When Togo RPCV Gregory Acker played African drums with a group of fourth- and fifth-grade students during an assembly, the students couldn't stop moving
Gregory Acker, of Louisville, spent four years in Togo and Morocco in the Peace Corps. He is a part-time professor at Indiana University Southeast and has been performing African music at schools around Kentucky, most of them elementary schools. "I hope these kids got a taste of the spirit that I got when I was living there," he said. Beating on African drums and creating "musical conversations," Acker described each drum and various ways to play them. Fourth-grade students then performed an African skit about unity. "I want to go to Africa now," said Kitty Williamson, a 12-year-old fifth-grader who played in the drum ensemble. Read more.
Returned Peace Corps Volunteers Podcast Around the Globe
The RPCV Podcast brings you interviews with Returned Peace Corps Volunteers from around the world. Whether you have an interest in a certain region, enjoy world travel, have served or are interested in serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer, the RPCV Podcast will provide you with a unique perspective from volunteers living and working in the far reaches of the globe. The RPCV Podcast is a GSIS original created by first-year MA student Hayden Gore. Hayden—who served with his wife Lisa in the Peace Corps in Guatemala from 2002 to 2004—first came across the idea of educational Podcasts in a newspaper article in 2005. Working at the time as a bi-lingual teacher in Fort Worth, Texas, the idea struck him: why not use the Podcast as a medium through which my students can publish their creative writing pieces before an international audience? To catch everyone up to speed, the Podcast is a digital media format through which anyone with a computer and an internet connection is able to produce audio or video broadcasts and publish them online for viewing by a Web-wide audience. It represents a completely democratic form of journalism and entertainment.
Visit the RPCV podcast web site.
RPCV Edward J. Shultz creates Web Site to teach About Korean-American Experience
''Americans remain awfully ignorant about Korea and also ignorant about Korean-Americans (although) Korean-Americans have been in the States for well over 100 years,'' Shultz said Friday during an interview with The Korea Times. ''And even younger generations of Korean-Americans don't know much about their ancestors' country.'' So he hopes that his new educational Web site can help those who have tried to find interactive and in-depth materials for the study of Korea and Korean-Americans.
The creation of the Web site shares the main purpose of the 2003 documentary films about Korean-Americans, which were produced as part of the project to commemorate the centennial of Korean immigration to America and shown through PBS. Shultz was also a core member for the production of the documentaries. ''The main purpose of the documentaries was to make Korea and Korean-Americans much better known across the America and also help Korean-Americans understand who they are and where they are fit in the American society,'' Shultz said.
RPCVs at University of Nebraksa/Lincoln sponsor “A Night of International Dance”
The event was not designed as a recruiting tool for the Peace Corps, but rather to celebrate ethnic diversity, said Gretchen Mills, Peace Corps coordinator at UNL. “It’s important to open the doors of the world to Nebraskans,” she said. Following the dance exhibition, the audience was invited to visit with a group of local Peace Corps volunteers and representatives from the student-led Global Friends of Japan organization. The former Peace Corps volunteers, who’d served in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, the Ivory Coast and the Kyrgyz Republic, displayed various souvenirs from their travels and answered questions about their experiences.
Don Bush, a graduate student at Union College in Lincoln, said his involvement in the Peace Corps stemmed from a personal desire to gain experience about societies other than his own. However, he said telling others about the experience he gained was not enough to make people’s lives better – a goal he aimed for during his Peace Corps service. “You can talk about it, but people have to go and see it for themselves,” he said.