Statement

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen of this distinguished Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today representing the Committee for the Future of the Peace Corps. We are grateful to the Committee’s positive response to our unprecedented request to have our voices heard the — voices of the Peace Corps Family. The Committee is made up of thousands of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, former staff, concerned citizens, friends and their families from across the country and around the world who have come together to form this distinguished Committee to oppose the nomination of Gaddi Vasquez as director of the Peace Corps because he does not posses the qualifications, leadership tools or the demonstrated financial management skills to head a large federal agency. We are a non-partisan group representing the Peace Corps family.
     With me today are John Coyne, Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Ethiopia I, ’62–’64, and editor of PeaceCorpsWriters.org; Barbara Ferris, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Morocco ’80–’82, who served as the Women in Development Coordinator for the Peace Corps and most recently, as chair of the 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Peace Corps; and Hugh Pickens, Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Peru ’72–’73 and publisher of PeaceCorpsOnline.org. And behind us are just a small percentage of the thousands of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, former staff, recently evacuated Volunteers from Uzbekistan and Tajikstan and others who are part of the Committee for the Future of the Peace Corps and who share my disappointment and sadness in President Bush’s decision to nominate a clearly unqualified individual to be Director of the Peace Corps.
     The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has had, through the centuries, the responsibility of deciding weighty questions related to America’s place in the world and its relationship to its neighbors, friends and adversaries around the globe.
     Today’s discussion is no different. Whether to confirm a President’s nominee as Director of the Peace Corps is among the most important decisions this Committee can make.
     As a former Director of the Peace Corps and retired Ambassador to Colombia under President Nixon, and as someone who was fortunate enough to be at the creation of what many people believe to be one of the finest example of America’s foreign policies, I want to voice my grave concern to you about President Bush’s nominee to be the new Director of the Peace Corps, Gaddi Vasquez.
     Today, the mission of the Peace Corps is more urgent than ever, and more difficult. The new Peace Corps Director must possess a depth of knowledge about the democratic and economic transitions in the countries where Volunteers serve. The director is the key person, not only repositioning the Peace Corps to play new roles in the transitions underway in country after country, but in inspiring Volunteers and staff to the maximum effort. It is in this context that the President and this Committee need to work together in identifying and confirming the best possible leadership for the Peace Corps. This nomination is incompatible with a forward vision of the Peace Corps.
     These are the qualities — along with the stature to inspire confidence inside the U.S. and around the world — that President Bush must insist on in the person who will direct the Peace Corps in the age of terrorism. The President has chosen wisely an experienced team of leaders in the Vice President, Secretary Powell, Advisor Rice, to meet the current foreign policy challenges of our nation. Why not a demonstrated leader of equal caliber, experience, skill and intelligence for the critical role of Peace Corps Director?
     Volunteers dedicated to peaceful change are vital in any effort to improve both the appearance and substance of U.S. involvement overseas. All they need is an experienced and knowledgeable Director, someone with both the skills and experience combined with the commitment they bring to each country to promoting peace in the world.
     Peace Corps Volunteers should be on the vanguard of the rebuilding and reconstruction of Afghanistan once stability comes. More than 1,800 Americans have served as Peace Corps Volunteers in Afghanistan and who continue to live and work the third goal of Peace Corps — to bring the world back home. Every Peace Corps Volunteer and staff member who served there knows we were popular there. Let me share with you an excerpt from an article in the October 4th edition of The New Jersey Record:

Peace Corps, aid can defuse terrorism, ex-envoy say

To truly win a war against terrorism, the Bush administration should beef up the Peace Corps and launch a new version of America’s post-World War II policy that rebuilt shattered Europe and Japan.
     That’s the advice a retired Pakistani diplomat offered at a Caldwell College forum two weeks ago as he explained how stressed Third World societies can produce murderous hatred . . . . Along the same lines, he said, America is widely admired in the Third World for the work of the Peace Corps Volunteers. That agency’s assistance to people at the village and neighborhood level should be greatly expanded, he recommended.

This statement, it should be noted, is from a former Pakistani diplomat. And he is not alone. Walter Cronkite, in response to David Letterman’s question of “What can we do?” just after the September 11 attacks, answered, “Join the Peace Corps!”

I believe the Peace Corps needs a Director of stature with a demonstrated record of sound personnel and fiscal management combined with competent leadership. There are over 7,000 Peace Corps volunteers living and working in 71 countries with a budget of over $265 million dollars. The Director must bring to the agency the fiscal management experience necessary to run a large organization along with an acute understanding of global affairs.
     Unfortunately, Mr. Vasquez is not that person.

• He has no international experience. He has not had the opportunity to gain any significant international experience of noted accomplishments in either the public or the private sector. The totality of his international experience was as an election observer in Armenia. Observer is not a management or decision making role.
• He has not demonstrated financial management capabilities—he oversaw the largest bankruptcy this country has ever seen costing taxpayers of Orange County $1.7 billion. As Supervisor of Orange County, CA, he was responsible for the financial ruin of one of our country’s most affluent communities. His financial improprieties disqualify him even for consideration as a Peace Corps Volunteer—how in the world then can such a person be put in charge of this complex organization?

The Securities and Exchange Commission Report of January 24, 1994 states:

In this case, the Supervisors approved Official Statements that, among other things, failed to disclose certain materials information about Orange County’s financial condition that brought into question the County’s ability to repay its securities absent significant interest income form the County Pools. The Supervisors were aware of material information concerning Orange County’s financial condition; this information called into question the County’s ability to repay its securities. Nevertheless, the Supervisors failed to take appropriate steps to assure disclosure of these facts. In light of these circumstance, the Board members did not fulfill their obligation under the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws in authorizing the issuance of the municipal securities and related disclosure documents.

