No Light. No Water. No Chance.
In rural Ethiopia, miles of rugged terrain born’s survival. The journey to a clinic often happens on foot. It happens in the dark. It happens when every second counts. For many women living in the country’s West Omo Zone and Bench Sheko Zone, access to a clean medical facility or a skilled provider is not a given. Village Health Partnership works where the pavement ends. Our mission is to end maternal and neonatal deaths. We are building the systems that make medicine possible. In 2023, the national maternal mortality rate in Ethiopia was 195 deaths per 100,000 live births. This...
The Great Peace Corps Book Exchange
Books have always played an outsized role in the lives of Peace Corps Volunteers. PCVs spend hours thumbing through paperbacks while waiting (and waiting) for public transportation in their host countries; they learn about these countries by reading local writers; and they enter fictional worlds to alleviate their homesickness. While today’s Volunteers continue the grand tradition of reading, the way they do it has evolved with technology, changing how they access books, exchange them, and consume them. Yet they still tend to read the same types of books—whether about their host countries, their jobs, or just for fun—and they continue...
Born to Serve
At the end of 2024, just days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the world lost one of the most eminent moral voices ever to sit in the Oval Office. President Jimmy Carter, whose life spanned a century, was also the biggest presidential champion of Peace Corps since John F. Kennedy. Both his mother, Lily, and his grandson, Jason, served, and numerous RPCVs have found meaningful work at the Carter Center, joining the fight to eradicate global diseases and to promote democracy worldwide. WorldView’s Robert Nolan spoke with Jason Carter, now the chair of the Carter Center board, who...
Literary Legacy
For as long as Peace Corps Volunteers have been sent to the remote corners of the world, they have brought back journals that capture day-to-day life in their communities, with all its ups and downs. Years and even decades later, these records give Returned Peace Corps Volunteers a way for them, and maybe a few loved ones, to relive the stories and contemplate the lessons learned from their service. But some of these journals go on to have a much larger reach as they are transformed into compelling memoirs, fiction, and other stories published professionally and even climbing to the...
Reading Room: RPCV Book Clubs
Nobody joins Peace Corps without a hunger to understand cultures beyond their own. But where does that hunger go once Volunteers are home again, amid traffic, school pickups, and email pings? For many, book clubs have become a doorway back to service, a place where returned Volunteers can feel the same spark of curiosity that once led them across oceans. Each meeting is an echo of those shared nights in far-flung Peace Corps sites, trading tattered copies of The Poisonwood Bible for One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Portland, Oregon, Bill Stein (Niger 1990–93) has been tending one of the...
A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey
This enthralling memoir from a former Peace Corps director follows the life of a curious and dedicated public servant, starting with her abandonment at age 3 and taking us through the next 76 exciting, joyful, and sometimes painful years of her life. Thankfully for the Peace Corps community, much of Jody Olsen’s life has included the agency, and her candid recollections are fascinating to read. But despite its title, A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey is as much about Olsen’s personal history as her professional one. She explores the dynamics of her childhood in a strict Mormon family, the...
Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben
I was just back from my Peace Corps service in Zaire when famed climate scientist Dr. James Hansen marched up to Capitol Hill in 1988 and told Congress—for the first time—that global warming was real. Fossil fuel combustion worldwide was overloading the atmosphere with carbon, he said, and overheating the planet. A year later, author Bill McKibben published his lyrical masterpiece The End of Nature, which grappled with the economic, social, and spiritual implications of a future where natural planetary rhythms give way to rampant wildfires, incessant sea-level rise, and heat waves that trap people, plants, and animals in their...
Married to Amazement
When Kathleen Coskran’s memoir kicks off by disclosing to her readers that she’s not just old, but old old (81 years), we can’t help but be drawn in by her humor and candor. She doesn’t claim to offer any pearls of wisdom, but instead offers up little snippets of wonder, glimpses of her extraordinary life experience. She offers us not pearls, but absolute gems. She opens with her first grand cross-cultural adventure, a crash course in amazement, when she accepts a Peace Corps assignment in 1965 teaching English and algebra in Ethiopia and confronts the uncomfortable revelations of American privilege...
Far from the Road: A Community Health Project in the Himalayas
The inspiring and dramatic events in Far from the Road unfolded half a century ago in the verdant, idyllic valley of Dhorpatan, at 9,000 feet elevation in Nepal. Ross Anthony, from Oklahoma City, a returned agricultural Volunteer, conceived the project alongside Nepal’s first NGO, Paropakar. With passion and persistence, “Ross the Boss” cobbled together shoestring-level funding and signed up Mary Murphy, a community health educator from suburban Washington, D.C. They recruited Stephen Bezruchka, a Stanford Medical School grad from Toronto, and were later joined by Mike Payne, a water systems engineer from Cleveland, Ohio. With ponies and porters, the team...
Endless Horizons
Paul Neville’s memoir of backpacking around Southeast Asia and South America more than fulfills the promise in his subtitle: A Global Backpacker’s Quest for Adventure, Connection, and Discovery. Readers will find this self-published effort a thoroughly professional product. Expect to enjoy an assiduously edited, excellently laid out, and beautifully written book. After two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tonga, Neville’s “festering travel bug”—a condition nearly universal among returned Volunteers—launches him into a year of vagabonding on a shoestring budget. Intermingled with vivid travelogue, he tries to explain why. There is novelty, of course. Bangkok, his first stop, is...