Edmund Ruge’s mail goes to a Manhattan address, but he’s been in Moma, Mozambique since June 2013, serving as a Community Health Educator with the Peace Corps. In between his duties helping undernourished families and managing a community pharmacy, he finds the time to join in our Tea & Trollope seminar, led by Blanche Siegal. Edmund reads a Trollope book every month and emails his reactions and thoughts for discussion. I was delighted to chat electronically with our farthest-flung active member about the unique experience of reading Victorian England from Africa.

NYSL: Tell us about joining the Peace Corps and how you got where you are now.

ER: Joining the Peace Corps was something I've wanted to do since high school. I worked for two years as a personal trainer after graduating college, but it left something unquenched. Rarely does a day pass here that doesn't leave me emotionally and physically spent, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

[Regarding location,] I'm proud to have been in one of the last groups to use the "you go where we send you" application. With an undergraduate background in Latin American studies, my placement in Mozambique certainly threw me for a spin, but now that I'm here I couldn't be happier.

I currently share a large cement house with a group of Brazilian missionaries. The house I really called home was a small mud-brick construction painted light blue and topped with zinc roofing. It had electricity but no running water. It collapsed last March under heavy rainfall, along with most of the other houses in Moma.

NYSL: Clearly you enjoy reading. Did you bring books from the US, or do you have access to an English-language library or bookstore?

ER: The Peace Corps imposes a strict limit on volunteers' luggage, and it probably didn't help that I insisted on bringing all three volumes of Edmund Morris's Theodore Roosevelt biography. The closest English bookstore is likely in either Zimbabwe or Malawi. [Moma is over 1,200 miles from Maputo, Mozambique's capital.] Anticipating this issue, I invested in a Kindle and asked interested family members to send books from home whenever possible.

I do most of my book swapping with other Peace Corps volunteers.The twenty of us who arrived in Mozambique together attempted to create a reading group, but it flopped immediately when one of my more ambitious colleagues insisted on making Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov our first book.

[In day-to-day work I use Portuguese, Mozambique's official language,] but I do very little of my reading in Portuguese. There is something very anchoring about being able to see a familiar language on paper after a day immersed in a foreign language. That said, I am currently making my way through Jorge Amado's Capitães da Areia.

NYSL: What brought you to Trollope, and why is he an important writer for you?

ER: My godfather is the biggest Trollope fan I know, and I think he was slowly steering me to Trollope when he bought me my first Edith Wharton book (Roman Fever and Other Stories) back in high school. I love Wharton and Trollope for similar reasons: it has something to do with their capacity for digging into the silent moments in social interaction. But Trollope just has more fun. I often imagine Trollope chuckling at his desk, scribbling furiously through a court interrogation or a fistfight.

NYSL: Any anecdotes about your time with the Tea & Trollope group?

ER: I gave short shrift to The Duke's Children, as it was the assigned reading for my first month with the group and I was still feeling things out. I don't think I finished it. It's my godfather's favorite out of all 47 novels. He has recently stripped me of all excuses: awaiting me back home is the limited-edition uncut manuscript from the Folio Society!

NYSL: Is there anything else about life with the Peace Corps that you'd like to share with our readers?

ER: What the host country gets from the volunteer's service varies country by country, project by project, but what volunteers take away from their service remains a constant internationally. Nothing about my service here has been easy, but I can honestly tell you that it has been the most rewarding experience of my life. What I learned in terms of patience, forgiveness, and empathy, I couldn't have obtained in any other setting. This job requires you to reevaluate everything you think you know about yourself, because too often the fluff we're attacked with Stateside - your favorite sports team, your hometown, your favorite restaurants - gets mistaken for actual self-substance. When you remove yourself from all of that, when you're truly naked for an extended period of time, you're forced to come to terms with your actual values and weaknesses. The Peace Corps teaches you what you actually care about.

The Library is grateful to Mr. Ruge for his time and his thoughtful responses.

For more about the Peace Corps' work in Mozambique, click here.

For more about Anthony Trollope, click here.