Eve Brown-Waite (Ecuador 1988-89) has hit the jackpot with her Peace Corps book, Take Me Home. She just signed a six-figure contract with Broadway Books, a division of Random House. Her memoir will be published in the spring of ’09. The book sold at auction, [five publishing houses were bidding for it] while Eve and her husband, John Waite (Burkina Faso 1983-86), waited out the day of tension at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, taking calls from her agent, and turning down offers. At one point, Eva turned down a two-book contract from Harper-Collins. “Here I was turning down book offers when I had rejection letters from magazines, agents, and publishers filling up my desk drawer back home.”
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Eve, who was recruited out of the New York Recruitment office [then located at Times Square] by the same John Waite. “I fell in love with him during the interview. I wasn't sure about the Peace Corps, but I was sure about him." Eva did go off to Ecuador only to be sent home early for medical reasons. “I didn’t think he’d marry me then since I wasn’t a Super Vol.”
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So, she went and earned a master’s degree in public health from Hunter College and he got his master’s in International Affairs from Columbia University. They married and John took a job with CARE in northern Uganda. It was in Arua, Uganda, that she began to write down her stories, beginning with her work with street kids in Ecuador, her life in Uganda, and later their tour from 1993-96 in Uzbekistan.
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She had plenty of stories to tell. The full title of her memoir is: Take Me Home: My Search for Meaning and a Decent Restroom in the Third World. My guess is that this Peace Corps memoir won’t be politically correct.
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Their tour in Uzbekistan was a time of guerrilla warfare and tense days--both were held hostage in their home at one point--but Eva also adds, “Most of the time it was beautiful and peaceful. We had a lovely time, and the people for the most part were tremendously friendly and helpful.”
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Her memoir begins and ends in Uzbekistan, but it is really about “following John—a Peace Corps poster boy—through the Third World.”
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It has taken Eve 12-years to write her story [and now she is busy re-writing] while she raised a family and worked full time. Today, she is a nutrition director for a community action childhood development center and John is the executive director of a community development corporation in the same county in western Massachusetts.
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When not working or rewriting, she daydreams about who will play ‘them’ in the movie. [Yes, there is already movie interest.] Eva is thinking of Sarah Jessica Parker, “who’s also curly-haired and short and Jewish.” And for John, she’d like, Matthew McConaughey. “He’s a real Peace Corps ‘poster boy’ type.”
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Eva's real dream, however, is to have her movie shot in Arua, Uganda, “because it will bring attention and economic development there,” she says, and it will also be a chance for Eva and John to go back to where they began their married life.
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