by Aaron Barlow
Most Americans remember “This Little Piggy” fondly from childhood, I think. And who can resist playing with the toes of a barefooted child sitting in front of them? But what do you do when the child in question can’t possibly understand “This little piggy went to market…?” I don’t know about other PCVs, but I created “Hena Kisoa Kely” for Tino.
After only two and a half months in country, my Malagasy was extremely limited. I spoke French fluently and, because that was a much more efficient way for me to communicate, I relied on it much more heavily than Malagasy. I couldn’t speak to the woman I paid to do my laundry, but we managed. I did the same with Tino, asking “Inona vaovao?” over and over, because it was about all I had to say to him. But I took what little I knew and worked out a translation of that favorite children’s game.
I didn’t know if there was a Malagasy word for “piglet” or “piggy” so I used the words for “little pig.” That’s “hena kisoa kely.” And I knew how to say “go to market”; that’s a pretty basic phrase to learn in training. So the first part of the translation was easy: “Hena kisoa kely miantsena.” It got a little trickier after that, but I decided on “Hena kisoa kely mipetrapetraka” for the little piggy staying home and “Hena kisoa kely mihinana henan’omby” for the little piggy eating roast beef. In reality the two mean, respectively, something closer to “The little pig made himself at home” and “The little pig ate cow’s meat,” but I was doing the best I could. “This little piggy had none” was pretty easy, as I knew how to say “didn’t eat.” Hence, “Hena kisoa kely tsy mihinana.” Finally, though, I was completely stumped as to how to say “all the way home.” So that last part of the rhyme got dropped and my hena kisoa kely merely said “wee wee wee.”
It didn’t matter if the translation was exact. It didn’t matter if there was any cultural context behind it. It didn’t matter if I looked foolish. All that mattered was the big grin on Tino’s face when I’d play the game with him.
One look at that sweet little boy’s face, and I couldn’t help but feel happier. On the tough days, that meant a lot. On the days when it’s hard to believe I left, I wonder how Tino looks now, as an eleven-year-old who I hope is doing well in school. I wonder how he has changed, and I feel guilty for leaving without a true explanation to him and all the rest. I left for myself, telling a story that I thought would make sense to the people of Vavatenina, something that wouldn’t prejudice them against the Peace Corps. All the same, I left a little piece of my heart there in Vavatenina, where I hope a little boy still remembers how an American woman once painted his toenails blue, taught him to count in English, and told a silly story while playing with those toes.
Amanda Wonson served in Madagascar from 1999-2000, after receiving her B.A. in International Studies. She returned to school in 2001, obtaining her master’s in Social Studies Education.
Coming to Sierra Leone
Sarah Moffett-Guice
Africa can quickly become a part of one, its future a signal to our own, all of our own.
The Peace Corps truck pulled away, disappearing down the hill. I was finally here, in Taiama, my assigned village, starting my new life in Africa.
For many years I had a fine career at home, as a nurse and health educator, and could have continued beyond retirement age. But, for reasons I couldn’t fully explain, I wanted to go to Africa; the Peace Corps offered me the chance.
However, they had high expectations.
The year-long application process required eight references, the more prestigious, the better. But how could the Chief of Surgery, who knew me only from my work in the medical center, be expected to know if I could function effectively in an African village? I had to submit essays also, explaining where I wanted to go, and why, and what I expected to do once I got there.
As a female applicant over the age of fifty, I also needed advance medical clearance. I asserted that I could lift fifty pounds, although I was unable to take it anywhere, and that I could walk wherever I needed to go, and keep walking for as long as would be required. I submitted my fingerprints, and assured the National Security Agency that I had no criminal record or vile habits.
After ten months of preparation, the letter finally arrived. Twenty-nine of us, all eager trainees, gathered in Philadelphia for the four-day ritual called staging, then flew to Sierra Leone for eight weeks of cross-cultural and language instruction.
We lived together in dormitory-style lodging, sharing rooms, meals, recreation, day-long classes and a constant flood of new experiences. It was an intense time of developing friendships and a few animosities. I was eager to do everything and try everything, to speak the pidgin dialect called Krio, to eat the hot, spicy rice dishes, and even to ride a bicycle, something I had never learned to do as a child. In spite of falls and many bruises, I persisted with the bicycle until our medical officer finally told me that if I broke a hip it would be the end of my Peace Corps experience. In the end I didn’t need the bicycle in Taiama. Everything, including the bus stop, was within walking distance.
A Sierra Leonean staff member, who could negotiate the primitive roads to the villages, had operated the Land Rover; there was room for a few new Volunteers and their gear. Only essentials were allowed, a plastic water filter, mosquito net, pillow and mattress, a medical kit with emergency drugs, and the prophylactic malaria medicines we had to take every week. We didn’t need a lot of clothes, only lightweight cottons for the year-round tropical heat.
Sashi was the only other nurse in our trainee group, and our sites were less than thirty kilometers apart, so we rode in the same truck.
