Making Peace with the World

Well we reached 100%! I am waiting to hear from the point and for them to tip this campaign and collect. Just want to make sure everyone is aware that we reached the goal, and once the point collects your credit or debit cards will be charged. You might want to check to make sure the point has your up-to-date information. Please contact the point to find out when they will be making the collection. I don’t want anyone to be caught surprised by a charge to their accounts that they were not expecting.

Contact the point at support@thepoint.com.

Peace Corps has put in writing a list of core expectations of volunteers. Reading through the list I realize that it is what I most of the volunteers that I know followed. Although when I served these expectations were not listed as follows, they were still expectations that were impressed on us throughout our excellent training.

Reading through this list it reminds me why I want to dedicate myself to documenting Peace Corps volunteers.

I want people who have not served in Peace Corps to understand what a huge responsibility and undertaking it is to volunteer in Peace Corps.

Here are the core expectations:

1. Prepare your personal and professional life to make a commitment to serve abroad for a full term of 27 months

2. Commit to improving the quality of life of the people with whom you live and work; and, in doing so, share your skills, adapt them, and learn new skills as needed

3. Serve where the Peace Corps asks you to go, under conditions of hardship, if necessary, and with the flexibility needed for effective service

4. Recognize that your successful and sustainable development work is based on the local trust and confidence you build by living in, and respectfully integrating yourself into, your host community and culture

5. Recognize that you are responsible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for your personal conduct and professional performance

6. Engage with host country partners in a spirit of cooperation, and mutual learning and respect

7. Work within the rules and regulations of the Peace Corps and the local and national laws of the country where you serve

8. Exercise judgment and personal responsibility to protect your health, safety, and well-being and that of others

9. Recognize that you will be perceived, in your host country and community, as a representative of the people, cultures, values, and traditions of the United States of America

10. Represent responsibly the people, cultures, values, and traditions of your host country and community to people in the United States both during and following your service.

I can hardly believe it. This campaign has tipped! That’s right – it has reached 100%!

A huge thank you to everyone.

Sincerely,

Richard

Just $130 until this campaign tips.

Sorry about all the spam on this discussion board. I contacted The Point about it, but nothing has been done. Apparently they are too busy with their Groupon site to continue to properly administer the point.

Please don’t take that as a reflection on this campaign.

It is so close to tipping. Please help get it over the top.

Thank you.

Thanks to more people pledging support this campaign is about to tip! Just 1% left. $140 to go. Please help tip this campaign. I think it will tip before the week is over, so if you have pledged be aware that your credit card or debit card will be charged.Thanks to everyone who has supported me and makes my work possible.

Thanks to more people pledging support this campaign is about to tip! Just 2% left. $195 to go.Please help tip this campaign. I think it will tip before the week is over, so if you have pledged be aware that your credit card or debit card will be charged.Thanks to everyone who has supported me and makes my work possible.

Thanks to more people pledging support this campaign is about to tip! Just 3% left. $325 to go.

Please help tip this campaign. I think it will tip before the week is over, so if you have pledged be aware that your credit card or debit card will be charged.

Thanks to everyone who has supported me and makes my work possible.

96% there. I initially created this campaign to help raise funds to complete a project documenting Peace Corps volunteers around the world. I have accomplished that and published a book, “Making Peace with the World”. The book can be purchased directly from the publisher here: http://www.otherplacespublishing.com/mpwtw.html
A portion of the proceeds will go to Peace Corps projects.
I completed this project with my own funding. I traveled around the world and photographed Peace Corps Volunteers in 22 countries on five continents. I had no outside sponsorship or corporate support to pay my way. Because of this I am in debt due to the expenses in producing this work. This campaign will only partially offset those debts, but every little bit helps. The interest alone on my debts is currently around $250 a month. So, it is imperative that this campaign tips.
It is very difficult to produce such a work as I did with “Making Peace with the World” and it is not work that I am making any profit. I merely wish to break even, and to do so I need for this campaign to tip. Please help support my work by pledging. Thank you.

95% there. I initially created this campaign to help raise funds to complete a project documenting Peace Corps volunteers around the world. I have accomplished that and published a book, “Making Peace with the World”. The book can be purchased directly from the publisher here: http://www.otherplacespublishing.com/mpwtw.html

A portion of the proceeds will go to Peace Corps projects.

I completed this project with my own funding. I traveled around the world and photographed Peace Corps Volunteers in 22 countries on five continents. I had no outside sponsorship or corporate support to pay my way. Because of this I am in debt due to the expenses in producing this work. This campaign will only partially offset those debts, but every little bit helps. The interest alone on my debts is currently around $250 a month. So, it is imperative that this campaign tips.

It is very difficult to produce such a work as I did with “Making Peace with the World” and it is not work that I am making any profit. I merely wish to break even, and to do so I need for this campaign to tip. Please help support my work by pledging. Thank you.

I just posted a new photo to represent the project.

It is of Peace Corps Mongolia Volunteer Cara Eandi, from Colorado. She carries water to the Ger in which she lives in Zuunmod, Mongolia. She is met by one of two dogs that live in the compound.

Gers are the round portable dwellings made of felt and wood that dot the landscape in Mongolia. Some volunteers live in Gers while others live in more westernized apartments.

Much progress has been made towards the tipping point of this campaign, but there is still a ways to go. I am looking forward to finishing my travels and getting the book published, but to do this I need this financial assistance. I have amazing photographs that will be representative of what it is like to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer now as the agency turns 50. Please help me get these photographs to a wider audience to further promote Peace Corps by donating to this campaign.

It doesn’t take much to get this campaign to tip. If every person on my campaign contact list pledged just $1 the campaign would tip. If every person who clicked “like” on the “Making Peace with the World” facebook page would pledge $10 then the campaign would tip.

I am leaving Saturday for the Dominican Republic to photograph Peace Corps volunteer Sarah Roberts.

Still need more pledges to get this campaign to tip. Please help get the word out. Thanks.

