanitarian solidarity with refugees.

As the refugee situation in Lesvos becomes more of a chronic emergency, its volunteering dynamic is also shifting towards longer-term development assistance rather than towards short-term emergency response. Despite the transience among both refugees and expatriate volunteers, many NGOs prefer that incoming volunteers stay for at least two to three months and bring practical language skills.

The required languages are now Persian (both Farsi and Dari), French, Levantine Arabic and Kurdish.

Knowledge of Greek is also helpful.

Recently I joined friends and colleagues at a benefit concert by Alcalica, a Berlin-based world-music-electronica group which includes a native of Mytilene. By midnight, the café overflowed with local university students, transplant Greek families, Greek and expatriate humanitarian professionals, and refugees from nearly every corner of the world. Above the music and the dancing, there was talk about the future for refugees and other outsiders to this island after the recent Greek elections.

I heard a voice ask, “How did we become branded the shame of Europe?”

Another held her glass aloft. “No, we must remember that in Lesvos we are setting a different example, we always have.”

I think, in the words of Sappho herself, Someone, I say, will remember us, even in another time. 1 Eirene Chen is a pro bono senior specialist in forced migration and development for the

Peace Corps Community for Refugees. She served as a university education Volunteer in Jizzakh, Uzbekistan from 2000 to 2001.

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Michael Honegger/Alamy

survey in English and French for asylum seekers who plan to settle and work in Greece. Then at 2 p.m. there’s a monthly meeting organized by the UNHCR Lesvos field office to learn what other refugee protection actors are doing and how to best coordinate with each other. A legal colleague gives us a session on asylum in which 70 percent of the participants are Afghan women over 55 years of age hoping to reunite with adult children in Belgium, Germany and Sweden. A few would also prefer the United States but recognize chances are slim in the current political climate.

Around 6 p.m. I’m drafting a grant proposal to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and repair with staff to one of the several cafés that welcome refugees as well as Greek and non-Greek humanitarian activists. When the summer sun sets late in the evening I gather with friends for dinner at Nan, a restaurant that has hired refugee chefs and the menu reflects the changing demographics of refugee arrivals to Lesvos. Two years ago Nan featured Syrian comfort foods, but these days South Asian dishes are more likely to be on rotation.

FICTION

The Price of a Wife A father’s bargain struck over quat

BY JEANNE D’HAEM

I

did consider running away. To where?

Or dousing myself with gasoline and burning to death like Zahara, one of the village girls. I wanted to live my own life, to make my own decisions. I hated everyone, especially myself because I didn’t have the courage to do anything. Eventually I decided to burn myself to death after the marriage, if he were horrible.

The first time I saw Hajji was when he came to discuss the bride price. My father and brothers lingered in the courtyard that morning waiting for the arrival of the visitors.

It would be insulting not to be waiting at the door for an honored guest. When Hajji arrived with his relatives, they were greeted formally: “Ah salaamu aleekum.”

“Aleekum wa salaam,” answered our visitors. My father offered a bowl of water for washing. He poured a thin stream of water onto the clasped hands of each guest and presented them with a little towel. Everyone received a drop of pale green toilet water to rub into their hands and face before they entered the cool interior room of our house.

My mother had prepared a goat stuffed with rice and spices and roasted slowly in a bed of charcoal. I could tell that she was excited about this marriage because she slaughtered one of her favorite goats. Mats and cushions had been spread in the room and the men sat in a circle. My mother and I brought in a tray mounded with rice, the spicy goat meat piled in the middle. I could feel Hajji’s eyes looking at me, burning into my back, but I kept mine lowered. If he thought I would betray the slightest interest by looking at him, he was mistaken. I kept my head down and attended to the business of arranging the meal on the mat in the center of the room.

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The men ate from the tray, taking a portion of the rice in front of them gracefully with the fingers of the right hand. The left hand is considered unclean and is used only for personal hygiene. The men joked about the government, discussed the high price of

the whitewashed walls. A radio was situated near my father’s cushion so the men could listen to Radio Hargesia and Somali music, poems, plays, and the news. I brought in the quat so my father could give each man a bundle about the diameter of a woman’s wrist.

They would pull the tender green leaves off the slender branches, one at a time, and My mother had prepared a slowly, tenderly, chew them.

