Fly More Kites

To keep learning about Peace Corps and Cape Verde, please visit http://www.peacecorpsjournals.com/?showcountryinfo,cv

It has all the other blogs for the volunteers serving there. While my Peace Corps adventure has come to an end, the story still remains being written so I encourage you to take a look at what the others have experienced.

I also should note that once, Peace Corps admin told a volunteer to take a picture down from their blog of him flying a kite on a beach. He was told that "it made it look like you all are just having fun there". That was easily one of the dumbest things I ever heard in my life, that someone wasted even three minutes on an issue like that. Peace Corps has enriched and changed my life for the better in so many ways that I cannot articulate, but I did always just want to finally post that I thought that was really dumb.

Thank you so much for reading and encouraging over the past two years. I hope to hear from you soon.





"I'm glad I did it, partly because it was worth it, but mostly because I shall never have to do it again". Mark Twain

think local act global

If I need any reminder of how much has changed in the past two years, I see it now sitting in the Peace Corps in Praia where President Obama's face hangs where there once was Bush. They even have the famous psychedelic colored Obama "hope" poster up in the library. Monthsthat would have been campaign propoganda, a big no no for a government office. And now it is enshrined, it is policy.
I remember hanging a poster on my wall sophomore year of college. Not a poster, as much as one advertisement ripped out of a magazine. It was a Peace Corps ad, with little black kids jumping onto what looked like a roaring river, with that irresistible legend down below, "life is calling. How far will you go?"
It was definitely the highest, most noble calling I could imagine. It encompassed everything I wanted to try to do and become, the adventure and the altruism, with a brand name that people instantly recognized and respected - for the most part. I made sure that I did everything I could, ever since I had first about Peace Corps on a camping trip when I was a freshman, to get in. Volunteer stuff when I just wanted to sleep, studied abroad, got good references from past volunteers, practically stalked the campus recruiters day and night. My whole way through college I knew what was next and it gave me a definite sense of purpose and of feeling special. I applied so early that I had to wait to submit my application as I had filled the mountains of forms out over a year before I would graduate and be eligible to go. If nothing else, I definitely have learned that if you are persistent and know about something long enough in advance, you can make any goal a reality.
As for what you do once you have arrived at your goal and once your goal has come and gone, that is some wisdom that I don't yet possess.

three summers

One of the best things about Peace Corps is the time. Any volunteer who claims they are stressed out or has no time is either a liar or not integrated into the culture of Peace Corps countries at all. The time can be a gift or a burden, and most of the time, both. I definitely feel that I have lived many lives while I lived here. At one point or another, I was an eager student spending every waking moment studying language flashcards, a pillar of the community, a complete recluse, a party animal, ascetic and abstaining, super involved, ultra detached, pissed, sad, hungry, poor, rich (at the beginning, when we got paid in three month intervals), motivated, a rambling traveler, in love, utterly alone, a homebody, a reader, a complete and utter waste of life, a workaholic, an insomniac, a bear in hibernation. Happy and sad beyond what I thought were my capacity. I feel as though I am going home a lot older than an extra two years.

better late

My buddy, when he first arrived at site the same time as me in Sept of 2007, needed some minor work done on his bed frame. Nothing major, just a few boards patched up. He hauled the thing off to the carpenter in another village called Coculi, where I spend a lot of time visiting friends. He then went back to sleeping on the mattress on his floor while he waited for the repairs.

The other day, the carpenter´s son stopped me and told me to tell my friend that his bed was ready.

Two years later!

And these guys seem to work 6 hours a week, mastering the art of turning on loud machinery at the most inopportune of times.

So here she is, the list I have been keeping since I first arrived of books I have read while in Peace Corps, the good, the bad, and the chicky. Obviously I did not do such a good job...I lost the first sheet of the list which I was able to reconstruct from memory, albeit out of order and still missing a mysterious three books. My most humble of apologies to that trio, for books are what saved me while I was here. Obviously a list doesnt say anything about what books were good and which were wastes of time, some of these are pretty slim and some were pretty epic. This doesnºt take into account the numerous books I quit, Newsweeks read literally dozens of times, or long stretches of time when I could not stand the sight of another book, like when I had a computer. But through it all, these guys were there for me. I may have never gotten around to War and Peace or some of those seminal other things you are supposed to read when you have two years in the bush on your hands, but I think that I still learned a lot. Mostly I just post this here to impress you all with how erudite I am, especially when you consider the ukranian tractor book. It is a pretty eclectic list when you consider you have to make do with what you can scatter together from a couple of islands in the middle of the Atlantic. God I will cry at Borders.

