Peace Corps Writers Blog

Peace Corps Was

Peace Corps was two years of my young life, half my life ago. A time of long blonde braids, still-chubby cheeks, a hardy body withstanding weeks of tummy rumbles, pinkened skin before sunscreen became de rigueur. Quick reflexes, and a back hardened to floor sleeping. Easy laughs.
           Peace Corps was unexpected, and unplanned for, fun. Many times, it just happened — someone arrives descending feet-first from the louage, at the doorstep, or someone shows up at a beach disco. Instant friends, mix and stir. A prepackaged community, insurance premium against the loneliness of the Sahelian plains.
           Peace Corps was earnestness. Adults used the word altruistic. We tried to do good, and reached for change, big change — winds of change, like the sandstorm Khamseen winds. After supper, I concentrated hard on my lesson plans — taking each one seriously, debating its worthiness with roommates, substituting a different reading passage, reciting lines aloud in preparation by candlelight.
           Peace Corps was giddy love, or illusions of it (mirages, salt puddles shimmering as goats wander by), usually across cultures. American slept with Italian, American went with Tunisian, French were waiting in the wings, we tried them all. Anyone was possible and people were buff and looking good. I had three foreign boyfriends in two years. Two overlapped; it was heady and flattering and confusing stuff.
           Peace Corps was plump olives and squishy dates and juicy tangerines, Mediterranean food of colors and hot stings, pits and juices, warm tomatoes and lemons, big bread you ripped, layers of things, and the convivial brik à l’oeuf. I learned to eat bread, not drink water, when food is too spicy.
           Peace Corps was about men. Afterwards, I explained my hypersensitivity away, saying I had been a libber, fresh from a women-only ivy college — headstrong, principled, and consequently, immediately indignant. I stayed mad at Tunsis for both two years. There were always eyes, always leers, always hands, always them. I wonder why I am still single, 30 years on. I still feel eyes.
           Peace Corps was simple rooms. Here was the smoothness of the blue/white striped blanket on my double mattress, here was a pillow. No more, no less. There was a small icon sitting on a plank serving as a tabletop. Here were a few of my things puddled on the floor or on boards and bricks against the wall. There was a round low wooden table set between two thin floor mattresses as a living room. Simple was good.
           Peace Corps was marriages. Twosomes separated off and got hitched; maybe five or six couples. I was floored; so young? Some of our women stayed there in-country. The nurse married the Arabic teacher. Haffouz married Kairouan. Tunis Bourguiba married Tunis Bourguiba and are still together. They said PC was hard on marriages. Was it really?
           Peace Corps was a slower time. Each day was a bookmark, in hammocks, sofas, on floors. There was lots to write in journals and diaries. Lots, and nothing, happened each day.
           Peace Corps was Aimée’s roof-top apartment in Sousse — a weekend refuge. The pall of ocean humidity hung like sheets through the white-washed couple of tiny rooms. I fasted up there for three days, but gave up and went downstairs to the beach.
           Peace Corps was Arabic, with a vengeance (see Men, above). Heaves and swallows, gutteral gasps an throaty coughs, vowels from bowels, ballistic combinations of consonants, straining lips, mouth, tongue, stomach, throat. “Bara idfin rowhic high,” I hissed on the busses. Kelb came in very handy in the souks. I get calls even now for Iraq, for Oman — “Titkallim il-Arabi?”
      Peace Corps was hammems, vaguely fungoid and slick, creepy with old women blobbing on top of each other, slamming hands into backs, scraping camel mitts over each others’ arms and legs, like frogs, squatting in running water, hot drops clinging to blue tiled walls, chipped and broken, steam everywhere. Leering eyes, private parts everywhere. I was bait, marriageable bait, for these crones, and they trolled —
           Peace Corps was being looked at. Jane Kuntz said she turned it off, walking as if with clappers and earplugs, oblivious. But my antenna quivered expectantly, dreading it, hating it, ready for it. Always noticed, under scrutiny, appraised like store goods or bartered horses. Comments on the bus, from the café on the corner, from within holes of souk shops, around from the teacher’s room. On display, in the public eye for two whole years. I can’t shake it all these years later.
           Peace Corps was the welcome mat over the threshold into a career — a teaching career — and seemed an answer for me. It would do for another decade.
           Peace Corps was finding Americana relief together on small R&Rs of chocolate chip cookies and outdated Time magazines and NY Times crossword puzzles, shared — English, our food, our ways, references only we knew, banana bread. We would sit on each other’s mattresses and reveal pasts, brief though they still were.
           Peace Corps was a stand-alone time, a dyad of years wrapped up in plastic and stored on the shelf. A 3-day repeat visit in 1981 rendered no further meaning; was too fast and people looked too different. A few letters over the years, a Saturday spent reorganizing slides, faded prints in albums, mainly of goofy 23 year olds in goofy poses. (I am smiling in every one of those pictures, I think.) Recent random emails, now a reunion 26 years on. Are the years atrophied, petrified, or are they resuscitable?
           Peace Corps was a gallery of types I can detail even now, down to the freckle, the lip mole, the calf shape, the chuckle, the broodiness, the breastbones, the contact lens, the frowns, the chubby bodies, their clothes, red toenails. I know their names by heart – after all, he was the first Robbie I knew, she was the first Melinda, the other one the first of many Franks I’ve known. First Lily, first Ken, first Edith — and every Edith I’ve met since then has made me think of that Edith. They will remember me as Peggy, I think, even though I matured long into Peg.
           Peace Corps was three lofty goals; but the third one is best. Return home and share what you learned. We talk fast and remember, and hope Peace Corps never goes belly-up. We wear the stripes.
           And Peace Corps was cliques — we remember them: the pack of future dropouts who hung unhappily together during training, the in-crowd in Sousse, the well-diggers, the nurses, the last-year veterans like the Funks (they knew so much), the Tunis gang, the twos and threes stuck together. There is a black and white photo of all of us that first summer, a family of 50 (missing only Sweater Man), backed up against a crumbly schoolyard wall. I made them my friends, one by one, two by two. A webbed ball of close people I have somehow let bounce away from me. Have they all reunited in pairs at grad school, making dates in their late 40s, eating cous-cous together in Houston or DC? Have they gotten together, hauling out photo albums over beers in apartments? Where have I been?

Peg Clement (Tunisia 1975–77) works now at the State University of New York in Albany, NY on democracy and governance projects in developing countries, but following her Peace Corps tour lived in six African countries for fifteen years. Her creative non-fiction has been published on-line at the expatriate website, Tales from a Small Planet and recently in Worldview Magazine. She wrote “Peace Corps Was” in anticipation of her group’s first reunion last August in Washington DC. There were fifty Trainees in her group and they trained in in northwestern Tunisia, high in the Atlas Mountains in a village called Ain Draham. She read her recollections to the group on the banks of the Potomac.

This essay won Peace Corps Writers' 2004 Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award.

