by Aaron Barlow
I shouted into his damp ear that we were Peace Corps Volunteers. He’d never heard of it. “We do development work.”
“A-h-h-h,” he yelled. “Bot you waste your time here.” His arm swept toward the dance floor. “Dese people...I luf dem...but you can not develop dem!” He swiveled his eyes toward my friends. “I vould like to meet zeez American. But dey afraid of me. I am Russian.”
His words, like a gauntlet flung to the ground, sent me to my feet. “Guys!” I announced, “This is Sergei. He’s a Russian sailor and he thinks you’re afraid of him.”
The Americans looked up, wiped beer foam from their mouths, laughed and yelled, “NOT!... I don’t think so...” and one by one shook Sergei’s hand. He beamed as they gathered around him, asked him about his ship, about Odessa. He asked them about their lives in the States, whether they had left spouses or children to work in this bewildering Peace Corps; if they really believed in peace; if they were rich. We ordered more beer, and went on to talk about the old Cold War and even African development.
The dance had worn me out and I soon waved to everyone and hobbled out on shaky legs to find a taxi. A bottle smashed somewhere behind me, heads bobbed up and down in the urinals but there, in a far corner of the Sports Bar, international diplomacy was blossoming like an orchid in the jungle.
Leita Kaldi Davis worked for the United Nations and UNESCO, for Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Harvard University. She worked with Roma (Gypsies) for fifteen years, became a Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal (1993-96) at the age of 55, then went to work for the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti for five years. She retired in Florida in 2002. She has written a memoir of Senegal, Roller Skating in the Desert, and is working on a memoir of Haiti.
One Last Party
Paula Zoromski
Getting there can often be quite the task—and can prove more important than the “there” there.
All I wanted to do was go to the party. I was more determined to attend the Fulani fête than an American teen was to drive into the woods for his first beer party.
Hot sand and thorns had hardened my feet. The wind knotted my hair around its barrette and the sun browned my skin. I longed for a hot shower; even for a cold one. Water was scarce.
My African friends told me I had become ugly. My skin was too dark, my body too thin. A steady diet of millet and milk, long walks searching for grazing camels, and living in the Sahel had trimmed my body fat.
I never could understand how events were scheduled. It had something to do with the moon, tribal chiefs, and hungry cows. I told Gado and Mariama, husband and wife, that I had enjoyed the previous party. I reminded them of the day we had watched old men in straw hats race their camels across the desert. I told them how captivated I was by the young men with their yellow painted faces dancing, singing, and flirting with girls.
Gado told me that it would be very far away from our place. I did not know what he meant. I didn’t know if it was far or he simply didn’t want to go.
After a week of hints, Mariama told me that she wanted to attend the festival. Gado would not refuse his wife. The next night, then, he told me to prepare my things. We needed to leave early in the morning.
Mariama and I were ready before the sun rose. I tightly rolled my sleeping bag and mat, setting the bedding on my camera bag. I wiped my face with cold water and put on my favorite black shirt, one embroidered with bright, multi-colored polka dots around the neck and sleeves. I tied a piece of black fabric around my waist, African skirt style.
The temperature was quickly rising, and Gado was moving slowly. We couldn’t make the trip without his navigation. Finally, as the sun began to cook our part of the desert, he was ready. It was 10:00. The hottest part of the day had begun.
Hassane asked if he could ride with me. This made me happy because he was a good camel driver. I had never learned how to prevent my camel, Mai Chin Abinci (One Who Eats), from tasting every leaf and blade of grass within his reach.
We rode for a long time. The sun was beating down on us. My entire body was covered with black fabric: only my eyes weren’t covered. I couldn’t bear to have even my eyes exposed. The sun and wind hurt, sucking moisture out of me. I couldn’t hold my body upright. I leaned against Hassane and the camel. I spotted a bush with a tiny shadow. I craved shade and begged Hassane to drop me off by the bush. I told him that he could pick me up tomorrow.
Hassane assured me that we were almost halfway there. We were almost at the market where we would eat, drink tea, and rest. Hassane wasn’t lying. Soon, we were in a small market town filled with traders.
Gado told us that we could get down and have some tea. I could not respond. My camel thudded its belly down in the sand. I couldn’t unclench my thighs. Hassane climbed off the camel and pulled my left arm and leg. My legs were stuck in a grip on my camel’s sides. I pushed on the hump with my hand, and rolled off my camel’s back onto the hot sand. I couldn’t get up. I curled up under my black fabric. Mariama vomited from the heat. Gado brewed a healing tea and made us drink. We rested in the shade and ate meat. When the sun went down, Gado walked us both around the market. Then, he convinced us to get back on our camels and ride to the party.
We rode in silence.
Once we had arrived, Gado set up our camp and brewed tea. He added sugar and herbs to give us strength. After tea, Mariama met relatives, Hassane and Gado joined the camel racers, and I walked around by myself.
I was too tired to take a photograph, but I was happy to see the boys dance.
