by Aaron Barlow
It is the people, the experiences, and the adventures that stay with me.
At the operational and social level in Macenta, there was a small, diverse, international group of interesting people. There was a team of Chinese who were introducing cultivation, harvesting and processing of tea, some Russians working in forestry and the educational system, several Lebanese merchants, a U.S. missionary couple, and some French of various professions. The working-class Guineans didn’t initially make distinctions as to who we all were.
We were leaving the Regional Agricultural Office one day and a young Guinean rushed out of the building to catch us, indicating that we had some mail. He gave it to us, and it was all in Chinese. We must have looked a little confused, and he said with some confusion, “You are Chinese, aren’t you?”
Islam and Christianity were both present, especially in the cities and towns. The traditional practices and beliefs were strong, especially in rural villages. Talk about it always brought up witchcraft. Some of the PCVs, including me, were prone toward ridiculing it. One day, I fell into that with the American missionary, and he interrupted me. He said that I should always respect it. I asked what that meant. Did he have any details about it being real? He simply stated again what he had said. Always respect it.
In Macenta, the rainy season was ten months long with several rains even in the two-month dry season. The height of the rainy season was constant showers throughout the day and night.
The rainforest is a paradise of nature. I lived several kilometers outside of Macenta on an old French farm/research station in the rainforest. We lived with nature. Mosquitoes, lizards, and sometimes army ants were a given. Seeing the army ants was impressive. Their march was not an hour or even a half-day affair. It went on for several days. In difficult spots, some of the ants would hold their bodies together to form a bridge that the others could walk over.
Shortly after my arrival in Macenta, a hunter showed up at the door. He wanted to sell me a python skin. It was fresh and bloody. Did I need a python skin? Maybe I’ll never see another one. Maybe, the hunter is right—they are hardly ever to be found. So, I bought it. I cured it over time by salting and washing. It stank. Finally I rolled it up and put it in a box. I unpacked it a few years ago. It looks good, but what do I do with it?
Once, a fellow PCV excused himself from the evening conversation, indicating that he was headed for a shower and bed. A few moments later he came back in, saying there was a snake in the shower. I would have thought it a practical joke, except his voice was quivering. His face was absolutely white. Yes, there was a snake in the shower.
The drain from the shower was a pipe through the floor and then through the foundation wall. Water then spilled onto the ground and the hillside. We must have taken covers off both the shower drain and the outside drainpipe. The snake had come in through the pipe. Many of the snakes are poisonous, so we normally minimized our risks. Rather than getting it back to nature, we did it in.
A Peace Corps Volunteer (a teacher) in Macenta decided to get a monkey as a pet. It wasn’t that nice a pet, but he liked the monkey. He kept it outside in a hut off the ground in which it could spend the night. It was also on a long cord so that it could move about. At one point the monkey and a dog got into a fight. The monkey had some wounds. The Volunteer cared for his pet as a dedicated owner does. But the monkey’s health deteriorated. After several weeks, the monkey was in bad shape. We took a blood sample and sent it off for testing. The monkey had rabies from the fight with the dog. We, especially the other Volunteer, were fearful about our exposure to the rabies. All went O.K. for us. But the monkey was put to sleep.
There were also chimpanzees in Guinea. A PCV teacher decided that her pet should be a chimp. One day another Volunteer and I were traveling through her town and saw the little beast. Being with that thing for an hour or so was eerie. It was not in a cage or on a leash; it lived in the house. It seemed clear to me that, for the chimp, we were all one family. For me, it was an uneasy feeling. The Peace Corps staff learned of her pet and immediately insisted that for health reasons, she find a new home for the chimp.
A few weeks after a staff visit and collection of samples for medical tests, I got a telegraph message that I was to come to Conakry. A preliminary test for a water-borne disease was positive. I protested a bit. They were insistent. I was to come by plane.
I made arrangements. On departure day, a rainstorm was in the making. At the airport, the pilot ordered us immediately on the plane so he could take off before the storm hit. We got to the end of the runway, but a wind gust blew the plane sideways. He straightened it out; another gust hit and again blew us sideways. He taxied back, and we sat in the plane, hot and humid, until we could finally take off. It was still stormy. He stayed below the clouds, which meant that he also had to do some maneuvering to get through the mountains.
We had flown for a while, and then we turned left for a few minutes, then right, and then left again. A man in traditional dress looked out the window and then started seriously studying things. Talking out loud to himself, he said in frustration and disbelief, “We’re in Mali, we’re in Mali!” A co-pilot came walking through the plane and got a map. Soon after that, we turned a hard right and flew until we hit the Niger River. We were in Mali. We then flew up the river to Kankan. The medical tests were negative.
Larry W. Harms is a retired Foreign Service Officer, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) with extensive experience in Africa and Haiti. He served in the Peace Corps in Guinea from 1963-65, where he and other PCVs introduced an improved poultry breed, upgraded poultry feed for increased production, reinvigorated a large government-run vegetable garden, and carried out field training of students in the regional secondary school.
