When the World Calls

by Stanley Meisler

  The stories have not been hidden. Scores of memoirs and novels based on Peace Corps experience have been published. This phenomenon has been celebrated and encouraged by the work of John Coyne and Marian Haley Beil, two Volunteers who served in the first program in Ethiopia. In 1989, they began producing their extraordinary newsletter RPCV [Returned Peace Corps Volunteer] Writers & Readers, with Beil as publisher and Coyne as editor. The newsletter publicized the memoirs, novels, short stories, poetry, and essays of former Volunteers, featuring reviews of the works and interviews with the authors. The exchanges encouraged other former Volunteers to seek out agents and publishers. The newsletter went online as Peace Corps Writers in 1997 and then became part of a new Beil-Coyne Web site, Peace Corps Worldwide, in 2009.

  There was thus a great deal of written testimony about the Peace Corps experience, and a herald, first in print and later online, to guide us into it. This testimony was essential in understanding the history of the Peace Corps. Much of the history, of course, involved machinations and politics in Washington. But it was the individual experiences overseas that kept the Peace Corps going, whether the decisions in Washington were wise or foolish. That, in fact, was the genius of the Peace Corps idea: No matter what, the individual Volunteers always powered and ennobled the Peace Corps.

  A discussion of three of the memoirs may help an outsider fathom this heart of the Peace Corps better. Mike Tidwell worked in south central Zaire (later the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1985 and 1986 as an extension agent for the government’s Projet Pisciculture Familiale (Family Fish Project). After training at the University of Oklahoma, he was assigned by the Peace Corps to the village of Lulenga, located alongside the Lubilashi River, a tributary of the Congo River. From Lulenga, he would travel throughout the Kalambayi area by motorcycle six days a week helping the Congolese build, stock, and harvest fishponds. “If you give a man a fish, he eats today,” he was told in training. “But if you teach a man how to raise fish, he eats forever.”

  Tidwell set down his adventures in The Ponds of Kalambayi, published in 1990. The job is very frustrating. He must communicate in Tshiluba, the local language. The roads have been neglected for so long that some are impassable, even for his motorcycle. Villagers are reluctant to dig fishponds because they fear that Tidwell, like most whites before him, will keep most profits for himself. Birds ravage the ponds until he finally rigs up scarecrows to keep them away. The river overflows and floods ponds. Yet he perseveres and counts notable successes.

  But he cannot escape loneliness. “Yet even as my village friendships improved,” he writes, “. . . the lonely times in Kalambayi never left me. There were a lot of them, times when I felt utterly by myself and close to bursting from the pressure of uncommunicated feelings.”

  When he hears news on his short-wave radio about the Challenger space shuttle explosion in January 1986, “I ran to my door and looked out, searching for someone, anyone, with whom to share the news. All I saw, though, were women loaded down with manioc like burros and dirty children eating sugarcane outside boxlike houses . . . . I went back to my chair and nearly exploded like the spacecraft, streaking and whistling. With whom could I discuss the space shuttle, much less more subtle matters like the frustrations, longings, and loneliness that called on me in this remote place?”

  Tidwell immerses himself in Kalambayi life in a way that would have enthralled Sargent Shriver in the early days. He chances upon an old blind man by a riverside one afternoon, and they chat.

  The whole time we talked, nothing he said suggested he knew I was white and from another continent. We were just two travelers pausing at a riverbank in Africa, speaking Tshiluba. To pull this off, to become this immersed in culture and language, had been one of my goals in coming to Africa. As I talked to the old man, clucking at his descriptions of hardship, guffawing at his jokes, offering my own, there spread through me a feeling of having walked a long way and reached the circled endpoint on a map. For every child my white skin had pumped with horror, for every fried grasshopper I had eaten, sure it would kill me, for every line of Tshiluba I had mangled to the chuckles of those around me, here now was my glory.

  Near the end of his tour, Tidwell receives a letter from Brian Steinwand, the Peace Corps director in Kinshasa, asking him to stay on for another year. Some diplomatic squabble has provoked the mercurial Zaire government to withhold visas for incoming Volunteers. It is not clear when anyone can replace him.

  “I agreed with him that it would be a shame to leave the post empty,” writes Tidwell. “Kalambayi was now one of the top fish farming regions in the country, and there was still room for expansion to the east.”

  But he has a problem: too much tshitshampa, the local alcoholic brew, distilled from corn. Whenever he enters the home of his neighbors and clients, they serve him tshitshampa. Lately, he has also started drinking tshitshampa on his own, to wipe out feelings of despair.

  “I looked around after two years and was terrified by the fact that a majority of the people I cared most about in this world had ten cents in their pocket on a good day and could expect to live, on average, no more than forty-five years,” he writes. “And what had I done for them really? What had I changed? The fish farmers had built more than one hundred ponds, and that was a lot. Fresh tilapia were entering village markets at a rate of two metric tons per year. I was proud of that fact. I was proud that, where before they had stood still, several dozen farmers were now walking a course out of absolute poverty. But it was a slow, hard, grinding course. Even with their ponds, the men were poorer than anything I could call acceptable.”

