by Aaron Barlow
No matter. I was young, and even Sierra Leone and Yonibana allowed me to indulge my explorer fantasies, which even then I knew were only that.
At the Christian Missionary Society bookstore in Freetown I bought a leather-bound journal and, in true explorer fashion, began recording my adventures and observations:
October 5, 1965: I went into the bush today with two other teachers and some students to cut sticks. After we finished, and as we were walking back, we talked of snakes. The most dangerous snake in Sierra Leone, they said, is a small, brown snake, about eight inches long. It is called anlofot and “the king of snakes,” for though small it will kill all others. It appears when the rains come; it has a nasty temper and doesn’t hesitate to attack. The snake charmers and snake jugglers will handle all varieties of snakes, even poisonous ones, but they will not touch this small, brown snake.
Tales such as these helped me to believe I was indeed living in the land of danger and adventure. And, perhaps morbidly, I turned to snakes to confirm this. After all, in the absence of lions, leopards, and rhinos, snakes were the most dangerous animals around.
Soon after hearing about the “king of snakes,” I was sitting on my porch when villagers spotted and killed one of these snakes that had been crossing the dirt street toward my house. Another time, while walking alone in the bush I came across a grass hut inside which a man had something suspended by string over a fire. Thinking he was smoking meat, I asked him what kind. He just looked at me strangely; then I saw that the “meat” was the head of an enormous rhinoceros-horned viper. The man was preparing magic, not a meal.
I took long hikes through a nearby forest preserve and always saw something unexpected.
May 1, 1966: In the trees overhead there was a large number of bee-eaters. A bird more gracefully designed I can’t imagine—slender curved bill, long forked tail—and quick and nimble in flight as well. As I sat there watching the bee-eaters, a movement in the bush beneath caught the corner of my eye. It was a green snake, at least four feet long, and it was moving in and out and along and around the vines. My first thought was that it might be a green mamba, and indeed I later confirmed it to be so. It glided quickly from branch to branch, its blue tongue flickering in and out. I watched it for some time with the glasses, and when it slid out of sight, I rose to look closer, but it had vanished. After seeing the snake, I no longer felt at ease sitting beneath the tree.
I was almost desperate to find in Sierra Leone and Yonibana what I expected from Africa. I took photos of grass-thatched huts, even if all the other houses in the village had metal roofs. I took a two-day backpack trip into a remote area and, with a native guide, climbed the 1,945-meter Bintimani, the highest point in West Africa west of Cameroon. I studied Arabic with a Muslim teacher from Senegal, drinking tea with him by candlelight, and I sat with a local Lebanese trader and drank sweet local coffee. At night, I listened to the beating of drums from the nearby forest where the Poro and Bundu secret societies met.
November 20, 1965: There is a Bundu bush about fifty yards from my house. Now that the dry season has come and the harvest is in, people have time to work with their secret societies. Last night the Bundu Society was performing initiation rites, so there was drumming and singing and clapping of hands all night long, wild merrymaking.
Despite the local people not being Masai, I fell in love with them, especially with their humor. I liked and enjoyed my students at the secondary school and, while I knew I wasn’t exactly Albert Schweitzer, I nonetheless felt I was fulfilling the Peace Corps mission of fostering international understanding. At night, by the light of an oil lantern, I sat with African schoolboys and teachers on my porch, and together we laughed and told stories and kidded one another, while on the porch of the house across the street tiny children sang native songs.
November 29, 1965: This evening, some schoolboys came by the house and asked me to point out some constellations; they needed to see some for a science class assignment. One question led to another, and soon a student asked me about thunder. I told him what science says it is; they, having listened to my version, began telling me theirs. Here in Africa, fear takes many forms, and there are few accidents: every mischance results from some spirit, witch, devil, or even someone having special power. Here in Yonibana there was a woman who was able to cry the thunder. If a thief were about the town, she would swear the thunder and swear as well to the people that soon the thief would be found out. Sure enough, within a week a mighty crack of thunder would be heard, even if the sky was completely clear of clouds, and the thief would be struck dead, even if he was in a house.
