"Sometimes I thought of the Peace Corps as a reverse refugee organization, displacing all of us lost Midwesterners, and it was probably the only government entity that taught Americans to abandon key national characteristics. Pride, ambition, impatience, the instinct to control, the desire to accumulate, the missionary impulse -- all of it slipped away." --Peter...

Eleanor Stanford ’s memoir, Historia, Historia: Two Years in the Cape Verde Islands , is out this month from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. Her first book, The Book of Sleep , was published in 2008 by Carnegie Mellon Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, The...

Not long ago American bookstores saw the debut of the new travel memoir First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria: How a Peace Corps Poster Boy Won My Heart and a Third World Adventure Changed My Life . Kristen Pope reviewed it here last week. Since this book is a humorous take on aid-work in places...

With the rush on "volunteer vacations" -- Celine's Vagablogging article on spring break students comes to mind -- there are numerous websites and agencies that, for a fee, will set up your volunteer experience for you. You pay them (usually between $1000 and the entire costs of everything) and they will find you a spot...