The Great Peace Corps Book Exchange

For decades, paperbacks have acted as a kind in-country currency among Volunteers, creating a buzzing marketplace of ideas, imagination and nostalgia that goes beyond service

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 to find ways to use stories to build community.  

 Founding Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver recognized Volunteers’ many uses for books and sent the earliest cohorts a book locker: a 100-pound trunk filled with 200 volumes representing  “classics and contemporary writing by both American and foreign authors, as well as titles on American history, politics, and social thought,” Shriver wrote. There were also books and maps related to the areas where Volunteers were working, as well as simple vocabulary and picture books for English language learners. The collection was intended not only to entertain Volunteers in the field, but also to seed English-language libraries in local schools and villages after they left.  

In 1966, Patti and John Garamendi pulled up to their village in Ethiopia to find a group of children waiting for them, eager to show off the 1,000-book library previous Volunteers had left at their site. “The locker was truly a treasure chest,” Patti said. “We were determined to read every book and to set up a library where the children could come after school.” John devoured the entire collection of Winston Churchill’s writings—“He was always chuckling, as he enjoyed the wit,” Patti recalled—while she used the picture books as teaching aids. “I remember trying to explain snow to the students, and the photos in the books made it real.”  

For Patti, the book locker spawned a lifelong love of reading. “I close my eyes and would give anything to be curled up [with a book] by my kerosene lamp in my mud house listening to the rain pound on my tin roof.” 

The book lockers came in handy in Liberia for Dale Gillies, who found only limited English-language reading material when he arrived at his site in 1964. Monrovia, the capital city, had a couple of well-stocked bookstores, but most PCVs went there only infrequently and could not afford many new books on their modest living allowances. “These book lockers were certainly a lifesaver,” Gillies said, noting that he read every single one of the books in his town’s locker over three and a half years.  

After a few years, the book locker program was discontinued, likely because of the cost of shipping trunks of books all over the world. The books themselves were left behind at Volunteers’ sites, but without restocking, the supply dwindled. By the time President Jimmy Carter’s mother, Lillian Carter, arrived at her Peace Corps site in India in 1966, she had to beat out her fellow Volunteers for the books she wanted to read. That’s why she stole six books out of a shared locker: “I hid them so nobody would look at the words before I did. I read last night as long as I could hold my eyes open,” she wrote in a letter to her family. 

In the decades that followed, Volunteers were largely left to their own devices, relying on care packages from their families or soliciting donations from New York book publishers to supplement the books available through their Peace Corps offices, at local libraries, or traded among English-speaking expats.  

By the 1990s, the paperbacks that had arrived in Senegal via book lockers were long gone, but the staff at headquarters in Dakar had stepped in to fill the void, maintaining a small library where Volunteers could find job-related titles. In 1994, Eric Stafne joined Peace Corps Senegal as an agroforestry extension agent and remembers Trees and Shrubs of the Sahel, given to him during training, which served as his dendrology “bible” throughout his service. 

Sargent Shriver and staff with one of the “booklockers” given
to Volunteers in the early years of Peace Corps.

For pleasure reading, Volunteers in Senegal could find books at one of the regional houses that they would visit when they needed to go to the bank or pick up their mail. Stafne recalled finding classics by Charles Dickens and Mark Twain there, and relying on care packages from family for more recent titles like The English Patient and Forrest Gump. He randomly picked up The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, and was “blown away by it”; he could hardly believe it was written in the 1930s. God’s Bits of Wood, a 1960 novel by Senegalese author Ousmane Sembène, and Under the Neem Tree, a memoir by RPCV Susan Lowerre (Senegal 1985–87), were also popular among the Senegal Volunteers. Stafne, now a research professor at Mississippi State University, said he did not encounter the internet until he got back home, which is probably why he was able to read 99 books during his service.  

Today, Volunteers don’t have to rely on random paperbacks they find in common areas or borrow from friends; they bring their laptops and Libby accounts with them and can instantly access e-books of the latest New York Times bestsellers. In fact, their entertainment options are not even limited to books.  