After the leaf is thoroughly goat stuffed with rice and chewed, it is tucked into the spices and roasted slowcorner of the mouth. This ly in a bed of charcoal. I leaf after leaf, until could tell that she was ex- continues the side of the mouth is full cited about this marriage of quat and bulges out like a because she slaughtered woman’s breast. one of her favorite goats.

My brothers had been to the quat market at noon when the fresh leaves arrived quat, and offered each other especially nice from Ethiopia. It was illegal to bring quat morsels of the goat meat. into the country, but not illegal to sell it. The “Hajji eats more than anyone,” observed quat market is thronged at noon each day my father with a smile. A guest who does not with the men from the village. The trucks eat well insults his host. used to smuggle quat into the country were When the meal was finished, my mother fast, and could outrun the border guards. and I came to take the tray back to the kitchen. When the trucks could not make it because The women and children would eat what of the muddy roads during the rainy season, remained of the rice and meat. there were many quat runners. These young men ran across the desert carrying the day’s RITUAL NEGOTIATION supply of fresh leaves to the willing buyers The washing ritual was repeated at the end in the village. of the meal. My father held the water pot My bothers had been careful to buy quat and poured a thin stream so the guests could with very small leaves, not stalks that were wash their hands. They slapped a drop of old and big. Small, young leaves are the most toilet water on their faces. potent and therefore the most expensive.

We brought hot spiced tea and oranges to I disliked men who had nothing better to the men and cleaned the room in preparation do with their lives than chew quat all afternoon. for the quat leaves they would chew together. Quat is a mild narcotic; it quells hunger and More pillows and cushions were placed around is a moderate stimulant. After an afternoon WO R L D V I E W FA L L 2 0 1 9

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of chewing, some men will be up late into the night, wandering in the town, drinking tea and of course, endlessly talking, talking about nothing. They are useless, these men, and I hated Hajji for being one of them.

“See,” I hissed to my mother in the kitchen as we cleaned the dishes. “That man will spend his life chewing like a cow with green spit running down the corner of his mouth.”

“Assia,” snapped my mother, “all important business including the bride price is discussed and settled at a quat party.” She stood up with her hands on her hips. “This does not mean that Hajji does nothing but chew quat. Don’t you think I asked about him very carefully?” My mother waited for my response but I didn’t look up. If you like him so much why don’t you marry him, I thought. I didn’t dare say it. I cleaned the pots in a silent rage while the men talked and chewed, listened to the radio, recited poems, joked, and spat green juice.

I took some cold ashes from the charcoal fire and scoured the inside of the pots used to cook the rice. When they were clean, I used water saved from the cooking to do the first rinse. Then I used clean water from the jug to do the final rinse. Our water came from a tank on the roof. A pipe ran down from the tank to the inner courtyard of our house. In the middle of the courtyard was a drain, and the cement floor was slanted slightly toward the middle. I could wash the dishes near the pipe and the water would flow in a little stream toward the center of the courtyard and down the drain. My ears were burning as I washed the pots and the faint sound of the men’s talk drifted into the still afternoon. I didn’t think they would be laughing and joking if men were the ones who got cut open on their wedding night.

I sat with my mother doing beadwork on a little handle for a miniature spear as the shadows moved slowly across the courtyard, as they had every day of my life. This day was different, and it was comforting that the shadow did not waver in its path. It did not leave a track as evidence of the events that transpired. Like the sun that cannot be retrieved once it has set, the talk that day could not be undone. I considered what the Prophet 36

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Mohammed said about marriage as I worked.

He said that when husbands and wives hold hands, their sins disappear through the touch of their fingers. After I kill my mother, I’ll hold hands with Hajji, I mused.

THE SETTLEMENT

All afternoon my father haggled the amount of the bride-price with Hajji and the members of his clan. I sewed rows of green, white, and yellow beads in smooth rows in the handle of the dagger. The price was finally set at 50 camels to be paid by Hajji’s clan to mine.

Twenty males and 30 females. “Whatever costs you dearly, you will care for,” said my mother, her black eyes glinting with pride.

I thought she looked like she did when she made a good bargain on one of her goats.

Her chin jutted out and there was a wisp of a smile on her lips.

