Yovo (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781935925576)

Joining the Peace Corps and moving half a world away to serve in a developing country wasn't the hard part. Coming home is.

When Rick "Oly" Olymeyer returns to America in the early '90s after serving in the Peace Corps in Togo, West Africa, he thought he'd be able to jump right in, readjusting to a life of relative ease with "regular" Americans. He never thought he'd become the proverbial fish out of water, distanced even from his own family as he hops from temp job to temp job, searching for meaning and a place in society.

But he soon discovers the painful difficulty of finding his purpose in an American economy and culture that can't possibly understand the dynamics of the life passionately devoted to service he'd lived in a village in Africa.

After an encounter with a professor eventually leads to his involvement in a dispute between land developers and the descendants of freed slaves, Oly's two worlds collide. He has Samantha, whom he met in Togo, as his touchstone, but is she enough to help him ground himself as a citizen of current-day America while preserving his love for the Africa he left behind?