Elaine Nadeau (China 2016–18) recalled that when Volunteers arrived for staging, they gathered in the hotel lobby “to exchange external hard drives; mostly for movies and TV shows, but e-book files would have been included.” Nadeau said e-books were very easy to get and probably the most popular way to read a book. “Generally, they were not acquired in a legal manner,” she added. Nadeau said she prefers physical books and had about a dozen of them, but she read far more e-books during her service because she was able to get them quickly. “I’m also a voracious reader, and I never would have been able to keep up if my only option were physical books.”

A Volunteer helps organize a school library in Vanuatu.

Julie Poust (South Africa 2022–24) went to her site with not one, but two library cards from library systems in Oregon. “Whenever I was anywhere with the internet, like when we were in Pretoria for training, I would download four to five e-books from the library and read them on my Kindle app on my iPad,” she said. “One delightful and hidden secret I learned is that as long as I was not connected to the internet, I could keep my book for as long as I wanted and was not limited to the three-week loan limit.”  

Despite the ease of e-book access, many Volunteers still find reading material through local communities of fellow readers, whether Peace Corps related or not. Tim Norris, an entrepreneur in Huaraz, Peru, a city about 10,000 feet high in the Andes that serves as the regional capital for a significant group of Volunteers, opened the California Cafe and quickly created a network built around books. The café has become a beloved hangout for local PCVs, not only for its delicious coffee and American-style breakfast, but also for its 1,500-volume book exchange and 250-volume nonfiction lending library.  

Norris and his Peruvian wife, Luisa, started their business in 2000, the year before Peace Corps Volunteers were invited back to Peru. (Due to political instability, the program had been suspended in 1975.) Despite the availability of the internet, online games, and e-books, Volunteers flocked to the café to play chess, join a weekly game of ultimate Frisbee, and refresh their stock of paperbacks. Norris said local guidebooks are the book exchange’s most popular offering by far, followed by titles set in Peru, such as Touching the Void, the true story of a mountain climb that goes very wrong, and the novel Death in the Andes, by Peruvian-born Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, about mysterious deaths connected to the terrorist group known as the Shining Path. 

Of course, Volunteers aren’t the only ones who recognize the value of literature, and their libraries sometimes attract attention from unexpected sources. Nyle Kardatzke (Ethiopia 1962–64) recalled the time his father shipped a huge collection of books to his Peace Corps site in Eritrea, acquired when a local public school district back home discarded them. His father constructed six plywood crates and sent them on a U.S. Navy ship “across the Atlantic, across the Mediterranean Sea, and down the Red Sea to the Ethiopian port of Massawa,” Kardatzke said. There, a Peace Corps employee picked them up and delivered them to their intended destination, the school where Kardatzke was teaching. Shortly thereafter, however, the region was invaded by rebels, and the books were packed up and taken to camps in the mountains where the rebels had started their own schools. 

While the rebels were not the intended recipients for these stores of knowledge, at least people were still learning from the books a Volunteer left behind. In fact, the portability and reusability of physical books is an advantage they have over e-books, which appear on one screen and are read by one person at a time. In that way, reading an e-book is an individual endeavor rather than a communal one, but books—knowledge, really—are meant to be shared. 

Danielle DeLaRue, who served in the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific, said that she and several of her fellow Volunteers brought e-readers or tablets preloaded with digital books to ensure they’d always have something to read. Nevertheless, she values the role physical books can play.  

A collection of women’s stories from the Polynesian region called Vā: Stories by Women of the Moana was especially important to her during her service. “I would grab the book and head to the water with my best [Tongan] friend and we would read stories to each other,” DeLaRue said. “Sometimes we laughed and sometimes we cried, and I know there was a perspective she had that I would always lack when it came to those stories.” 

Beatrice Hogan (Uzbekistan 1992–94) is on the editorial staff at The New Yorker