I still have cigars for the next nine pledges. Be one of the next nine people to pledge at least $20 or more and you will receive a genuine Dominican cigar.

According to Blog Critics" The Dominican Republic, fittingly discovered by Mr. Cigar himself, Christopher Columbus, is the largest producer of cigars in the entire world, making it known as “Cigar Country” and leaving stogie lovers everywhere to search for their passports, book their flights, and come to a place that captures the true culture and essence of tobacco.

Read more: http://blogcritics.org/culture/article/the-dominican-republic-cigar-country/#ixzz0yrbSIjMA

I spent two weeks in Ukraine photographing some wonderful volunteers. Ukraine currently has the most Peace Corps volunteers, and they are expanding the program. Because of this I photographed several volunteers. I photographed a volunteers in different size communities from a city to a small village. Thanks to Peace Corps staff who helped arrange everything.

I am now in Sofia Bulgaria for my second Eastern Europe country. Unfortunately, I am going to have to limit it to two countries in Eastern Europe, so that I can make it to Asia. I plan to photograph three countries in Asia if possible.

Desperately need this campaign to tip. The expenses are piling up, and so is the interest on the credit cards. It will be expensive to get to Asia. I saved some money by taking trains … very slow trains – here in Eastern Europe. I am going to have to fly after this. I looked at some possible prices for flights to Mongolia and they start at $1,000. That’s just to give you an idea of the expenses.

Please help get the word out and convince others to support this project.

From Martha Windisch:
My dog training company, Personalized Dog Training LLC, will match the first $400 earned from November 1st until the campaign tips. That means if you pledge $10, Personalized Dog Training LLC will make it $20! I encourage you to support the expenses of publishing this book. If you already pledged, add a bit more to your pledge so this campaign can tip and help cover Richard’s dept accrued by doing this project. I also encourage you to purchase this book as a Holiday gift for those that you need gift ideas for.
Martha Windisch CPDT-KA
Personalized Dog Training LLC
PersonalizedDogTraining.com

My last topic was titled “war”, so I thought I would title this one peace.

During President Obama’s inaugural address he said this:
To restore America’s standing, I will call on our greatest resource – not our bombs, guns, or dollars – I will call upon our people. We will grow the Foreign Service to renew our commitment to diplomacy. We will double the size of the Peace Corps by its 50th anniversary in 2011. And we’ll reach out to other nations to engage their young people in similar programs, so that we work side by side to take on the common challenges that confront all humanity…."

To double the size of Peace Corps more people need to learn about what Peace Corps is all about. Please support this project to be a part of that.

Order Making Peace with the World, a commemorative book celebrating the 50th anniversary of Peace Corps, at Other Places Publishing: http://www.otherplacespublishing.com/mpwtw.html

A portion of publisher proceeds from this title will go to Peace Corps projects around the globe.

(Ideas: Order a copy of the book for yourself, order a copy as a gift for family and friends, order a copy for a person who might be interested in becoming a Peace Corps Volunteer, order a copy to donate to your local library, high school library or college library).

In June 2009, Richard Sitler embarked on an epic journey to document Peace Corps Volunteers serving communities around the world. Over the next two years, Richard would find himself traversing the planet while staying with Peace Corps Volunteers, experiencing their communities and work sites, and documenting what it’s like to be a Volunteer in the modern Peace Corps.

Richard discovered that the values President Kennedy had imagined for the Peace Corps in his famous 1960 speech at the University of Michigan continue to be evident in the organization today. However, the Volunteer has evolved over the years.

Volunteers today are no longer required to conform to the stereotypical image of young idealists giving up their comfortable lives to live in a grass hut. Rather, Richard discovers Volunteers are using modern technology, such as laptops and cell phones, to not only enrich their experience, but to impact their community as well. He sees how retired professionals bring years of experience and knowledge to their organizations. And how, as it always has been, Volunteers are changing lives while being forever changed themselves. This is the story of Peace Corps and its Volunteers, fifty years after conception.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Making-Peace-with-the-World/345091284182?ref=ts

The free cigar offer has been extended until September. The next 10 new pledges who pledge $20 or more will get a free Dominican cigar. Pledge and send me your address and I will send you one of the finest cigars brought to you straight from the Dominican Republic by me.

Here is another way to support my project:
http://www.nameyourdreamassignment.com/the-ideas/richs85/making-peace-with-the-world-peace-corps-at-50/
Please follow the link and vote for my project.

I’ve posted a new photo to represent this campaign. It is of Peace Corps volunteer Phillip Olaleye who serves in the Philippines. For more information about him and his service follow his blog at http://www.philnppines.blogspot.com/

This campaign as well as the project has come a long way since the inception. I’ve traveled to over 22 countries on five continents photographing Peace Corps volunteers. All of this has been on my own funds so far. I estimate that my expenses are over $25,000. So, I am in quite a bit of debt now. The funds from this campaign will help, but will not totally cover my expenses to produce this wonderful book about Peace Corps volunteers that will be out by next spring.

Please help publicize the book and this campaign so that it will tip and help me offset some of my debts. Thank you.

Pledge today to get a free cigar. Pledge at least $20 and I will send you a cigar from the Dominican Republic. Offer limited to ten people.

From Martha Windisch:
My dog training company, Personalized Dog Training LLC, will match the first $400 earned from November 1st until the campaign tips. That means if you pledge $10, Personalized Dog Training LLC will make it $20! I encourage you to support the expenses of publishing this book. If you already pledged, add a bit more to your pledge so this campaign can tip and help cover Richard’s dept accrued by doing this project. I also encourage you to purchase this book as a Holiday gift for those that you need gift ideas for.
Martha Windisch CPDT-KA
Personalized Dog Training LLC
PersonalizedDogTraining.com

From Martha Windisch:
My dog training company, Personalized Dog Training LLC, will match the first $400 earned from November 1st until the campaign tips. That means if you pledge $10, Personalized Dog Training LLC will make it $20! I encourage you to support the expenses of publishing this book. If you already pledged, add a bit more to your pledge so this campaign can tip and help cover Richard’s dept accrued by doing this project. I also encourage you to purchase this book as a Holiday gift for those that you need gift ideas for.
Martha Windisch CPDT-KA
Personalized Dog Training LLC
PersonalizedDogTraining.com

From Martha Windisch:

My dog training company, Personalized Dog Training LLC, will match the first $400 earned from November 1st until the campaign tips. That means if you pledge $10, Personalized Dog Training LLC will make it $20! I encourage you to support the expenses of publishing this book. If you already pledged, add a bit more to your pledge so this campaign can tip and help cover Richard’s dept accrued by doing this project. I also encourage you to purchase this book as a Holiday gift for those that you need gift ideas for.