Some of the price would be paid directly to my family, some would be given to members of the clan. Insults, murders, injuries, and marriages are all resolved by paying compensation in camels. A price to redress the injury, or compensate the bride’s family, is agreed upon by the elders. The murderer, or the betrothed, must pay the agreed-upon price. Like all good Somali women, I was infibulated as a child and would need to be cut open on my wedding night. The bride price must be paid because the woman will be injured, I thought. I was angry and resented being treated like a piece of property, but pride at the high price Hajji would have to pay drifted unbidden into my thoughts. The thought of it brought a wisp of a smile to the corners of my mouth.

My father also agreed on the ma’her or the amount of the bride price to be given

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directly to me. This would be mine and I could keep it even if we divorced. Hajji had agreed to give me one thousand shillings, four gold bracelets, and ten goats, which my mother and sisters would keep for me.

“Don’t be a fool, Assia,” said my mother.

“This ma’her is generous. Your father has done well for you.” She handed me a helo or love poem from Hajji. He had lingered near the kitchen looking for me, but I did not come out and so he gave it to my mother.

Your body is to Age and Death betrothed, And some day all its richness they will share.

Before your firm flesh goes to feed their lusts, Do not deny my right to love you.

I wanted to crumple up the stupid poem and

throw it into the fire. I had a right to refuse this marriage.

My mother saw the paper and sat next to me. “Assia,” she said, “this man is not that old and has no other wives. His first wife died without giving him any children.”

“I don’t love him.”

“You will learn to love him. He is a kind man.”

“He is not attractive to me.”

“Assia,” she answered, “there are many things involved in a marriage. Kindness and wealth are good foundations to build a love. Poverty and meanness will pierce your heart like sharp thorns and empty it. You won’t care for love when you are hurting or hungry.” I didn’t answer her. What did she know about love?

Over the weeks that followed, my mother talked to me many times about her own life, something she had never done before. One day when we were alone in the courtyard, she told me this story. “When I was first married to your father, he was not a rich man. He gave most of the camels he owned to my clan for my bride price.” She talked slowly, carefully, as if the words had been buried deeply within her.

THE FATE OF A SISTER

“Our first child was a girl, which displeased my mother-in-law. She and I did not get along. She was sour like old milk. When this baby was just learning to walk, I became pregnant again.” Mother sighed and stared past me before she continued. “The rains did not come, and did not come. There was hardly any grass left and the distance between the grasses and the deep wells got further and further. We walked to our wells, but they were dry. Your father ordered us to walk quickly to the deep wells shared with the Galla. The journey takes seven days and we had to hurry because the animals needed water. I could barely keep up because my belly was so full with my new child. I couldn’t carry that little girl, she was too big. She kept falling further and further behind. I would go back to her to encourage her to keep up with us, but her legs were too short. My mother-in-law beat W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

me with her stick. She told me to leave that baby or we would all die. ‘Forget about her you fool,’ she said. ‘Keep the child within, perhaps it will be a boy.’

“And so one long terrible afternoon I left that little baby in the desert. I heard her calling after me in her velvety, sweet voice, ‘Hooyo, Hooyo.’ There was nothing for it but to abandon her. I didn’t have any choice but to put one foot in front of the other over those endless brown hills. I tried to close up my ears but nothing kept that little baby voice out of my mind. There were not even any tears or time for me to cry. Why do we struggle so to go on living when it is so hard and full of pain, I thought? But, I couldn’t stop myself from living, and I couldn’t save that little girl. The only thing I could do was to walk.”

I looked at my mother and saw that tears were streaming from her eyes, making glistening tracks down her face. They stopped in the corner of her mouth, then dropped unheeded from her chin. It was the first time I ever saw my mother disheveled. Suddenly she exploded into sobs and her body shook and jerked like it was broken. She cried as if this story had been inside her for so long that it had to tear her body apart to find a way out. I was frightened. I had never even seen my mother cry. I put my arms around her and we rocked together.

“Assia,” she continued after a long silence, heavy with sorrow, “marry a rich man, so you don’t have to leave your children on the desert.” We sat together and watched the light give itself up to the long arms of the darkness. I put down the little spear handle and let the beads spill out of my lap. I felt my anger at her recede with the daylight.

The story was like rain after a drought, it soothed the anger and the grief, but not the dread. 1 This excerpt from Jeanne D’Haem’s The Promise, was published in Volume 2 of Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, edited by Clifford Garstang and copyrighted by Press 53, LLC. D’Haem served in Somalia from 1968 to 1970 and is emeritus professor of special education at William Patterson University. She has also published The Last Camel: True Stories about Somalia. Garstang served in Korea from 1976 to 1977 and gave up a World Bank career in East Asia to write novels, short stories and to edit his Everywhere Stories anthologies.

