Derek Lowstuter graduated with a B.S. degree in Natural Resource Management, with minors in Horticulture, Forestry, and History. He obtained his M.S. degree in Forest Sciences in collaboration with the Peace Corps Master’s International Program. He is currently a doctoral student at Colorado State University, where he works as an Agricultural and Natural Resource Specialist at Colorado State University Extension. He has directed agricultural and natural resource management projects on four continents, but now calls Colorado Springs, Colorado, home with his wife, Claire, their daughter, and a menagerie of animals and houseplants.
SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory – what’s it about and what inspired you to write it?
Derek Lowstuter: This book is equal parts memoir and ethnographic case study. All the books I had read on Peace Corps were either written wearing rose-colored glasses or were rants against the experience. I wanted to provide a holistic view that showed the good, the bad, and the ugly of being a Peace Corps Volunteer. Peace Corps service is rich, nuanced, and complicated. The book is told from my experience abroad but written to be engaging for everyone.
UNDERWRITTEN BY
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SunLit: Place the excerpt you selected in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole and why did you select it?
Lowstuter: The excerpt is one of the last chapters of the book. It is brief, but provides insight into the challenges and opportunities of serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV). Volunteering with the Peace Corps is challenging, transformative, and occasionally traumatic, but sometimes coming back home a different person can be just as difficult.
SunLit: What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?
Lowstuter: I didn’t start writing the book until more than a decade after my Peace Corps service. I needed time to reacclimate and synthesize all of the jarring, contradictory experiences I had as a volunteer. Being a Peace Corps Volunteer is both wonderful and terrible.
I read a lot of Peace Corps memoirs, and while many of them were good, I did not think they captured the feeling of leaving your home country for more than two years and trying to help others in a country you might not even be able to find on a map. I wanted to write a book that was deeply personal but spoke to the richness of Ethiopia and of the larger Peace Corps experience.
SunLit: What did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter?
Lowstuter: Writing this book made me ask hard questions — of my memories and my intentions in expressing them.
SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book?
“Fiddler on the Roof of Africa”
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Lowstuter: It is difficult to fit two years full of unique experiences and research into one book. The greatest difficulty was not deciding what to include, but what not to include.
SunLit: What do you want readers to take from this book?
Lowstuter: The world is a large place, but we each have our role in it. There are ultimately more similarities than differences that connect us to everyone around the world. We need more humanism and less nationalism, and one of the best ways to realize that is to interact with people outside the narrow scope of life experiences you have had.
SunLit: How does “Fiddler on the Roof of Africa” turn an idealistic dream of “saving the world” through the Peace Corps into a hard-won, but ultimately hopeful rethinking of what international development means?
Lowstuter: I started from the same place many would-be Peace Corps Volunteers do: brimming with romantic ideas about helping “the people of Ethiopia” and sketching out grand projects on the flight over, long before I’m even finished training. The early atmosphere is electric. Sleep is scarce, optimism is abundant, and the work ahead seems almost heroic rather than messy or uncertain.
Once on the ground in rural Ethiopia, that clean narrative quickly fractures. Life feels less like a linear success story and more like the opening line from Fiddler on the Roof: everyone is “a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck.” I used this image as the book’s governing metaphor for development work: precarious, improvised, and perilously exposed to forces beyond any volunteer’s control.
Instead of offering a straightforward Peace Corps memoir, I deliberately constructed the book as a hybrid: “equal parts literature review, introspection, scholarly analysis, confabulation, with a pinch of classic ethnocentrism.” That framing undermines the comforting fantasy that there is a universal, technocratic formula for “fixing” poverty or environmental degradation.
The book situates personal vignettes within large, often abstract conversations about international development — food aid, environmental conservation, cultural traditionalism, and development theory — but always drags those concepts back down to ground level through lived experience.
Through all this, I never let go of affection. I describe the Simien Mountains and the Ethiopian highlands not just as a worksite, but as “a second home and roof over my head.” My occasional harsh judgments are framed not as bitterness toward Ethiopia but as “disapproval of a loved one.” The people and landscapes I write about remain vivid, contradictory, and deeply human.
By the end, “failing successfully” in the Peace Corps does not mean accomplishing nothing; it means abandoning the fantasy of clean solutions and heroic saviors, and accepting that the most honest contributions are modest, relational, and sometimes invisible.
The book argues that international development, when viewed up close, is less about technical fixes and more about navigating shared fragility. In that sense, “Fiddler on the Roof of Africa” is both an insider’s critique of development practice and a love letter to a place that permanently altered my sense of home, comfort, and responsibility. It invites readers not to ask “Did the volunteer succeed?” but instead: “What does it mean to live ethically and attentively on someone else’s roof, knowing you might slip, and that you were never the only fiddler up there to begin with?”
SunLit: Tell us about your next project.
Lowstuter: I am doing more academic writing. 2026 will be a year of peer-reviewed journal articles for me. My primary research interests are related to personal growth and transformation. I have ideas for future books, but those will have to wait until after I complete my PhD research.
A few more quick items
Currently on your nightstand for recreational reading: “Originals” by Adam Grant
First book you remember really making an impression on you as a kid: “Swimmy” by Leo Lionni
Best writing advice you’ve ever received: Write buzzed, but edit sober.
Favorite fictional literary character: Darrow O’Lykos in the Red Rising Saga by Pierce Brown
Literary guilty pleasure (title or genre): Science Fiction
Digital, print or audio – favorite medium to consume literature: I will always prefer a physical paperback. I spend a lot of time on screens and holding a hardcopy is always more tactile and pleasant.
One book you’ve read multiple times: “The Giver” by Lois Lowry
Other than writing utensils, one thing you must have within reach when you write: A dog to keep me company
Best antidote for writer’s block: Read!
Most valuable beta reader: My wife