Christian & Alysia

My wife recently tore her ACL and will require surgery and rehabilitation to fix it. We were nominated to go to Burkina Faso in June 08 and now we are waiting to hear back from OMS about what will happen with us. I fear that they will make us wait an inordinate amount of time (5-6 months, possibly more!) before they medically clear her again.

Does anyone know of someone else that received an injury right before departure.?

Did they go to their nominated country or were they sent somewhere else? Will the PC decided we are not worth the trouble (gasp!) How long were they deferred?

We just found out that the ACL was torn yesterday and called OMS and left a voice mail. We haven’t heard anything as of this morning. I am just worried and I have a terrible feeling that OMS will be vague and not tell us when we could expect to ship out. I am a teacher and kind of need to know if I should return to my current school (which didn’t give me a renewal contract as I announced in December that I was moving to Africa with the Peace Corps) or just have an extended summer.

Feel free to add your own pages. (More information below.)

Dear RPCV,

For the first time in its almost fifty year history, the volunteers themselves are happy to announce the creation of a wiki based website dedicated to collaborative work.

http://www.PeaceCorpsWiki.com/

An institutional memory of this complex organization is being built day by day creating a bridge to an exciting future. This is an effort, lead by recently returned volunteers, to positivity develop the concept called Peace Corps - the history of Peace Corps and the projects that volunteers have done in over 139 countries around the world, ever since Kennedy announced ‘And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’

There are now a handful of administrators volunteering their time to the project and regular users (both registered and anonymous) have added almost a 1,000 pages of contributions.

However, we still need your help!

The ultimate goal is to have everything cross referenced, searchable, and freely available to anyone interested in the Peace Corps; countries, cities, sectors, volunteers - all relating to the Peace Corps service and its history for the past 47 years. We’re hoping that eventually volunteers would be able to read what progress has been made in Tamali, Ghana (for example) in the past 40 years. Which volunteers were stationed there? What did the Education volunteers have to do differently in The Gambia then Education volunteers in Senegal, Guinea or Mauritania? What projects did volunteers in Malawi work on 10 years ago, were any in Mzuzu?

You are even encouraged to create a page about yourself! What country did you serve in? What projects did you work on? What was in like serving in Venezuela in 1962, or being one of the 21 total volunteers who served in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 2000-2002? We even made it easy for you - on the main page is a ‘Add Volunteer’ box - just type in your name and the hard part is done for you!

Served in Farafenni, The Gambia or Gyumri, Armenia? Want to make a page about your town or village? Please do. Think the page for your country of service needs a few pictures? Welcome to upload them and post them. (As of now we’re using roughly the same standards as Wikipedia) The page for Ukraine has pictures of what the electrical outlets look like!

You can’t break PeaceCorpsWiki - anything can be fixed or improved later. Don’t be afraid to edit - anyone can edit almost any page, and we encourage you to be bold! You do not need to register as a user to contribute; anonymous legitimate edits/suggestions are welcome.

More than 190,000 people have answered the call to serve, and the PeaceCorpsWiki site provides the tool necessary to capture and disseminate this valued knowledge. You are welcome to join us and contribute your first-hand knowledge to this collective public information exchange.

Thank you,

-Mike Sheppard RPCV / The Gambia (’03-’05) http://www.PeaceCorpsJournals.com/ http://www.PeaceCorpsWiki.com/

Peace Corps bloggers are sharing on their blogs, something that is monitored daily by Peace Corps and discouraged. PCVs share the nice stories Peace Corps likes to keep their jobs and can’t really express themselves or they are threatened.

Peace Corps and NPCA encourage blind following, especially when it’s the budget, anti State Department or military. PCVs should be asking themselves questions before blindly following. Yes, you can’t express yourself and expect a job with Peace Corps, but be anti US government and they hire right away.

The latest issue is spying. Peace Corps quoted the agencies charter, but wouldn’t mention the contract and changes that have been made when you sign up. NPCA sells off it is paid by Peace Corps to lobby against the military on behalf of Peace Corps. All this is strange considering Peace Corps has memorandums of understanding and country agreements with dictators that have been put in power by military coups and destroyed the native Fijian democratic government. All other aid, except for military aid and Peace Corps aid is cut off. Peace Corps just got 10 million from the foreign military aid budget. Thailand and the Philippines are the same and perceived as countries that have military coups all the time, so we might as well stay. These militaries work closely with Peace Corps. The spying issue might start right there.

So, we went and shared anyway. I got to solve Bolivia, but Peace Corps doesn’t like the answer. It’s a training issue. If you keep files and report on people to your program manager in your site as Peace Corps requires, you are spying. An HCN trainer is just going to accuse you of spying and then you have to accuse them of spying and the US government is probably just going to say they probably spy for another country. Either way it’s espionage and your guilty. So, when this happened in training we agreed never to file reports. They threatened to fire us allot.

We are at the height of Peace Corps expansion. There is pressure to stay in countries. There is pressure to expand in countries. It has become too dangerous for PCVs. Their clearances change. They end up in areas where they are not trained and cannot do the job. In some countries the State Department pays danger pay. We might take a look there.

As Peace Corps and NPCA lobby Congress for money and legislation during Peace Corps Week and NPCA’s National Day of Action, RPCVs and PCVs should know all the issues. You can bet those Congressmen do.