by Aaron Barlow
By now, Marie had given birth to twelve children, but had lost at least five. Someone would later tell me Tshinyama left Kamponde in fear of sorcery, believing a spell had been cast against his family, causing their babies to die.
As we had ten years ago during my first visit back, we began to plan the village feast for which he would cook.
My last morning in Kamponde, after my humiliating scene in church, we set off on foot, my pink floppy hat shading me from the sun as we headed through the green savanna toward Tshinyama’s new home.
Children gathered to see the first foreigner to ever set foot in the desolate village of a few dozen square huts. It was so grim and small compared to Kamponde; once again I had to hold back more tears.
We ate with our hands, a rich meal of fou-fou, chicken spiced with his trademark pili-pili sauce, and boiled manioc leaves. Tshinyama apologized for not having the ingredients for the mango pudding so many Peace Corps Volunteers had once craved.
He showed off his homemade rifle as I took in the antelope antlers and other animal talismans used to decorate his home. Faded magazine ads of Western food on gleaming plates were tacked to the whitewashed walls of his little mud hut.
An adopted son, a young man he took in after his parents were killed, at first cried with fear that I was there to take Tshinyama away, then serenaded us with a love song for his father on a guitar he had fashioned from an Oki peanut oil can.
After lunch, and the obligatory sip of palm wine with the village chief, I told Tshinyama that it was time to go.
I gave Indian cloth to Marie, though glaucoma has clouded her eyes and I didn’t know if she could see the bright paisley patterns. There were notebooks and pens for the grandkids, a red rubber ball.
Tshinyama would not meet my eyes as I pushed an envelope with $150 in his hands, suggesting he buy a new bicycle and a cellular phone. I told him there was now a weak signal in Kamponde, that a few clever types were making money selling phone calls, hinting it might be a way for him to return home. It wasn’t much, yet still more than the average annual income in his ravaged homeland.
We said our last goodbye before I headed back up the path. I hated leaving him in the bleak little village and pledged to try and return one last time.
We both knew it unlikely we would ever meet again.
“Washala bimpe, tatu,” I choked, as we grasped each other’s hands, my fair freckled ones clasped between the rough dark fingers that had cooked so many meals for hundreds of Peace Corps Volunteers. It’s a simple Tshiluban farewell: Stay well, father.
Tshinyama softly replied: “Wayi bimpe, mamu”—Go well, mother.
Beth Duff-Brown was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1979-81. It was there that she determined she would become a foreign correspondent and she has twice visited her village of Kamponde as a journalist to report on conditions there. She has worked for The Associated Press—most recently as the Deputy Asia Editor—for twenty years, based in Africa, Asia, and North America. She currently is a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University.
The Utopia of the Village
Heather Corinne Cumming
We carry Mother Earth, and all she gives, within us.
In the years that have passed, I find myself longing for the intangible—a dream that exists under the raw, rugged spaces of earth, the places where the roots of trees sleep. Under buried earth, bruised patches that both grow and decay with time. I can smell Africa in places where it doesn’t exist: in dreams, in corners of the rooms in my mother’s house in America, in parts of my flesh I could swear I’ve washed hundreds of times since I was there.
I miss the heat of Africa that I once hated. Africa is a thick, slow heat—seeping into the blood. It’s a different kind of heat than anywhere else on Earth. Its heat has girth, could drown a man the way the ocean could devour him. It is a kind of unforgiving heat that will never care about people, the will of Nature that will always remain uncontrolled by human beings.
I miss the scent of Africa. I miss the developing world. I long for a place where people defecate on the sides of the street and think nothing of it—it is a way of life for them, just as using clean toilets is a way of life in Westernized cultures. I search out poverty; I am drawn to the edges of the Earth where people sleep on hay and worship the gods of the trees and thank the Divine for the food that fills their bellies each day. I long to live in silence among people who will understand something that has no words.
When I come back to my home country, I am overwhelmed. It is the place where the people all look like me and talk like me and share my language, and I am overwhelmed to be in a place where I can talk to anyone because we all speak the same language. I long to leave again, to go to a place where people don’t speak my language and I have to learn to speak theirs. Or simply not speak at all.
If that place even exists on Earth.
It is called the Mute Earth and it is a silent heaven, a place where no one says anything because words cannot make sense of nonsense, and sometimes I wish to not have words although words are the things that often save me; they are my therapy.
I am a writer.
I love America because she is my Mother, my womb. Where I learned myself and grew and learned my language. And I love Africa for all the things America never could have given to me: a certain strength that comes from suffering, a strength I hope never again to live without. Africa is the raw earth, the roots of the trees struggling below the ground; Africa is Nature, and god. But they are my two children, and I love them the same, but for different reasons: America and Africa. A mother loves her children the same but in different ways. We are given the opportunity to live on Mother Earth for such a short, sacred time. We must find the significance in all things, above all within ourselves.
Heather Corinne Cumming served as a Peace Corps Volunteer from 2004-06. She returned and published her book, The Messages of Trees, Volumes I-IV. In 2008 she returned to Zambia to begin the Simwatachela Sustainable Agricultural and Arts Program, which helps to promote water, food, and nutrition security and sustainability created by the people and committed to serving the needs of the people in Zambia as well as in Sierra Leone, West Africa.