The Things I Gave Her

The first thing I gave Genevieve was a pile of my clothes to wash. The shirts and trousers were red with dust from day-long bus rides and bike rides, and from nine weeks of my swirl-and-rinse washing. I gave her my full attention as she showed me how to wash thoroughly, with merciless, strong arms, two basins of water and a small bar of soap. She returned my clothes to their normal color and left them smelling only of wind.
           Once I had more than just a mug to eat out of, once I cleaned the lizard poop off my bed and chased the scream-sized flat spiders from behind the kitchen shelves, I gave Genevieve my trust. She maneuvered me down the rutted, dusty path of Daffiama’s Sunday market, around people talking limply in the sun, past men who called to me with exaggerated smiles, and past adolescent girls in satin Church dresses with torn lace who watched me out of quickly guarded eyes. She guided me past table after shaded, rotting-wood table covered with small pyramids of tomatoes, onions, soap, dried fish. She showed me the best okra, and made jokes to escape the toothless old women who pestered me to give them my earrings. When she pulled a bench into the shade so we could share a pot of pito to quench our thirst, I was relieved.
           I gave her my curiosity and willingness to try tempane, banku, baobab leaf soup; I let her laugh at the way the soup, green and slimy as a turtle, curled around my fingers and slithered between my knuckles.
           I gave her my tomatoes on the verge of spoiling and I gave her my insect-ridden beans — for her pigs, I told her, but I knew she would let them sit in the hot sun to chase the insects away, and that she might eventually eat them. From the town of Wa, I brought treats for her and her children—bread, plantains, oranges. I gave her children handfuls of peanuts and mangoes when I had too many, and I gave Genevieve eggs from my chickens when she got her sore and rotting teeth removed. She said the TZet I prepared according to her instructions was delicious.
           My second year in Daffiama I gave her money and she brought me dinner. Every evening she came, whether the cool, moist air swirled on the skin like chiffon or whether it scraped like sandpaper, whether Orion glinted above, or whether a slate-purple rainstorm drowned out the skronks and whistles of the mating frogs in the field next to my house. She came after we spent all day tending thousands of young trees in the nursery, and she came after she had knelt over her children who were feverish with malaria the night before. I hoped I was giving her more than enough money to cover the cost of the food — maybe even enough for her and her children to eat comfortably as well — but she would never let me pay her for her knowledge and effort.
           I went away for a night, a week, a month, and I left her the key to my house so she could take care of my cat. I promised her one of the cat’s spring-loaded kittens, but there was an accident, and one kitten lost part of a paw. She would take that one, she insisted, and I knew she was the only person who was kind and nurturing enough to accept a cat that might not be able to catch the mice gnawing on her dried corn. I helped her stand up to the men who wanted to buy her pito on credit but would never repay her, but she resisted when I said I wanted to make her nursery treasurer. I told her I’d pay for training in fabric dying, teaching, anything to help her earn a reliable living, but her confused look begged to know how she would do it, when the children needed her, there was cooking and washing to do and water to carry; she could never take me up on the offer, whether she wanted to or not.
           I tried not to give her my impatience. It was her idea to bring the food to me — she never knew exactly when it would be ready — but waiting made me hungry and bored and a little lonely. I chased the thoughts of burritos or pizza or ice cream away before they had a chance to spoil in my brain. When Genevieve bustled in and announced with smiling, crinkly eyes that we were having beans’ leaves soup, I gave her my enthusiasm, privately wondering whether she had forgotten we’d already had beans’ leaves soup three times that week. When I offered thanks, Genevieve chastised me for saying the words before I’d even tasted the soup.
           “How do you know you will like it?” Genevieve demanded. “You taste it and see.”
           I knelt by the water storage tank and washed my right hand, having learned before that if she didn’t see me do it, she would remind me. Then I took a small corner of the TZet and dipped it into the soup bowl’s green abyss.
           “Can you take it?” she asked hopefully.
           “It’s good,” I assured her, letting the starchy lump and viscous soup slide down my throat. “I can take it.”
           And when I was alone again I did take it. I took it silently and gratefully as I hovered in the candle’s yellow-orange glow.
           I could not give her a comfortable house with a roof that didn’t blow and leak in storms. I could not give her easy access to clean water, or a courtyard gate to lock out the noisy assholes from the bar who stole her water, leaving her without enough to wash her face in the morning. Still, when the health clinic allowed her to draw good, clear water for me as part of her tree nursery duties, I always encouraged her to take an extra basin home for herself. I could not give her guts that stayed solid under the assault of internal parasites, and I could not repair her gums that twanged when food was too hot or sour or sweet. I could give her respect for never complaining. She didn’t need me to give her dignity.
           I gave her my loneliness and she didn’t even notice the burden. Genevieve invited me over to pound fufu at her house, and told me to keep trying, even after I almost brought the wooden pestle down on her hand; she let me grind the nuts for the shea butter, even though I took twice as long as she did. When, each evening, the familiar timbre of her voice arrived at my house behind her flashlight’s dying glow, I wondered if she knew that her few moments of company were just as important as the food she brought me. She carried me along to festivals where her brown eyes grew wider and her claps louder as I stamped my feet in the dust trying to dance, and to her hometown where I met her mother’s brother’s wife’s aunt, who showed me yellowing photo albums and gave me as much pito as I could drink, welcoming me as kin. I gave her the privileges of mother, sister, friend, and counted on her to fill the roles.
           After the first kitten died, I gave her another one. I gave her six yards of orange cloth for a new dress. The shedda cloth, hand batiked by my favorite artist in Accra, made my eyes giddy. It made Genevieve’s black skin radiate, and I gave her earrings and a necklace to go with it. I told her she looked like a queen, but I would never tell her that the cloth cost more than three months of her salary.
           When I cleaned out my house before I left, I gave her my old foam mattress, my pots and pans, my cheap aluminum silverware whose handles got hot moments after plunging into a boiling pot. I gave her my most comfortable shoes, a pair of Tevas nearly everyone in town coveted. She traveled part way to the airport with me, but eventually we had to say goodbye. We faced each other, and my mind grasped for one last idea, something to give her a way out, a chance to be something more than a village woman in second-hand clothes who wondered each morning what she was going to feed her children. I wanted to give her courage, independence, relevance. Instead, I gave her stationery, stamped and with my address already on it, and when she was boarding the lorry to go back to Daffiama, I gave her money, not knowing what else to do. She thanked me tearfully and mentioned that she needed a towel, like the old ones I had given away to my male employees. If I saw one, she suggested, maybe I could send it. She needed it.

Lisa Kahn Schnell (Ghana 1998–00)

This essay received the Peace Corps Writers 2005 Moritz Thompsen Experience Award.

The Rainy Season in Guatemala

How to Make Recycled Paper
I shredded paper snowflakes into a bucket of water: Guatemalan newspapers, Peace Corps newsletters, embassy safety bulletins and the Catholic magazines that my mother mailed me each month in care packages. Then I stuck a bean grinder into the word-soup, twisting the plastic knob until the bucket filled up with purplish pulp. I was all alone outside a church in Guatemala.
        It was May 2001, midway through my first year in Peace Corps. I had walked two hours to get to a wood-shack village called Buena Vista, planning to teach a youth group how to make recycled paper. The project looked so sensible in the “Youth Training Manual” they gave me, just memorize the script in Spanish and follow directions.
        I sketched out my future the same way: follow the steps for two years, amaze the villagers and bring my life-affirming experiences back home. Writing this story a couple years later, I still can’t tie up the story in admirable platitudes.
        Peace Corps assigned me to a cluster of villages that sprawled between mountains in eastern Guatemala. Buena Vista rested at the very end of my area. Each trip I crisscrossed two valleys and inclines, land so steep that I had to claw my way up. The village sat so far from the world that they didn’t have electricity, so I used a bean grinder instead of a blender to pulp the paper.
        I had planned to teach the youth group how to make recycled paper and invite them to a big, inter-village talent show in the summer. But nobody ever came. I watched rainy season storm clouds creep along the sky, casting shadows the size of movie spaceships across the valley. Down there, a patchwork quilt of farm-plots shimmered between Emerald City green and space blue.
        After a few hours, I crammed the crayons, markers, plastic sheets, homemade paper press, posters, and scripts back into my backpack. I walked home.

