In Memoriam: Mary Broude
As a lifelong Volunteer, she served as a steady beacon of Peace Corps ideals. And her commitment to the Peace Corps community and desire to create a positive experience for RPCVs will be remembered as part of her enduring legacy. By NPCA Staff With heavy hearts, we announce that Mary Broude, who served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Korea 1969–70, passed away last week on Tuesday, November 8. She devoted decades to supporting returned Volunteers and Peace Corps ideals: as a board member of the NPCA affiliate group Friends of Korea (FoK), as co-founder of the Orange County Peace Corps Association, and...
WorldView Magazine Wins OZZIE Award for Best Cover
The magazine for the Peace Corps community earns top honors for a special 60th anniversary cover illustrated by artist Tim O’Brien. By NPCA Staff THERE WERE CHEERS for the Peace Corps community Tuesday night at the FOLIO Magazine gala in New York City. WorldView magazine earned top honors for the cover of the “Peace Corps at Sixty” edition, recognizing six decades of service by Peace Corps Volunteers around the world. Artist Tim O’Brien created the portrait of John F. Kennedy for the cover under the art direction of Pamela Fogg. The EDDIE and OZZIE Awards recognize excellence in journalism and design across all sectors of the...
Unfinished Business: From the Editor of WorldView Magazine
Hopeful work, as Volunteers return to serve alongside communities overseas. And crucial work to ensure Ukraine survives. By Steven Boyd Saum Illustration by Anna Ivanenko For so much of the Peace Corps community, the months since March have been brimming with optimism, bringing news of Volunteers returning to service in countries and communities across the globe. In Africa, they’ve returned to countries including Zambia and Madagascar, Ghana and The Gambia, Senegal and Sierra Leone. They have returned to the Eastern Caribbean and the Dominican Republic. In Latin America, Volunteers have been welcomed in countries including Paraguay and Peru, Colombia and Costa...
Tales of Cartography
Mapmaking with fabrics and dances and sloths By Nathalie Vadnais Consider the map. We’ve all used one to get from point A to point B, to navigate the geography of the place in which we find ourselves. We also live in a world profoundly shaped by the arbitrary drawing of borders on colonial maps decades or centuries ago. But change the way you map the world around you, and you might see and hear and taste anew. That’s an idea that resonates with the Peace Corps community — which is why Hannah Engel-Rebitzer launched the World Maps Collaborative, through which...
Here’s Where Peace Corps Volunteers Have Returned to Service
Two dozen countries have welcomed them back. And some fifty countries have issued invitations for Volunteers to return. By Steven Boyd Saum Two years after all Peace Corps Volunteers were brought home because of the COVID-19 pandemic, they began returning to service overseas in March 2022. We shared the exciting news in the previous edition of WorldView that the first Volunteers had returned to Zambia and the Dominican Republic. In the months since, posts around the world have been busy welcoming back Peace Corps Volunteers and Response Volunteers to work alongside communities. As of August 2022, Volunteers have returned to some...
A Little Relief: Public Service Loan Forgiveness
At last, some good news for the Peace Corps community on Public Service Loan Forgiveness By Katie McSheffrey Last October, the U.S. Department of Education announced an overhaul of the troubled Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (PSLF). But that initial overhaul did not include proposals to help Peace Corps Volunteers. National Peace Corps Association has covered this problem in podcasts and in WorldView magazine. Months later, those of us who have been leading the RPCVs for PSLF Relief Facebook group have some good news. First, a bit more background. What the Secretary of Education announced in October 2021 was a limited time waiver, through which...
The Campaign to Pass the Peace Corps Reauthorization Act
Following on big news from the Senate, let’s ensure that Congress passes the most sweeping Peace Corps legislation in a generation. By Jonathan Pearson In these times when division and discord define politics across the nation, recent months tell a different story when it comes to support for the Peace Corps. Democrats and Republicans in both the House and the Senate have come together to bring forth meaningful bipartisan legislation. On June 23, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee introduced the Peace Corps Reauthorization Act of 2022 (S. 4466). Led by Chair Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Ranking Member James Risch (R-ID), the bill had six bipartisan...
Bucha Was Home
A place where I lived and taught — with colleagues and students and a family, people who cared about me and I about them. Then the war came. By Sonia Scherr Ten days before Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine, I awoke to a Facebook message wishing me a happy Valentine’s Day. It was from Liuda Skorlupina, a friend and former colleague in Bucha, near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Later that day, we met over Skype; it was night in Ukraine and she was in her home office, a room that had become familiar from our regular...
Intimate and Lyrical Poetry by Ukrainian Poet Natalka Bilotserkivets. Her Work Has a New Resonance and Urgency.
Eccentric Days Of Hope And Sorrow By Natalka Bilotserkivets Translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky Lost Horse Press Reviewed by Steven Boyd Saum Prologue to this collection spanning four decades is the poem “ДІТИ,” or “Children.” It’s a word that readers have seen in photos from Ukraine scores of times since February. Usually it is rendered in Russian, for the benefit of the invaders. Spray-painted on gates to a yard in a village house. In pen on a sign taped to the inside window of a car fleeing rocket fire and shelling. Spelled out in enormous letters...
A Biography of Writer Michael Gold Traces an Anti-Democratic Thread in American Life
Michael Gold: The People’s Writer By Patrick Chura SUNY Press Reviewed by Marnie Mueller In the very last pages of his story of the life of Michael Gold, Patrick Chura writes: “Gold managed the challenge of proving the existence of another America, and how difficult it made his life.” An avowed and uncompromising Marxist, Gold has fallen from the literary canon and political history of America, despite his major contributions. In writing of him, Chura has also told the story of my parents and people like them, who dedicated their lives to making a better, more equitable nation, and...