Tell your Peace Corps story, but first study this book. Robert Klein, Peace Corps Oral History Project, Kennedy Library The ultimate how-to book for former Peace Corps volunteers and staff who have hesitated to write about their own experience. This book explains what a memoir is, how to write, publish and promote.

Tell your Peace Corps story, but first study this book. Robert Klein, Peace Corps Oral History Project, Kennedy Library The ultimate how-to book for former Peace Corps volunteers and staff who have hesitated to write about their own experience. This book explains what a memoir is, how to write, publish and promote.

She was a sixty-two-year-old California grandmother, retired program director and college professor when she joined the Peace Corps. Within months, Joan Heron found herself in Turkmenistan, a small, impoverished country born out of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Using meager resources, a beginner’s grasp of the Russian language, tremendous trust in friendship and a can-do will, Ms. Heron embarks on a two-year adventure in an alien, male chauvinist, often obstructionist environment. Her compelling true story, told with humor and immense compassion for the people and their plight, reaches across borders, cultures and politics to illuminate the strength and riches of the human spirit.

Leigh Marie Dannhauser gets sent to Cameroon to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer. She faces the challenges of adapting to a new way of life while not knowing French or the patois. But she persists, and in the process learns about herself away from American society. This is the story of her time in a village that became her home but is now a memory.

Contains a collection of autobiographical reminiscences written by about 28 former Peace Corps volumteers.

At the age of 48, Moritz Thomsen sold his pig farm and joined the Peace Corps. As he tells the story, his awareness of the comic elements in the human situation--including his own--and his ability to convey it in fast-moving, earthy prose have madeLiving Poora classic. "Hilariously funny at times, grimly sad at others and elavened with perceptive insights into the ways of the people and with breathtaking descriptions of the Ecuadorian landscape."-St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A complete and revealing history of the Peace Corps—in time for its fiftieth anniversary When the World Calls is the first complete and balanced look at the Peace Corps's first fifty years. Stanley Meisler's engaging narrative exposes Washington infighting, presidential influence, and the Volunteers' unique struggles abroad. He deftly unpacks the complicated history with sharp analysis and memorable anecdotes, taking readers on a global trek starting with the historic first contingent of Volunteers to Ghana on August 30, 1961.