Mr. Vasquez resigned from the Orange County Board of Supervisors after a recall effort was initiated in 1995 and after Orange County filed for bankruptcy — costing local taxpayers $1.7 billion dollars and leading to the indictment of two of his colleagues.
     In addition, during his tenure on the Board of Supervisors, Mr. Vasquez voted against allowing individuals with HIV/AIDS to gain access to public housing. As Peace Corps Director, Mr. Vasquez would be in charge of one of the world’s largest international AIDS education programs.
     Mr. Chairman, we are aware that several groups have declared their support for Mr. Vasquez’ nomination, but we hold such support suspect in light of Mr. Vasquez’ record. We wonder if these backers would be so exceedingly generous with their support if Mr. Vasquez were being considered to head their organizations. We also doubt if any of these organizations or each congressional office has a budget of $265 million a year to manage?
     We recognize President Bush’s right to nominate a candidate of his choosing to head the Peace Corps and we applaud him for recognizing the need to include Hispanic Americans among his appointees. But we ask that an alternative to Mr. Vasquez be nominated for Peace Corps director and we ask that the nominee have the same stature and credentials as the President’s foreign policy team now in place.
     One week ago, President Bush called upon all Americans to come to the service of our nation. I can assure you, Senators, based on my years in international service, that all Americans are willing to serve their country. Many are eager to join the Peace Corps and serve overseas in the Peace Corps.
     Give the Peace Corps a leader with the vision of a Sargent Shriver, give them a leader with the compassion of a Loret Miller Ruppe, give them a leader with the fiscal background of a Paul Coverdell, and they will receive the direction and support to continue the good work with the same skills and talents and dedication of the over 162,000 Volunteers who have already served our country without pay, without fanfare, and without regret in over 135 countries of the world.
     Again, who has done more than Peace Corps Volunteers to promote global peace by fighting poverty, ignorance and disease? As Loret Miller Ruppe often said, “Peace isn’t the absence of war — it is the absence of the conditions that cause war — poverty, hunger and disease.”
     As a Republican who has served his Party and his County equally, it pains me to no end to sit here before you today in opposition to a fellow Republican nominated by a Republican President.
     This is neither the place nor the time for on-the-job training in exchange for a $100,000 political party contribution. This is the time for a director of the Peace Corps to bring significant international and fiscal management experience and who can rally the good will and desire of a new generation of young people, and others, including, men and women like myself who are willing to do something for their country.
     In the aftermath of September 11, everything in American life has changed. What has not altered is the basic mission of the Peace Corps, but the Peace Corps will have a forward vision. For 40 years, 162,000 Peace Corps Volunteers have given 300,000 years of service and used their skills and training in over 135 countries speaking 330 languages to promote development and seek understanding in the world. Then they “bring the world back home”to teach Americans what it means to cross cultures in the name of peace.
     From deep personal experience as the second director of the Peace Corps, I can promise you, the Senate, and the president that if he were to say to this so-called Nine-Eleven Generation, “America needs 20,000 young people to join the Peace Corps today, with 500 going to Afghanistan after rigorous selection and training,” that the White House Mail Room could not handle the volume of mail it would receive.
     It must be hard being young today. The Peace Corps, and, more importantly, Peace Corps Volunteers proudly serving our country overseas, deserve a director worthy of a their commitment to “Toughest Job you Will ever Love!”
     FINALLY, again, I urge you to vote against Mr. Vasquez for director of the Peace Corps based on his lack of demonstrated financial management ability, his lack of foreign policy involvement, and his lack of large-agency management experience.
     We, The Committee for the Future of the Peace Corps, again thank you for the unprecedented opportunity to testify here today. We want to assure you that we will continue to mobilize thousands of people in the Peace Corps family who are concerned about the future of this agency. We will work cooperatively and in the volunteer spirit with whoever is finally confirmed as agency director. But Peace Corps Volunteers — and America as a whole — deserve a skilled and experienced director of equal caliber to the President’s foreign policy team than Gaddi Vasquez in this time of international crisis, economic challenge, and global opportunity. Thank you.

Statement

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I thank you for the opportunity to be here today to congratulate Jody Olsen as the Deputy Director and to testify in opposition of Gaddi Vasquez as the nominee for Peace Corps director on behalf of nearly 15,000 people who have joined me on The Committee for the Future of the Peace Corps.
     I am a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Morocco; I served as the Women in Development Coordinator for the Peace Corps for five years and I chaired the 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Peace Corps — where our nation recognized the contributions of 162,000 Volunteers, who gave 300,000 years of service in 130 nations, speaking 330 languages. As a result of my Peace Corps experience, I established the International Women’s Democracy Center (www.iwdc.org), an international non-governmental organization which trains women leaders outside the United States how to run for elected office, how to lobby their legislators, and how to advocate for issues central to their communities. For the past 20 years, I have worked on a wide range of public and international policy and economic development programs to empower women in over 100 countries.
     President Bush has surrounded himself with a skilled, experienced foreign policy team in Vice President Cheney, Secretary Powell, NSA Rice, Secretary Rumsfeld, Administrator Natsios and many others. We are deeply disappointed and saddened that The Peace Corps, which is our nation’s best and most respected goodwill ambassador for forty years, was not given this same skilled and experienced consideration for leadership. In a time when the United States is challenged as never before, the Peace Corps needs a leader of stature with a significant record of achievement, a demonstrated track record in financial management and an unblemished record of public service. This nominee possesses none of those qualities.
     The Peace Corps will be on the vanguard of reconstruction and rebuilding in Afghanistan once the country stabilizes. As we know, the Peace Corps has the capacity to place a Volunteer on the ground within six months of a request from country. Of the more than 1,800 Returned Peace Corps Volunteers who have served in Afghanistan, only one who directs the Afghan American Center in Omaha has been called upon by our government during this time of international crisis. More importantly, the “Friends of Afghanistan,” a group of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers who have served that country and their friends, have supported a wide range of small scale projects for the past 10 years in the country they called home for two years.
     Unlike any other federal agency of the government, the Peace Corps has enjoyed 40 consecutive years of bi-partisan support from Congress. No other federal agency can claim a “family” as diverse, as opinionated nor as committed to the 3 goals of the Peace Corps helping people help themselves; having people from other cultures get to know Americans; and bringing the world back home. The Peace Corps has 7,200 Volunteers in 71 nations with 450 staff and an annual budget of $265 million — the agency must have skilled leadership to navigate its journey in our changed world.
     In six weeks, nearly 15,000 of us mobilized across the country and around the world through faxes, emails and phone calls to raise our voices in opposition — it’s not personal — it’s just that the world as we knew it has changed since September 11 and Peace Corps needs an experienced leader with the depth of knowledge of our intricate relationships with 71 other nations and the demonstrated financial management skills to make split-second decisions which will impact many lives — not one who has to spend a year doing on the job training. In this hearing room are not high paid lobbyists, but a diverse group of Americans including those recently evacuated from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan whose experiences around the world have transformed us, but more importantly, have made us acutely aware of what it takes to truly lead the Peace Corps.
     The opposition to Gaddi Vasquez is based on his lack of demonstrated financial management skills and his lack of significant international experience combined with the January 24, 1994 Securities and Exchange Commission Report of the Investigation into the Matter of the County of Orange, California as it relates to the conduct of the Members of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, which states,