Paula Zoromski served in the Peace Corps teaching math in the Central African Republic and Niger. She got the travel bug at a young age and went to summer school in Mexico, traveled the Sahara desert on camelback with nomads, hiked the hills of Honduras, and danced in the streets with pink hair at Carnival in Trinidad. Paula, a world traveler, photographer, and writer, passed away in 2009 at the age of 41 from breast cancer.
The Peace Corps in a War Zone
Tom Gallagher
From the beginning, Peace Corps Volunteers dealt with much more than peace.
My first hint of Eritrean revolution came while I was still in Peace Corps training at Georgetown University in Washington. A small newspaper article appeared on a bulletin board telling of a bomb that had gone off somewhere in Eritrea. A couple of months later, in Agordot, the Education Officer for western Eritrea, Sheik Hamid Mohammed el-Hadi, took us on a tour of the town. In front of the government office, he pointed to a small circle of stones that marked the spot where the bomb had exploded.
Hamid was the most dignified man I have ever met. His six-foot-tall frame, always covered in a perfectly ironed jalabia, seemed more to flow than to walk. While most of the townspeople wore their turbans in the loosely wrapped Sudanese style, Hamid wore his in the neater Middle Eastern/Indian style. The turban/wimple framed a serene, honest, handsome face. If his skin were 1 percent lighter he could have passed for a Hindu mystic. Although he was still not forty, he had already earned the title “Sheik,” which means an old man, or, as in Hamid’s case, a wise man.
His education was spotty, consisting of grammar school and a year or two at a teacher training college. He had taught himself by reading and spending as much time as he could in the company of the wiser teachers at the mosque. A few years before we met, the American Consulate General in Asmara had awarded him an exchange-visitor grant to spend thirty days on an educational tour of the U.S. He loved every minute of it and was tickled to death when he heard that the Peace Corps would be sending Americans to Agordot.
As Hamid came to trust us, he became our source of fascinating information about the war that was taking form all around us. A staunch man of peace, he was also sensitive to the legitimate grievances of the Muslim population. He would not actively join the revolution, but he enjoyed every story of their guerrilla strikes in the hinterland.
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sp; Eritreans, Hamid said, had never been happy with the Allies’ decision to give Eritrea to Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia. Disposing of the Axis’ only colonies in Africa—Libya, Italian Somaliland and Eritrea—was not a priority issue for the West in the late 1940s. Haile Selassie, who had considerable international popularity, wanted access to the sea for landlocked Ethiopia. Why not let him have it?
As Hamid explained it to me, the Eritreans of the 1950s saw themselves as more worldly than the Ethiopians. Their location on the sea had given them access to the outside world for centuries, while the Ethiopians, isolated as they were in their mountain kingdoms, had less contact with new ideas and inventions. The Eritrean experience with sixty years of Italian colonialism had left them with skills in mechanics, business and other aspects of modern economy that were unknown in Ethiopia. Eritrean Muslims were uncomfortable with a government that had a state religion that wasn’t theirs. Tigrinya speakers in both Tigre Province of Ethiopia and in Eritrea regarded Haile Selassie and his Amhara kinsmen as upstart usurpers of a throne that rightfully belonged in Tigre. Nonetheless, Eritrean Christians saw an affinity with the Amhara, with whom they shared a religion and a language group, if not the particular dialect. Many Eritreans made a genuine effort to make the new arrangement work.
One day as I was teaching a seventh-grade history class, we heard a muffled blast off in the distance. I didn’t pay it any heed until later in the day when people told me that a bomb had gone off at the Senior District Officer’s office. The bombers left a calling card in the form of an announcement over Radio Khartoum that this bomb had been set off by a group called the Eritrean Liberation Front. It was the first time that Hamid Idris and his friends had given their movement a name.
Only once in my first year in Agordot did the war come a bit too close. I had just turned the light out when an explosion went off just outside my bedroom window, just a few feet from my head, but with a wall in between me and the event. I heard a man screaming in pain and others running to his assistance. There was no door on that side of our house, and by the time Paul and I got some clothes on and got out to the street, the whole thing was over and he was being carried off to the veterinarian.
Our house was just across the street from the police station. Rebels had set a crude land mine in front of the station in the dark hoping to hit one of the officers. They succeeded, but this time the victim was a Muslim officer who was known for his fair treatment of people.
As I look back over my life from the perspective of sixty, I realize that that moment was the closest I have ever come to actual combat despite having been intensely, but peripherally, involved in nine or ten armed conflicts. It seems, my reaction should have been more profound. It wasn’t. I just went to sleep, and don’t remember thinking or talking about it much at all.
I spent the summer of 1963 in Asmara. By then, the Eritrean Liberation Front had staged several hit-and-run operations on targets in the highlands near the capital city, making the point that they were not just a small movement in the western lowlands. They had also begun to demonstrate some of the military panache for which they would later become noted.
I was sensitive to the non-political nature of the Peace Corps and did not want to embarrass the institution by taking sides. At the same time I wanted the people I lived and worked with to understand that I understood their predicament. It was a narrow tightrope to walk. Nonetheless, the fact that we did not preach did not mean that we did not present a point of view reflecting our American bias in favor of democracy.
