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.

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.

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.

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

Now in paperback: a gripping, witty travel memoir that offers "a fascinating look at voluntourism from an Indigenous perspective" (Book Riot) "Ursula Pike's memoir is unlike any other I've read, with her perceptive, always-seeking, and lovely narrative voice." --Susan Straight, author of Mecca "This book is alive with a spirit that welcomed mine to meet it." --Elissa Washuta, author of White Magic When she was twenty-five, Ursula Pike boarded a plane to Bolivia and began her term of service in the Peace Corps. A member of the Karuk Tribe, Pike sought to make meaningful connections with Indigenous people halfway around the world. But she arrived in La Paz with trepidation as well as excitement, "knowing I followed in the footsteps of Western colonizers and missionaries who had also claimed they were there to help." In the following two years, as a series of dramatic episodes brought that tension to a boiling point, she began to ask: What does it mean to have experienced the effects of colonialism firsthand, and yet to risk becoming a colonizing force in turn? An Indian Among los Indígenas, Pike's memoir of this experience, upends a canon of travel memoirs that has historically been dominated by white writers. It is a sharp, honest, and unnerving examination of the shadows that colonial history casts over even the most well-intentioned attempts at cross-cultural aid. With masterful deadpan wit, it signals a shift in travel writing that is long overdue.

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

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.