The Africa of Yonibana was good, at least most of the time. Outside the village, Africa wasn’t so good. I made journeys at least once a month to the capital city for supplies and to connect with other PCVs. They tended to live together in compounds. Instead of schoolboys, they were waited upon by houseboys, servants. The youths they taught were often arrogant and cheeky. The city was noisy, crowded, and filthy. Theft was a pervasive problem. My fellow PCVs certainly weren’t having any of the African adventures I was having, though we did share adventures as we traveled around Sierra Leone together: climbing the Bintimani, visiting the remote beach at Shenge where rusting cannons lay on the beach, and traveling to the diamond area of Kono, where a local diamond trader allowed us to hold uncut diamonds acquired illegally. We drank palm wine and fiery omole.
As our two-year assignments wore on and exoticism waned, we began feasting upon tales of just how delightfully dysfunctional Sierra Leone was. Every expatriate had a favorite WAWA (West Africa Wins Again) story.
March 5, 1967: I was anxious to go to Magburaka because Yonibana is boredom’s native home. Also I was looking forward to listening to Kent’s running diatribe against Sierra Leone. He keeps sane here because 1) he drinks, and 2) he openly ridicules this country he can’t stand.
Sierra Leone went from being ersatz National Geographic to something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. The Freetown newspaper story of the body found missing most of its internal organs had the police quoted as saying, “We have not ruled out foul play.” The prime minister, the Sierra Leoneans called Toadface. A country as awkward and inexperienced as any adolescent, stumbling and bumbling. Even the military coup was comic opera. Who could take seriously soldiers who rode around in lorries painted with mottoes such as: Help us O God, Black Zorro Again, and Shanghai Joe?
The second school year ended, and I and my fellow PCVs departed. After I’d loaded my belongings into the local missionary’s truck and we were driving away from Yonibana, I looked back at my home of two years and the schoolboys with whom I’d shared it—and I wept.
That was forty years ago. The country no longer is comic opera but dark tragedy. Coups devolved into civil war and then into anarchy. Bands of teenage brigands, ragged but heavily armed, roamed the countryside pillaging, raping, murdering, and—their special signature brand of savagery—severing victims’ arms and legs with machetes. Most foreigners departed, including the Peace Corps; the government collapsed. While the civil war and anarchy finally have ended and foreigners are beginning to return, Sierra Leone, despite significant natural resources, has remained the nadir of global economies; the 2007 United Nation’s Human Development Index of nations ranked Sierra Leone at the bottom.
The Sierra Leone I experienced, the Sierra Leone that disappointed me for not being Africa, was indeed Africa, the real Africa, of ordinary people facing disease and inadequate health care, pervasive corruption, food shortages, and lack of opportunities. What most Americans see—the animals, the photogenic tribesmen, even the exotic snakes—are just an Africanized version of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.
I identified the “king of snakes” through a field guide as a night adder, Genus Causus: “Although this snake is poisonous, its venom is not very potent and causes mainly pain and swelling. There are no recorded deaths caused by this snake.” De
ath is caused by diseases and people.
With all that has happened to Sierra Leone in the forty years since we were young together, I wonder: Was it all just a fantasy? If my snake adventures were just youthful fancies, what of my hopes of making a difference? Were they, too, just fantasies? Perhaps.
Yet without fantasies—and the idealism and optimism they engender—I and countless other young Americans would not have left home for places like Yonibana—and we needed to go there, if only to encounter the real Africa. And there are still young Africans who need to stop by these Americans’ verandas in the evening and together tell stories and kid each other and talk about the world not only as it is but also as we wish it to be.
