by Aaron Barlow
We did avoid what others were going through in training programs from Puerto Rico to New Mexico, boot-camp-like physical endurance training, thinking maybe that was the best way to get future PCVs up to the task. But the good news is that it was only us early kids that were subjected to personal humiliation or extreme physical challenge as the method of choice for preparing PCVs to be successful at living and working in unfamiliar places around the world.
Early on, Peace Corps worked hard to recruit childless, married couples…maybe thinking that two people would be able to rely upon and support each other in the hard times. What they didn’t count on was that most Americans have so many distractions in their lives that they may spend only a few hours a day with each other, one on one. A married couple going to their PC site often discovered that living with each other for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 12 months a year…elevated them to a whole new level of togetherness...either tightening bonds to where only death would do them part or stretching the limits of familiarity and secret knowledge beyond anything humanly possible. Married couples got to know each other in the most detailed ways, and if the high percentage of PCV separations is any indication, a lot of us didn’t like what we found out.
Eventually we all came home, not realizing just how much we had been changed by what we had been doing day in and day out for two, three, or four years. At times we felt like we had stepped onto a train and traveled to unexpected places and exposed to unimaginable people and events while everything we came back to was as we had left it. There were differences…more houses, more or bigger kids, older friends, newer cars…but as the anthropologist E. T. Hall has said, the most important parts of any culture are the invisible ones. It was those once unseen things that our travels had now made visible. The attitudes, beliefs, perceptions about us and the places we had been, the people who lived in those places and even the places we were coming back to were the same, while everything in our own world had been completely altered by stepping onto that train.
We had seen a world where people with so little to spare still put hospitality and friendship before their own needs, where people who were in a day-to-day struggle to survive were still cheerful and welcoming to strangers. We saw the depth of extended families and the values inherent in traditional communities. We also saw how the introduction of religions and belief systems from the outside were corrupting those values and destroying the families. I think we were surprised when the questions we were asked on our return were seldom about what we had learned or what it was that had changed us.
Home now, our family with deep PC connections has a special bond that doesn’t require explanation. Quietly, we believe…we hope…the collective experiences have had a positive impact on us, helping us to give more emphasis to the people side of our lives, to the interactions we have in our jobs and communities, to the perspectives we bring on how we should deal with each other; whether that be the people next door or a wider international community. Individually, we’ve turned into public health professionals and development workers in other international organizations and NGOs, college professors, businessmen and women, teachers and artists trying to contribute something back to the country from which we’d started but always with one foot planted in that thing we had done in a moment of idealistic fervor…or in a haze induced youthful confusion…five, ten….and now forty-plus years ago. I think most of us have felt we were deep down changed but it isn’t easy to say what that means: except to maybe six other members of a rather deep Peace Corps family.
Arne Vanderburg is currently a history teacher at a private school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He took his first plane flight ever from rural Ohio to New York City preparing to be a Peace Corps Volunteer. Over the next forty years he was to become divorced from the woman who first joined him on that adventure and married to another whom he met in Peace Corps. One of his best Peace Corps friends married his brother, a former PCV, his nephew decided to head off to Peace Corps in Eastern Europe, and most recently his youngest son spent three years as a PCV.
Your Parents Visited You in Africa?
Solveig Nilsen
Accident and death: never far away, or far from mind. But home and our families aren’t, either.
My parents arrived in San Francisco for the unveiling of their first grandchild exactly one month after she’d made her debut in the Kaiser Permanente delivery room. My mother of immaculate house fame would get her first glimpse of my skills as a housekeeper. She and my father would be sleeping under their married daughter’s roof for the first time.
Fortunately, they’d never considered a trip to see us in Africa; going abroad was not much done in their circles in the sixties, an unimaginable extravagance for someone with kids in college whose vacation traditions tended toward visits with the relatives and camping in national parks. Besides, if international travel could be contemplated at all, Africa would not have been on the list. First things first—they’d fantasized about someday making a trip to Norway, the “old country” of their mothers.
It was inconceivable to imagine them making the trip to Addis Ababa. When our plane had landed in Beirut for refueling, in September 1967, it was in the aftermath of a Middle East war. The airport was full of soldiers with machine guns, two accompanying me back into the bathroom to retrieve the purse I’d somehow managed to leave behind.
Yet getting to Addis Ababa was the easy part. The three-day journey to our village in the upper reaches of the Simian Mountains started out with a flight to the Eritrean city of Asmara, where we spent a day loading up on provisions: three-kilo tins of powdered milk, five-pound cans of Danish butter. Local dairy products were proscribed; tuberculosis was prevalent.