The Rainy Season
That night, the sky rumbled and crackled like tornado season in the Midwest, and the rainy season broke open with a whoosh of high-pressure rain. The thunderclouds and noise dissolved into a foggy gray roar outside. After an hour, the dirt chicken yard outside my room flooded and spilled muddy paste across my concrete floor.
         I used my bucket from the recycling project to catch rain leaking through my flimsy roof. The rain pounded my roof all night, and I buried myself underneath four blankets to stay warm inside that blanket cocoon, the rain sounded like an ocean splashing at the bottom of my mountain.
        I stared at my bookshelf, listening to rain on top of rain, and I thought of Amy back home. Amy had sandy hair that she dyed blazing red most of the time, she stood tall enough to wrap up my whole skinny body when she hugged me. We met as editors at a college newspaper, both of us carrying around the same robin-egg blue copy of T.S. Elliot poems. We matched each other, both of us disheveled and anxious from being stuck in books for too many years.
        I knew her five years, but we spent what amounted to months of time in smoky coffee shops telling stories and trading books. Years before, we had promised each other that we would read James Joyce’s book, Finnegans Wake. That book stood between us, the ultimate literature-major’s dream that we could unravel like compulsive kids.
        The last time we spoke on the phone, Amy had been sick for months. Her doctor diagnosed pneumonia, but never noticed the two blood clots stuck in her lungs like sputtering firecrackers. She lay in bed with her mysterious illness while we talked long distance. “Oh, by the way,” she said, “I had some free time, so I read the Wake.”
        “You heartless bitch!” I yelled, and she giggled back.
        “Read it yourself,” she said.

Tower of Babel
And so I did. The first week of the rainy season, huge chunks of eroded fields washed out and my usual paths slicked with mud. I didn’t see the sun for a week, so I hid out in my bedroom like a monk and read Finnegans Wake in heroic sessions. I went a whole week without speaking English, while reading the craziest book ever written in English.
        Midway through that reading marathon, my neighbor Manuel stopped by. The 16-year-old from my youth group was just bored after hours of rain. “Is that the Bible?” he asked me, scrutinizing the 900-pages of English gibberish. I tried to explain, but he wasn’t very interested.
        “People used to speak the same language, you know,” Manuel said. “Man decided to build the Tower of Babel, a tower tall enough to go to heaven. Then God smashed the tower and made all men speak different languages. That’s why you speak English and I speak Spanish.”
       His impromptu sermon shocked me. Joyce kept talking about that same Bible story in Wake, he wanted to stir all the languages together in a word soup, a dreamy story built from echoes of different tongues. Manuel had stumbled on the secret of the book. “You should read more,” I said, “I think you could be a teacher, maybe.”
        “Primero Dios,” he said, “I want to be a minister someday.”
        Primero Dios. That Guatemalan cliche means “God first” or “God willing,” and it stuck in my head after he left. The country’s long civil war and bad leadership had left public education in shambles. Manuel might have been the smartest kid for miles around, but school ended at sixth grade in the village. The richest kids moved to private schools in the city, but most villagers never made it that far. Too often Primero Dios glossed over sad realities that no Peace Corps Volunteers could ever fix.
        I finished the Wake, and wrote Amy a huge letter about the rain, Manuel, and the book. We both loved writing stories within stories like that. Stories within stories make a magical circuit, an echo chamber with a little life bouncing around inside forever. Somewhere in this story, Amy is still waiting for my letter and I’m still buried under blankets in Miramundo.

My Bicycle Crash
On June 14, 2001, the blood clots burst and Amy died on an operating table. Before anybody could tell me that she was in the hospital, I rode my bicycle down my mountain. I left my emergency beeper at home, thinking I’d ride the bus back up later that afternoon.
        Halfway to the city, I ran over a scrawny puppy. He dashed off screaming into the bushes and I wobbled around a steep curve. The dirt road was a minefield of rainy-season potholes. My tire caught a rut, and I flipped over the handlebars and skidded across the gravel. The crash tore a hole ten-stitches wide in my face.
        I stumbled into the first house I saw, trailing gobs of blood behind me. An old lady was working in the yard, and she helped me tape a bloody rag on my face. I rode the rest of the way down the mountain in a shaky daze. At the hospital, a doctor sewed up my face. Doped up on painkillers, I drooled all over his rubber gloves. I spent the rest of the weekend in a hotel, swallowing pain pills.
        On Monday, I found out that Amy died and that I had missed her funeral. By nighttime, I was drunk and spending a fortune on phone calls home at a tourist cafe. I called Amy’s mother, and rambled into the telephone. “I sent her a letter two weeks ago. Did she read my letter?” I begged her to answer me.

A Picture of Me Dancing
“Ven, ven al gran show de talentos,” I shouted, a full month later, into a rusty P.A. system. There’s something tremendous about hearing your words beamed through a scratchy microphone and booming over a mountain; your voice lingers and feels tangible.
        We had built a plywood-plank and cinderblock stage in my neighbor’s lofty garage. We pumped recorded mariachi music through the amplifier to attract more people to the party. The rainy season rain held off for the whole night. Just before I opened the show, a red and white striped chicken bus rumbled outside.
        In one of the happiest moments of my life, I watched more than 50 parents, grandparents, kids and a whole mariachi band spill out of the bus like circus clowns — the youth group from Buena Vista had come back. They knocked off the recorded music and pounded out the real thing on their tubby instruments. People danced and sang along, and the crowd swelled to 300 by the time I opened the show.
        The youth group did the rest, performing all the skits they had planned. Veronica sang a country duet with her husband, the 17-year-old girl wailed out the love song. By the time I left, she would have her first baby. Marcella dressed up like a ditzy farm-girl, skipping around the stage. She left for high school on a scholarship that Christmas.
        Towards the end, the Buena Vista leader stuck a cowboy hat on my head and dragged me onstage. “Dance,” he ordered, “Dance and we’ll dance with you.”
        The band struck up that lilting mariachi beat, and I hopped from one foot to the other, following the beats in my invented gringo dance. Each time I landed, the wood planks banged out the beat beneath me; Freddy and his friends laughed and bobbed beside me, our footsteps booming even louder. I laughed and laughed, I was dancing fast enough to fly.
        Somebody took a picture of me dancing, and I still keep it on my wall. I see a younger me: I’m high-stepping like a Vegas showgirl in dirty jeans and a cowboy hat; for one pristine moment I’m lost in my crazy march-step, I danced so fast that both my feet hovered in mid-air; for one moment, I left the ground and I floated, close to Amy as I’ll ever be . . .

Jason Boog (Guatemala 2000–02) joined Peace Corps after graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in literature. He recently graduated from the journalism program at New York University, and hopes to return to Central America as a journalist. His work has appeared in The Revealer, Newsday, and Street Level.
       This essay received the Peace Corps Writers 2006 Moritz Thompsen Experience Award.