Bob Hixson Julyan has taken a different course than the country in which he served from 1965-67. Unlike Sierra Leone, he changed his name, from Hixson to Julyan, and he gave up his independence when he married his wife, Mary, and began a family. He is the author of several books about history, geography, and outdoor recreation. He and Mary now live in New Mexico, far removed from equatorial Africa, where dangerous snakes have rattles on their tails.
Breakfast
Jed Brody
What is it they say about a good breakfast being the most important meal of the day?
My alarm goes off at six, but roosters are already crowing. They’ve been crowing for three hours; I’ve learned to sleep through it. I open the metal-slat windows. Twenty minutes ago, someone at the mosque ascended to call the faithful to prayer; this, I haven’t learned to sleep through.
Blinking sweat from my eyes, I glance at the thermometer: 33 degrees Celsius. I try not to think about what this means in Fahrenheit. I delay getting dressed, packing my bag with lesson plans and a bright yellow meter stick. I place my stubs of colored chalk in my shirt pocket before putting it on just for that extra second of relative coolness.
Outside, motorcycle exhaust and crinkled brown stalks contribute to the fragrance of the morning.
I ride my bicycle two blocks, to have breakfast outside the school. I pass the old man I pass every morning. He’s riding a bike that might be older than he is; he’s wearing the kind of cap Oliver Twist wore. He shifts his weight from side to side as he pedals, the folds of his robe flowing like tall grasses. I wonder where he’s going. Again I don’t ask.
I smell mango peels drying when I reach the women selling food. I’m early; one woman hasn’t finished setting up. Her small son, no more than eight, is carrying a long wooden bench on his head. He’s having a little trouble with balance. He looks like a seesaw that got up and walked away.
I hear forks scraping metal plates. I lean my bike against the fence and walk around the chickens pecking at fallen rice; some are sprayed hot pink so their owners can identify them. Several students are standing together and eating. “Do like me!” they say, extending their plates in a symbolic offer to share what they have. “Merci! Bon appetit!” I reply.
I approach the beans and rice table. Eight or nine students jostle, waving their empty plates in the face of the woman who serves them. Her head is ornamented with a gauze-like black-and-orange scarf and glittering balls of sweat. Her outfit, yellow and brick-red, depicts baby chicks and eggs. “Bonjour, Yovo,” she says affectionately.” “Yovo” means “foreigner.” “Bonjour, Mama,” I answer.
Shoving aside protesting students, she selects a plate for me. She reaches for the mountain of cooked rice rising out of a metal basin. As her metal scoop scrapes away a plateful, steam gushes. She ladles on some chickpea-like beans, the beans that I’m going to eat forever in the afterlife, if I’m good and kind. Finally, she dips her spoon into the sauce, past the red oily superficial layer on which green hot peppers float, through murky regions dense with mashed tomatoes, until at last she reaches the source of flavor.
When I finish, I lower my plate into a sudsy bucket; a young girl scrubs it immediately. As I hurry toward the classroom, I prepare for the lesson I’m about to give.
Jed Brody was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Benin from 1996-98. He teaches physics at Emory University. He has not had a driver’s license since 1995.
Daily Life
Kathleen Moore
It’s in the small things that we learn the most.
In January 1965, the Peace Corps sent me to Emdeber, an isolated village in the highlands of Ethiopia. The people there are called sabat bet Guragi, the seven houses of Guragi. Just living there from moment to moment took a concentrated effort. Drinking a glass of water, for example, was not something I did hastily or without thinking. I held the glass under the tiny spigot of the water filter while it slowly filled with liquid, the color ranging from pale orange to deep red depending on how long it had been since the filter was new.
While the sediment in the water settled, I looked out the back door at the hills in the distance, wondering how to teach the passive voice, say, to my ninth-grade English class. Finally, I sipped the water slowly so as not to stir up the little pile on the bottom of the glass. When I got close to it, I poured the remaining drops on a struggling carrot plant.
Everything was connected: the garden, the students, the river, and drinking a glass of water. I became accustomed to the complex routines of living in that grass house and found I did not want a life that would require less of me.