Public entities that issue securities are primarily liable for the content of their disclosure documents and are subject to the proscriptions under the federal securities laws against false and misleading information in their disclosure documents. In addition to the governmental entity issuing municipal securities, public officials of the issuer who have ultimate authority to approve the issuance of securities and related disclosure document have responsibilities under the federal securities laws as well. In authorizing the issuance of securities and related disclosure documents, a public official may not authorize disclosure that the official knows to be false; nor may a public official authorize disclosure while recklessly disregarding facts that indicate that there is a risk that he disclosure may be misleading. When, for example, a public official has knowledge of facts bringing into question the issuer’s ability to repay the securities, it is reckless for that official to approve disclosure to investors without taking steps appropriate under the circumstances to prevent the dissemination of materially false or misleading information regarding those facts. In this matter, such steps could have included becoming familiar with the disclosure documents and questioning the issuer’s officials, employees or other agents about the disclosure of those facts.

The Supervisors approved official statements that failed to disclose certain material information about Orange County’s financial condition that brought into question the County’s ability to repay its securities absent significant interest income from the County Pools. The Supervisors were aware of material information concerning Orange County’s financial condition; this information called into question the County’s ability to repay its securities. Nevertheless, the Supervisory failed to take appropriate steps to assure disclosure of these facts. In light of these circumstances, the board members did not fulfill their obligation under the anti-fraud provisions of the federal securities laws in authorizing the issuance of the municipal securities and related disclosure documents.

Mr. Vasquez resigned from the Orange County Board of Supervisors after Orange County filed for bankruptcy costing taxpayers $1.7 billion dollars and a recall effort was initiated which led to the indictment of two of Vasquez’s colleagues.
     In addition, in 1989 during his tenure, Gaddi Vasquez voted with the majority of a bitterly divided Board against a measure that would have barred discrimination against people with AIDS in employment, education and housing. In January 1992, a broader measure was brought before the Board that would bar discrimination business, employment, education and housing against those infected with HIV and AIDS sufferers or those perceived to be infected. Explaining his unchanged position, Vasquez was quoted in the LA Times as saying, “There are already laws on the federal books and nothing’s changed as far as I’m concerned.” As you know, thousands of Peace Corps Volunteers going to Africa are now trained in HIV/AIDS education and prevention.
     Our nation is built on Rule of Law and it is the essence of a functioning democracy. Our government puts millions of dollars into programs in emerging democracies around the world to help people build their civil society and each and every one of us in this room know that the concept of Rule of Law is the foundation of a flourishing democracy. In my work around the world with IWDC, as I help women leaders build their own democracies, the concept of Rule of Law presents an enormous challenge to building civil society as many people are used to solving problems with violence. In our unprecedented request to testify here today in opposition of Gaddi Vasquez for director of the Peace Corps, we have exercised the basic freedoms that ensure we continue to flourish as a democracy that many around the world strive for. Vasquez failed to do his job as required by the law and he failed to disclose information as required by federal antitrust law. I believe that we must give serious consideration to the Rule of Law and the example we would give to leaders of emerging democracies with a leader who has failed to abide by the law.
     Finally, this past Sunday, one of our baseball heroes, Mark McGuire announced that he would not sign the $30 million dollar contract because he does not have the skills necessary to support his organization or his fans. This move has been hailed as one of extraordinary leadership. It is our hope that Gaddi Vasquez will demonstrate similar leadership and step aside as nominee for director of the Peace Corps.
     On behalf of The Committee for the Future of the Peace Corps, I want to thank the committee for the opportunity to have our voices heard today.

Letter

November 14, 2001

Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Statement

Presented by Hugh Pickens, Publisher, Peace Corps Online
November 14, 2001

Thank you Mr. Chairman for the opportunity to be here today to state my opposition to Gaddi Vasquez for the position of Peace Corps Director.
     My name is Hugh Pickens and I am the Publisher of Peace Corps Online, an online News Forum and monthly email newletter that serves over 7,000 Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. Peace Corps Online opposes the confirmation of Gaddi Vasquez as the next Director of the United States Peace Corps.
     It is the President’s prerogative to appoint whom he wants to head the Peace Corps. This is a prerogative that is normally respected by the U.S. Senate in its role to advise and consent. But we believe that the nomination of Gaddi Vasquez is too divisive, too partisan, too ill-advised, and too egregious a failure to understand the nature of the Peace Corps to let it stand without speaking out.
     Before we elaborate on the reasons that we oppose Gaddi Vasquez, let’s get two things out of the way: Politics and Ethnicity.

A Writer Writes

Very simple: let the sky draw itself closed,
taking with it the hills, the fence post, the object
of desire. Write our names in ash on the hearth
and the fire will burn all night. I too have spent time
alone, rubbing the shine from stars and raking
the beach until a single shell is left, bone white
and dropped like a wish. There is no moon tonight and the shore
is mostly memory, an understatement of waves and tree,
black rocks in spindrift armor, where a kelp-stranded crab trap
shares the reef with herons, a gull, and the skin from last
night’s cod.

We’ve both lost seasons to solitude, our memories yellowed
like settlers in an old photo, hands crossed, faces just as stern
and mouths so full of loathing. They’re gone now, like summer
wings and water signs, or places safe from healing. I’ve grouped
everything in threes and traced the ground beneath me with
ancient sand and order: a silent forest of reasons,
trunk upon trunk. Finally, the skies find a new idea for
weather: cold, wet fog in the morning and trees no more than
bones.

On Cascade Lake two teals take flight to mark my passing,
females, wood-hued like the man I met from Pakistan
who’d lost his wife and told me: One day I will be brilliant.
I’m studying to know your father. He made no sense
but led me to believe him with nods and assurance,
a gaze made sad by the yearn of his twice-forgotten eyes.

It’s true: the world remembers winter
the same way darkness comes for my eyes
on nights I fight to sleep, a winding cloth of cotton
flecked with the silver fire I cling to
like the windborne spray of shattered waves,
so brief, so futile, so soon to be blamed for failing.