Tales from the Sulu Archipelago

At the turn of the century, Gen. John J. Pershing asked Colt Industries to make a handgun ‘powerful enough to knock over a running Moro'. Even with the Colt .45, the US Army could not subdue the Moros and end a Muslim secessionist movement that dates from Spanish contact. Following Marcos' declaration of martial law in 1972, fighting between the army and the rebels, now the Moro National Liberation Front, intensified. The Peace Corps stopped placing volunteers in southern Muslim areas, which includes a broad swath of islands that connects Mindanao to Borneo, the Sulu Archipelago. Travel to Sulu was expressly prohibited; any PCV who did so would be immediately expelled.

That’s why I was determined to go there.

On a return visit in 1982 I learned the Philippine Government had just lifted its travel ban to Sulu. An American friend and I hastened down to Zamboanga and grabbed a PAL flight to Jolo, the Sulu Provincial capitol. Upon arrival, the airport authorities searched us, then turned us over to a group of tough-looking young men who looked every bit the part of the fierce Tausug warriors romanticized by Filipinos everywhere. Any further travel into Sulu, they told us, would require the approval of the Sultan of Jolo.

It felt like we were being abducted. But we were merely meeting the Moro National Liberation Front. 

On our way to the Sultanate we saw bombed out buildings and burned down huts. The road was littered with wrecked vehicles. We were the first Americans to arrive in Jolo in ten years, our informants told us. They seemed disappointed that we were not journalists. But we promised to tell their side of the story and that satisfied them. We never saw the sultan but approval for further travel was mysteriously granted.

The next morning the same escorts took us down to the crowded ferry which would carry us to Sitankai, Tawi-Tawi and several smaller islands in between. We pushed our way aboard. The boat soon left, its engines throbbing, the double-decker decks swaying ominously with the swells.

We had no idea how we would get back to Zambo. Nor did we care.

The next three days we spent island-hopping and exploring this stunningly beautiful place. Everywhere, white-trimmed coral islands lay like beads from a broken necklace, scattered in the lime-green waters. Pods of dolphins frolicked as our boat plied the deeper, purple channels. We passed the occasional fisherman checking his traps or trailing a line from a trim outriggered binta. At each stop the same drill occurred. The boat would take on freight and passengers and out of the crowd would appear another group of tough-looking, young men waiting for us. They invariably spoke perfect English. Later we learned why.

 There were constant reminders we were in a war zone. With every island the arms became more conspicuous. On bustling Sitankai Island, where more people live in boats than on land, our hosts brandished M-16s, wore bandoliers across their chests and carried sheathed, serrated traditional Muslim swords. Just a few hundred yards away from the wharf there was a platoon of Philippine Army soldiers. We could see their foxholes behind a barbed wire fence. We never did meet them but we did meet schoolteachers, merchants, fishermen, imams and local politicos. All treated us cordially but not deferentially as other Filipinos unfailingly do. By now we were used to it. What they most wanted was to tell us their grievances. And tell us they did. For hours, as we watched colorful ships sail into and out of the picturesque harbor, we heard accounts of historical oppression, recent army atrocities and hopes for independence. I jotted down notes as a journalist would. 

That night we were honored guests at a Badjao wedding. The Badjaos are an animist tribe that eschews land and migrates perpetually among the Philippine, Malaysian and Indonesian waters. They have co-existed peacefully with the Muslims for centuries. We squatted with perhaps fifty of them in the hold of a large houseboat. As the ritual unfolded, drummers began to play. Soon they glistened with sweat in the candlelight. Then the young women danced, their bright saris swirling, their smiles beguiling. When words fail, smiles do the work. I remembered hearing of an early PCV falling in love with a Muslim princess in Sulu. Legend has it they eloped and live somewhere out here still.

As a child, I used to spin a globe, close my eyes and point to a spot. Tawi-Tawi was one of those imaginary end-of-the-world places, like Timbuktu or Tingo Maria. At last there it was, a Gibraltar-like rock on the horizon. Our first stop was the American Jesuit missionary high school where so many of our MNLF informants had studied. At the rectory we dined with Fr. Timothy, a gracious man who betrayed no surprise at two scruffy, backpacking Americans turning up at his door. He arranged an overnight trip for us to Sibutu, the westernmost Philippine island. We would be just off the coast of Borneo. On the way we would pass Siminul, revered for being the first Philippine island touched by Muslim missionaries. Marcos had made it his private hunting refuge.

The next morning we were the only passengers on a ten-ton junk chugging its way to Sibutu to pick up a load of copra. Our captain was a young Chinese man with whom I had trouble communicating in English, Tagalog, Ilongo or T'boli. As we turned into the Sibutu Passage the boat began to vibrate. The humidity and air temperature dropped. Flocks of seabirds caromed about excitedly, diving for fish amidst the flotsam and jetsam. We had entered a strong current, its edge visible like the curb on a street. Every year this current reverses direction, the captain managed to tell us. The Badjaos take it down to The Celebes and back. Suddenly he fell silent. Off the port side, far in the distance, a small boat appeared. It was shiny and black with two long antennas and no markings. It was heading toward us. The captain reached down and lifted an M-16 from below the floorboards. He checked the magazine, cocked it and set it next to us. "They are either pirates, smugglers or police", he said. As the boat drew nearer my heart began to pound. This was no-man's land, international waters where anything could happen. We had no radio and there was no place on board to hide. Maybe they still need that travel ban, I was thinking. But now it was too late. No one in Manila or elsewhere even knew we were here. I remembered how hard it is to shoot an M-16. Just when we were within shouting distance the mysterious boat stood up and sped away, powered by twin inboards.

We returned to Tawi Tawi the next day, tired and preoccupied with our return to Zamboanga. Our concerns soon evaporated. Fr. Timothy had arranged a flight for us back to Zambo with the Governor of the province, no less. The next morning we boarded a twin-engine Cessna. In the copilot's seat sat the Governor, a worldly, affable Tausug. All the grievances we reported fell like drops off a duck’s back. The problems his people faced, he felt, were more economic than anything. He envisioned investments, new airports, expanded trade. He believed it would come. All we need is peace, he added. I remembered that bumper sticker: if you want peace work for justice. But we had said enough. Seated behind us in silence were his two bodyguards who kept their rifles pointed at our backs the whole time. The bejeweled waters below glistened in the brilliant sun.   

Mike McQuestion

Philippines 74-77

My Iranian Samovar

One of my prize souvenirs from my two years in Iran as an English teacher during the 1960s is the brass samovar I found in a local bazaar. Like the beautiful carpet that adorns my study, samovars come in many shapes and sizes. Samovars may be pot-bellied like mine, or straight-sided, brass or nickel-plated, decorative antiques, or functional contemporary models. Samovars and their ever-present pots of tea are a major presence in Iranian daily life.

This is the time of year when Iranians celebrate the ancient festival of Now Ruz, a Zoroastrian tradition. Now Ruz marks the beginning of spring and the start of the Persian calendar. Families gather for picnics and family reunions throughout the country. I was privileged to attend a Now Ruz picnic as the guest of an Iranian agricultural engineer from Shiraz, his American wife, their two children, and many members of his extended family. Early one morning, we hauled carpets, folding chairs, a brass samovar, huge caldrons of rice and chicken as well as other food (enough to serve twenty people) across a river. We sat in his father’s orchard and enjoyed the warm spring air.