  If he stays, he will have to rely on even more tshitshampa to fight his dark moods. He fears alcoholism and decides it is time for him to leave Africa and return home.

  After the Peace Corps, Tidwell achieved success as a travel writer and environmental leader, founding and running the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting global warming. His prescient 2003 book, Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast, warned that the levee system around New Orleans was causing the loss of coastal land. He insisted that the land behind the levees was sinking and the barrier islands in the Mississippi disappearing, leaving the area without protection against a hurricane. The book was published two years before the terrible devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

  Ellen Urbani, a graduate of the University of Alabama, arrived in Guatemala in the spring of 1992, destined in the eyes of her fellow trainees for failure. They called her “China Doll.” Urbani understood why they thought she was out of place. “A sorority girl, fresh from college in the refined Deep South, with her Laura Ashley dresses and long, beribboned tresses, should be hosting tea at the country club,” she writes.

  But Urbani completed her full tour of two years, two months, and eight days while most of her fellow Volunteers felt forced to leave early. Guatemala was a dark and difficult country then, cruelly torn by civil war, unstable government, violence against leftists, and repression of Indians. Volunteers worked in enervating tension. The work for women Volunteers, especially those assigned to sites alone, was even more tense because of the contemptuous machismo of Guatemalan men.

  The Peace Corps experience was so fraught with fear that Urbani did not want to talk or write about it for years. Her memoir, When I Was Elena, written under her married name, Ellen Urbani Hiltebrand, was not published until 2006, more than ten years after she left Guatemala.

  Urbani’s writing differs from Tidwell’s because she incorporates fiction into the work, interspersing the shortened memoirs of seven other women, including another Volunteer, with her own story. These interludes are evidence of Urbani’s empathy, but they are fiction nevertheless.

  In the book, the Peace Corps first assigns Urbani to work with the ministry of youth in a small town, San Marquesa de Trójillonada, but the mood sours when her Guatema
lan partner begins harassing her, showing up drunk at her house at night, pounding on the door. When the teacher at a nearby mountain village school breaks his leg, Urbani quickly applies to take his place and moves to the village. He returns the next year, and Urbani is reassigned to work with the ministry of youth in Zataquepeque, a town in the Indian highlands. There she hikes to five different schools, spending an afternoon at each working with children, trying to help them think differently, think creatively.

  Guatemala will mature her. “At twenty-three . . . I was still too fresh, too new to her shores, for Guatemala to have yet stolen from me my native idealism,” she writes. “She would rob me soon; grab hold of me, give me a good flailing, wrench from my embrace the sense of personal omnipotence fueling the perception that a single person can make a difference. Oh, how I grew to hate Guatemala for that!”

  The menace of Guatemalan men hangs over the memoir. She tries hard not “to allow this tale to digress and then degrade into a scathing denouement belittling and chastising the Hispanic male.” But, throughout her two years, she sleeps with a butcher knife under the pillow, a lead pipe under the bed, and her German shepherd, Cali, on the bed. Four of her fellow Volunteers were raped during the two years.

  An ordinary walk through town is always an unpleasant obstacle course. Women would often touch her harmlessly. “Only the men loitering on the streets meant disrespect, not just touching my hair and skin to test their reality but lunging for my crotch or my breasts to taunt me,” she writes. “The less ballsy ones, but nonetheless still crude, would call to me sick sexualisms as I strolled down the street. Once, in an effort to gauge the precise frequency with which this occurred, I counted the tally of crude gestures in a seven-block round trip to the store. Fourteen different men assaulted me either verbally or physically.”

  She describes herself frolicking with her friend Luci and Luci’s children at dusk one evening. “Multiply in your mind,” she writes, “the beauty of this evening and spread it out over the course of the years. Do not let the robberies and the rapes and the assaults dull the sound of these children laughing or chill the warmth of their hands slipped into mine . . . . After leaving, I recall that the bad overshadowed the good for far too long, and I can find no way to tell the full truth without letting those sentiments creep back in.”

  She is attacked during her last week in Guatemala. First she finds a warning scrawled in red on the wall of her house. “Gringa bitch, I’ll fuck you or I’ll kill you,” it says. At night, she hears the footsteps of an intruder on the porch. He then smashes down the door and rushes toward her bed. She is so paralyzed with fear that she is unable to reach for her knife or pipe or even scream. All she can do is admonish herself continually to breathe so she does not faint. But Cali, growling, snarling, biting, snapping, scratching, fights off the assailant, who runs away.