A Toubac in the Gloaming
E.T. Stafne
Sometimes the cultural barriers just do not get broken, no matter what we do.
My experiences in northern Senegal varied from the sublime to the insane, often within the same day. Quite often I think of those times that seemed impossibly embarrassing and try to make sense of them, even many years later. Most of the strangest events occurred early in my Peace Corps service, when I spoke little Toucoulor and understood even less of Senegalese culture. Some of these still haunt me; I know I will never fully understand what happened.
I kept a daily journal during my service, as many Volunteers did. Most of it was mundane, but what I really wanted was a memory-jogging device for later in life. Sometimes I will send a certain meaningful passage to another RPCV that served with me, but that is becoming less frequent as time marches on. Since my return to the States in 1996, the only other person to read the entire journal was my wife; the majority of it just isn’t that interesting. However, some days, like Tuesday, June 14, 1994, are.
My village was Nguidjilogne, not too large, but it had a market that made it a crossroads right on the banks of the Senegal River. Numerous small villages lined the river and considered Nguidjilogne a center of commerce, so there were, in essence, no strangers from Nguidjilogne. Every village, no matter how small, knew of Nguidjilogne and its residents. Occasionally, soccer matches between Nguidjilogne and another village would be coordinated, and surprisingly large numbers of villagers would attend. It was in the gloaming of that June day when I attended a soccer match that turned into one of those inexplicable, memorable events.
In my early days, I had gotten to know the schoolteachers in the village. They spoke varying degrees of English and my French was tolerable, so we could communicate easily. It was after 5 p.m. when they invited me to attend the soccer match at a neighboring village. We walked, en masse, to the soccer pitch behind the mud-brick schoolhouse. The gathered crowd numbered in the hundreds. It was still very hot, but the sun was slowly setting, making it bearable. I took my place on the sidelines to watch the match with all the interest I could muster. At that time everythin
g was still new to me: the swirling sand, the smell of dead animal carcasses, and the shared existence of people who lived in that desolation.
Not long after the match started, it became apparent that our team was overmatched, but it was all played out in fun.
When the match ended, players from both sides gathered on the pitch, as did the observers. Among them was a horde of children, who seemed in be in a state of agitation. They were loud and boisterous.
And, like the colors on a soccer ball, the interface between black and white was about to become razor thin.
I, of course, was the only white face for miles, and judging by the reaction of the children, the only one they had seen in quite some time. As a group, they gathered behind me and began to chant in unison the obligatory white man descriptor, “Toubac, Toubac.” The school teachers did little to quash the chanting, although later they claimed to be embarrassed by it.
We marched to the edge of town with darkness encroaching, followed by almost one hundred children chanting for the white man. In retrospect, I believe it provided some entertainment for the villagers and, in that sense it is hard to begrudge them that. So, if it had ended there as I walked off toward Nguidjilogne, I probably would never have given it a second thought.
But it didn’t end there.
I turned to the crowd one last time, in a daze, to soak it all in. The black faces with white pearls for teeth, all moving in slow motion shouting and pointing at me. While I stood there captivated and unable to process that strangeness before me, the horde of children slowly parted and a girl came toward me, urged on by the masses. She lacked the usual dark pigmentation in her skin and had white hair. She wasn’t completely white, but that mattered little to the vocal group behind her. They pushed her up in front of me, all along relentlessly chanting, “Toubac, Toubac.” She uncomfortably stuck out her hand to me and said, “Toubac.”
At that point nothing made sense anymore. What was I doing here in the middle of the Sahel surrounded by an African mob? I did the only thing I could—I shook her hand and tried to put on a smile. When our hands parted she turned around and was swallowed up by the crowd. It was then they all broke out into hysterical laughter. I turned my back to them and started walking back to my village.
I couldn’t make any sense of it then and still can’t today. Sometimes things get a little bizarre in the gloaming.
E.T. Stafne served in Senegal from 1994-1996. He wrote a novel shaped from his experiences in Senegal called The Wretch Unsung. He considers his Peace Corps service one of the most formative, and odd, experiences of his life.
Family Affair
Arne Vanderburg
Peace Corps all in the family? It certainly can bring one together.
At last count there were seven: seven of us brothers, sisters, sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, nephews, sons, wives, ex-wives, ex-husbands who, gathered at any one time in a room, usually find old and even new Peace Corps experiences from Ghana, Nigeria, Turkmenistan, Malawi, El Salvador, Paraguay, and Belize dropping into our extended family ramblings.
Some of us couldn’t get enough. We came back for a second dose of whatever version of Peace Corps was playing in the next forty years…some for a third, fourth…even a fifth dose. As PCVs we were teachers, archaeologists, photographers, school builders, community organizers, department chairs, librarians, TV performers, beekeepers, farmers, tree planters, public speakers and a myriad other things that, had we stayed home we would never have been, smelled, tasted, or learned in those two or three short years. We learned what it meant to be outsiders and honored and not-so-honored guests as collectively we brushed up against dozens of cultures and hundreds…thousands…of different beliefs, traditions, and subtle little behaviors to which we were totally oblivious, but that could make or break a friendship—like when you casually waved at someone on the other side of the street carrying a huge load and they dropped everything and came running to see why you had called them, or you held up your thumb to hitch a ride and found out you’d just flipped someone off, or you smelled a bowl of soup and offended the cook.
