The Diary of a Gold-Digger

Asunción is hot and humid and dirty and on Sunday, everything, including places where one might buy food, is closed. This is the place where...

The next morning I was well enough to leave Salta. Jeff had left the day before for Bolivia. I was now on my own. I traipsed down to the bu...

Now that the farmers had left, there was more room at the hostel and we’d graduated to better quarters. Jeff went out in search of entertain...

The cowhide weighed three and a half kilos -- too heavy to carry in my backpack. We took it to the post office and I asked how much it would...

Primo told me that Doris wants to ship her winter clothes - her more than seven years' old winter clothes - up here for me to sell. Beca...

We’d had a boring morning trying to find food in Salta. The farmers had left so the scenery at the hostel was not so great. The Handbook men...

When we arrived in Salta, we went to a hostel where Jeff had stayed the year before. It was full, but Jeff persisted and the owner agreed to...

I had several chores to handle in Santiago, among them being mailing to the US the statue Monica had given me. I was relieved to learn month...

My trip began the night I left Temuco, the city in southern Chile where I’d been a Peace Corps volunteer for two years. I’d envisioned score...

From Cuzco, Kelly and I took a ten-hour train ride through the altiplano (the high plains) to Puno, which was at the time (this was 1994, I ...

I am going through some old emails and found this one from Primo. Remember the Bad Bacon Eater episode? He had forwarded me an email from Sl...

I feel as if I should be labeling these posts "Peace Corpse" or "Peace Corp." There are people who were in the Peace Cor...

On Sunday morning, when I wanted to bake cookies, Primo got all, "Whoooooo!" because he thinks the kitchen will turn into a big ...

When I was a Peace Corps volunteer, thanks to my country director's very liberal interpretation of the Peace Corps vacation policy, we g...

Remember how I told you about the summer we spent on my grandparents' farm? Did I tell you the part about how my grandfather rented a po...