Martha Windisch CPDT-KA
Personalized Dog Training LLC
PersonalizedDogTraining.com

I left my full time job as a staff multi-media specialist a daily newspaper in the spring of 2009 to pursue a dream. That dream was to document Peace Corps volunteers around the world to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Peace Corps. I took on this project as a result of my personal experience as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was a life changing experience. I wished to give back by using my talents as a photojournalist to help illustrate that Peace Corps is still going strong after 50 years.

I did this project at great sacrifice, spending my life savings and accruing a large amount of personal debt because I was unable to find any funding for the project. I traveled around the world and did all the work on my own. I created this campaign to try to get some assistance, but since it has yet to tip I am stuck with a large amount of debt as a result of the travel expenses.

On top of that, as a result of the changes in my career field and with situation with the economy, I am unable to find full time employment, so this has made it difficult for me to make payments on my debts accrued as a result of the expenses from the project.

I did not complete this project and publish the book to make a profit. That was never my motivation. However, I had hoped that I would at least break even. Even when this campaign tips, it only covers about a third of my expenses.

I think that if you get a copy of my book, “Making Peace with the World, Photographs of Peace Corps Volunteers” you will see that it is a commendable work and worth the expense that it took to complete. Please help me cover these expenses by tipping this campaign.

I left my full time job as a staff multi-media specialist a daily newspaper in the spring of 2009 to pursue a dream. That dream was to document Peace Corps volunteers around the world to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Peace Corps. I took on this project as a result of my personal experience as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was a life changing experience. I wished to give back by using my talents as a photojournalist to help illustrate that Peace Corps is still going strong after 50 years.

I did this project at great sacrifice, spending my life savings and accruing a large amount of personal debt because I was unable to find any funding for the project. I traveled around the world and did all the work on my own. I created this campaign to try to get some assistance, but since it has yet to tip I am stuck with a large amount of debt as a result of the travel expenses.

On top of that, as a result of the changes in my career field and with situation with the economy, I am unable to find full time employment, so this has made it difficult for me to make payments on my debts accrued as a result of the expenses from the project.

I did not complete this project and publish the book to make a profit. That was never my motivation. However, I had hoped that I would at least break even. Even when this campaign tips, it only covers about a third of my expenses.

I think that if you get a copy of my book, “Making Peace with the World, Photographs of Peace Corps Volunteers” you will see that it is a commendable work and worth the expense that it took to complete. Please help me cover these expenses by tipping this campaign.

I am setting a deadline for this campaign to tip. Please pledge your support for my work by November 5th. Lets get this campaign to tip by then. Thank you.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, we’re excited to announce the pre-order sale of Making Peace with the World: Photographs of Peace Corps Volunteers. This full color photographic book explores the modern PCV and how they continue to make a positive impact in the communities they serve. Save 35% off retail in the pre-order sale!

http://www.otherplacespublishing.com/mpwtw.html

Go to the above link before March 10th to order and get the discount.

I will be in Washington D.C. September 22-24th to promote “Making Peace with the World” during the 50th Anniversary celebrations for Peace Corps.

The book is out, and I funded the travels to go to 22 countries on five continents to photograph Peace Corps volunteers. As you can imagine I incurred quite a bit of expenses just getting around. It was worth it to create this work that promotes the work of Peace Corps volunteers around the world.

However, I now have over $25,000 of debt as a result of this project, so the money from this campaign, once it tips, won’t cover all my expenses, but will reduce my debt significantly.

Please help tip this campaign. The interest alone on my debt is barely manageable.

I will be in Washington D.C. the end of the month for the Peace Corps 50th Anniversary Celebration to promote my book. I am hoping by then this campaign will have tipped, and I can focus my efforts entirely on promoting this wonderful book.

Thanks to all of you who have pledged. Your pledges will not help until the campaign tips, so please help get the word out to others to support me and my work.

I still have cigars for the next nine pledges. Be one of the next nine people to pledge at least $20 or more and you will receive a genuine Dominican cigar.

According to Blog Critics" The Dominican Republic, fittingly discovered by Mr. Cigar himself, Christopher Columbus, is the largest producer of cigars in the entire world, making it known as “Cigar Country” and leaving stogie lovers everywhere to search for their passports, book their flights, and come to a place that captures the true culture and essence of tobacco.

Read more: http://blogcritics.org/culture/article/the-dominican-republic-cigar-country/#ixzz0yrbSIjMA

Hello,

I have entered a proposal to an online competition calling for photographers to name their “Dream Assignment.”

From March 3 to April 3, 2009, the ideas will be open to a public vote. The Top 20 ideas with the most “pics” coming out of the vote will then be judged by an expert panel, who will select the winner based on the originality and creativity of the photographer’s idea. The panel will also take into consideration skill and experience.

Go to the following url to vote for my project:
http://www.nameyourdreamassignment.com/the-ideas/richs85/making-peace-with-the-world-peace-corps-at-50/

Please take a moment of your time and vote for my project. It costs you nothing.

Forward this to your friends and colleagues.

Thank you for your support,

Richard Sitler (JA 00-02)

Hello. The current conflict that has flared up again in the Middle East has made me think what we can do as individuals to avoid war. Unfortunately, I can’t think of much. As individuals it is difficult to have any influence outside of our own connections.

However, I do believe that individuals can have influence on world peace by coming together and supporting organizations that promote peace.