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GA L L E RY

Mongolia Blue Skies PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK CURRY

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s the train left Ulaanbaatar, the vast steppes of Mongolia immediately captured the attention of photographer Mark Curry. He and his wife, Katherine Farrell, were going to visit their son, Thomas, who was half-way through two years training English teachers in the remote town of Bayandun. Mark and Katherine had served in Kingston, Jamaica from 1985 to 1987, but they had seen nothing like this.

“Every moment was a photographer’s dream,” Mark said. “I filled a 32-gigabyte memory card in the first hour of a train ride to our first location.” Flowering plants and clumps of trees only a few meters high were scattered on hills and plains of late summer grasses. Riders on horseback or motorcycle moved effortlessly among large herds of grazing cows, goats, sheep, and horses.

During the long day’s journey, the train stopped only a few times at a small collection of gers, tents insulated with felted wool and much like the ger in which Thomas survived through seven bitterly cold

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weeks last winter with no running water or furnace.

Beneath these wide, clear blue skies, families live a hard life as herders. Homesteads are usually small and often include a nearby family garden.

The 400-mile ride from Ulaanbaatar to Bayandun took more than half a day. “The final 120 miles was little more than a dirt track through the grass. At one point our progress was delayed by more than an hour as we sought a path through terrain inundated by a flash flood.” They were hosted by Thomas’s neighbors when they arrived. “Even the family compounds were traditionally arranged to accommodate livestock.

Herding defined the lifestyles of our hosts.”

When Thomas was free, the family took long walks together in the countryside. “It was so quiet,” says Mark.

“Maybe the wind, or a bird or an insect, but otherwise not a sound. Nothing but grass and wildflowers. It was easy to understand how the landscape shaped the fortitude of the people who live there.”

! A young boy, the oldest son of a herder in the Selenge Aimag countryside, poses with family photos and medals he earned racing horses during the traditional Naadam festival games.

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n Located about 50 kilometers east of Ulaanbaatar, the 131-foot-tall steel statue of Chinggis Khan faces east to the conquerer’s homeland in Khentii Aimag. Chinggis Khan is a highly revered figure in Mongolian history, and most famous in the west for leading the Mongolian empire.

In 1206, at the age of 44, Khan combined the tribes of Mongolia into one state and became king (khan).

His name is one of the most popular given to children and his face is printed on all currencies. The location is a popular tourist destination and is billed as the largest equestrian statue in the world. , Bibas, a 60-year-old member of the Buriad ethnic miniority, tends to her cows on family-owned land.

Cows are raised mostly for milk but some will be sold or eaten for meat.

Buriad people are known for living in houses as opposed to gers.

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n Two young men discuss their rock climbing adventure in the shade of an Eagle statue at the Russian Border Park outside of Sukhbaatar city.

The mountain park offers astound-

ing views of the lowlands where the Orkhon and Selenge rivers merge on their way to Russia’s Lake Baikal, considered the world’s oldest and deepest fresh-water lake.

% Mother and son outside their countryside herding ger near Zuunburen. The family can relocate the ger as they move with their herd throughout the seasons.

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BOOKLOCKER

Trying to Understand Thai Review by Jim Skelton

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n the opening paragraph of the preface to Amy McGarry’s book about her Peace Corps service in Thailand, she declares that As a foreigner [farang in Thai language], I was biased, and for that I apologize. My descriptions of Thai culture should always be read with that “grain of salt.”

That statement really caught my attention and made me wonder what kinds of prejudiced revelations could possibly be contained in her tome.

What I discovered is that Amy has written a very humorous, painfully honest and deeply insightful view of her service and life in Thailand from 2003 to 2005. She describes what could be characterized as a love-hate relationship with the Thai social culture, despite the fact that she clearly loves and respects the Thai people. Through her personal and emotional stories, Amy, perhaps unknowingly, conducts an informal examination of the differences between Thai and American social cultural norms. It is at times a sad, fascinating, and occasionally hysterical tale of what happened to her and how she I am Farang: Adventures of a Peace reacted while living Corps Volunteer in and teaching English Thailand Amy McGarry (Thailand in the small town of Non Sung.