Tea was also served throughout the day in the teachers’ lounge at my school. I regularly drank tea or a soft drink in the private office of the president of our local bank with whom I exchanged language lessons. Sometimes, the postmaster invited me to the back of the PTT (post office, telegram and telegraph) for a cup of tea after I picked up my mail.

Rug merchants also had samovars in every shop. At times, I felt every Iranian businessman or government officer believed that socializing and hospitality superceded the official transaction. I suppose I was a slow learner because I often felt frustrated when fardah ya pasfardah …Inshallah (tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, God willing) seemed to rule the day. But as time went by, I figured out that it was always going to take an hour to cash my stipend check at the bank. Clearly,  if the president were not available that morning, the tellers or clerks were already taking a tea break or chatting with other customers. And while breaks between class hours often stretched beyond the allotted five or ten minute period if one were engaged in a serious conversation with fellow teachers, I began to fit into a society that values communication. I also learned that any serious bartering about an important purchase doesn't take place until the two parties have first established a sense of mutual trust.

Contrast these memories with an incident that happened last fall. When our car’s engine blew out on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, it was clear we had to buy a replacement vehicle as soon as possible. My husband spent the better part of the next day checking out various makes and models on the Internet. Finally, he found one at a price we could afford. That evening, we drove a rental car over to the dealership. "We’d like to test drive that blue one,” we told the salesman. After a short test drive, we agreed on the purchase. Since it was a “website special,” the price was non-negotiable. When we followed him back inside the showroom, we noticed we were the only customers present that evening. We watched him complete the requisite paperwork. Only later did he seem interested in chatting with us. Actually, he mostly wanted to talk about himself. For the next two hours, we tried to figure out a way to end the one-sided conversation gracefully. We had already declined his offer of coffee because the hour was late and we were anxious to get home.

If the sales manager invests in a samovar, he might bring more customers into the showroom.

Jennifer B-C Seaver (RPCV Iran)

Christmas With Eva

On December 22, 1991, we took a smelly bus from Suwalki to Warsaw. Marzena, another teacher and I chatted and snacked on sandwiches and hot tea as we rode south for seven hours, through the chill and snowy countryside of Northern Poland. We saw farmers guiding their furry plow horses and wagons through the streets, loaded with silver milk jugs, cabbages and crates of chickens. A long-legged stork landed on her nest on the roof of a farmhouse. After a booster shot at the Peace Corps office in Warsaw, I rode a streetcar to the Marriott Hotel in the center of town for coffee (kawa pronounced "kava"). Violins and a grand piano played on a balcony over the lobby that gleamed festively with bird of paradise in blue and gold jardinières, plush oriental rugs and squishy sofas. PC had adopted the hotel; where we gossiped with friends and called home to the States — $5.00 for five minutes. The American-feel of that gorgeous hotel, in a strange land, soothed our homesickness.

"Poland 3," as we were called, had arrived in June 1991 to teach English. Two groups had preceded us to teach business and the environment. We lived with host families while we attended school for teacher training, Polish language and history. Eva Orlowski, husband Kazik and the children had made me feel at home in Milanowik. The house was a two-story brick in a quiet, wooded area. Kazik had built it soon after the war; a little farm in the backyard. Eva sold produce and Kazik worked in a tractor factory. They didn't speak English, but we managed to communicate with sign language, stick drawings and my stumbling Polish. Eva and I became great friends and sang songs from old movies on long walks in the woods. She had been a little girl when the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and cried when she spoke of the horror.

About 125 of us graduated at the end of August as Peace Corps Volunteers. We were feted at a wild party and the next day went to schools all over the country to teach.  I was excited to finally be on my way. I was sent to Suwalki in the Lakes District, N.E. corner of Poland. It's called the Siberia of Poland, because of its proximity to the North Pole. It is 10 degrees below zero in the winter and dark at 3:00 P.M., a shock to me after sunny California.

Evidence of the Soviet 44-year occupation after WWII was everywhere. The air, rivers and water polluted and towns still in need of attention from the devastation of war. There were many empty store shelves because the best food had been shipped to Russia. In 1988 the communists were forced to leave when the brave workers at the Gadnsk shipyards staged uprisings. The economy was terrible and most residents were out of work. Speaking English would help them move from a Third World country into the World Market.

I lived in a one-room cozy apartment inside a music school and taught other subjects besides English, to 48 freshmen in the college next door. They all passed their exams and we had given the Director, Elzbieta, and staff an art show and concert. When Eva invited me for Christmas I was ready for
some R & R.

Monday, the 23rd of December 1991, I boarded the kolega (the local commuter train) in Warsaw to visit them. I stopped at a kiosk and got Eva five flowers wrapped in cellophane, tied with a red ribbon. It's a tradition in Poland that when you visit you take odd numbers of flowers, never even. I arrived at the Orlowski's in the afternoon to warm hugs and kisses. I felt so welcome.

The house smelled like cabbage — Eva's bigos (sauerkraut stew) — and pine needles from the Christmas tree. Eva and I walked to the market for fish and bread. Later we went to visit Kazik's sister, Juanita, and her family and drank herbata which is strong tea, in small glasses with a spoon resting on the top for sugar. We ate cakes and tarts. You do not refuse food in Poland. I helped Eva's granddaughter, Justina, ten years old, trim the small tree with many items handed down from her ancestors: silver angels, animals and religious icons (the country is predominantly Catholic). Eva cooked a rich dessert with cream and fruit.

Tuesday, the 24th is Wigilia (Christmas Eve).  The cooking speeded up. Eva cooked a long menu of courses. She had gone into the woods at 5:00 A.M. to pick mushrooms (grzyby pronounced "gre-jibby").

I called her "Grzyby Eva" which made her laugh. Kazik took me on a tour of the basement storeroom. It smelled musty like a cave and was spooky down there with light bulbs on electric cords swinging from the ceiling. The shelves were loaded with: jars of jam, potatoes, peas, corn and fruit. There were rabbits, fish and chickens in a freezer. Barrels of pickles reminded me of the country stores in Pennsylvania when I was a kid. Kazik laughed at my astounded expression.

PCVs were warned not to eat the fish from the polluted rivers. The Poles ignored the danger. Eva cut up a large carp in sections. She put the raw fish  (ryby) across a platter with the head at the top, carrot and lemon slices in between the sections to look like ribs or bones. She put the tail (ogon) at the end, sprinkled parsley over it, peas around the edges. Then poured hot lemon gelatin all over it.  This went into the fridge to become a mold. The salad (sa-wat-ka) was apples, hard- boiled eggs, peas, carrots, onions, pickles on lettuce with gobs of mayonnaise on top. A second salad was shredded cabbage and spices. Eva would not let me cook, but I helped her get ready. We put up a long table in the living room with an embroidered tablecloth made by Eva's great grandmother.

The immediate family ate dinner together Christmas Eve: eldest son, Robi, wife Malgosia, their daughter Justina, youngest son Hubik, wife Monica and her father, Tata. Everyone stood up. Representing a Polish blessing we each broke a piece of paper-thin wafer and passed it around. They toasted with vodka (my choice — apple cider) and we exchanged gifts. Eva loved my ceramic-mushroom candleholder. I gave gifts to the rest of the family and received fun presents from them. While the Poles drank vodka and got very loud, we all ate the huge meal and told stories. Two people could speak English. It was a loving evening meal and I enjoyed it so much.