Many people focus on the aspect of Peace Corps that is about providing aid to poor people in third world countries – that the only purpose of Peace Corps is for rich Americans to alleviate our guilt by helping poor third world people. Peace Corps does much in providing skilled workers to third world countries, but there are many agencies such as USAID that does so much more. To me the most important goals of Peace Corps are the simplest and they are the final two goals: Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served and
Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

To me by creating a better understanding between peoples, this is how we as individuals can help promote world peace.

These goals of Peace Corps are the reason I am doing this project. I hope that my photos can help people who have not served in Peace Corps have a better understanding of Peace Corps.

If you have not already pledged your support please consider doing so. If you have then please help by getting others to pledge so that I can create and publish a body of photographs that will show volunteers working towards the goals of Peace Corps and be an inspiration to others.

Follow the progress of the project with the new Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Making-Peace-with-the-World/345091284182?ref=ts
I will post some photos and information from time to time as I travel.

Hello everyone,
Making slow progress. I appreciate those of you who have already pledged. Please encourage others in your network to join.

If anyone has a civic organization, church group or any other club looking for someone to give a program let me know. I have powerpoint program about this project complete with photos from Jamiaca, Belize and Panama. All I need is a computer projector.

Rich

More progress on the book. I’ve changed the campaign photo to the preliminary mock-up of the book cover.

The book will soon be published, however still need this campaign to tip to cover debts in producing this book.

We are taking pre-orders for my book, “Making Peace with the World, Photographs of Peace Corps Volunteers by Richard Sitler”. Order now and save a little over 35% off retail. Follow the link below to order:
http://www.otherplacespublishing.com/mpwtw.html

Making Peace with the World
www.otherplacespublishing.com
Product Information Pages: 168 Full color throughout Gloss finish Published: March 2011 ISBN: 978-0982261989 Dimensions: 8.5 × 8.5

Great news. My book, Making Peace with the World, is now up on the site and available for pre-order. Pre-order customers save a little over 35% off retail. So, order your copies now and save money.

Follow the link below to order:

http://www.otherplacespublishing.com/mpwtw.html

Rich

I am auctioning a beautiful handmade Berber carpet that I acquired in Tangiers, Morocco during my travels. Proceeds from the auction will be added to this campaign. Please bid: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=150504549319#ht_500wt_1156

To the next ten people to pledge I’ll will send you authentic Dominican Cigar from here in the Dominican Republic. To get a cigar you must pledge at least $20 between now and Sept. 1, 2010, and provide an address where I can send the cigar.

The campaign is at 66%! Making lots of progress, but still a ways to go. Please help by getting the word out and convincing others to help make this campaign tip.

Thank you for your support.

Awesome photographs from around the world and they can be yours. Order prints, calendars and other products. They make great gifts. Support my work. I will keep adding photos, so check back often.

View Album – Travel Photos
http://www.dotphoto.com/go.asp?l=Richard+Sitler
Photo sharing and photo printing is easy with our online photo album. Create your digital photo album online, share and sell your photos and prints, use our digital photo printing service to order prints, photo gifts, photo books and more.

Order prints of photographs by Richard Sitler at http://www.dotphoto.com/go.asp?l=Richard+Sitler

Friday I leave for Mali! I will be traveling to six countries in Africa.

The travel expenses for Africa are high. I’ve already paid more than $200 in fees for visas. My airfare for Africa will be almost $5,000.

After Africa I still have the regions of Eastern Europe, Asia and the Pacific to go.

I need this campaign to tip to allow me to travel to all of the regions. Please help me to document Peace Corps volunteers in every region.

It has been awhile. I am sitting at the airport waiting for a plane. I am on my way to photograph another Peace Corps volunteer. I will be photographing volunteers over the holidays in the Eastern Caribbean. I feel it is important to document volunteers who are away from home during the holidays because that is a big part of the experience for many.

After taking time off I can’t wait to get back to work on this project. The time off gave me the opportunity to get some other work done.

The good news is that I now have a publisher lined up to publish a book of my photos. I recently signed a contract with Other Places Publishing. http://www.otherplacespublishing.com/

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
Chinese philosopher (604 BC – 531 BC)

Or in my case it starts with an American Airlines flight.

Tomorrow I fly to Guatemala to start work on this project. I will be traveling for the next year around the world photographing Peace Corps volunteers.

At this time I am funding the project with my own money, so I need for this campaign to tip to help with some of the expenses.

As I travel, my sister Martha will be assisting me with this campaign to help me reach the goal.

Please encourage your friends, family and colleagues to support my campaign.

As I travel I will be blogging and posting photos on a couple of different websites.

Follow my progress at these sites: http://www.smalltownphotojournalist.com/

http://glimpse.org/people/blog/user/facebook_789907501/2009/jul/11/about-me-and-my-work/

and

http://community.peacecorpsconnect.org/profiles/blog/list?user=2c4oktw9v8mpv

Good news concerning my project. I have been corresponding with Glimpse Magazine editor Kerala Taylor. We have been discussing collaborating on this project.

Here is what her response: “You can start a blog on Glimpse.org so that people can follow you and your photos as you travel. We can feature the blog on our homepage from time to time and promote it in other ways so that it gets good readership.”

I will be starting my travels in mid-July. I will start out in Guatemala where I will be photographing PCV Aron Rosenthal. After Guatemala I will then go to El Salvador.

I will post more info here later about the blog at Glimpse.

Still have a long way to go to meet the goals on this campaign, which will continue as I work on the project.

This article about Peace Corps and Obama sums up eloquently what I believe Peace Corps is all about and why I wish to complete this project.

Paul Theroux: The Lesson of My Life 

Yes We Can! 

In 1963, Paul Theroux joined the Peace Corps, shaping both is future and his view of the world: Cue President Obama’s new appeal to public service… 

I became a teacher in Africa and my whole life changed. I was happier, I had a purpose, and no one ever asked me, “What are you going to do with your life?” I had left home. I was becoming the person I wanted to be, not just a young man with a job but someone developing a sensibility. I had volunteered because I wanted to know the world and myself better. 