Part Two
Why Are We Here?
The Engine Catches
Susanna Lewis
Little by little, people can make a difference.
Thirty people, including four teachers and twenty-six eighth- and ninth-grade girls, are crowded behind a rusty, light green, open-back Toyota truck, our bodies poised to push. “Um! Dois! Tres!” and we jam our bodies against the truck. We use all of our strength, but the truck only moves in almost imperceptible increments until—at last—the engine catches and we hear the whir of the motor. We chase after the truck, grab at the green metal and pull ourselves up and in.
Once everyone is in the truck, we are packed liked sardines—girls are sitting on each other, their hands are around each others’ waists, and we are clinging to the sides of the truck to keep from falling out.
The wind blows at the girls’ hair; their smiles are unrestrained, broad and toothy. Palm trees and mud houses blur past us as we make our way to Ilha de Mocambique.
I am the assistant coach of the Escola Secundaria de Monapo girls soccer team, and we are on our way to a game against the team from Ilha de Mocambique. Ilha is a 500-year-old town forty-five minutes from our own village, Monapo. It is a tiny place situated just off the Mozambican coast, and it served as the first Portuguese capital of Mozambique until the turn of the twentieth century. It is a hauntingly beautiful place of 300-year-old churches, navy and green waters, and women dressed in colorful capulanas and iridescent earrings. Ilha’s gently crumbling, centuries-old Portuguese buildings and sturdy Mozambican mud-and-reed houses are a fascinating juxtaposition of this country’s past and present.
We can see
, hear, and smell present-day Mozambique as we drive across the one-lane bridge to Ilha. It is low tide, and female figures walk on the water more than a mile into the sea, on paths worn into the sea floor by thousands of fishermen before them. They look for fish with nothing but a pail and a free hand. The air is fresh and fishy, and shirtless men ride bicycles with sacks of charcoal and cassava between their knees.
We make our way to the soccer field, which is next to the Portuguese Forteleza and the glimmering water of the Indian Ocean. The girls and I change into our uniforms inside the Forteleza and they giggle in excitement—this is their first “real” game against another team and they are nervous. The coach says a few words and I say a few more, to build their confidence and to remind them that together we are strong and that we can win this game.
We play a bigger, tougher opponent on sandy dirt, and the girls play barefoot, though I play wearing sneakers. The girls play better than they ever have before; they do what we taught them to do in our practices, and they play like mature soccer players. They pass the ball well, talk to each other on the field, and dominate the other team. During halftime, the coach and I tell them how much they have improved, and how proud we are of them. When we score the girls do cartwheels, hug, run over to me with their arms open and clasp my hands in theirs. I can’t help but smile and hug them back. I have never felt so comfortable and like myself with Mozambicans before. The girls flash their big smiles and we are in the moment, we are a team.
We do the unthinkable, achieving a resounding victory, 5-0.
After the game, we push the truck to start its engine, pile into the back and make two victory laps around the island. The girls sing to taunt the other team, their voices nasal and imperfect, but somehow the disharmonies are beautiful. They sing, “Silencio toda a gente, Monapo esta a passar!” (Everyone be quiet, Monapo is passing!). They sing, and I sing with them. Next to me a girl blows on a whistle to accompany the singing, on my other side another girl has her head on my shoulder. Sea salts are in my nose, and the gravelly road throws us up and down against the metal of the truck. The girls’ glee is palpable and my own happiness is pure. We drive back to Monapo in the fading light of the day, and when we reach our town the girls sing again, “Silencio toda a gente, Monapo esta a passar!”
As we pass by their different neighborhoods and girls jump off of the truck, they say to me, “Goodbye Teacher!” and give me big hugs. Even though I had been running team practices for a couple of months, and teaching these girls English for nearly a year, it was only after that game that I finally felt like I was a part of their team and a member of their community.
To me, being a Peace Corps Volunteer is working hard every day to belong, every day to learn new customs and change your perspective. You don’t know that you are changing or that your community is slowly accepting you until, like those pushes that finally get the truck’s engine to catch, you have an amazing, surprising moment where everything comes together. For me, the soccer game was the moment that, after months of pushing, the engine caught. After that game I finally felt confident that I was a member of my community, and knowing that I had taught my girls to be better, more confident soccer players made me feel that I had an effect on them, too.
Progress as a Volunteer is slow and often difficult to detect. Even though it may seem impossible at times, serving in the Peace Corps guarantees you one thing, that you will change and you will see change in others—even if to realize it you need a ride in a rusty old truck, a soccer ball and twenty-six wonderful girls.
Susanna Lewis served as an English teacher at the Escola Secundaria de Monapo in Mozambique. She was a part of the tenth training group in Mozambique and her service was from September 2005-07. Susanna now lives in Baltimore, Maryland and is teaching English to refugees, as well as pursuing a master’s in Social Work at the University of Maryland.