“Finally” won the 2001 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize awarded by Wind Magazine.
     Thor Hanson is a writer and naturalist from the Pacific Northwest. After the Peace Corps he lived and studied in Kenya and Tanzania. Hanson’ s articles on travel and natural history appear regularly in periodicals and newspapers, and his poems have been featured in Dog River Review.
     Hanson is the author of The Impenetrable Forests, a memoir of his work with Uganda’s endangered mountain gorillas, and he contributed to the forthcoming Wilderness Comes Home: Rewilding the Northeast. Hanson studied ecology and writing at the University of Redlands and received his Masters degree from the University of Vermont’s Field Naturalist Program.     

Talking with . . .

An interview by John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962–64)

ONE OF THE PEOPLE to whom the news media and Congress have turned since September 11, 2001, is Tom Gouttierre (Afghanistan 1965–67). Gouttierre is director of the nation’s unique Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Nebraska.
     For 37 years he has lived, worked, and studied Afghanistan — as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kabul, as a Fulbright Fellow, and then as Executive Director of the Fulbright Foundation in Afghanistan. Gouttierre has made presentations on aspects of the war in Afghanistan, on US-Pakistani Relations, on International Terrorism, and on Human Rights in hearings before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations. He has been invited to present his views on Afghanistan and human rights issues in hearings before committees of the British Parliament, the French National Assembly, the Norwegian Storting, and the UN Select Committee on Human Rights. Since 1986, Gouttierre has served as the American specialist on Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and South Asia at the meetings of the US - Russian (formerly Soviet) Task Force (the Dartmouth Conference) on Regional Conflicts.
     Gouttierre speaks, reads and writes Afghan Persian (Dari), Iranian Persian (Farsi), and Tajiki Persian (Tajiki), and has published numerous articles about Afghanistan society, culture, and politics. He is the co-author of a two-volume language textbook (Dari for Foreigners); original Dari poetry, and had translated Persian poetry. Today he serves as the Dean of International Studies and Programs at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and as the Director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
     We spoke to Tom recently by phone about his Peace Corps experience, Osama bin Laden, and Afghanistan today.

Did you go into the Peace Corps from directly from college?

Yes. I was raised in Maumee, Ohio, and worked in my Dad’s pastry shop. I got my Master Baking Certificate when I was 18, but I had never been anyway from Maumee until I went to Bowling Green State University. The college was 13 miles from Maumee and I never saw it before starting school. The first plane I flew on was when I went to Peace Corps training.

Where were you at a PCV in Afghanistan and what was your job?

My wife, Mary, and I taught in Kabul. I taught English in a secondary school and also coached basketball. I was, in fact, the first male to be approved to coach girls. I also established the first high school girls’ league. We had four teams. And I coached the boys as well.
     In the ten years that I lived in Kabul, I also coached the Afghan National Basketball Team. This was during the time I was director of the Fulbright Foundation in Afghanistan.

From your experiences in the region, where do you think the U.S. went wrong with Afghanistan? How did we get to where we are today?

After the cold war, the U.S. dropped Afghanistan. We were no longer involved in the events of the country. We could have led the Afghan people to reconstruct their social structure, social fabric, infrastructure, and economy. It was a country that needed a Marshall Plan of reconstruction, because it looked very much like the financial district in New York City today, or Berlin after World War II. It had lost millions of people, and almost all of its trained talent.

What about the region? Where have we gone wrong there?

We have not had a good long-term policy relating to Central Asia, South Asia, and Afghanistan. Our government didn’t understand how to effectively work with the competing Afghan resistance parties after the Russians left. The last time we had a real policy concerning Afghanistan was under former Secretary of State George Schultz. James Baker did not have one, nor did Warren Christopher, nor did Madeleine Albright. I was waiting to see if Colin Powell would have one, but all that’s been pre-empted. Now we have a policy, but it’s been forced upon us by war.

What did the Afghans want?

A lot of them would have been happy to see the removal of the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and the Pakistanis from their country. The Taliban does not represent the average Afghan. If we have to go into Afghanistan, we need to remember that there are many there who would like to cooperate with us, with whom we could work in the future, so that we could help preclude a repetition of these circumstances.

How do we do that?

The key is an aggregate working with the UN and by working directly with the Afghans. Working towards reconstruction. If we don’t, we’ll face the same problems there, as well as, in Pakistan.
     We need more people-to-people involvement. We need more of the kind of work done by Peace Corps Volunteers and Fulbright scholars. You listen to the media and everyone is asking, why do they hate us? Well, they hate us because 30 years ago we stopped communicating with them. We pulled out of their lives and their country.

Do you think that former PCVs from Afghanistan have anything to
Contribute to understanding the country?


Of course. The Third Goal. No one in this country understands the positive aspects of the Afghan culture. Afghanistan is a beautiful country with a rich culture, but you don’t see that today. Former Volunteers can put a face on the Afghans.

What was Afghanistan like when you were living there as a PCV?

It was a very different country. Women were not wearing a veil. There were actually more women in college than men. There were women in the government, women as cabinet ministers. Women were equal. Also it was a time when everyone went to movies, went out dancing. There was no religious or gender concentration. Afghanistan was a joyful place.

Have you ever seen bin Laden?

No, but I saw his compound in Kandahar, and I once saw his motorcade. I have maps in my office of his training camps in Afghanistan.

When was it that you saw his motorcade?

I spent several months studying him for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in 1996 and ’97. At the time I used my sources to confirm for then-U.N. Secretary General Boutros Bourtros-Ghali that bin Laden had indeed returned to Afghanistan after leaving Sudan.

Could the Taliban throw bin Laden out of Afghanistan?

No, it’s more likely that he could throw them out. The Taliban have become a junior partner in the strategic plans of Osama bin Laden and the Pakistani extremists.

How have the wars with the Russians and today touched you?


Well, I no longer have the houses I lived in when I was in the Peace Corps and with Fulbright. They are all rubble. I have also lost so many good Afghan friends, in the war and because they have become refugees.


What do you try to achieve with your International Studies Program at Omaha?

We started here in Omaha in 1973 and today we have 160 students majoring in international studies. We have over a thousand international students studying here, and about 500 of our students studying overseas. The International Studies Program has an undergraduate degree in international business and commerce, secondary school teaching or government service. We have 160 majoring in international studies at the college.