The route from New York to my destination, Nyasaland, took in Rome, Ben-ghazi (Libya), Nairobi, Salisbury (Rhodesia), and finally the tiny aerodrome at Blantyre. Flying low into that last stop, I could see tiny thatched-roof mud huts surrounded by banana groves and maize fields. This sight lifted my spirits. The thrill was intensely like being on another planet. In some ways it was just as remote, a parallel universe, but I thought of it as my Eden. 

It was December 1963, and I was glad to be gone. I’d been dismayed by the spirit of the times, the violence, the complacency, the racism, the militarism, the weird quest for material goods. I was well aware, with a lightness of soul, that I was unburdened. Everything I owned in the world fitted into the small suitcase I had with me. I had nothing in the bank, no property; did not own so much as a chair. I was superbly portable. I had just turned twenty-two. 

That first departure for Africa led me to a lifetime of travel. It shaped the way I see the world and showed me that there was more to write about than my own inner miseries. I realized that what at first seemed so alien—a schoolhouse of barefoot students at the end of a red clay road—was not so different at all. Wishing to express this experience, I became a writer. 

Although I joined one of the earliest Peace Corps groups to go overseas, I was not heeding the call from President John F. Kennedy. Apart from being a coastal New Englander, as he was, I felt I had nothing in common with this remote figure or the complexities of his ambitious and ruthless family. I joined instead partly because the Peace Corps was committed to helping people who were at last free from colonial control. As for the rest, it was a leap in the dark. 

Today, we live in a world much like the one I knew as an absolute beginner, more than forty years ago. Technology is brighter now, but so what? Bewilderment persists, we’re as fallible as ever, and most thoughtful people, especially the young, have the same question: Where is my place in the world? 

Once again we have a president who is calling on us to engage with our community and the world. Just as then, we face war and violence—this time in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. What’s new is the prospect of global economic collapse: Hard times can divide us, or they can help us to understand each other better. In such fragmented times, finding the connections among us seems more urgent than ever. Travel—not sightseeing, but real encounters with real people—has never mattered more in helping us to see how we’re crowding a blighted planet, how interdependent we are. 

 

Just after Christmas in 2006, I saw a familiar face in a small hamburger restaurant near where I live on the North Shore of Oahu. Apparently unrecognized by anyone in the place, Senator Obama, in an aloha shirt, sat at a large table with his sister and about seven children, on a holiday outing. After they had finished eating, I introduced myself. The senator was tall, witty, charming, the soul of friendliness. He wanted to talk. No sooner had we exchanged pleasantries than I became engaged in a conversation unlike any I have had before or since in this little surfing town. “You know, like you, I’ve spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia. I lived in Indonesia,” the senator said, as a way of introducing himself. We talked about Africa, about Cuba, about Hawaii. He wanted me to know that not only had he read my work but he had traveled and lived in distant lands, as well as in the poorer parts of America. In the conversation that followed, we talked about books, and life in general, but most of all we talked about the richness of the places we’d seen and how they had influenced us. Senator Obama seemed to define himself by the depth and complexity of his experience as a young man looking for his place in the wider world. With a glow of sympathy that was enlarged by humor and intelligence, he was utterly at home in the world. I mentioned that he’d make a great president and that he ought to run. He said he was studying it. That was the word he used. “But there’s no hurry,” I said, and making a play with his name in Swahili I added, “Haraka, haraka, haina baraka.” He understood and laughed at this owlish jape (“Too much of a hurry makes bad luck”—or an unsuitable Barack, since his name and luck or blessing are synonymous). This in itself was an event: the only time in twenty years when anyone in my little town showed any knowledge of Swahili. Not long after that encounter, Obama gave a speech at Cornell College, in Iowa, calling on his audience and all Americans to go out and serve their community. “Growing up, I wasn’t always sure who I was or where I was going,” he said, describing how he got all sorts of advice, as young adults do, just before he became a community organizer in Chicago—when he decided, as he put it, “to step into the currents of history and help people fight for their dreams.” 

Obama’s speech was a call to participate, to make a difference, to be more than a spectator in life. And since taking office, President Obama is once again calling on us to serve, to “engage” with the world. I don’t immediately think of politicians as the greatest role models, but this man had his apprenticeship on the mean streets. His early foreign policy moves suggest a new way of looking at world conflicts. He has instructed George Mitchell, his special envoy to the Middle East, to go out and “listen.” 

This particular moment is remarkable—and different from the past eight or even sixteen years—because everyone on earth seems to be experiencing the same shrinking of net worth and an ensuing solemnity. But rather than retreating, many have chosen to look deeper into the possibilities that have arisen because of the global recession: Volunteerism is on the rise. Peace Corps applications jumped by 175 percent in the month of January over a year earlier. President Obama has pledged to boost Ameri-Corps and double the size of the Peace Corps. He is urging us to get to know our neighbors, here and in the world, and not to lecture or do battle but to listen and work. 

The Peace Corps experience holds lessons for us all as travelers. As a teacher in Africa, I learned to listen. I discovered people with real lives and real problems, as well as dreams of transformation much like my own. From this distant place in Central Africa—colonial Nyasaland, soon to be independent Malawi—I saw America clearly, its virtues and its failings. Travel was revealed to me as an experience of being myself, in contact with people who had no preconceptions of who I was. 

My decision to join the Peace Corps was an implicit rejection of sightseeing. Even then, tourists went to Africa as sensationalists and voyeurs. It was a novelty to be an American teacher in a little schoolhouse at the end of a narrow red clay road 

in the bush. Whenever I mentioned Africa, people talked about Ernest Hemingway, and I laughed, thinking of him as strictly a bwana on safari, killing animals and talking to his gun bearers in what we called “kitchen Swahili.” My hero then was not Hemingway, the rich visitor and fantasist, using the machismo of money, but Nelson Mandela, the committed individual, who’d just been given a sentence of life imprisonment on Robben Island for sabotage against South Africa’s white regime, at the Rivonia trial. 