At midnight Eva and I bundled up and walked five blocks to the Catholic Church down the dark country road.  There was no moon or streetlights and it was cold as a bear's ice-lair. I was glad I had found fur-lined boots in Bialystok. The bright stars in the black sky made me think of the story of the star shining over the manger so long ago. We arrived late and had to stand and I froze. There was no heat in the church and no cheer as the greedy Nazis had stolen all the ancient gold icons and paintings. The German government was slowly returning the ones they could find. We sang the lovely Polish carols. I missed my family and tried not to cry. Eva was always sensitive to my feelings. We walked down the middle of the silent dirt road and I was shivering. Eva took hold of my arm and began to sing "Silent Night" in Polish with her contralto voice; I joined in singing soprano and we sang all the way back. I thought it had been a joyful Christmas Eve.

Christmas Day — 7:00 A.M.— Andrew and Rose picked Eva up and they went to the cemetery where their mama was buried to put flowers on the grave. Eva cooked breakfast for Justina and me; kielbasa, eggs and fruit. About 1:00 P.M., when the rest of the family came, Eva was slaving away in her little kitchen, Justina was playing her xylophone and Kazik and I were enjoying a soccor meet from England on their TV (televisor) and cheered when England scored. Justina let everyone in. It was quite a mob with Eva's cousins, Kazik's mama, Hanjia — 80 years old; twenty people in all, carrying gifts and flowers; white lilacs, roses, poinsettias and freesia. We sat down at the table for the feast.  First we ate fried leftover carp and szledz, a raw fish like herring, with onions and lemons and bowls of cream soup (zupa); then the huge, black mushrooms Eva had sautéed in oil. Eva had baked two chickens (kurcheki), a corn and pineapple salad with gobs of mayonnaise, a spicy/salty cabbage dish, tiny dishes of noodles,peas and carrots.  I helped Eva put food on large platters: sliced meats, bread (cleb), a rabbit loaf, ground and baked in a pan like a meatloaf. "It keeps for months," Eva told me. The Poles drank vodka and brandy and celebrated. Eva's brother, Woichek, his daughter Kathy and I drank strawberry juice and sang songs. For dessert there were oranges (pomorancze) from Turkey, hazelnuts, and Eva had baked a loaf cake with powdered sugar on top. We drank sweet, black coffee and tea, poppy seed cakes and macaroons. Each course was served with fanfare.  I never ate so much in my life. I poured Eva into bed under her duvet-covered comforter and turned out the tree lights.

December 26th in the morning, after hugs and thanks, with a light snow falling Eva's son Hubik and Monika drove me to the Warsaw station. I took a five-hour train ride to historic Krakow. The snow was intense and I had a difficult time finding the Old Polonia Hotel in the dark. Finally in my heated room with the silent snow falling outside, I nestled under a warm duvet and fell asleep. The next day, in a blinding blizzard, I took a bus with others to the town of Oswiecim (German word is Auschwitz) and walked five blocks to the former death camp and across the infamous train tracks into the compound. With tears streaming down my face, I toured the Auschwitz Nazi Concentration Camp, now a Museum.

On December 28th, because of the miserable weather, I returned to my apartment in Suwalki to write up my lesson plans for the next semester. The weather had indeed been cold, but my Christmas with Eva had been loving and so warm. I was so thankful I had been to a true Polish Christmas; an experience I knew I would never forget.

Posted by Peggy Raggio RPCV
Poland 1991-1992

Ashura

Ashura – A Time of Expiation

Ashura is the tenth day of the Muslim month of Muharram. This year, the festival falls on February 9, 2006. Sunnis and Shi’ites alike observe this festival. Shi’ites honor it as the anniversary of the day in 680 C.E. when Caliph Yazid martyred Hussein, a grandson of Mohammad, and seventy-two of his kinsmen in the holy city of Karbala, Iraq, ending the struggle for succession to the Prophet.

While serving in Iran during the 1960s as a Peace Corps Volunteer, we were always cautious and respectful of the Muslim holy days. We were especially careful to remain inside our walled compound especially after dark during Muharram, and to avoid contact with the crowds of chanting men and boys that marched through the city on the festival of Ashura. Then, I returned to Iran in 2002, traveling with a group of RPCVs and their families. We visited the 14^th century C.E. Amir Chakhmaq Mosque in the ancient city of Yazd. The grandstand where the faithful reenact the martyrdom of the Hussein, the third Imam, annually is nearby. Standing there, I recalled the only time I had dared to open our gate ever so slightly in hopes of catching a brief glimpse of the men and boys who passed through our alley carrying their flaming torches and striking their backs with switches to the beat of drums.

Sunni Muslims, however, observe this day as the time when Nuh (Noah) left the Ark and Allah led Musa (Moses) and his people out of Egypt. After Mohammad migrated from Mecca, he found a community of Jews living in Medina. The Jews were fasting in remembrance of God’s deliverance of them from the Egyptians.

The people said, "O Messenger of Allah, it is a day that the Jews and Christians honor. The Prophet said, "When the following year comes, Allah willing, we shall fast on the ninth day." Sadly, he died the next year.

Today, there are demonstrations against the west (and between Sunnis and Shi’ites) around the world. Perhaps instead of flagellation over the battle that broke much of the Muslim world apart, the festival of Ashura can once represent a time of forgiveness to the sons and daughters of Abraham. Then Jewish, Christian, and Muslim brothers and sisters can begin to work together again to build a peaceful world.

Jennifer B-C Seaver

(RPCV Iran)

The Orphans

There’s something about the word “orphanage.” I guess one is predisposed to feel sorry for a bunch of neglected, impoverished or abused kids. The ones we visited in the regional orphanage/school near Birobidjan weren’t pathetic, but neither were they beautifully turned out, all bright-eyed and on top of the world. They were dressed poorly. Clean, but poorly.

The Children’s Building for school-age orphans was in the old school house of Waldheim, one of the nearly defunct Russian Far East villages settled by Jews in the 1920s and ‘30s. The town is in the potato fields about a half hour out of Birobidjan. The Germanic name, Foresthome, reflects the Yiddish language history of the Jewish Autonomous Region. The orphanage for babies and toddlers was in Birobidjan. We had met the school’s English teacher at a conference we lectured at and felt like making some sort of contribution. We finally rounded up a box of children’s books mailed along with others from friends in the States. The teacher was delighted to have them, along with a cassette of American folk songs I had taught the regional English teachers and recorded for them.

The kids were animated and likable, and they liked us first, welcoming us with cheers and open arms. They ganged up on us as we made our second visit for a music program the day before Victory Day. We sat by a window overlooking the acre or so of plowed ground that soon would be the school’s much-needed garden. We were early and watched the director, a stout, capable-looking woman, helping three older girls plant cabbage seeds in plastic-covered hotbeds, preparing seedlings for late-spring planting.