I awoke in the morning to the crowing of a rooster held captive in my outhouse so the hyenas wouldn’t get him, but I didn’t move from my flea-infested mattress until I heard the rhythmic thud, thud, thud of coffee beans pounded in a wooden mortar, a soft, comforting sound, a morning sound. It meant that Demaketch, my landlord’s daughter, would soon bring me good, strong coffee.
She tried to sneak in with the coffee and slip out like a shadow. I wondered what she thought of me. She knew me more intimately than anyone; she washed my clothes in the river, pounding them on the rocks and drying them in the bright sun to make them clean again after the red dust of Emdeber had crept in and even dyed my skin red. She cooked lentil stew for me Monday through Friday; I never ate it all because I knew she would eat what was left when she came to wash the dishes.
On Saturdays, she cleaned my house and put a new coat of cow dung and water on the floor. I wouldn’t come home until the smell was gone, so she had lots of time to look through my books, stare at photos tacked on the wall, examine my wardrobe and marvel at my kitchen utensils, even slip a little sugar into her pocket. It was Demaketch who brought me the eucalyptus branch to put in the sugar when I found ants in it. Next day, they were gone.
I often got to school after the students had said the Lord’s Prayer, just in time to hear the last refrains of the national anthem, “Ethiopia, Hoy!” It reminded me of my school days when we prayed every morning and said the Pledge of Allegiance, “one nation, under God,” putting patriotism right up there with godliness.
First through seventh-grade classes were in rooms made from thin eucalyptus trees with a half-hearted attempt to fill in the cracks with mud. Forty to fifty students squeezed into each. The only light came from a small square cut in the wall that passed as a window and from the doorway. There was no door. There were no desks, just benches, worn so smooth that the students’ skinny bottoms slid off. Most of them didn’t have paper or books or pencils. I talked and they repeated. I wrote a few words on our tiny blackboard, passed out scraps of paper and stubs of pencils, and they got on their knees behind the benches, put the paper on the bench and copied my words. I cried after each class for the first week.
Then I got over it.
Watching a child play with a homemade toy car—a piece of wood to which he had loosely nailed four bottle caps as wheels that rattled like those on the Land Rovers that occasionally came to Emdeber—it dawned on me that there were no wheels in Emdeber other than those that came attached to vehicles and then left with them again. There were no carts, no wagons, no pulleys, no bicycles. Nothing rolled. There were only feet and bac
ks and hips. Women and children and donkeys carried everything from babies to stacks of firewood to clay jars heavy with water.
The Guragi way of life had not changed over the centuries. In larger cities there were hospitals and high schools, post offices and telephones, electricity and foreigners; influences that, like thin cracks in an antique Chinese vase, doomed it to break apart from the pressure of change. Emdeber had no cracks except for us, the Peace Corps Volunteers. Emdeber’s language, food, customs, beliefs, and social structure were yet untouched, and we were privileged to live in that secluded time capsule for two years.
How is it possible to live in a place so different from what you have known that you might as well be on the moon? The truth is that place doesn’t matter. The truth is that language doesn’t matter. The truth is that running water and electricity don’t matter.
If I had had running water, I would not have known Ato Tesfaye, the man with a donkey who brought me two metal cans full of spring water each week. I would not have known when his baby daughter died. I would not have walked behind his family to the cemetery, would not have shared the grief of a mother who had had four babies, buried two, and was no older than I.
If I had had refrigeration and could have bought dead chickens, then my boys would not have had to put the rooster from Friday’s market in my outhouse to keep it from being eaten by hyenas. Then I would not have been aware of the hyenas nor understood their part in the grand scheme of things. I do not like hyenas. They are ugly and make horrible sounds. But there are predators in this world, and I needed to learn how to live with them and not be captured and eaten by them. I needed to know, too, that there is safety and protection from these creatures and, when it is offered to me, I can accept it and share it.