Next morning, we boarded an overloaded bus for the two-day journey to the village in the mountains that would be home for the next two years. On the second day, we began the climb high into the Simians, a range of mythic proportions replete with bottomless crevices and spectacular fissures. Located between the valley of the Blue Nile to the west, the Rift Valley to the east, this drama-queen region of the world was created by an ancient volcanic cataclysm resulting in one of the planet’s most precipitous drop-offs, down to 400 feet below sea level. All I had to do was look out the bus window, and there it was, a view in the direction of one of the lowest points on earth, the Danakil Desert. Our bus driver navigated the edge of the abyss to the accompaniment of Ethiopian pop blasting at top volume from speakers directly above our heads.
The bus crawled up the steep grade, the driver downshifting, then downshifting again until we were almost at a halt, engine grinding and roaring. The hairpin turns required the skilled (we hoped) bus driver to navigate them inch-by-inch, pulling to the very edge of the chasm, backing up, inching forward again, backing up again until we could proceed along the narrow road carved into the side of the mountain. Until we got to the next switchback. And the next.
I tried to distract myself by imagining the moment I longed for, of disembarking in Maychew, of opening the door to the house that awaited us. Rented on our behalf by a Peace Corps staffer who’d been sent to reconnoiter, it was—we were assured—in decent repair and appropriate to our station in life. The University of Utah dorm room that had been our honeymoon quarters during the three months of training was about to be superseded by our first home. Trying to fill in any of the details of the picture, however, was useless. I had no idea what awaited us. Besides which the view out the bus window demanded my vigilance, crucial (I was certain) to the driver’s efforts to keep us on the road.
We had fabulous front-row seats for this thrilling show, the place of honor directly behind the driver, who had cleared them of the previous occupants in a mini-drama of shout and gesture. When the unfortunates who’d been occupying the seats didn’t go willingly, they were dragged out and shoved down the aisle. Our protestations were ignored. We acquiesced in this humiliating situation; our rudimentary language skills were apparentl
y insufficient to communicate our preferences. There was, of course, the real possibility that our driver understood us perfectly, but held to his own beliefs about the proper order of seating on his bus.
The front row seats were not such a wonderful advantage; they began to feel more like a curse with their unobstructed down-views of deep gorges, at the bottom of which we saw the twisted skeleton of a crumpled vehicle far below. My own personal curses, tendencies toward vertigo and anxiety, were super-activated. Closing my eyes didn’t help.
Peace Corps training staff had warned us about dangers we would encounter, including a list of diseases so long and entertaining that we couldn’t take it seriously: elephantiasis, leprosy, schistosomiasis, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, Rift Valley Fever, rabies, multiple varieties of dysentery. They concluded by telling us that, statistically, the greatest danger to life and limb for PCVs “in country” was motor vehicle accident.
A bus top-heavy with cargo might have triple the allotted weight riding on its axles; the brakes might not be up to the load. Or the taxi driver in Addis Ababa might have been invited in for drinks when he dropped off his last fare, and be all over the road on his way home. You might be in a questionable place at a drastically wrong time—or you might be in a perfectly appropriate place, except the taxi driver might hit the accelerator instead of the brakes, plowing into a couple on a sidewalk in front of a hotel, hitting one of them with such force that she went flying through the air before landing in the street a distance away.
That was the night we arrived in Addis. We were just barely on the ground, having landed at Haile Selassie International Airport two hours before.
On the bus ride into the city, we inhaled our first amazed breaths of African air, thick with smoke from cooking fires, the pungency of eucalyptus. The ride was punctuated with frequent stops, our bus driver slamming on the brakes, honking his horn, leaning out the side window to shout and shake his arm at shepherds with their flocks of goats or sheep blocking the road. The darkness, at 6 p.m. in this part of the world close to the equator, was part of the unfamiliar territory. We were Northerners, used to long summer nights and, once night came, there were always streetlights.
The bus delivered us to the hotel where we were to check in and have a first formal welcome to the country. But there weren’t rooms enough for everyone; it would be necessary to send a few of us to another hotel. Three of the married couples, Erik and I among them, volunteered. We piled into a Peace Corps Land Rover along with Susan and Charlie, Gwen and Nile. After we’d checked in, the driver drove us back to join the rest of the group, pulling into a parking space just off the street, directly in front of the hotel. Susan and Charlie got out of the back seat first. I followed. Somehow, they must have lingered, for they were behind me when I heard Erik shout: “WATCH OUT! RUN!”
Maybe Susan and Charlie weren’t behind me. Maybe I ran faster, my husband’s peremptory order being so urgent. When a person you trust, someone whose vocal modulations you know intimately, screams out an order in a tone of voice you’ve never heard him use before, instinct kicks in; you obey without thinking. You run, expecting a screech of brakes, the crash of metal on metal.
But there were no dramatic sounds. Just the single thud of impact, the muffled chilling sound of a soft object, a person being hit by a car. Turning back to look, I saw a body, airborne.
It was already over, too late to replay the scene, to cut and start over, to retract our offer to go to the other hotel, to take a few minutes longer to settle in at the hotel instead of rushing.
