Peace Corps Book Club Part 2: River Town

On a Valentine's day unlike any other, I spent another ninety minutes with the CRPCA book club, this time in the welcome company of Peter Hessler. He is author of River Town, a book about the time he spent teaching English at a college in China's Sichuan Province. As I began to read Hessler's book, it's understated charm slowly began to infect me until the reading of it became a careful indulgence, something to be savored. I found myself poring over it's pages, often re-reading sentences to be sure that no edifying morsel of stark, expressive prose was left unexamined.

Perhaps what stands out to me most about Hessler's stories in River Town is the compassion with which he manages to capture the people and events of his time overseas despite countless baffling, often humorous examples of what makes the Chinese culture so inscrutible to the American mind. What makes the book even more interesting is the fact, we learned, that it was written in just eight months during Hessler's difficult reentry period following his time in the Peace Corps.

In a delightful turn of events, my good friend Stephanie Austin turned out for the book club and we proceeded to have a Valentine's day evening, conspicuously free of flowers and lovers' sighs.

Development Salon

Yesterday was the date of CRPCA's monthly happy-hour get-together. This month it was timed to correspond with an informal gathering organized by Global Sistergoods. Arriving near the beginning, I had the pleasure of chatting with one of Sistergoods' founders and her husband while RPCVs slowly trickled in.

My next conversation was with an RPCV from Ukraine and another from Jamaica. The woman who served in Jamaica expressed the interesting opinion that the 60 people serving there when she went were far to large a group for such a small island. After a while, I finally saw the DR RPCV who I had arranged to meet there. She and her partner, another former DR volunteer were able give me an interesting overview of their experience and offer some advice.

Some interesting tidbits that emerged from our conversation included the fact that the mosquitoes will bite me like crazy for about the first month I'm there until my blood assumes the same character that as everyone else's. They also recommended that I bring a headlamp and that decent new clothing will be hard to come by during my time there so I should invest in some nice clothes now and avoid the hassle of trying to track some down in the future.

Peace Corps Book Club

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a book club hosted by the Columbia River Peace Corps Association (CRPCA). The month's book was Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle by Moritz Thomsen. While Moritz's grasp of prose is undeniable I think any review of his first book is incomplete without the added perspective of other returned Peace Corps volunteers (RPCV's).

As I discussed the book's (and indeed Mortiz's) strengths and weaknesses with about eight returned volunteers the consensus seemed to be that Moritz's service, while profound and largely unprecedented, by today's standards was deeply flawed. In particular everyone disapproved of the author's mingling of finances with his host community, and his blind devotion to his projects.

However, we also agreed that it was very accomplished in expressing certain undeniable realities of class interaction in the third world and, in general conditions endemic to being on outsider in a foreign culture. Passages like the following one prompted lively discussion that helped to bring to life for me the shared vision of these veteran volunteers.

I had always been aware of the jealousies in the town, but now I began to see that I had underestimated the power to order the live of the people. It began to get through to me. Ramon Arcos, drunk, buttonholed me on the street. He wanted ten sucres to get drunker and when I said "No," he said I was a bad man who helped only the rich like Ramon Prado and Alexandro. "Rich?" I cried. "They're the poorest people in town." But, of course, it wasn't true anymore. Ramon was about to get his hundredth chicken, and Alexandro was up to seventy. A year ago they had been among the poorest people; now they were about to be the richest. There was real dissatisfaction in Rio Verde about the job I was doing, and every day I heard reports of my favoritism. Rumors reached me that a couple of old wise guys who knew all about the Peace Corps were telling everyone that I was making money off the people, that the chickens I sold should be gifts, and that the loans I was making did not have to be repaid. It was part of my job to give people money, they said.

For more excerpts, check out this link:

http://clipboarding.blogspot.com/search/label/Living%20Poor