I don’t see my grandkids very often, so I’m no longer used to having small children drape themselves over my knees. I felt a little guilty that my first reaction was to worry that I might catch something from them. I looked down at Yana, a 10-year-old who looked 6. Her hair had been hacked off at about two inches long. Why had someone done that? Easier to keep clean, I guess. Skin eruptions here and there. Dirty clothing, in this case. Dirty fingernails. A whiff of urine. I recalled admonitions to the staff one summer when I worked at a hospital for retarded people: “Wash your hands often; keep your fingers out of your mouth.” The little creature needed a hot soapy bath and a fresh change of clothes and shoes. I looked at her hands. What poisonous bacteria lurked thereon? (I hasten to add that most of the children were reasonably clean, and the school appears to make do very well on extremely limited means.)

Yana kept her eyes on Sharon, next to me. She and the other little girls beamed at her, rapturously sometimes, this beautiful woman from a far-away magic kingdom. Many of the kids are too small, maybe stunted. I read a painful phrase in a book about Russia’s gulag days: Children who were abandoned and unloved didn’t grow properly, suffering from “failure to thrive.” Some of these orphans clearly had failed, had been failed.

Ruslan, 14, looked about 10. But his brain had kept thriving throughout whatever unhappy circumstances had brought him here. (Not all were orphans; some were simply abandoned to the state by unwed mothers or parents who couldn’t rear them.) His English was unusually good, and he held us captive in the hall until he had finished reciting a long, repetitive English poem, “The Tasty Herring,” something akin to the one about the old lady who swallowed a fly and other animals.

We observed an English class and made a note to find them some more readers and a map of the U.S.A. (oh rich, clean world that has everything, in abundance — and its own sad children, I must remember.) The teacher, an attractive, small middle-aged woman with golden front teeth and no molars, struggled mightily to keep the little beggars’ attention. She half-succeeded. About six of the kids, 10 to 12 years old, were involved in the lesson, when not distracted by the other six, who were out of it. It appeared that this division is common in Eastern Russian schools: teach to the 50% who have it, ignore or simply squelch the 50% who are the have-nots.

She moved swiftly around the room to stay on top of things, her muscular legs reminding me of how she had danced the night away after a conference. With typical Russian enthusiasm, she had exhausted several partners, whirling madly around the large room, sweat flying. Russian energy. “I love to dance!” she had said early in the evening. That was for sure.

The children who were not listening looked vacantly around the room. They didn’t look like they were having thoughts. They were just glancing here and there, brains on dead center. Switched off. In the cold term from a cruel world, “damaged goods.” No hope. Many Russian babies have been adopted by Americans these days, although in typical leftover Soviet fashion, some bureaucrat recently ordered the practice stopped, for no good reason. "We are not selling our children," he announced. So there are many good things that now may not happen. In such adoptions, if they resume, there is some risk of finding later that alcohol damage has happened to the children.

The teacher had printed a poem on the board, beginning ”April brings the primrose sweet,” although she had written "primerose." And when they read aloud, all pronounced it “prime.” A typographical error in a textbook, a common occurrence, dutifully got memorized along with the rest. It didn’t seem appropriate to correct it, although she had a number of questions about their textbook later and we were able to correct as well as explain some things.

One of the shortcomings of some Russian schools (possibly many) is their use of outdated textbooks from the old regime. As with almost everything, there's not enough money for new books. So they still repeat, “If five comrades must share 13 tractors, how much time. . .” Books are filled with exercises based on one of Russia's few reasons for pride: its space program. Kids learn grammar translating sentences about Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, the Cosmonauts. . .

The kids who weren’t mentally damaged were having thoughts, clearly visible in their eyes. Searching, their eyes penetrated ours. They kept ignoring the teacher in order to look at us. “You must come from a wonderful place,” said their eyes, wistful, not exactly sad, mostly northern blue. “Could you take me back with you, so I could see it? Just for a little while?”

My eyes felt a little sad, a little watery a time or two. They answered, of course, “No kid, I can’t. Sorry.” The children happily settled for picture-taking, clamoring to be photographed with a friend or, in one case, a sister. They knew I wasn’t taking instant pictures and that they wouldn’t get a copy, at least not for a long time. It seems they just wanted to be noticed, kind of have it recorded on paper somewhere that they exist and are worth something. They matter to someone. The rich foreigner took pictures of them, and that proves it.

We visited the orphanage again before we left, taking along the photos we had made of them, and another box of books. They greeted us like old friends and in Olga's class they sang an American song, "On Top of Old Smoky," that they had learned from the folk song tape I had left for them. It was a strange, warm feeling, hearing children in this remote village sing a song I had prepared for them. “All cahvered weeth snow. . .” We were delighted and touched.

They wanted another song, and I got an inspiration: I taught them "Little Peter Rabbit Has a Fly Upon His Nose (and he brushed it away with his paw)." It's a fun song for kids. The words are accompanied by hand gestures — ears when you say Peter Rabbit, waving hands when you say "fly," finger pointed at your nose, hand brushing away the fly, hand held up for "paw." You repeat the verse, each time leaving out a word and substituting a hand gesture.

At the same time that I was singing and gesturing and watching the kids sing and gesture back, I was aware of something wonderful, almost magical in that international moment: a bunch of little Russian kids with shining eyes, standing in a tattered schoolhouse in a snow-covered potato field happily singing in English, "Little Peter… had a… upon his… and he …. it away with his….."

School Garden Project, Madarounfa

The sun slips above the horizon on the dot of six in Madarounfa, a mere thirteen degrees north of the equator, close enough that sunrise and sunset vary almost not at all the year ’round.  The ten primary school teachers who have gathered for this late-December, weekend school-garden-project instruction are up within minutes. Once they have washed and made their separate trips to the bush, they gather for breakfast under the old baobab tree. It’s still cool and they drink hot tea, brewed very strong, with great chunks of sugar chopped out of a cone that comes wrapped in blue paper. Jon, the American who is instructing them, has made oatmeal. It’s nice of him but the teachers find it rather bland. They add sugar and salt and are polite while watching the light begin to sparkle on the lake just below the camp. The water level has fallen since the end of the rainy season, and will fall lower still before it rains again.

The pink and yellow light has dried up the drops of water left on the leafy plants inside the garden enclosure during the night. The windmill stands silently above the demonstration plot and the small-bore well that lies beneath it. There is no wind today. Jon speaks in Haussa and hands out tools. His instruction covers what plants to chose for the gardens in which today’s pupils will in turn teach primary school children the simplest rudiments of farming. In front of them are large, green cabbages with leaves the size of elephants’ ears, and kohlrabi, a vegetable foreign to this land but which grows well, as long as there a little is water now and then. Of course, they also discuss the peppers, hot red and green, the millet and corn plants, and in the corner there are tomatoes. These are delicious and new. They can be used in tuo sauce. Another new food is the lima bean. These two Western tastes bring a surprising sensory experience: they delight the eye as well as the tongue.

The black men toil lustily all morning as the sun warms the garden and at noon they sit for a discussion in the shade of the baobab once more. Everyone savors the millet paste made by Ali’s wife, Halima, smothered in the sauce she has made from Jon’s tomatoes. As they are relaxing under the baobab for the afternoon sieste, farther down near the lake, Halima is pounding millet in a large mortar and pestle and her sister, Zenabou, is sifting the chaff away in the light air. The men doze in the heat of the day before resuming their weeding and harvesting at four o’clock. At the end of the day each makes a packet of sample vegetables to take back with him.