I took pains to learn to speak the local Chichewa language grammatically. I never went on a safari, I did not own a camera, and most of the wild game I saw were the hyenas that raided my garbage pile, the bats that hung from the eaves of my house, and the occasional snake—black and green mambas—that rattled through the thicknesses of dead leaves on bush paths and in sun-heated maize fields. I stayed in Africa six years. 

In Africa I had no material ambitions or hope of advancement. As an English teacher, I earned a stipend, just enough to support myself, but because it was so much more than anyone else in the country was earning I had nothing to complain about. It was only when I went into town and met, say, an American embassy official that I was reminded of my obscurity. Round about this time, the very youthful L. Paul Bremer, who was exactly my age but much more presentable, was shuffling paper at the U.S. embassy in Malawi as economic and commercial officer, earning a good salary and in the upward spiral of the diplomatic service. Later he would hold the exalted position of American proconsul in Iraq. 

Around this same time, Chris Matthews was teaching in Swaziland, and Paul Tsongas, the late senator from Massachusetts, was a Peace Corps teacher in Ethiopia. When I met Tsongas much later, or bumped into other former Peace Corps volunteers (diplomats, businessmen, teachers, doctors), I found we had a great deal in common and had enjoyed many similar experiences, and felt an immediate bond. Most of all, I respected them for their years of service. None of them had had it easy, and some had had it very hard. An American consular official I recently met in India had spent two years in a tiny village in south central Zaire, in a mud hut, with no electricity, on a dead-end jungle road. The best years of his life, he said. 

 

For the two years I was in Malawi, I never made a telephone call and my only contact with my family was in letters that took up to a month to arrive. This suited me fine. The instant connection in today’s world tends to distort the experience of being far from home. What sort of a life is it when, on the days when things are going bad, you are able to dial Mom for consolation? The experience should involve remoteness, inconvenience, hardship, even risk; isn’t that the whole point of being away? I don’t understand a recent graduate doing a mediocre job, finding an apartment, getting into a routine in the hope of advancement. I do understand, with Huck Finn, the wish to light out for the territory ahead of the rest. I lived among people who, on the surface, seemed to have very little. Money was so scarce, they were practically existing on the barter system. The students’ notebooks were always damp and penetrated by the odor of wood smoke from the cooking fires of their huts or the kerosene stink from the lamps: Electricity was rare in their villages. Though they wore a simple school uniform, my students were barefoot. Their soles were toughened by walking to school, and they played soccer barefoot. Before we developed a lunch program, lunch for most of them was a whole boiled potato or a few stalks of sugarcane that they chewed to stave off hunger. It would be easy, but misleading, to list all the things my students and their families didn’t have. This is what celebrities do when they visit villages in Africa: Out of a guilty, grotesque, almost boasting self-consciousness, these wealthy visitors enumerate the insufficiencies. That’s because they don’t stay very long. If they stayed longer, perhaps a few years, they would see what I saw in Africa: the resiliency of the people. Africans knew neglect, drought, flood, bad harvests, hunger, disease, and—more insidious than any of these—tyrannical government; and yet in the face of these adversities they had developed survival skills, and prevailed. For more than forty years I’ve heard outsiders lamenting the plight of Africans—and, given AIDS and Darfur and Zimbabwe, sometimes justly; but I seldom hear, except from someone who has lived closely among them, how Africans, ignored by the world, have managed to save themselves, often in the bitterest of circumstances. My teaching had its uses for them, but what I taught was negligible compared to what I learned. Yes, after two years my students spoke and wrote English well, and some of them went on to college. But today, despite forty years of volunteer efforts, Malawi is probably worse off than it was back in 1963. The population has quadrupled to more than thirteen million (of these, one million are orphans), and the per capita income is $160 a year. 

People talk about culture shock. I should have experienced it when I saw those mud huts or had my first case of malaria, or my surprising bout of myiasis—the putzi, or tumbu, fly eggs from my infested shirt hatching into maggots under my skin (I later turned this experience into a short story, “White Lies”). I learned to cope. I got culture shock when I came back to the United States. The country was pretty much the same—the Vietnam War was much hotter, more divisive, and destructive. But I was different. 

I maintained links with my students and others in the country, and with my fellow Peace Corps teachers. Every summer we spend five days together: They are the best friends I have. I know many former volunteers who stay in touch with their village, or with friends, over many decades. The Malawi Children’s Village, an orphanage, was started by former volunteers and has grown into a substantial project. 

Like many people who have been affected by such an experience in a distant land, I did not come all the way home; nor did I leave that experience behind. It stayed in my mind, it informed my decisions, it made me strong. To all of this, there are people who will say, “What’s the point?” But those are the same people who’ll say what’s the point of writing a poem, or learning a language, or going for a hike, or lingering on a wooded path to watch a bird flash onto a branch. 

Whenever someone asks me what I think he should do with his life, I always say, First, leave home. Get out there, where if you care to listen, you will find many other people dreaming of making connections and changing the world, just like you. The only mistake is in thinking that you will make an important difference in the lives of the people you’re among. The profound difference will be in you.

This is a really good piece about Peace Corps and President Obama written by Paul Theroux. I concur with the points he makes. He really sums up the reasons I believe in Peace Corps and why I want to complete this project.



Paul Theroux writes: Obama, the Peace Corps, and the Lesson of My Life 

Paul Theroux: The Lesson of My Life 

Yes We Can! 

In 1963, Paul Theroux joined the Peace Corps, shaping both is future and his view of the world: Cue President Obama’s new appeal to public service… 

I became a teacher in Africa and my whole life changed. I was happier, I had a purpose, and no one ever asked me, “What are you going to do with your life?” I had left home. I was becoming the person I wanted to be, not just a young man with a job but someone developing a sensibility. I had volunteered because I wanted to know the world and myself better. 