Yaka
Kelly J. Morris
One of the best things a Peace Corps Volunteer can do is make himself or herself unneeded.
In January 1969, I went to Togo as a Peace Corps Volunteer to work as a community development extension worker for community self-help construction. It was my job to help communities and their leaders determine their needs for classrooms, clinics, bridges and culverts on farm-to-market roads, and other infrastructure; to prioritize their needs and inventory their resources; and to organize self-help projects to address their highest priority needs. The community provided labor and local materials (sand, gravel, rocks, and water); the local officials provided transport and skilled artisans; and Peace Corps helped to obtain grants for the materials that were not locally available (e.g., cement, reinforcing steel rods, wood planks, tin roofing sheets, etc.) and organizational and technical support, i.e. me.
I was shocked when I went to visit one of the village chiefs with whom I was to work. It was less than ten years since Togo had become independent. To my surprise, the chief of Yaka welcomed me by lamenting the departure of the colonial government and complained that the country had “gone to hell in a handbasket” since the whites departed! We had been told that our mission was to “work ourselves out of a job.” This was not what I was expecting.
I persevered, nonetheless, and worked with the chief, the neighborhood sub-chiefs, the women’s group leaders, and local artisans to build several bridges and culverts on farm-to-market roads. The work went well. The people needed the bridges and worked hard to help obtain something that was in their own interest.
During the dry season, I had to go to Lomé, the capital city, to buy building materials and transport them back to our worksite about 450 kilometers inland. I rode my red CZ Czechoslovak motorcycle down to the railhead about 200 kilometers to the south. My motorcycle and I spent the rest of the voyage sitting on 100-kilogram sacks of millet in a freight car with a squad of soldiers. We bought sodabi, the distilled palm wine that is Africa’s “White Lightning,” from women who crowded the railcar at rural whistle stops and punished our innards with it for the remainder of the agonizingly slow trip.
I spent several days in Lomé buying materials, arranging to hire seven-ton trucks, loading them, and expediting them northward. My plan was to hoist my motorcycle onto the last truck and to ride back to my site on it. Fate, however, intervened in the form of a mangy street dog. As I was riding on my motorcycle down the street the night before my proposed departure, the dog rushed out from an alley, bit me on my ankle, and disappeared.
The next morning, before departing, I dutifully reported the incident to the Peace Corps Medical Office.
“Where is the dog?” the doctor asked.
“Long gone,” I replied.
“Well, I have to assume that the dog was rabid and treat you accordingly,” he announced.
There began a series of sixteen daily shots that he mercifully rotated in four-shot cycles between my biceps and thighs.
“I’ll give you the vials of serum and the throw-away sterile needles to take with you to your post,” the doctor said. “You can have the nurse at the nearest clinic inject you.” I was ready to depart, only one day behind schedule.
My plan was foiled again in a most unexpected way. For several hours after my first injection, I had a reaction to the shot that left me woozy, light-headed, and unsteady on my feet.
“You aren’t going anywhere,” the doctor decided, “until your shots are completed.”
I sent the trucks ahead and then whiled away an unplanned sixteen days in the capital city.
When I finally completed my shots and was liberated, I hopped the next train back north to my post.
The chief of Yaka was not too pleased with me when I went to check on our worksite. He berated me for my extended absence that he characterized as a vacation. Then he treated me to a long list of all the things that he and his collaborators had to do in order to keep the project going in my absence. Thanks to them, the work had contin
ued.
“I know what you were doing,” he concluded. “You were drinking beer and chasing after women. That’s what you were really doing!”
Of course, he was right. Young, single, trapped, and bored in Lomé, I had spent my time, after the dizziness from each day’s injection wore off, drinking beer and chasing women.
My local friends who caught up with me at the beer bar that evening found me in a deliriously good mood. I described my saga and my dressing-down by the chief, which pleased me no end.
“You white people are crazy,” they said. “Why does getting chewed out by that old chief make you happy?’
“Because,” I replied, “in Yaka they figured out that they didn’t need me. In this one village, at least, I worked myself out of a job. Mission accomplished.”
Kelly J. Morris is an international development consultant and writer who served nineteen years with the Peace Corps. Beginning in 1969, he was a Volunteer and country staff for eleven years in Togo and staff for two tours in Washington. He is the author of the Bight of Benin: Short Fiction and the upcoming African Democracy: A Primer. He is the founder and list owner of the Friends of Togo.
Nous Sommes Ensemble
Anna Russo
Perhaps “globalization” is simply recognition of a basic truth.
The sandy dirt footpaths in my village wove an intricate design in between the thatch-roofed huts. These pathways carried the community: motorcycle taxis; skittish goats hurrying to get out of the way; chickens; dogs; cattle; children on their way to school; women carrying stacks of bowls, firewood or water on their heads; people going to the fields or heading home with their harvest. I walked these paths every day, getting to know the shortcuts to the market and home, maneuvering my way around the ruts that formed during the rainy season and trying to avoid getting my bike tires stuck in the sand. Eventually, I became familiar enough with the paths that I could walk them at night without a flashlight, using the moonlight for guidance.