As the night settles, the group shares a meal of six roasted chickens brought from the market in Maradi, a distance of thirty kilometers, just for this purpose. Chickens, or at least this many of them, are not often available in the tiny Madarounfa market. The tomato-hot pepper sauce is very spicy and makes their tongues dance. Later, they roll into their bedrolls for the night, so many black bodies, tucked together to keep warm inside Haussa blankets made of strips of woven cotton stitched together. The nights are cool now in the dry season and they are glad to sleep inside the small, enclosed space Jon has built for this purpose. In warmer weather, which is most of the year, everyone sleeps under the sky, but before morning the temperature will fall to a very low sixteen degrees (centigrade), halving the daytime level. In the morning the school teachers will pile into the land rover with their gardening knowledge and their packets of sample foods, and Ali, Jon’s driver, will take them to the gare routière in Maradi. There they will find bush taxies back to their villages where they will transfer what they have learned into the soil of their own pupils.

Margot Miller was in Niger from 1972 to 1974.
From memory, some of the vegetable material may be inaccurate!

Finishing Touches

During my pre-service training, one of the hardest and seemingly most necessary things I wanted to communicate to my host family was that I missed home. I missed my friends. I missed pizza and beer as dark as the nights in my new, lightless neighborhood. But the best that I could do after two months of Peace Corps’ astounding language training was tell them, Ma yad garchhu (I remember).

And what do I remember now? Had I changed after two years in that most wonderful and flawed organization? Am I better? Did I climb Mt. Everest? Did I build a bridge with cave-dwelling, sun-fearing villagers? Wasn’t I supposed to be sick all the time? And what about the States? Wasn’t I supposed to realize that, at heart, I too had become a cave-dwelling, sun-fearing villager and could never live like I had before?

I spent my last couple months as a Peace Corps volunteer wondering exactly how correct the Peace Corps’ shrinks would be at forecasting hard times. They told me I’d be sick, which I really hadn’t. I mean, not any more than I would have been if I’d stayed in the States, or if I’d moved to Canada. Yes, I did have diarrhea, but it wasn’t like I’d never experienced that before the Peace Corps. I didn’t need Nepal to get indigestion. As much talk as there was about this, I never got ill enough to really complain about it. Except that one time during the monsoon when it was well over 110°F and the power went out for a couple days.

Which was awful.

§

I’m still having a hard time looking back at my Peace Corps experience and the very, very strange culture that surrounds it. For me, it was completely unlike anything that I had preconceived. In a country of mud huts with thatch roofs, I never lived in one. In a country of sprawling rice fields, I never spent much time around them. In a country of poverty, I never really experienced it.

Sure I saw it. I passed chilly corpses dead from the night’s freeze. I watched one morning as tractors demolished the shanties I used to pass on my way. I fingered bullet holes in the waiting room of the airport. I heard bombs. I saw the flashes from rifle muzzles in the distance before going to bed. I taught shoeless children and paid half-naked rickshaw drivers. I was mugged and robbed.

But I never really experienced the things that gave the city where I lived, Birganj, its edge. I was always safe, far from the things that really change people. Even when I rode in the backseat of an army captain’s car, his Browning 9mm shoved down the front of his pants, and explaining how not a month ago the Maoists had attack him at this very spot and killed several of his men, even then I was safe.

And I can’t explain why that was.

§

I was in Dharan, in the hills and far from the flat, dusty life in my city. I was finishing the training that the Maoist-affiliated student union said I couldn’t finish, because they were trying to keep Eastern Nepal closed for some reason, to prove some point, to someone, somewhere. I was in Dharan and I’m thinking about where I’m going to be, what I’m going to do, after Peace Corps.

I was thinking about April, when I would be finishing my service. I was thinking about what it’s going to be like the day after I finish, when I’m done and I go to sleep, and when I'd wake up, I’d still be in Nepal but no longer affiliated with the government. I was thinking about two years ahead. All I was seeing was “Future looks hazy. Check back later.”

The one thing that I wanted to do, though, was to have one last breathe of what I loved about Nepal, outside of what I can get in Birganj. I want to see Birtamode, another flat, dusty city, and remember all the crazy people that flocked to Andrew, a PCV who lived there. I wanted to walk the quiet, almost urban and slowly dying streets of Rajbiraj and remember the street dogs and the Christmases I spent there. During an early morning, I wanted to ride a bus along the quieter parts of the East-West Highway, remembering that not all the trees have been cut. I want to jump off the bus as it pulls into a buspark with rickshaws swarming about, remembering that in such a place, I can be happy.

I remember the first walk through the Birganj bazaar after arriving at post, not sure if I was in an Indiana Jones or a Mad Max movie, but knowing I was going to be OK. I remember my first night in Birganj, staying in such a bad hotel that I even surprised myself. I remember being woken numerous times in a shady hotel in Thailand by roaches crawling over my body. And that had been a vacation.

I need to go to Jhappa and see the green, lowland tea fields one more time. I need to stay a night in Rajbiraj one last time, because I didn’t know that my last visit there was going to be my last visit there. I need one more cold coke on a hot, sticky day. I want more foggy mornings spent over coffee and newspapers. I have to see more smiling faces of eager students—and teachers. I have to experience everything again, so I can remember.

And yet there was no time.

§

And everything ended with a whimper. I said my farewells to the teachers and administrators at the District Education Office. I have to be honest: they were too thankful. Every month for the last year I was in Nepal, the calendar was filled with blacked-out days due to strikes called by both the Maoists and the political parties. Schools were a top target. I knew the system I had worked to assist was doomed. Still, everyone smiled and wished me luck in the future.

I went to Kathmandu and started the paperwork that would end my Peace Corps service. Then I realized why my whole experience had such a weird feeling to it: the people. Two years it'd taken me to figure out that I living in very strange social and professional circumstances. I had walked into my office and proclaimed with great pride that I was a Peace Corps volunteer, and had immediately gone to work. I had met a couple dozen people one day, and within a week had been holding some girl's hair as she vomited into a toilet, and then laughing as the story was recounted to entire groups of people.

This was not normal. It was, however, one of the best parts of this experience.

I had met my wife in the Peace Corps. She was making a documentary for USAID on development programs in Nepal. A focus of this documentary had been about the Peace Corps. She had been collecting still photographs to use in the footage and was confronted by something she thought was strange. The photos were either of volunteers working in schools, helping farmers, holding trainings, etc., or the photos were of volunteers having parties, guzzling booze, posing in Nepali drag, etc.

I had a hard time sorting all this out to her.

Perhaps I wasn't the best volunteer. I still have strong ties to the country, yes, and I did accomplish some nice things while I was there. But there are just too many memories to sort through, and making a nicely packaged anecdote about my experience has been next to impossible. It was positive. It was wonderful. And I wouldn't have been as successful if I hadn't done it. But what it's like to be a Peace Corps volunteer? I don't have a great answer to that, and I really wish I did.

Because I remember it a lot.

Scott Allan Wallick was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal from February 2002 until April 2004. He worked as a teacher trainer for the District Education in Birganj, Parsa District. He blogged extensively about his Peace Corps experience (visit the blog) until Peace Corps / Washington asked him to close it for safety and security reasons, which he did. The Peace Corps program in Nepal closed in in September 2004, and Scott's group, N/194, became the last to COS in country. Currently Scott lives in New York with is wife, Binita, and is an editor for the English Language Teaching division of Oxford University Press.