What do you tell your students to do when they graduate?


I tell them to join the Peace Corps. I tell them to apply for a Fulbright. I tell them to go out into the world. It is what I did and it has made all the difference in my life. Remember, I started as a baker in Maumee, Ohio, and if I could leave home, anyone can. The Peace Corps was my ticket to a wonderful and eventful life.

Literary Type

November 2001

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler (China 1996–98) has just been awarded the 2001 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize in the nonfiction category. The announcement was made on Saturday, October 20, at the 14th annual Vancouver International Writers Festival. Hessler will share the $30,000 prize with fiction winner, Patricia Grace of New Zealand.

• Among the thousands and thousands of prose pieces written about the September 11 attack is a thoughtful piece by George Packer (Togo 1982–83) that appeared in The New York Times Magazine published September 30. The piece entitled, “Recapturing The Flag” is on how a generation of liberal skeptics now know the deep emotions of patriotism. Writes Packer — author most recently of Blood of the Liberals — “My political views haven’t changed since Sept. 11. Even as the sight of other people’s flags stirred me, I did not go out and buy my own. Some part of me still shrinks from the display of patriotism, as if it would violate the emotions itself. I don’t desire war — but I know that patriotic feeling makes individuals exceed themselves as the bland comforts of peace cannot.”

• William McCauley (Sierra Leone 1985–87) has won this year’s William Peden Prize in Fiction, given by The Missouri Review. McCauley won the award for his story “Mister Henry’s Trousers,” which appeared in the popular Knopf Files issue of The Missouri Review. McCauley’s stories have also appeared in Confrontation and Geraldine Kennedy’s anthology From the Center of the Earth. His novel, The Turning Over, was published by The Permanent Press in 1998.
       The William Peden Prize in Fiction is named for a founding editor of The Missouri Review, the literary magazine of the University of Missouri–Columbia. The annual prize awards $1000 cash to the best work of fiction published in the previous volume year of the magazine. Selected by an outside judge of national reputation, the winner is invited to travel to Columbia, Missouri, to meet with the editors of the magazine and attend a reception in his or her honor. This year’s judge was Alice McDermott.

• The Kennedy Men 1901-1963 by Laurence Leamer (Nepal 1965–67) appeared on The New York Times extended bestseller as #31, three days after publication. The book has also been receiving wonderful reviews. Reviewer Joe Sciacca in The Boston Herald on Sunday, October 21 summed it up best by writing, “With all that’s been written about the Kennedys, it’s hard to imagine that you could fill a book with what we don’t know about America’s most remarkable political family. But Laurence Leamer has done it with his new work, The Kennedy Men: 1901–1963.” Sciacca goes onto say, “The Kennedy Men is a fine work of research — and an absorbing read as well.”

• Charles Michener (Ethiopia 1962–64) senior editor of The New Yorker has a long piece in the November 12 issue on soprano Renee Fleming who sang recently at Ground Zero for the memorial service for families of victims of the World Trade Center. Fleming is the biggest-selling soprano in the world today, and among female singers her record sales are eclipsed only by those of the mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli.

• Since September 11, getting on a plane or a train seems a lot more complicated. Travel & Leisure Magazine, in their December issue, asked a series of writers about traveling now. One of the writers was Peter Hessler  (China 1996–98) who wrote about flying recently from Beijing to Wenzhou, in the south of China, and then back to Beijing. Hessler also reflected on travel he did in post-Communist countries in 1993 and how he is still traveling the world.
       Peter has an article at the Travel & Leisure website dated 9/1/01 entitled “Chongqing, China: City of the Future.”

Recent Books by Peace Corps writers — November 2001

Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters,  and Social Change in Nepal
by Laura M. Ahearn (Nepal 1982–86)
University of Michigan Press, $24.95
280 pages
November 2001

The Bronze King (The Sorcery Hall Trilogy, Book 1)
(reissue— young adult )
by Suzy McKee Charnas (Nigeria 1961–63)
Wildside Press, $15.95
196 pages
October, 2001


The Golden Thread (The Sorcery Hall Trilogy, Book 3)
(reissue— young adult )
by Suzy McKee Charnas (Nigeria 1961–63)
Wildside Press, $15.96
209 pages
October, 2001

Music of the Night
(fantasy, horror and science fiction short story collection)
by Suzy McKee Charnas (Nigeria 1961–63)
ElectricStory.com, $5.99
108 pages
2001

The Silver Glove (The Sorcery Hall Trilogy, Book 2)
(reissue— young adult )
by Suzy McKee Charnas (Nigeria 1961–63)
Wildside Press, $14.95
162 pages
October, 2001

Strange Seas
(ebook )
by Suzy McKee Charnas (Nigeria 1961–63)
Hidden-Knowledge.com, $8.95
162 pages
October, 2001

The Vampire Tapestry
(reissue as ebook)
by Suzy McKee Charnas (Nigeria 1961–63)
ElectricStory.com, $7.99
108 pages
2001

Richard and Sabina
by Jack Cole (PC staff: Afghanistan 1968–70, Swaziland 1970–1971, India 1971–73)
Xlibris Corporation, $21.99
288 pages
April, 2001

Kinky Friedman's Guide to Texas Etiquette:
     Or How to Get to Heaven or Hell
     Without Going Through Dallas-Fort Worth
by Kinky Friedman
Cliff Street Books; $22.95
224 pages
October 2001

Families As We Are:
     Conversations from around the World
by Perdita Huston (Staff: PC/W 1978–81, CD/Mali 1997–99, CD/Bulgaria 1999–2000) with a foreword by Richard C. Holbrooke (Staff: CD/Morocco 1970–72)
Feminist Press,
320 pages
June 2001

Now Let Me Tell You What I Really Think:
     Playing Hardball with Chris Matthews
by Christopher Matthews (Swaziland 1968–70)
Free Press, $25.00
256 pages
October, 2001

Tales from the Jungle . . . A Gringa in Nicaragua
by Rachael Tyng McClennen (Nicaragua 1996–98)
Self-published with Amigos de las Americas (Seattle), $15.00
35 pages
May, 2001

Life in Hong Kong
(The Way People Live series)
by Tony Zurlo (Nigeria 1964–66)
Lucent Books, $27.45
November, 2001

Review

A Stained Dawn
Poems About Africa

by Christopher Conlon (Botswana 1988–90)
Mango Biscuit Press
     605 Thayer Avenue
     Silver Spring, Maryland 20910
$5.00
32 pages
August 2001

Reviewed by Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978–79)

“We must take the feeling of being at home into exile,” wrote Simone Weil. “We must be rooted in the absence of a place.” These lines have stuck with me for over twenty years now partly, I think, because they get to the heart of what it means to be a Peace Corps Volunteer living as a representative American in a foreign place. Like Weil, PCVs understand that the comfortable (read Americans) need to be afflicted in order to see. Again like Weil, by uprooting themselves, PCVs seek a greater reality, albeit not necessarily the spiritual reality Weil sought.
     I’m convinced that unlike perhaps most of us, Christopher Conlon took the feeling of being at home into exile long before he hit country (in his case, Botswana in 1988).

