Author: Moritz Thomsen
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 9780295969282
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
At the age of 48, Moritz Thomsen sold his pig farm and joined the Peace Corps. As he tells the story, his awareness of the comic elements in the human situation--including his own--and his ability to convey it in fast-moving, earthy prose have madeLiving Poora classic. "Hilariously funny at times, grimly sad at others and elavened with perceptive insights into the ways of the people and with breathtaking descriptions of the Ecuadorian landscape."-St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Author: Earle G. Brooks
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economic assistance, American
Languages : en
Pages : 412
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Book Description
A mature young midwestern couple describe their training, experiences, and afterthoughts of two years of community development and teaching for the Peace Corps in a coastal fishing town of Ecuador.
Author: Rhoda Brooks
Publisher: Untreed Reads
ISBN: 1611873770
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
In February 1962, Earle and Rhoda Brooks, a young sales engineer and his schoolteacher wife, left home and friends in Illinois to serve as members of the Peace Corps in Manta, Ecuador. This book is an account of their life in the Peace Corps. The first book ever written by Peace Corps volunteers, it is a revealing chronicle of personal involvement, of people from vastly different cultures learning to know one another on the level of their common humanity. Earle and Rhoda begin their story with their decision to enlist as trainees in President Kennedy's people-to-people grassroots aid program. They describe their jubilation at being accepted, the initial testing in Chicago, and the briefings in New York. With warmth and humor, they recount their experiences during the four-month training period in Puerto Rico. This was a time of trials and learning, of physical exertion and mental and emotional challenge. Of the 100 men and women who had formed their original group, 61, including Earle and Rhoda Brooks, graduated from trainees to volunteers. Earle and Rhoda were assigned to a community development project in Manta, a small fishing village on the coast of Ecuador. Here they would spend two years, working with the people, helping them to help themselves. The Brookses' story of Peace Corps life in Ecuador is no simple success story, no tale of triumph over staggering odds, rather it is one of beginnings, as these two young Americans put all their skills, knowledge, compassion, and ingenuity into an effort to provide humanitarian grassroots help in alleviating poverty and disease. Their story also shares what they learned from their humble fisher-people friends and neighbors. From their rich and varied experience emerges a picture of Latin American life far different in focus, and in many respects, far truer, than that of learned economists and political pundits. It is an intimate, human picture of a land filled with paradoxes and beset by problems that yield no easy solutions. It is a picture of a quest for learning and sharing, not on a soapbox or in the press, but in the hearts and minds of the common people. Now, in 2012, on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Peace Corps and fifty years after their decision to join the Peace Corps, Rhoda Brooks has created a new Foreward and Afterword, to highlight the intervening years during which she and her husband adopted two Ecuadorian youngsters, ages 2 and 4, and brought them home to Minnesota. She tells of the growing up years of Carmen and Koki (Ricardo) in a suburban community west of Minneapolis, the birth of their biological son and the adoption of a mixed race daughter three years later. Brooks explores the challenges and opportunities presented in the raising of their bi-racial family, the pain and sorrow of the untimely deaths of her husband Earle and their daughter, Josie, as well as the excitement and apprehension generated by the return to Manta for a visit when the children were in their teens. Brooks continues the Afterword with the return to Manta of her five Ecuadorian grandchildren who, then in their teens, went to explore their roots and meet their own biological grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. She concludes the final part of her story with an update into the lives of her seven grandchildren and the arrival of new great grandson, Brooks.
Author: Doris Rubenstein
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1663223394
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
Between 1933 and the end of World War II, over 3,000 Jews from countries all across Europe fled what was an almost certain death there to find freedom and safety in a small country in South America. Most of them had never heard of it before there was nowhere else to run: Ecuador. Some left for the U.S. or Israel after five or ten years. Others decided to make it their permanent home. Today, there are less than 1,000 Jews still living in Ecuador. Why did they decide to stay? Each family’s story is different. Every single person has their own, unique memories of their early days in Ecuador. The Boy with Four Names is the story of one family, and one boy who ended up with four names. You will enjoy this book whether you’re thirteen or sixty-three!
