From Dennis Cordell
Editor, Volume on Africa and the Middle East
The Peace Corps at 50 Anniversary Story Project

In three years, the Peace Corps will reach the ripe old (or young, if 60 really is the new 40) age of 50. Several other former volunteers and I have organized The Peace Corps at 50 Story Project to honor that event in writing. It is described in detail with pictures at www.peacecorpsat50.org. We are all actively soliciting non-fiction stories for four volumes to mark this milestone in Peace Corps history.

The four volumes—on, respectively, Africa and the Middle East; Asia and the Pacific; Central America, South America, and the Caribbean; and After the Cold War (Eastern Europe and Central Asia)—will include stories from past and present volunteers, staff, instructors, and “Peace Corps friends.”

We deeply believe that everyone who has served in the Peace Corps has a story or two, or a hundred. We tell them at RPCV and family gatherings; we resurrect them in job interviews and when we meet new friends. But even the best told tale, tall or otherwise, may shrink from memory unless it is recorded. A lost story takes a part of the history of the Peace Corps and its volunteers with it. It takes part of our own collective history with it.

The four of us who are editors of The Peace Corps at 50 Anniversary Story Project are looking for well-told stories that reflect the entire range of experiences in Peace Corps—whether rosy, funny, uplifting, embarrassing, scary, or ethnically murky. A story can be about anything: from negotiating a border crossing to witnessing an execution to conjuring with just what you do, in my own case, when presented just after arrival in the country with a plate of freshly fried crickets by a smiling little girl in Chad.

Returned Peace Corps volunteers from Kenya will find complete information on the project, the editors, writers’ guidelines, and how to submit a story and contact us at http://www.peacecorpsat50.org.

The deadline for submitting stories is April 15, 2008, six weeks after the 47th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s executive order creating the Peace Corps on March 1, 1961. We plan to have the volumes to help celebrate the 50th.

Attached is a fact sheet that summarizes the relevant information. Be sure to look at the site and the fact sheet. And please, too, be in touch with suggestions or questions. Without stories from a sample of all of us, across space and time, this project will not come to be. It is our history to write!

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