4. The 27th City – Jonathan Franzen
5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavaliar and Klay - Michael Chabon
6. War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning – Chris Hedges
7. What is the What – Dave Eggers
8. Moneyball – Michael Lewis
9. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
10. The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahiri
11. A Hope in the Unseen – Ron Suskind
12. Falling Man –Don DeLillo
13. The Best and the Brightest – David Halberstam
14. Angela’s Ashes – Frank McCourt
15. A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian – Marina Lewycka
16. The Glass Castle – Jeanette Walls
17. Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor 1977-1981 - Zbigniew Brzezinski
18. How to be Alone – Jonathan Franzen
19. Underworld – Don DeLillo
20. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex – Nathaniel Philbrick
21. Running with Scissors – Austen Burroughs
22. Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer
23. Going All The Way – Dan Wakefield
24. The Third Brother – Mick McDonell
25. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut
26. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
27. We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver
28. The Ugly American – William J Ledever and Eugene Burdick
29. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
30. The Quiet American – Graham Greene
31. River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze – Peter Hessler
32. Power Lines: Two Years on South Africa´s Borders – Jason Carter
33. The Unheard: A Memory of Deafness and Africa – Josh Swiller
34. The Final Solution – Michael Chabon
35. I Know This Much Is True – Wally Lamb
36. Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
37. The Memory Keeper´s Daughter - Kim Edwards
38. The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern US Senate – Lewis L. Gould
39. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
40. Sleepwalking through History: America in the Reagan Years – Haynes Johnson
41. FDR – Jean Edward Smith
42. Theodore Rex – Edmund Morris
43. Special Topics in Calamity Physics – Marisha Pessl
44. The Alienist – Caleb Carr
45. A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
46. The Last Hurrah – Edwin O´Connor
47. I´m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after 20 Years Away – Bill Bryson
48. Lila: An Inquiry into Morals – Robert Pirsig
49. Three Guineas – Virginia Woolf
50. The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
51. Love Invents Us – Amy Blloom
52. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down – Anne Fadiman
53. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood – Marjana Satrapi
54. Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return – Marjane Satrapi
55. Digging to America – Anne Tyler
56. Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver – Scott Strossel
57. The Emperor´s Children – Claire Messud
58. You Shall Know Our Velocity! – Dave Eggers
59. A Movable Feast – Ernest Hemingway
60. Following Christ in a Consumer Society – John F. Kavanaugh
61. The Last Lecture – Randy Pausch
62. Giving – Bill Clinton
63. Eat, Pray, Love – Elizabeth Gilbert
64. Making a Life: Meanings of Migration in Cape Verde – Lisa Akesson
65. What You Can Do For Your Country: An Oral History of the Peace Corps – Karen Schwarz
66. Theater of War – Lewis Lapham
67. Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times – Bill Moyers
68. Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary – Juan Williams
69. Snow Falling on Cedars – David Guterson
70. Journals 1952-2000 - Arthur Schlesinger
71. Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America – Thomas Friedman
72. The Post-American World – Fareed Zakaria
73. The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
74. The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey – Ernesto “Che” Guevara
75. The Purpose Driven Life – Rick Warren
76. The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa – Bill Berkeley
77. After the Plague – T.C: Boyle
78. Creek Walk – Molly Giles
79. Profiles in Courage for Our Time – Caroline Kennedy
80. A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton - Carl Bernstein
81. Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History - Ted Sorensen
82. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln – Doris Kearns Goodwin
83. Big Russ and Me – Tim Russert
84. At Home in the Streets: Street Children of Northeast Brazil – Tobias Hecht
85. The Last Time They Met - Anita Shreve
86. The Heart Is a Little to the Left: Essays on Public Morality – William Sloane Coffin
87. The Hour I First Believed – Wally Lamb
88. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
89. The Fall of Baghdad - Jon Lee Anderson
90. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
91) Truman – David McCullough
92) Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan – Edmund Morris
93) Rabbit, Run – John Updike
94) The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

Heres a bunch of pics of that lighthouse of which I wrote, as promised!

When we repair a bridge, who does it? Penguins don't do it. Robots don't do it. We don't hire bears to do it. Pennsylvanians do it." - Gov. Ed Rendell