Our goal as a publication is clear: we want to devote our efforts in sharing the experiences, culture, and knowledge of Peace Corps Thailand volunteers—past and present.

Our history runs deep.

     60 years ago, PCV Brad Martin from Group 11 decided to create a “grab-bag of fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and art”; a publication to share with his co-Volunteers that focused on their time in Thailand but also gave them a pre-Netflix escape from their work. This first iteration of our literary voice was dubbed Klong, or canal, traditionally used in Thailand as a means to transport goods and/or communication. 

       Martin would collect stories from Volunteers and publish when they had enough to make a volume. The Klong committee had weekly meetings at a restaurant called Sorn Daeng on Democracy Monument traffic circle, near where Martin volunteered in Bangkok. The Return of the Klong was only published twice, in 1968, and was created in an effort to tighten the bonds among Group 11.

      After Martin, the newsletter did not return to a consistent publication until 1976 when Hey You! was published by the newly formed Advisory Council of Thailand (ACT) / Volunteer Advisory Council (VAC). Howard Statement (Group 51) was the Chairperson of ACT and the editor in chief of Hey You! until August 1976. Unlike Klong, Hey You! was a newsletter of announcements, meeting minutes, articles, and volunteer gossip. There were (surprisingly frequent) wedding announcements, sometimes between Volunteers and their counterparts, classified ads for items and apartment rentals, and restaurant reviews. The main contributions came from ACT, who had the mission of facilitating group participation and volunteer involvement at that time. Statement says there was no censorship by the staff, and very little contributions from staff besides announcements and mailings.

    In 1977 the Editor-in-Chief of Hey You!, Dewey Weaver (Group 58), changed the title to Sticky Rice in order to abandon the English greeting “Hey You” that had made its way into Thailand’s street vernacular.* When Weaver renamed the newsletter Sticky Rice in 1977, there were some familiar objectives: allowing volunteers a space to share information about their cultural experiences, both in their villages and during their travels; educating volunteers on Thai architecture, religion, rituals, food, clothing, language, crafts, myths and music; announcements about internal and external meetings as well as classifieds and opinion articles. One of the editors from Group 58 wanted to recognize that the “official administrative support for the effort was critical and unequivocal: encouragement of creativity, self-expression and validation of the Peace Corps experience made the paper ‘hum.’ ” 

     In 1977, Sticky Rice was published on a Gestetner mimeograph machine on Foolscap 8″ x 12″ paper, which was rolled into a tube and sent through the Thai mail system.

       In the mid-1980s there was an effort to change the title of the newsletter to “The Kwai,” but the ajaans shot down the request because of its lingual proximity to a commonly used Thai profanity. At that time the newsletter remained a quarterly, and the publication would continue to be issued in the same manner for around twenty years. By the 1990s the issues was created using a copy machine, and included comics to make fun of Volunteers and staff alike.  There are still copies in the PCV office, waiting to be uploaded onto the internet. In the 1990s, the journal became more of a thick book of stories, comic strips, announcements and jokes.

Nowadays, Sticky Rice Magazine continues to the honor our legacy and highlight the hardships and humor of working as a PCV in Thailand. We are an online outlet for self-expression, creative media, and collaboration.

 *Howard Statement denies the RPCV rumor that the name “Hey You!” was related to the United States military influence during the Vietnam war;  rather it was just one of those standard greetings that Thai kids learned while studying English in the 1970s.