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ecuador
Languages : en
Pages : 4
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Book Description
Author: Eve Brown-Waite
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767931491
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
In this hilarious memoir, a pampered city girl falls head over little black heels in love with a Peace Corps poster boy and follows him—literally to the ends of the earth. Eve Brown always thought she would join the Peace Corps someday, although she secretly worried about life without sushi, frothy coffee drinks and air conditioning. But with college diploma in hand, it was time to put up or shut up. So with some ambivalence she arrived at the Peace Corps office, sporting her best safari chic attire, to casually look into the steps one might take to become a global humanitarian, a la Angelina Jolie. But when Eve meets John, her dashing young Peace Corps recruiter, all her ambivalence flies out the window. She absolutely must join the Peace Corps and win John's heart in the process. After spending a year in the jungle in Ecuador, she runs back to the states, vowing to stay within easy reach of a decaf cappuccino for the rest of her days. Just as she's getting reacquainted with the joys of toilet paper, John gets a job with CARE and Eve must decide if she’s up for life in another third world outpost. Before you can say, "pass the malaria prophylaxis," the couple heads off to Uganda, and the fun really begins— if you call having rats in your toilet fun. Fortunately, in Eve’s case you certainly can, because to her, every experience is an adventure to embrace and the pages come alive with all of the poignant and uproarious details. From intestinal parasites to getting caught in a civil war, culture clashes to unexpected friendships, First Comes Love, then Comes Malaria is an honest and laugh-out-loud look at Eve’s misadventures as an aspiring do-gooder and her search for love and purpose, which she finds in the last place she expected.
Author: Edna McGuire
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ecuador
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
The story of the Peace Corps and its volunteer workers.
Author: John Perkins
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1626566755
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Featuring 15 explosive new chapters, this new edition of the New York Times bestseller brings the story of Economic Hit Men up-to-date and, chillingly, home to the U.S.―but it also gives us hope and the tools to fight back. The previous edition of this now-classic book revealed the existence and subversive manipulations of "economic hit men. John Perkins wrote that they are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. In Perkins's case the tool was debt-convincing strategically important countries to borrow huge amounts of money for enormous, development projects that served the very rich while driving the country deeper into poverty and debt. And once indebted, these countries could be controlled. In this latest edition, Perkins provides revealing new details about how he and others did their work. But more importantly, in an explosive new section he describes how the EHM tools are being used around the world more widely than ever-even in the U. S. itself. The cancer has metastasized, yet most people still aren't aware of it. Fear and debt drive the EHM system. We are hammered with messages that terrify us into believing that we must pay any price, assume any debt, to stop the enemies who, we are told, lurk at our doorsteps. The EHM system-employing false economics, bribes, surveillance, deception, debt, coups, assassinations, unbridled military power-has become the dominant system of economics, government, and society today. It has created what Perkins calls a Death Economy. But Perkins offers hope: he concludes with dozens of specific, concrete suggestions for actions all of us can take to wrest control of our world away from the economic hit men, and help give birth to a Life Economy.
Author:
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1428927603
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
Author: Judy Blankenship
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292745273
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
While many baby boomers are downsizing to a simpler retirement lifestyle, photographer and writer Judy Blankenship and her husband Michael Jenkins took a more challenging leap in deciding to build a house on the side of a mountain in southern Ecuador. They now live half the year in Cañar, an indigenous community they came to know in the early nineties when Blankenship taught photography there. They are the only extranjeros (outsiders) in this homely, chilly town at 10,100 feet, where every afternoon a spectacular mass of clouds rolls up from the river valley below and envelopes the town. In this absorbing memoir, Blankenship tells the interwoven stories of building their house in the clouds and strengthening their ties to the community. Although she and Michael had spent considerable time in Cañar before deciding to move there, they still had much to learn about local customs as they navigated the process of building a house with traditional materials using a local architect and craftspeople. Likewise, fulfilling their obligations as neighbors in a community based on reciprocity presented its own challenges and rewards. Blankenship writes vividly of the rituals of births, baptisms, marriages, festival days, and deaths that counterpoint her and Michael’s solitary pursuits of reading, writing, listening to opera, playing chess, and cooking. Their story will appeal to anyone contemplating a second life, as well as those seeking a deeper understanding of daily life in the developing world.