When I was thirteen
my father lived
in distant cities
and his face was a telephone 
. . . 
My mother drank
until her eyes
were those of a doll
and bowls
slipped through her fingers,”

he writes in “African Child, American Child, Poem in Two Voices.” To his credit, Conlon steers away from the confessional road it might have been convenient to take with such material. In A Stained Dawn: Poems About Africa, the darknesses of America and the darknesses of Africa are like tectonic plates. When they collide, as they do in Conlon’s best work, we get something truly earthshaking.
     “Morning” and “Night” (which open and close the collection) barely appear on my Richter scale. These poems make mythic and chronological sense, but don’t carry a lot of psychic weight. They are impressionistic pieces — a little soft because they’re overly poeticized. These lines from “Morning” are representative:

This is African girls in blankets
lighting cooking fires down the hill:
this is birds bluer than any sky
trying softly twittered notes
in the naked trees.

A few other landscape poems (for example, “Kalahari” and “Noon”) pack more of an Imagist punch. Still, I don’t hear Conlon’s voice speaking incontrovertibly in these short poems.
     I do hear it in “Johannesburg: A Call Girl.” This poem is amazing. “Even at two hundred rand, it’s a tawdry thing,” it begins and continues, in the long deceptively prosy lines I tend to associate with C.K. Williams, until tawdriness is the furthest thing from the reader’s mind. Are the sex partners “jam-filching children,” or are they “two imminent criminals”? Both possibilities exist in every line. The sex doesn’t get too far. “Joanne” commingles instead with the “amazingly integrated city” outside their designation, with its

green-fatigued soldiers
who, every few blocks, study passing faces, guns hanging from their arms like cigarettes
from their lips.

A screaming police car signifies climax. When dawn arrives, it is as a “frightened girl” not unlike “Joanne.”
     “For Wilfred Owen” is another favorite. Its comparison between the “unreal savagery” of an African thunderstorm and that of World War I is riveting. Other poems high on my Richter scale include “Soweto,” “Justin in a Garden of Flowers” and “A Poem I Didn’t Write.” Unlike the tourists on the bus into Soweto, these poems do not snap easy pictures of poverty and racism and cluck their tongues. Rather, they burden us with the responsibility of the struggle to understand the other. In “Pig-Chasing by Starlight,” yet another favorite, even the lizards participate:

Stonelike Kalahari lizards
study all this closely,
wondering perhaps
what new strangeness
the white people have brought now.

     The reality is that the World Trade Center disaster has changed the way we live in the United States. We are now more nervous than ever about the strangers in our midst. It is thus increasingly imperative that we listen to voices such as Conlon’s that urge us not to come to any easy conclusions about those who are not “like us.” There are bridges to cross between the self and the other, and A Stained Dawn helps us to find them.

Ann Neelon recently won fellowships from both the Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her work will appear in Bearing Witness: Poetry by Teachers About Teaching, to be released this month. She is the author of Easter Vigil, winner of the Anhinga Poetry Prize.

Review

Families As We Are:
Conversations from around the World

by Perdita Huston (Staff: PC/W 1978–81, CD/Mali 1997–99, CD/Bulgaria 1999–2000)
with a foreword by Richard C. Holbrooke (Staff: CD/Morocco 1970–72)
Feminist Press,
320 pages
June 2001

Reviewed by Sharon Dirlam (Russian Far East 1996–98)

PERDITA HUSTON LISTENED to fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, children and grandchildren. She learned about their hopes and frustrations, sometimes about their overwhelming despair, other times about their love for each other and their plans for a better future.
     She interviewed scores of families — people from different generations and different countries and different world views — and documented their comments. In this important book, we too can listen to these ordinary people, who so seldom have our attention, and we can learn from them.
     Huston writes that when she first considered writing Families As We Are, a book on contemporary families, people said, “Oh, don’t do that! The family is too controversial.” And that, she concludes, “is just the point.” While families struggle to cope with the rapidly changing world, politicians “condemn the transformations underway . . . . They cast the beleaguered family as villain for all that ails contemporary society.”
     It is hoped that her book will give them pause, that at least some might see the need to support families of all kinds through these troubled times.
     Huston explains how she found the people she chose to interview. She selected countries that she thought would reflect the major global trends of modern life — economic transformation, urbanization, the migration of workers, and environmental stresses. She chose the United States, Japan, Thailand, Bangladesh, China, Mali, Uganda, Egypt, Jordan, Brazil and El Salvador. Then she asked sociologists and activists in each country to introduce her to families coping with these trends.
     She usually spoke with three generations, enabling her to find commonality across cultures. Her subjects included farmers and office workers, impoverished and affluent people, multigenerational and nuclear families, close-knit families and families separated by distance or by education. She also found people who created families from a common bond — prostitutes struggling to raise their children, and families consisting of street children who help each other stay alive.
     Huston and an interpreter interviewed each family member alone, so each one would feel free to speak openly. The hundreds of hours of conversations were recorded and transcribed, and the result is a fascinating and detailed record of each individual’s perception of family life.
     Interspersed with the interviews is a remarkable spectrum of statistics. A sampling: In the past century, the average life span in the world has increased almost 30 years; there are 13 million AIDS orphans in the world; 25 percent of the world’s families are headed by women.
     Huston recognizes the family as a constant force, although it takes a variety of forms.
     “Throughout history, family forms have evolved to meet the changing demands of society,” she writes. “The pace of change sets us apart from generations past. It demands immediate adjustment.”
     In the United States, Huston interviewed a family from a small farming community in Missouri, an Indian family on the Paiute Native American Reservation, and a lesbian couple with an adopted daughter.
     While some of Huston’s interviews do touch on the growing disparity between the world’s rich people and its poor people, there is no foreshadowing of the increasing intolerance of Islam fundamentalists, no anticipation of the hatred toward America that would applaud terrorist acts. Huston’s subjects were looking the other way — toward a better future for their daughters, toward increasing prosperity for all their children.
     Yet the older generations did express apprehension about the pace of change. They worried that their grandchildren no longer showed respect for their elders, felt little responsibility for their family members, and lacked a sense of commitment to their community.
     The interviews took place over a four-year period just before the turn of the 21st Century. In Uganda, Huston spoke with grandparents who were raising several grandchildren whose parents had died of AIDS. In Bangladesh, she met prostitutes who lived together and cared for each other’s children. In Thailand she recorded the stories of Cambodian refugees.
     Chapters are arranged by topics, such as “Families As We Were,” focusing on patriarchal and multigenerational families in various countries, and “Living Together, Growing Apart,” showing a trend toward smaller and nuclear families. Other chapters focus on the elderly, women’s changing roles, men’s changing roles, ways in which childhood is changing, environmental issues, health and politics, disintegrating families, and, finally, public policies.
     The inclusion of family photographs enriches the book. These priceless pictures capture the essence of their subjects, their love for each other, and their pride in being chosen.
     It appears that there was a basic list of questions, weaving a common thread through the multitude of interviews. These questions elicited comments on the changing roles of men and women, attitudes of the generations toward each other, the family’s place in the community, earning a living, and outside forces impacting the family, including disease and war and politics.
     In Families As We Are, the author is “writing down the words and thoughts of the voiceless, helping give them shape and, above all, giving them to us,” writes Richard C. Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in his foreword. Both he and the author were Peace Corps country directors.