She was young, with the petite stature, almond-colored skin, and delicate features of her native India. As a U.S. resident and naturalized citizen since the age of twelve, she had assimilated American behavior and styles of dress, but still enjoyed the foods of her native land. On occasional visits to Freetown we sometimes would go to a restaurant serving Indian cuisine. But for this day, en route to our villages, we settled for a roadside “chophouse,” a collection of three or four oilcloth-covered wooden tables with straight-backed wooden chairs placed in the cleared space in front of the cook’s house.
The woman of the house boiled white rice over a ground fire in the dirt-floored kitchen, then added a spicy sauce of peanut paste, tomatoes, eggplant, okra, and hot peppers. Her husband collected the money, served customers and kept the tables cleared, and there were chores for all the children. We all ate heartily.
The two male Volunteers in our van, Tom and Matt, were tall and athletic and not long out of college; they had healthy appetites. Harry, the driver, was short and wiry, but he had learned never to let a good meal pass him by. Food was a serious matter in Sierra Leone, especially for travelers, who might encounter only one chophouse in a whole day’s journey and would need to fill up or go hungry.
None of us talked much during the trip. My site was in the south, just fifty miles from the Liberian border where armed conflict had broken out the previous year and all the Americans had left. But I wasn’t worried about that. I was here at last, in Africa. The villagers would be happy to see me and anxious to help. What could go wrong? How could anything go wrong, after all the planning and preparation?
By mid-afternoon we were driving down the soft dusty road, passing smiling faces and waving hands. Crimson hibiscus blossoms on the sloping hillside flanked the health center gate. Harry skillfully backed the Land Rover up to the door of my assigned apartment and helped unload my belongings.
My new home was a two-bedroom apartment, within the compound gates and 100 yards up a gentle slope from the health post. It had been built and furnished by missionaries and was luxurious by village standards. The large living room was furnished with a worn green leatherette sofa, two matching chairs, and a long wooden table. A solar panel in the roof provided enough electricity for lights a couple of hours each evening, so my apartment became
the locus for meetings of the health commission.
There was also a tiny kitchenette, with shelves and a kerosene-operated refrigerator. But kerosene was expensive and often unavailable; I learned how to function without it by salting fish and buying fresh produce every day, just as the villagers did.
The bathroom served a dual function, as it was the only source of water. There was no kitchen sink, but an elevated tank just outside the bathroom wall held a week’s worth of water, pumped from the underground cistern by solar power, which then flowed by gravity into the bathroom sink, commode, and bathtub. Because of gravity and the placement of the tank, it was impossible to have an overhead shower.
Of course, the water in the cistern came from the heavy downpours of the rainy season. A few months into the dry season, I began to contemplate the exhaustion of the supply, and how I would function without running water. The village women walked to the Taia River each morning and carried their daily supply home in buckets on their heads. I supposed I would have to hire someone to carry water for me, since I lacked the balancing skills and the neck muscles for the task.
My favorite feature of my new home was the small screened porch with a view of the hillside behind the health post. Tiny fragrant white flowers on lush deep-green bushes bloomed beside my porch, and stately date palms lined the path below. Many evenings, I would sit on my porch contemplating life and how I had come to Africa with such high hopes.
I sincerely believed that these people, whose lives and experiences were so very different from mine, would be better off for my coming to stay with them, even if only in some small way. I was eager and optimistic, and tried to push apprehension down into the deepest recesses of my mind. Fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar, was not allowed here.
It was late afternoon. The clinic had closed and the workers had gone home to their families. I stood in my doorway and watched the Peace Corps truck drive away, and wished it would not leave just yet.
One evening I sat on my small screened porch, gazing at the hillside beyond the health center, and thinking about life:
And when my time is done, will I cry for Africa the rest of my days? The sun is burning on the western slope, the first candle is lit. On the road fisherwomen trudge home carrying their hoop-shaped nets, balancing baskets of fresh caught fish on their heads. In the field of dry leaves below the hospital, circles of fire glow and send pale gray smoke drifting toward the river.
I go to see what is happening, the pastor comes from his house also, probably to reassure me. He speaks of what he thinks I want to hear—wild animals which used to live in the forest on the edge of town, of trees cut down and hopes for replanting, of times of his youth and times of the future.
Dusk has settled in, murmuring shadows drift by, the evening breeze floats on the treetops, and the leaf fires have gone out. It is cooler now, the time for relaxation and contemplation. And when my days are done, will I cry for Africa?
Sarah Moffett-Guice was a Peace Corps Youth Development Volunteer in Sierra Leone from 2004-2006. She now teaches at Tamna University in Korea.
Shattering and Using Book Learning
Susan L. Schwartz
Learning, and walking away, in the real world, from what we’ve thought we’ve learned!
I should have known that Peace Corps wouldn’t be quite what I expected. The recruiter interviewing me had said that, with my strong science background, I could easily get a position teaching math or science. Huh?! I had never taken even one math course in college and the only science courses I’d taken were a beginning astronomy course and a geology course popularly known as “rocks for jocks.” The resume she was looking at was for a person with the same name as me.
Once that was straightened out, I was told that maybe I’d be offered a position teaching English. That did not appeal to me; I was an anthropology major, focusing on Africa and development, and felt it was much more important for people to be able to grow their own food and have enough to eat than to be able to speak English as a foreign language.
