Peace Corps Information Collection and Exchange Publication No. T0087. Provides a map to guide Peace Corps volunteers through their cross-cultural experience and also a way for them to record thoughts and feelings as they live and work in a host country. Contains a variety of exercises, as well as stories and quotations from Volunteers who have served in the past, from experts on cross-cultural training, and from the kind of people a volunteer might expect to meet in a new country.

Peace Corps volunteers experience adventure and challenge every day as they serve in communities around the world. They leave a legacy and a better understanding of the United States in their host countries, and they come back home as changed persons. As volunteers share their experiences back home, they change us as well, helping Americans better understand other cultures and peoples. In telling their stories, Peace Corps volunteers also convey the essence of community service. Not only are volunteers trained professionals, but they are also dedicated Americans who share a spirit of service and a commitment to making a difference in the lives of the people they serve. Peace Corps volunteers wrote the stories in this book to an audience of classroom students in the United States. The letters are intended to help U.S. students get to know and understand other cultures. Peace Corps volunteers agree to serve in order to meet the three goals of the agency: to provide assistance to the peoples of other countries, to help the people of other countries better understand Americans, and to help Americans better understand other peoples. This book helps fulfil the agency's third goal through remarkable stories by volunteers in the field. This book consists of public domain documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.

Contains a collection of autobiographical reminiscences written by about 28 former Peace Corps volumteers.

"Looking at Ourselves and Others contains lesson plans, activities, and readings that help students understand components of their own culture and leads them to appreciate and understand differences between their culture and that of others."--Home page.

In a remote corner of West Africa, Monique Dembele saved lives and dispensed hope every day in a place where childbirth is a life-and-death matter. Monique and the Mango Rains is the compelling story of the authors decade-long friendship with Monique, an extraordinary midwife in rural Mali. It is a tale of Moniques unquenchable passion to better the lives of women and children in the face of poverty, unhappy marriages, and endless backbreaking work, as well as her tragic and ironic death. In the course of this deeply personal narrative, as readers immerse in village life and learn firsthand the rhythms of Moniques world, they come to know her as a friend, as a mother, and as an inspired woman who struggled to find her place in a male-dominated world.