Journalist Sharon Dirlam, a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, has written Two Years Beyond Siberia, a nonfiction narrative about her Peace Corps service that is now making the rounds of agents and publishers, and two stories published in Travelers’ Tales: A Woman’s World.

To Preserve and to Learn

Moritz Thomsen’s Living Poor

THERE IS A BIT OF A DONNYBROOK taking place in the world of book lovers these days. It seems Jonathan Franzen, on tour to promote his latest offering, The Corrections, has been expressing his dismay at being chosen as one of the Anointed Few to be invited by Oprah Winfrey to appear on her monthly book club program. Oprah heard of his hesitancy to take her oft-suckled teat and liked it not; as a result she withdrew her offer, setting the stage for a good old-fashioned brawl between “elitist” authors like Franzen and “popular” authors like those championed by Winfrey.
     This sort of flareup is not exactly new, but Salon’s Laura Miller saw this latest battle as her chance to make some pointed observations on this long-standing feud. In her article of October 26, “Book Lovers’ Quarrel,” Miller absolutely nails “the deeply unattractive tendency for book people to act like stingy trolls sitting atop a mound of treasure they don’t want to share. If they did, it would be a lot harder to use their reading habits as a way of feeling better than other people.”
     That’s quite a statement to lob into the fray, made all the more stinging by the fact that it’s true. Perched squarely atop my own precious pile of treasured authors is a man named Moritz Thomsen. While I may offer in my own defense a long-held desire to write about him, possibly something along the lines of a full biography, I must confess a certain troll-like satisfaction that nobody I mention him to has ever heard of him. It’s a trite phrase, I admit, but Moritz Thomsen could well be the finest American writer you’ve never heard of.
     Thomsen wrote four books in his lifetime: Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle, The Farm on the River of Emeralds, The Saddest Pleasure, and My Two Wars (a fifth manuscript, Bad News from a Black Coast, is still being shuffled about by hesitant publishing companies). His life came to a painful end on August 28, 1991, in his apartment in Guayaquil, Ecuador. He was 75 years old, suffering from advanced emphysema brought on by years of chain-smoking, combined with cholera, a scourge of third-world countries; his body broken as well from a lifetime of toil as a farmer and Peace Corps Volunteer. He joined the Peace Corps at the age of 48, spent about four years as a Volunteer in Ecuador, and just never left. That’s about as much biographical information you would need to introduce excerpts of his work or even to put on dust jackets, since Thomsen’s four books are all memoirs; they contain everything he cared to say about his extraordinary (my word, not his) life.
     Thomsen’s choice of memoir as his genre may partly explain his “little-known” status. When writing a memoir, it’s easy to slip into writing an autobiography, and from there into outright self-aggrandizement or self-pity, and Thomsen has been accused of both by his detractors. Tim Cahill, for one, wrote a mostly positive review of The Saddest Pleasure for the New York Times Book Review, but expressed “. . . an urge to grab Mr. Thomsen, to shake some sense into him” for what he saw as Thomsen feeling sorry for himself. But Thomsen avoids these pitfalls as long as readers see that he is writing down stories of his impressions and the stories of others’ lives, with Thomsen taking center stage only when the time has come for a good dose of self-deprecation. If he needs to point out the foibles and eccentricities of humans, he has at his disposal his favorite target for scorn — himself.
      Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle, published by University of Washington Press originally in 1969, was Thomsen’s first book, and is considered to be one of the best accounts of the Peace Corps experience to this day. You find no easy answers to the problem of poverty in this or any of Thomsen’s works; what you do find is his unparalleled ability to observe what goes on around him, even as he becomes more and more a central figure in the mad yet beautiful, heroic, often tragic cast of characters in the coastal Ecuadorian village of Rioverde (Green River).
    Thomsen writes sparingly of his motivation for joining the Peace Corps in 1965. That comes later, when we are introduced to Charlie Thomsen, Moritz’s father, a man who comes off ultimately as a monster and a source of endless torment and self-loathing, brought horribly to life in My Two Wars. He is mentioned only once in passing in Living Poor; we will get to know him better soon enough. For now, Thomsen speeds the narrative along through his initial Peace Corps training in Bozeman, Montana, and mustering out to Ecuador, where the first problem is where to send him.
     His first trip into the country gives us a glimpse of one of Thomsen’s lifelong grievances: rather than being dazzled by the stupendous terrain of the Ecadorian interior, his gaze is riveted on people below the lowest rung of the social ladder: “Superimposed like a black shroud over this mountain area of natural splendor is the situation of the Indians who, since the time of the [Spanish] conquest, have been robbed, murdered, and exploited; now, centuries later, their situation is basically unchanged . . . . Since in the past all change has been for the worse, they resist all change now.” A burning rage toward the state of two-thirds of the world’s population permeates Thomsen’s work, a rage he was never able to tuck away safely for any period of time.
     His initial stint cut short by a life-threatening lung infection, Thomsen re-enlists in the Peace Corps and this time finds himself in Rioverde, a small fishing village on the Ecuadorian coast, and the drama unfolds in earnest. Here he meets people who will shape his narrative not just in Living Poor, but in his other books as well: Alexandro Martinez, his neighbor and “guide” in his first weeks in Rioverde; Bill Swanson, an old gringo expatriate who never tired of bending Thomsen’s ear with tales of how “a month after you’re gone, nobody will ever know you were here”; Alvaro, the local storekeeper turned bitter enemy when Thomsen’s efforts to establish a cooperative threaten his monopoly and power; Wai, the town hero and best boy, with his perpetually pregnant wife, scrabbling hungry horde of kids, and frightening widowed mother; various minor characters like Wilson, Jorge, Pancho, Ricardo, Ernesto, Clever, and others.
     Here we meet Ramon Prado, a poor young zambo or beach bum who is to figure prominently in the course of Thomsen’s life and therefore his books, in ways neither could ever have known when. Ramon comes forward as the first Rioverde resident to face up to his fears of great change and ask for help; Thomsen sets him up with half a dozen chickens and Ramon’s life is never the same. Immediately Ramon and Alexandro are seen as Thomsen’s favorites, set apart from the people of the town.
     In Living Poor, Thomsen first displays his gift for understanding what it is like to live in absolute, crushing poverty, poor in a way no American will ever know:

Craziest and most interesting is the problem of incentive. Many of the people of Rioverde, for instance…didn’t want anything. To talk to a man about tripling his income was to fill him with confusion; he got nervous; he started to laugh; he wanted to go get drunk. The poor man from the moment of birth was so inundated with problems, so deprived, that to end up wanting things was a sort of insanity. What he wanted was to stay alive another day to tell jokes and visit with his friends in the sweet night air . . . he wanted ten sucres from time to time so that he could drink and dance and feel cleansed of life.

     Another telling paragraph:

Living poor is like being sentenced to exist in a stormy sea in a battered canoe, requiring all your strength simply to keep afloat; there is never any question of reaching a destination. True poverty is a state of perpetual crisis, and one wave just a little bigger or coming from an unexpected direction can and usually does wreck things. Some benevolent ignorance denies a poor man the ability to see the squalid sequence of his life, except very rarely; he view is rather as a disconnected string of unfortunate sadnesses. Never having paddled on a calm sea, he is unable to imagine one. I think if he could connect the chronic hunger, the sickness, the death of his children, the almost unrelieved physical and emotional tension into the pattern that his life inevitably takes he would kill himself.

     The story in Living Poor unfolds essentially as described above, with one hopelessly complicated situation following the other, and would be depressing as well were it not for Thomsen’s ability to capture the sublime and ridiculous, often in hilarious fashion. Like most Peace Corps Volunteers then and since, he stumbled into Rioverde with the noblest of intentions and soon found himself on the receiving end of astonished, uncomprehending stares; his ideas and plans and offers of assistance were seen as sheer madness, rebuffed time and again with “the people aren’t accustomed to doing it that way.” His ventures in raising chickens, breeding pigs, planting coconut trees, and ultimately organizing the town into a cooperative are an unending roller-coaster of backbreaking labor, precarious success, and horrible defeat.
     Just as the reader begins to think Thomsen has managed to become a part of Rioverde society he points out the gulf that always existed, even after years of living and working in the town. He constantly struggles to find enough to eat, paying exorbitant prices for what few eggs, cans of tuna fish, sacks of rice, and bottles of beer he can scrounge. Still he has to travel to Guayaquil every month or so to gorge himself on hamburgers, milkshakes, pork chops, and green vegetables. He realizes that, no matter what he tries to tell himself, he is never going to be a real part of a town where everyone subsists on rice, plantains, and the occasional pile of fish, while he can just pack up and go to town and stuff his face with protein. How can he consider the prices he pays to be outrageous when the money he pays is all that separates entire families from physical or financial ruin, and the eggs on his plate are desperately needed by protein-starved children?
     Living Poor is simply too wonderfully written to put down once the reader becomes wrapped up in the horrifying, hilarious, heartbreaking, fascinating story that unfolds around Thomsen and Ramon, as they find themselves further and further distanced from the people of Rioverde. Thomsen’s book is not exactly a groundbreaking work — Peace Corps Volunteers have written of their experiences since before and long after Thomsen’s stint — but it stands alone by virtue of Thomsen’s unique insights and writing style. Some have found his work oppressively dark, especially the books he wrote near the end of his life, but Thomsen’s cynicism is tempered by his obvious love of people, a love he fights terribly to keep in the face of betrayals and disappointments.

“Moritz Thomsen’s Living Poor” first appeared in the November 2001 issue of Smokebox (www.smokebox.net) and is published here with the permission of the author.

Opportunities for writers

• Tanya Elders (Malawi 1997–99) is creating a website that features stories about women in every country that Peace Corps serves or has served in. The website would serve as a place where women in developed countries could learn about women in developing countries, where they could experience a piece of another woman’s life and perhaps find relatedness in their lives. The website would work to create a global community for women. “We Are All Sisters” is completely nonprofit and would be built and maintained with donated efforts. Visit the site at www.allsisters.com and learn how to make submissions. Stories should be no longer than 2500 words. Deadline for submissions to be included in the site launching on March 8th, 2002 — International Women’s Day — is January 12, 2002.
• Paul Alan Fahey (Ethiopia 1968–71) is the editor of Mindprints, a literary journal for writers with disabilities that is also open to any writers with an interest in the field or with something to say about it. The first issue was published Fall, 2000 and has sold out. Issue #2 is at the printer, and Mindprints is now accepting submissions for #3. The magazine is looking for short shorts and short memoir (250–750 words), poetry to 25 lines, black and white photography, and artwork. They are also looking for flash fiction and creative non-fiction. The deadline for issue #3 is April 1, 2002.
  E-mail Paul at pafahey@sbceo.org.