03–05) Self-published, 2019, One of Amy’s main 213 pages frustrations is her fail$14.95 paperback, ure to learn the Thai $2.99 Kindle language. Throughout the book, she refers to her worries about and agonizing inability to understand and speak the language well enough. As a result, she invariably resorts to the English language in order to get by in both social and work-related situations. Consequently, she feels the need to be understood and, as she writes in Chapter 38, “to make contact with people who speak W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

my language and understand my culture.”

In Chapter 26, Amy writes about “Why Thais Need Glasses,” which became an issue for her as a result of the injuries she suffered when she was hit from behind and knocked off her bicycle by a woman driving a motor scooter on a flat, straight stretch of road in Non Sung. The woman who was driving the motor scooter followed her to the hospital, stood beside her bed and admitted that she “didn’t see” Amy riding along the road. Amy

passage of a few hours she can feel utterly frustrated and angry about a negative cultural or Thai language event, consider buying an airplane ticket home, and then find a way to accept the slight or embarrassment she has suffered. Near the end of the book, she describes herself as “an ambassador for America,” and states, “I am warm and friendly, all the while seething and sick on the inside, thinking maybe today will be the day the tears come.” Luckily, she is able to overcome this type of emotional conflict by the end of her first year of service.

He returned there in 2005 Amy bears her soul in as a Fulbright Scholar this book about her life in and has been visiting at Thailand, and I salute her for having the courage to share the rate of about twice a such a truthful and emotional year since then. journey with the reader. Her conversational style of writing initially refers to the woman who consoles her made me laugh out loud many times, as well and tries to explain the accident as a stranger as feel her pain when things went wrong. I but when she gets used to her being there highly recommend Amy’s book, and I hope renames her “No-Longer-A-Stranger” and she will write another one for us to enjoy. 1 uses the name repeatedly in the development The book’s author, Amy McGarry, served in Thailand of her theory that many Thai people who need (03–05). Reviewer Jim Skelton worked in the smallpox eradication program in Ethiopia (70 to 72). He is the glasses don’t wear them. lead editor and co-author of Eradicating Smallpox in Amy’s Thai fellow teacher and closest Ethiopia: Peace Corps Volunteers’ Accounts of Their friend, Somjai, who is fluent in English, is Adventures, Challenges and Achievements, to be published by Peace Corps Writers in 2019. He also wrote simultaneously a joy and a pain in the neck, a memoir, Volunteering in Ethiopia: A Peace Corps as well as the only Thai person with whom she Odyssey. Skelton has practiced law for more than 43 has a very close relationship. Amy depends years, specializing in upstream international petroleum transactions in emerging markets. on Somjai and her ability to translate Thai into English in virtually every circumstance, especially when she is taken to the hospital after the bicycle accident debacle. In her own Thai approach, Somjai is both too nice and very demanding because she is somewhat of a know-it-all and has absolutely no idea how important personal privacy is to Amy. Time and Review by D.W. Jefferson time again, Somjai oversteps Amy’s personal boundaries and forces Amy to choose between f you are interested in an in-depth discusgiving in to the extreme but well-intentioned sion of immigration from Central America Thai hospitality and standing her ground. to the United States, I highly recommend Amy gives in to her dear friend’s aggressive this book. Like the author, I was a Peace kindheartedness almost every time.

Corps Volunteer in El Salvador (74-76), Even though there are numerous ways and have followed events there since, but in which Peace Corps Volunteers may expe- I learned a great deal about the country’s rience culture shock, Amy appears to have current situation from this book. found a special niche of her own. In the Jim Winship first lived in El Salvador

Youth in the Northern Triangle

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BOOKLOCKER

from 1970 to 1972 as a PCV. He returned in 2005 as a Fulbright Scholar and has been visiting at the rate of about twice a year since.

This book is based upon research Winship and his colleague, Virginia Quintana of the Panamerican University of El Salvador have done, and upon other research conducted in Coming of Age in El Salvador both El Salvador and

by Jim Winship the United States. published by Verdada Coming of Age in Press, 2014, 228 pages El Salvador includes $16.95 paperback, $9.99 Kindle chapters on the geography and history of El Salvador to provide context for the discussion among young people currently entering into young adulthood. The author’s voice alternates between that of an academic reporting study results, and that of a narrator discussing case studies and other stories.

Twelve chapters in the “Stories” section recount the experiences of individuals, including that of the author and of young Salvadorans from a variety of backgrounds.