The recruiter said there weren’t many generalist positions available and didn’t have much hope.
So I was thrilled when I received the invitation to go to Sierra Leone as an agricultural extension agent. I’d gotten exactly the type of job I’d wanted.
Most importantly, I wanted to live like the local people. Wasn’t that what anthropology was all about? Blending in, being as unobtrusive as possible. Becoming a part of the community, but not influencing or changing it with foreign ideas or products, which would damage the culture. Waiting for the people to ask for my help instead of me proselytizing about the benefits of irrigated-swamp rice production. Who was I, a twenty-two-year-old college graduate from New Jersey, to tell these people they needed to change farming practices that must have been centuries old? They first needed to want to change; I couldn’t force them into it.
Oh, I so wanted to be culturally sensitive!
That’s why I hadn’t brought a Frisbee with me, although I had seen other Volunteers throwing them to kids during training, and the kids seemed to have lots of fun playing with the toy. What would happen when the Volunteers left and took their Frisbees with them or, if they gave them to some kids, they got lost or damaged? That’s why I didn’t want to have a motorcycle like the other PCVs: I didn’t want to have something that the people in the village I went to had no way of owning. I just didn’t think it was right if I could ride in and out whenever I wanted, and the villagers had to walk and depend on public transportation to get anywhere.
I was so naïve!
When I arrived in “my” village, two and a half miles from a main road—which I’d have to walk from now on any time I wanted to go to town for supplies or to attend Ministry meetings—the first thing I saw was a motorcycle leaning against the wall of a mud-brick house! How could it be? What was going on here? I’d been told that this village had really wanted a Peace Corps Volunteer because they didn’t grow enough food for themselves and didn’t have the money to buy food during the “hungry season.” So how was it that someone had had enough money to buy a motorcycle?
All my grandiose ideas were shattered.
I realized that all the anthropological theory I’d read and accepted in college did not necessarily apply out here in the real world. That was reinforced when Sierra Leoneans found out I didn’t have a motorcycle, because they thought that foreigners who were richer than they should have one. Without that status symbol, I think I was somehow less respected by some people. On the other hand, being forced to use taxis and minivans gave me the opportunity to meet and talk with far more Sierra Leoneans than I would have if I had had a motorcycle.
After the initial shock of feeling betrayed by my anthropology background, I never seriously regretted not having a motorcycle. Once I reconciled myself to the fact that academia wasn’t a totally reliable guide to life in the bush, my knowledge of African history and my awareness of issues in development, gained during my coursework, made it easier for me to adjust and adapt to living in Sierra Leone.
Later, I learned that the bike I’d seen was broken and the owner didn’t have the money to repair it.
Susan L. Schwartz has been a teacher and teacher trainer in the field of English Language Learner education since 1990. After Peace Corps and graduate school, she worked in China and Indonesia before taking a teaching position at a public school in Massachusetts. Susan has traveled widely in Asia and received a Fulbright-Hays Seminar Abroad grant to India in 2007.
The Adventures Overseas
Larry W. Harms
What does one find in a rainforest or in an airplane over it?
One starts Peace Corps by studying a map.
In May 1963, at the end of my senior year of college, the Peace Corps sent a letter indicating that I was accepted, pending final clearances, as a Volunteer for assignment to Guinea, Africa.
> Early June was wheat-harvest time in western Oklahoma. So, first things first—I had to help family and other farmers until there was clearance.
One event confirmed that the Peace Corps was working on it.
I was working for a neighbor, tilling fields immediately following the harvest. I took a mid-afternoon break for sandwiches and ice tea, and the owner and a neighbor stopped by to talk. They had been over at a rebuilt bridge, checking it out. The person checking me out found them there. They told me about the guy, how he was dressed, where he might be from, and what kind of car he was driving, then jokingly said, “We didn’t tell him anything.” They also said he would always remember the interview. Standing on the bridge, he had leaned against one of the railings. The black wood treatment was not completely dry; he left with some on both his clothes and hands.
Guinea was the first independent French colony in Africa, and it set the stage for all others. President Sekou Toure was the key person in gaining its independence. His reputation with Africans was (and still is) that of a hero. With France, his situation was very difficult: France had both commercial and political interests that it wanted to continue after independence. President Toure turned to Russia for assistance. That was against the interests of France.
Politics aside, the economic, social, educational, and other developmental progress expected by the people could not be realized. President Toure had a very good reputation within Guinea when we arrived, but a lot was rapidly lost during our two years there. Toure was known for strong opinions, and he was instrumental in putting in the Peace Corps, ousting it after about four years, and then inviting back in after an additional number of years.
We were Guinea I, 1963-65, the first group of Volunteers. I was assigned to Macenta, a town in the southeastern rainforest. The primary elements of my Peace Corps Volunteer experience, from the technical standpoint, were to introduce an improved chicken breed and meet the nutritional and other needs for higher levels of production, to teach students using direct field training to improve vegetable and poultry production, and improve production of high-quality vegetables for the town market. The details seem a little lost at this point (forty year later). We certainly didn’t create the revolution that we had envisioned!