As Eritrea and Ethiopia slipped ever closer to total war, the government’s efforts to stifle opposition grew. One day, I was teaching a sixth grade class in English. As usual, the only background noise was the sound of goats and camels being paraded down the street alongside the school, and the murmuring from the market. Suddenly there was a deafening and increasing roar that seemed to come from nowhere. Earthquake, I thought, although I had yet to experience an earthquake. As the roar turned into a shriek, the school went berserk. Kids were jumping out of windows to run…where? Animals panicked and so did everyone in the market. They all ran about senselessly, except for my class, which followed the teacher who hit the floor. The noise came from three F-85 fighter-bombers that flew directly over the school at a height of about ninety feet. They were supposed to frighten us from rebelling.
When it was over, my students and I arose from our ignominious positions, the kids all laughing. I knew that I was the subject of the humor, but I wasn’t sure why. I asked what was so funny, but, at first, got no reply except for more giggles. Finally Mohammed Ali Elmi, a Somali boy who was the brightest in the class, closed his eyes, stood rigidly at attention as if expecting the worst, and said: “But sir, we have never seen a white man become whiter before.” The Ethiopian Air Force had had its desired effect on me.
The F-85s, by the way, were donated by the people and government of the United States of America. As Americans, we were in a difficult spot in Eritrea. It was an American Secretary of State, after all, who had made the decision to give Eritrea to Ethiopia. Part of that deal was a promise from Haile Selassie that he would allow the U.S. to maintain a then-important communications base at Asmara. In return, the U.S. touted His Imperial Majesty as a serious defense against communism. To keep Russia at bay, we gave him every manner of military hardware that he asked for—and he was greedy.
Unfortunately, rather than discourage communism, our support for the feudal lord encouraged all those who hated him to look at communism as an alternative to the U.S.-backed regime. The Eritrean revolutionaries, along with those from Tigre, the Somali tribes, Amhara dissidents and others who opposed the Emperor, became communists and Maoists in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, mainly because they saw the U.S. as the enemy. We were constantly bombarded with questions from students as to how a democracy could go to such lengths to support a king.
The hardest one to answer was the student who asked me why the Ethiopian soldier wearing the donated American uniform and carrying a donated American M-1 rifle had killed his grandfather the night before. What could I say?
Through the years of struggle, I heard various rumors about the town of Agordot itself, most of which were catastrophic: in 1975, I heard that Ethiopian bombing of Eritrea had been so severe that there were “not two stones connected to one another west of Keren.” Fortunately, that wasn’t true. Paul Koprowski and I took a sentimental journey back to Agordot in 1997 when Eritrea was enjoying a post-independence boom. Almost every structure we remembered was still there, although the town is much larger now. Where once there were only 12 students in the eighth grade there is now a secondary school with 1,100 pupils. A paved road, lined with Russian-built tanks destroyed during the war, passes through and beyond Agordot as far as Barentu.
Tom Gallagher was the second Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Ethiopia, 1962-64) to enter the U.S. Foreign Service. Ten years later, he resigned in disgust over the Vietnam War and the Nixon foreign policy. He became a social worker, and for ten years directed the largest public outpatient mental health clinic in the U.S. in San Francisco. On a volunteer basis, he also served as Director of the Counseling Program at the Gay Community Services Center of Los Angeles, which was the largest gay-oriented mental health program anywhere. In 1994 he returned to the Foreign Service where, among other assignments, he served as the State Department’s Country Director for Eritrea, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Holding the Candle
Suzanne Meagher Owen
Things we hide are, elsewhere, open and celebrated.
My roommate Judy and I couldn’t seem to keep our Tunis apartment clean or deal with hanging laundry out on rooftop lines. However, we had generous enough Peace Corps allowances to afford the luxury of hiring a woman to come to our aid one morning a week. We found her in the classified ads and tried to be as sophisticated as possible interviewing her, a new role for both of us.
Aicha won our hearts with her broad smile, gold teeth, discrete tattoos, and flowing safsari, which she folded and left on a chair while working. After two workdays, she asked if she could come more frequently without charging more. We said we’d definitely pay her more, but she protested and said she was much happier being with us (and the other maids she met hanging laundry and sun-drying peppers and tomatoes on the baking hot, blindingly bright rooftop) than at home.
She had gradually filled us in on her life: two little kids and a tyrannical, underemployed husband.
After teaching our TEFL classes at Institut Bourguiba, Judy and I walked back to our apartment, picking up enough provisions at various shops along the way to make lunch for Aicha and ourselves. She was very tolerant of our cooking gaffes and always appreciated every bite. We felt good about giving her a balanced meal. Simple as it was, it was probably her main sustenance on workdays. Aicha taught us domestic Arabic, and she learned more French and some English from our animated exchanges.
After a year and a half, Aicha gave birth to a third child, a son. She hadn’t counted on having more children whom she couldn’t afford and didn’t seem to understand how it had happened. We gave her some linguistically challenged explanations. All three of us laughed loud and long. While she was still nursing, we escorted her to the birth control clinic, which was, I think, a Peace Corps project set up by the group which preceded us.