Someone appeared and took me by the arm, leading me away from the scene of the accident. I remember hearing a disembodied keening sound before I realized that it was my body making that sound.
“Try to calm down,” they said. “Everything is going to be all right; an ambulance is on the way. Don’t worry,” they said, “there’s a decent hospital in this part of town, not that far away.”
When they took us back to the hotel they promised to keep us informed. As soon as there was any news about Susan and Charlie they’d let us know.
They kept their promise.
We were awakened before dawn by a knock on our door. I remember sitting up in bed next to Erik, after the Peace Corps rep had expressed his regret at having to bring us the terrible news, leaving us to go down the hall to knock on Gwen and Nile’s door. Susan had died during the night. Charlie’s injuries, he assured us, were relatively minor. He had a broken arm; he was going to be O.K.
Less than twenty-four hours before, I’d been sitting next to Susan on a bench in the airport in Amsterdam when Charlie came over and dropped a small glossy package in her lap. I watched her open the tiny bottle of French perfume he’d just bought her in the duty-free shop, teasing her about wearing it on the job in their village. But Susan never made it to her village, never opened that bottle of French perfume, never woke up to even one African morning, nor to any morning anywhere.
Our heavily curtained hotel room was dark when I awoke, but there was a narrow strip of light on the floor from a gap at the corner of the window. Had we overslept? I got up to find my watch and draw the curtains. I looked down on a broad avenue, across from which a high-walled compound stretched the entire length of the block.
Sitting atop the wall were two full-maned motionless creatures. I stared, blinking. We were in the city, traffic moving on the street below. They couldn’t be actual lions. Then one of them turned its head, and stretched a leg.
“Erik,” I said. “Wake up.”
Our hotel, as we soon found out, was across the street from the palace of the Emperor.
I remember virtually nothing else of the week in Addis, of the schedule of events that were to orient us to life “in country.” I have no memory of any other details of the hotel across the street from the compound of His Excellency, Haile Selassie, also known as the Lion of Judah, Elect of God, and Negusa Negast, King of Kings. We were fully dis-oriented; we wanted to get out of there, to get on with it, to get to our village in the mountains.
A week later, on the last leg of our journey, a turn in the road gave unto a view of a town below. The driver gestured toward the scene ahead, speaking to us in Italian (ferengi in northern Ethiopia were assumed to be Italian, or at least be able to speak the language). “Scusi!” he said, and then, in English this time, “We are soon to arrive, Maychew. You see? Is visible, your town!”
We were about to set foot in our village, on a high plateau in the mountains of Tigre Province, Ethiopia, the Horn of Africa. We were to be the first ferengi in residence. We’d volunteered for this. Peace Corps didn’t send people to outpost locations if they didn’t want to go.
We were so relieved to be getting off the bus that we were primed to view whatever awaited us as a marvel and a refuge. The living quarters they’d rented for us were of typical chico construction, sticks and mud, the Ethiopian version of adobe. Bright green shutters opened to let in the light, the flies, and the occasional chicken. The amenities: a tin roof, cement floors in the living room and bedroom, a light bulb that dangled by a cord from the living room ceiling, providing electricity for two or three hours in the evening. In the kitchen, a packed earthen floor, a table, three chairs. A small gas stove was, for the time being, a tantalizing but useless convenience, since the propane tank that would fuel it hadn’t arrived. The two fifty-gallon drums in the corner, our water system, were empty, the water itself not part of the onsite package.
The women we hired to carry water from the river delivered it to our door in large earthenware jugs balanced on their heads. They poured the water from the jugs into one of the drums in an every-other-day system dictated by the Peace Corps Health Officer so that any water we touched would have “sat” for forty-eight hours, after which the flukes of the schistosomiasis snail would no longer pose a danger. At that point we were free to boil the cloudy water for the twenty-minute minimum,
after which we poured it into a filter apparatus so that it would resemble drinking water, the flotsam and worse from the river strained into the quickly clogged filter.
The intricacies of navigating daily life required a whole new set of routines. A trip to the WC entailed a mini-trek through the compound, past the landlord’s house, past the goats, the chickens, the donkey, out the back gate into the field behind us to the shintebet, newly constructed as a precondition of the rental agreement. Should the need to make this journey occur in the middle of the night, it was made to the accompaniment of the nocturnal song of the hyena, whose laughing howl we heard every single night.
No, it never occurred to me to invite my parents to visit us in Africa. But entertaining them in our San Francisco flat would be a piece of cake. The shintebet was down the hall. No hyenas in the alley. Electricity flowed through our wires twenty-four hours a day. We had a stove and a refrigerator. I missed our bright green shutters, but with glass in each and every window we didn’t need them.
My parents in our village in Africa? They’ve now been there via the stories embedded forever in my memory, that I’ve loved to relive, over and over again, so they’ve been there in a way, as have all of you who sit and open yourselves to the witness we brought home, letting yourselves be taken all the way to our village in Africa.