We learned that when offered a drink on some special occasion, don’t forget to dribble a bit of it onto the ground, and make sure you never offer someone food with your left hand, and when people come to visit give them something to drink as they come in or they will think you don’t want them to visit, and if you are the only person with a radio or tape recorder in the village, play it loud enough for everyone to hear or they will think that you think you are better than they if you play it just loud enough so that only you could hear it.
An easy answer might be that four of us joined Peace Corps because, once the first one did in 1964, it just seemed natural that the next would and then the next. But the simplicity of that belies the streak of independence that seemed to be the one thing we all had in common. So, in trying to put reason to our opting to leave friends, family, and familiarity for two or more years, five of us might say it had to do with a young President who gave an idealistic speech and got us wondering what we could do for our country or even if our country would actually let us do something for it. Some of us had already been asked to do something else for our country and though we were young and filled with a spirit of adventure…nightly network news photos of body bags or our trusted allies blowing the brains out of suspected enemies at point blank range encouraged us to seek our tropical adventures elsewhere…perhaps even in places where we would be tolerated if not down right welcomed.
In a pre-draft lottery age, Peace Corps promised at least a deferred tour of military duty. Still, even without that hanging over the male heads amongst us in those early years, my guess is we still would have been caught in the centrifugal pull that so many of us felt…a sense of adventure fulfilling youthful dreams of far-off lands and unknown places, made doubly seductive by the hope we would actually be doing something useful for ourselves, our country, and the people with whom we’d be living.
Once there—wherever there was—most of us found out that much more was expected of us than we had planned on…or hoped for. The teachers of us became the chairs of our science or English or math or whatever departments. If you had performed in a high school play, you ended up directing your schools’ dramatic presentations. One of us who dabbled in amateur archaeology was dropped altogether as a teacher at the end of his three months of training and spent three years cataloging priceless artifacts, publishing in a respected journal. Another, who had a passion for photography, spent a summer crawling around in the West African bush taking wildlife photos for a fledgling wildlife preserve hoping to tap into a growing tourist market. Nearly all of us found ourselves writing grants to access monies and organizing labor for the construction of schools and community latrines, while others built beehives and ran trainings on apiculture or having healthy babies or performed American folk songs on national TV, which admittedly at the time amounted to some 200 televisions.
And while at times it actually felt like the hardest job you’ll ever love, one of the hardest parts of the job at first seemed to be the best…filling in the downtime in our jobs…the excessive surprise, unscheduled, day upon day upon week of unplanned time off due to holidays and celebrations. We learned quickly what it meant to be an honorific society, where independence day was followed by Liberation Day and by Christmas and New Year’s and Hero’s Day and the start, and end, of Ramadan and if in a former British colony, Boxing Day.
Having left the comfort of living amongst family and friends who naturally occupied the spaces of our lives, we were now confronted with the necessity of contriving ways to fill those gaps. Many of us learned that, while we humans are a curious lot, always searching out the new, we like to do this from a familiar perspective, surrounded by or at least able to be surrounded by ideas, images and experiences with which we can touch base if we so feel the need.
The reality of our new lives was in fac
t an ideal many of us strived for: to be in an isolated, rural setting solely dependent on our wits and the good will of locals for whatever satisfaction the experience could provide. Those of us who arrived in the first few years of Peace Corps did so not only amidst high hopes and expectations, but also with a large trunk filled with what seemed like more books than were in my high school library. What felt at the time like manna falling from heaven, in retrospect should have been viewed as a warning…something to the effect that we were hereby being put on notice that we will have huge amounts of time when we will have absolutely nothing planned and or needing to be done and therefore will be left with the only alternatives available which are…do nothing, find something to do…or read. So we read, and when we had finished the books in our own book locker we traded books with those who had book lockers different from ours.
We visited neighbors, studied languages, started clubs, made gardens and tapped in as deeply as possible to local culture…some of us spending long nights recording the sounds of traditional dances and ceremonies while partaking freely in the festivities. And after that…we read for days and for weekends at times.
Peace Corps, even in the confused wisdom of its early years did its best to prepare us for these realities…for a job for which some government couldn’t find a local warm body and for a lifestyle that had nothing in common with the one we had left…nothing. We wondered how Peace Corps came up with the idea of sending us to classes up on West Broadway, at Barnard College where bizarre psychiatrists ran group sessions that reduced hopeful PCVs to tears by beating into us how emotionally unprepared we were for life in Nigeria or Ghana or wherever, as Peace Corps Volunteers. And we questioned the wisdom of the weekly posting, after dinner on Thursday evenings, of those who were not being invited to do the hardest job they would ever love or the large group sessions where we were told to complete questionnaires asking us to name those amongst our group whom we thought might be the best or the worst PCVs. (This last activity we eventually gleefully walked out on, en masse.)