The route from New York to my destination, Nyasaland, took in Rome, Ben-ghazi (Libya), Nairobi, Salisbury (Rhodesia), and finally the tiny aerodrome at Blantyre. Flying low into that last stop, I could see tiny thatched-roof mud huts surrounded by banana groves and maize fields. This sight lifted my spirits. The thrill was intensely like being on another planet. In some ways it was just as remote, a parallel universe, but I thought of it as my Eden. 

It was December 1963, and I was glad to be gone. I’d been dismayed by the spirit of the times, the violence, the complacency, the racism, the militarism, the weird quest for material goods. I was well aware, with a lightness of soul, that I was unburdened. Everything I owned in the world fitted into the small suitcase I had with me. I had nothing in the bank, no property; did not own so much as a chair. I was superbly portable. I had just turned twenty-two. 

That first departure for Africa led me to a lifetime of travel. It shaped the way I see the world and showed me that there was more to write about than my own inner miseries. I realized that what at first seemed so alien—a schoolhouse of barefoot students at the end of a red clay road—was not so different at all. Wishing to express this experience, I became a writer. 

Although I joined one of the earliest Peace Corps groups to go overseas, I was not heeding the call from President John F. Kennedy. Apart from being a coastal New Englander, as he was, I felt I had nothing in common with this remote figure or the complexities of his ambitious and ruthless family. I joined instead partly because the Peace Corps was committed to helping people who were at last free from colonial control. As for the rest, it was a leap in the dark. 

Today, we live in a world much like the one I knew as an absolute beginner, more than forty years ago. Technology is brighter now, but so what? Bewilderment persists, we’re as fallible as ever, and most thoughtful people, especially the young, have the same question: Where is my place in the world? 

Once again we have a president who is calling on us to engage with our community and the world. Just as then, we face war and violence—this time in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. What’s new is the prospect of global economic collapse: Hard times can divide us, or they can help us to understand each other better. In such fragmented times, finding the connections among us seems more urgent than ever. Travel—not sightseeing, but real encounters with real people—has never mattered more in helping us to see how we’re crowding a blighted planet, how interdependent we are. 

 

Just after Christmas in 2006, I saw a familiar face in a small hamburger restaurant near where I live on the North Shore of Oahu. Apparently unrecognized by anyone in the place, Senator Obama, in an aloha shirt, sat at a large table with his sister and about seven children, on a holiday outing. After they had finished eating, I introduced myself. The senator was tall, witty, charming, the soul of friendliness. He wanted to talk. No sooner had we exchanged pleasantries than I became engaged in a conversation unlike any I have had before or since in this little surfing town. “You know, like you, I’ve spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia. I lived in Indonesia,” the senator said, as a way of introducing himself. We talked about Africa, about Cuba, about Hawaii. He wanted me to know that not only had he read my work but he had traveled and lived in distant lands, as well as in the poorer parts of America. In the conversation that followed, we talked about books, and life in general, but most of all we talked about the richness of the places we’d seen and how they had influenced us. Senator Obama seemed to define himself by the depth and complexity of his experience as a young man looking for his place in the wider world. With a glow of sympathy that was enlarged by humor and intelligence, he was utterly at home in the world. I mentioned that he’d make a great president and that he ought to run. He said he was studying it. That was the word he used. “But there’s no hurry,” I said, and making a play with his name in Swahili I added, “Haraka, haraka, haina baraka.” He understood and laughed at this owlish jape (“Too much of a hurry makes bad luck”—or an unsuitable Barack, since his name and luck or blessing are synonymous). This in itself was an event: the only time in twenty years when anyone in my little town showed any knowledge of Swahili. Not long after that encounter, Obama gave a speech at Cornell College, in Iowa, calling on his audience and all Americans to go out and serve their community. “Growing up, I wasn’t always sure who I was or where I was going,” he said, describing how he got all sorts of advice, as young adults do, just before he became a community organizer in Chicago—when he decided, as he put it, “to step into the currents of history and help people fight for their dreams.” 

Obama’s speech was a call to participate, to make a difference, to be more than a spectator in life. And since taking office, President Obama is once again calling on us to serve, to “engage” with the world. I don’t immediately think of politicians as the greatest role models, but this man had his apprenticeship on the mean streets. His early foreign policy moves suggest a new way of looking at world conflicts. He has instructed George Mitchell, his special envoy to the Middle East, to go out and “listen.” 

This particular moment is remarkable—and different from the past eight or even sixteen years—because everyone on earth seems to be experiencing the same shrinking of net worth and an ensuing solemnity. But rather than retreating, many have chosen to look deeper into the possibilities that have arisen because of the global recession: Volunteerism is on the rise. Peace Corps applications jumped by 175 percent in the month of January over a year earlier. President Obama has pledged to boost Ameri-Corps and double the size of the Peace Corps. He is urging us to get to know our neighbors, here and in the world, and not to lecture or do battle but to listen and work. 

The Peace Corps experience holds lessons for us all as travelers. As a teacher in Africa, I learned to listen. I discovered people with real lives and real problems, as well as dreams of transformation much like my own. From this distant place in Central Africa—colonial Nyasaland, soon to be independent Malawi—I saw America clearly, its virtues and its failings. Travel was revealed to me as an experience of being myself, in contact with people who had no preconceptions of who I was. 

My decision to join the Peace Corps was an implicit rejection of sightseeing. Even then, tourists went to Africa as sensationalists and voyeurs. It was a novelty to be an American teacher in a little schoolhouse at the end of a narrow red clay road 

in the bush. Whenever I mentioned Africa, people talked about Ernest Hemingway, and I laughed, thinking of him as strictly a bwana on safari, killing animals and talking to his gun bearers in what we called “kitchen Swahili.” My hero then was not Hemingway, the rich visitor and fantasist, using the machismo of money, but Nelson Mandela, the committed individual, who’d just been given a sentence of life imprisonment on Robben Island for sabotage against South Africa’s white regime, at the Rivonia trial. 