Winship reveals interesting information about El Salvador: At the end of its civil war in 1992, 30 percent of Salvadorans over the age of 14 had never attended school. Only a

it was 23 years of age compared to 27 years in the United States. El Salvador’s murder rate puts it in the top third of the most dangerous countries in the world, and in 2011 it was ranked second for most homicides per capita.

Winship discusses the The woman who was driving root causes of the pervasive the motor scooter follows violence, and Salvadoran govher to the hospital, stands ernment attempts to stop it, beside her bed and admits which have so far failed miserably. The situation is more that she “didn’t see... ” complex than is commonly portrayed in the U.S. media, third had more than a 6th-grade education. and our government shares responsibility Today almost 100 percent of children now for creating it. attend primary school, but only 60 percent Profits from the sale of this book are reach the 6th grade, and 30 percent graduate being donated to a non-profit offering afterfrom the equivalent of high school. Salvador- school programs and scholarships at the ans working here sent home an estimated Panamerican University of El Salvador. 1 $3.97 billion in remittances in 2013, which was 16 percent of El Salvador’s 2013 gross D.W. Jefferson was a Peace Corps agriculture volunteer in El Salvador (74-76) and Costa Rica (76-77). He domestic product. In 1996 first marriages maintains a blog about his Peace Corps years. He is occurred at about 18 years of age, in 2012 retired from a career in computer software engineering.

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A Guide for Selling Your Travel Stories Review by David Arnold

E

xplaining other cultures is difficult and probably should be left to pros like Craig Storti (Morocco 70-72), winner of this year’s Peace Corps Worldwide’s best travel book award. Storti’s Writing Abroad: A “Why Travel Matters” Guide to Travelers is the intriguing result

By Peter Chilson & of three decades of Joanne B. Mulcahy exploring ideas and The University of Chicago expression across culPress, 224 pp., tures for government $22.50 paper, $67.50 cloth, $22.50 E-book and corporations.

But travel writing seldom measures up to such thoughtful cultural standards. When traveling, even in countries where we served for a couple of years, Americans often don’t get the complexities of a host culture right. Our travel writing appears in Sunday sections of daily newspapers and in glossy popular magazines as tips on where to go what to eat, all wrapped around short often superficial narration of a personal adventure.

Peter Chilson (Niger, 85-87) and Joanne Mulcahy are writing teachers who have written a book that tells travelers how they can to do better than that. If you can’t take a classroom course in writing with Chilson at Washington State University or Mulcahy, who has taught at nearby Lewis and Clark College and at Duke University, you can use their Writing Abroad: A Guide to Travelers as a guide to creating something that just might attract an editor’s eye and give readers a deeper travel experience.

Travel writing is not the regurgitation of the itinerary. Chilson and Mulcahy quote British author Peter Whitfield on the deepest value of a good narrative journey: “… travel is deeply purposeful: as we move through space, we are changed, we discover, we are transformed.”

Travel writing is story telling, a collection of little events that give you a cultural clue to the W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

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place, the structure of the face of a woman who served you espresso, a picture in words of a pair of careworn trousers hung out to dry, an overheard political disagreement in a neighborhood bar, any unexpected encounter that changed your mind about where you were, or where you really wanted to go.

The research and the final article may include passages giving context of local history, food, politics, even topography. In any case, story telling detail is crucial. I recall a writing teacher who described a profile he wrote about the Mexico’s national movie legend, Cantinflas. As that nation’s own version of Charlie Chaplin, Cantinflas went to work each morning, followed by several assistants carrying bags of centavos. As he climbed several flights of stairs, the movie star reached into the bags and handed out coins to a hundred or so of Mexico City’s poor.

Like any good writing, a travel story needs to read well. “Writing Abroad” gives you the wisdom of dozens of great writers from many times and places—Jamaica Kincaid, John McPhee, Theodore White, Ibn Battatu—who have taken millions of armchair travelers on adventures of discovery. The list of experts includes some whose early experiences included the Peace Corps: Jay Davidson, Peter Hessler, Sarah Erdman, and George Packer, for starters.

This book is a summary of what Chilson and Mulcahy have learned that has worked during many years of classroom teaching: arduous cultural research, compulsive journaling, choosing the form of the narrative—using techniques of a documentary or profiles of people and setting—followed by the process of writing, revising, editing, and rewriting.