I took pains to learn to speak the local Chichewa language grammatically. I never went on a safari, I did not own a camera, and most of the wild game I saw were the hyenas that raided my garbage pile, the bats that hung from the eaves of my house, and the occasional snake—black and green mambas—that rattled through the thicknesses of dead leaves on bush paths and in sun-heated maize fields. I stayed in Africa six years. 

In Africa I had no material ambitions or hope of advancement. As an English teacher, I earned a stipend, just enough to support myself, but because it was so much more than anyone else in the country was earning I had nothing to complain about. It was only when I went into town and met, say, an American embassy official that I was reminded of my obscurity. Round about this time, the very youthful L. Paul Bremer, who was exactly my age but much more presentable, was shuffling paper at the U.S. embassy in Malawi as economic and commercial officer, earning a good salary and in the upward spiral of the diplomatic service. Later he would hold the exalted position of American proconsul in Iraq. 

Around this same time, Chris Matthews was teaching in Swaziland, and Paul Tsongas, the late senator from Massachusetts, was a Peace Corps teacher in Ethiopia. When I met Tsongas much later, or bumped into other former Peace Corps volunteers (diplomats, businessmen, teachers, doctors), I found we had a great deal in common and had enjoyed many similar experiences, and felt an immediate bond. Most of all, I respected them for their years of service. None of them had had it easy, and some had had it very hard. An American consular official I recently met in India had spent two years in a tiny village in south central Zaire, in a mud hut, with no electricity, on a dead-end jungle road. The best years of his life, he said. 

 

For the two years I was in Malawi, I never made a telephone call and my only contact with my family was in letters that took up to a month to arrive. This suited me fine. The instant connection in today’s world tends to distort the experience of being far from home. What sort of a life is it when, on the days when things are going bad, you are able to dial Mom for consolation? The experience should involve remoteness, inconvenience, hardship, even risk; isn’t that the whole point of being away? I don’t understand a recent graduate doing a mediocre job, finding an apartment, getting into a routine in the hope of advancement. I do understand, with Huck Finn, the wish to light out for the territory ahead of the rest. I lived among people who, on the surface, seemed to have very little. Money was so scarce, they were practically existing on the barter system. The students’ notebooks were always damp and penetrated by the odor of wood smoke from the cooking fires of their huts or the kerosene stink from the lamps: Electricity was rare in their villages. Though they wore a simple school uniform, my students were barefoot. Their soles were toughened by walking to school, and they played soccer barefoot. Before we developed a lunch program, lunch for most of them was a whole boiled potato or a few stalks of sugarcane that they chewed to stave off hunger. It would be easy, but misleading, to list all the things my students and their families didn’t have. This is what celebrities do when they visit villages in Africa: Out of a guilty, grotesque, almost boasting self-consciousness, these wealthy visitors enumerate the insufficiencies. That’s because they don’t stay very long. If they stayed longer, perhaps a few years, they would see what I saw in Africa: the resiliency of the people. Africans knew neglect, drought, flood, bad harvests, hunger, disease, and—more insidious than any of these—tyrannical government; and yet in the face of these adversities they had developed survival skills, and prevailed. For more than forty years I’ve heard outsiders lamenting the plight of Africans—and, given AIDS and Darfur and Zimbabwe, sometimes justly; but I seldom hear, except from someone who has lived closely among them, how Africans, ignored by the world, have managed to save themselves, often in the bitterest of circumstances. My teaching had its uses for them, but what I taught was negligible compared to what I learned. Yes, after two years my students spoke and wrote English well, and some of them went on to college. But today, despite forty years of volunteer efforts, Malawi is probably worse off than it was back in 1963. The population has quadrupled to more than thirteen million (of these, one million are orphans), and the per capita income is $160 a year. 

People talk about culture shock. I should have experienced it when I saw those mud huts or had my first case of malaria, or my surprising bout of myiasis—the putzi, or tumbu, fly eggs from my infested shirt hatching into maggots under my skin (I later turned this experience into a short story, “White Lies”). I learned to cope. I got culture shock when I came back to the United States. The country was pretty much the same—the Vietnam War was much hotter, more divisive, and destructive. But I was different. 

I maintained links with my students and others in the country, and with my fellow Peace Corps teachers. Every summer we spend five days together: They are the best friends I have. I know many former volunteers who stay in touch with their village, or with friends, over many decades. The Malawi Children’s Village, an orphanage, was started by former volunteers and has grown into a substantial project. 

Like many people who have been affected by such an experience in a distant land, I did not come all the way home; nor did I leave that experience behind. It stayed in my mind, it informed my decisions, it made me strong. To all of this, there are people who will say, “What’s the point?” But those are the same people who’ll say what’s the point of writing a poem, or learning a language, or going for a hike, or lingering on a wooded path to watch a bird flash onto a branch. 

Whenever someone asks me what I think he should do with his life, I always say, First, leave home. Get out there, where if you care to listen, you will find many other people dreaming of making connections and changing the world, just like you. The only mistake is in thinking that you will make an important difference in the lives of the people you’re among. The profound difference will be in you.

I am planning to start work on this project this August. I am in the process of making plans. I do not have a set itinerary as of yet, but I plan to start in central America and go from there.

If you have already pledged please help me get more pledges so that I can meet my goal and get the funding needed to complete this project.

As I travel I will blog and post photos online both on a personal website and on the Peace Corps Connect website created by the National Peace Corps Association, so everyone will be able to follow my progress.

The proposal reads that I will travel to at least two countries in every region, but my goal is to try to travel to every country where Peace Corps currently serves. I don’t know if it will be possible, but that is the challenge.

Thanks.

I posted a new photo to go along with this campaign. It is one of the photos I took while shadowing Peace Corps Volunteer Jerry Wagner who served the village of Lucky Strike in Belize. Jerry worked in youth development serving a 4-H club.

I have increased my own pledge to the campaign to include money that rpcv’s Rogean Cadieux-Smith and Jonathan Smith donated to the cause. They were two dedicated Peace Corps volunteers from a great group of volunteers in Jamaica when I was there for Crisis Corps. They are also two of my subjects for the project.