This is a teaching book complete with suggested exercises in every chapter on topics like brainstorming with a writing group, practicing how to see and smell new places, freewriting the meaning of a border, researching a shrine you have visited in the past to see what more there is to know that you missed the first time, writing profiles of people you know, just for practice. The book may be labeled a guide for travelers, but it’s also about good writing someone else will want to read.

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The authors address concerns about writing for print and the Internet and how to deal with gender. They offer the personal tools of writing pros like Steven Kurutz who spurns GPS. He argues for the use of those beautiful but cumbersome maps that fill up your dashboard and windshield when you are lost. My own attic bears the burden of my own collection of travel and topographic

maps of everything from Ethiopia’s Ogaden desert and Guatemala’s northern highlands, to the tallgrass prairies of Kansas, Oregon’s High Desert, Colorado’s Indian Peaks and the Boundary Waters north of Ely, Minnesota.

Kurutz believes you lose touch with the landscape when you follow Siri blindly, when you choose to follow the voice on your cell phone, ignore names on the road signs and

zip by the stone fences and country lanes to reach your day’s destination. I wish Kurutz would tell me what to do with all of those old topo maps in my attic. 1 Peter Chilson and is an award-winning journalist and

writer of fiction. Joanne Mulcahy founded the Writing Culture Summer Institute at Lewis and Clark University and wrote Remedios: The Healing Life of Eva Castellenoz. David Arnold served in Ethiopia (64-66) and is the editor of WorldView magazine.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Oscar Nominee

Saving the Salton Sea

Photos courtesy of Orange County Coastkeeper (top) and Bryn Mooser (right)

Nina Waszak conducted a sustainable agriculture project with the

indigenous residents of a rainforest village of Embera Wounaan in Panama from 2017 to 2019. “When I moved to this California desert last November I learned that the water issues were different here than in my indigenous village.” Waszak says. “But I was surprised to find some of the same problems. There’s a whole portion of this Coachella Valley that still lacks access to potable water sources. In the United States. In 2019. Just like my remote jungle community.”

Waszak was hired to in June by the 20-year-old Orange County Coastkeeper—a member of the national Waterkeeper Alliance, headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—as the Coachella Waterkeeper.

Her job is to advocate alongside other agencies to mitigate the water problems in the Whitewater River watershed for 400,000 residents on 66,500 acres of dry farmland and those of the Southern California’s Salton Sea. The Salton Sea is a shallow, saline lake on the San Andreas Fault, predominantly in the Imperial and Coachella valleys and not far south of the recent earthquake.

She takes the same approach she learned in Peace Corps: Listening to the community’s leaders. “I want to gain a full understanding of the water issues here in the Valley, so the I can assess where I can make its greatest impact.” 1 W W W. P E AC E C O R P S C O N N E C T.O R G

The producer of “Lifeboat,” one of the 2018 nominees for an Academy Award, is Bryn Mooser. Mooser shares credit for the success of this half-hour documentary with Skye Fitzgerald, the director.

This is Mooser’s second Oscar nomination. The first was “Body Team 12”, a documentary on a team of health workers in the center of the Ebola epidemic. Since completing his Peace Corps service as a forestry extension volunteer in The Gambia in 2004, Mooser has ventured into worlds that inspire the humanitarian, the journalist, and the filmmakers who make his hometown, Los Angeles, what it is.

“Lifeboat” follows Capt. Jon Castle and the crew of a vessel operated by the German nonprofit Sea Watch on a 2014 search and rescue mission hunting the vast Mediterranean for African refugees drifting in old wooden boats and rubber rafts off the lawless north coast of Libya.

Mooser and his business partner, David Darg, follow their instincts to use new technology to make the world a better place. The pair have created more than 100 films and garnered many 3 Mooser (left) and Darg ready for Oscar night. film festival awards including Oscar nominations and Emmys. They co-founded their first media company to advance their humanitarian work in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. When a friend handed Mooser a virtual reality camera, Mooser and Darg founded RYOT, an immersive media company. Three years ago Verizon Media Group bought RYOT and merged AOL and Yahoo. Mooser and Darg left RYOT to create a new venture launching in the Fall. 1 Find other monthly RPCV alumni news at www.peacecorpsconnect.org/ articles. Send suggestions to Peter Deekle (Iran 68-70) at pdeekle@ peacecorpsconnect.org.

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