  “My bond with Guatemala unraveled in those last few weeks, tore clear through that last night,” she writes. “The invader did me a favor, though; he filled me with fury and fear and a righteous indignation which swifted me home without regret.”

  Yet years later, she goes on, “time has softened and tempered my thoughts of her. Guatemala gave to me more than she took, and I would live it all over again, no second thoughts . . . . Guatemala made me me, and if she hurt me, the cicatrix is too much part of what I am to ever relieve myself of it. It is my battle wound, my numbered tattoo, my Purple Heart that says I thrived.”

  After leaving Guatemala, Urbani married a fellow Volunteer and settled in Portland, Oregon. She had to be treated for tuberculosis, which she contracted in the Peace Corps. After receiving an MA in art therapy, she began designing art programs for cancer patients. Her work became a subject of a well-received documentary, Paint Me a Future, by David Kaminsky. Now the mother of two small children, she told John Coyne in an interview in 2007, “I have more books in me, but heaven knows when I’ll have time to write them.”

  Barbara E. Joe arrived in Honduras with forty-eight other trainees in the summer of 2000. She was in a definite minority, the only one over the age of sixty. Despite all the Peace Corps propaganda about its quest for older Volunteers, only 7 percent of its Volunteers throughout the world were older than fifty. Most of the trainees with Barbara were younger than her own children.

  Peace Corps lore was rife with stories of older Volunteers who did not make it. Many staffers insisted the older Volunteers were inflexible, weak at foreign languages, often homesick, and squeamish over the primitive living conditions. A male friend predicted to sixty-two-year-old Barbara that she would be out and home by Christmas.

  But Barbara persisted, even extended for a third year, and wrote a memoir that flattens all the clichéd objections to older Volunteers in the Peace Corps. The book, Triumph and Hope: Golden Years with the Peace Corps in Honduras, which she published herself, was selected by the Peace Corps Writers Web site as the best Peace Corps memoir of 2009.

  Barbara had toyed with the idea of joining the Peace Corps for many years. She was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley when Kennedy was inaugurated. She might have answered his call earlier, but education, marriage, career, and children always seemed more important. Many years later, the underpinnings of her life were shaken by divorce, a job loss, and the deaths of a son and a foster child, and she decided the time had come for the Peace Corps.

  As might be expected, Barbara came into the Peace Corps with a record of achievement far longer than that of most Volunteers. She was fluent in Spanish, a language she used as a teenager in Colombia when her father worked there for the Organization of American States. A member of Amnesty International, she had served as an election monitor in Chile, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, and, on vacations, had taken part in refugee and health projects in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Colombia. A former social worker, she had worked for many years for the American Occupational Therapy Association. Barbara had even visited Honduras before, when she accompanied her father, a Canadian-born architect, to an archeological project at the Mayan ruins of Copán. She was less than three years old then.

  The title of her book comes from the two villages in which she served: El Triunfo (Triumph), where for two years as a health worker she tried to inculcate good sanitation and health habits, and La Esperanza (Hope), where for one year she served as an aide to the staff in a Peace Corps regional office.

  In the memoir, Barbara often discusses her relationship with younger Volunteers. In training, she writes, “I soon found myself acting as mother confessor to young trainees missing their own parents, or perhaps finding it easier to talk with me than with contemporaries . . . . A few expressed condescending admiration for my ‘bravery’ for joining the Corps in my dotage, though I considered myself better prepared than they for what actually lay ahead.”

  She feels that older Volunteers are “less vulnerable than many younger Volunteers to loneliness and depression,” and that their expectations, “tempered by experience . . . were more realistic.” In a visit to a maternity wing of a hospital, she notices that her young associates are uneasy about the women in labor for they, unlike herself, had never given birth. But she is not condescending about their youth. “I was blown away by my fellow trainees, all in their twenties, who made up for lack of experience with touching sincerity and boundless energy,” she writes.

  Most memoirs by returned Volunteers tend to be introspective, almost self-indulgent in the way they devote lavish space to the discovery of new sensations and ideas that they experience in their first brush with an unfamiliar culture in a distant and impoverished land. Everything is new; everything is a wonder; everything churns out fresh feelings and thoughts.

  But Barbara’s memoir is different. It is not that she is jaded or bored, but rather that she is matter-of-fact and reportorial in her description of her experiences. Nothing fazes her; nothing drives her to despair; nothing sends her
into raptures of wonder.

  In El Triunfo, she rents a space in a hut in the crowded compound of eighty-six-year-old Doña Marina. Her space is only twelve by fifteen feet, with a partition separating a living room and a bedroom. Barbara sizes up the pros and cons calmly. “Doña Marina’s compound provided me with a welcome status, sense of belonging, and margin of safety,” she writes. “But the loyalty cut both ways, preventing me from ever moving elsewhere lest she suffer a huge loss of face. I also had to live with virtually no privacy.”

  She shows neither sentimentality nor despair as she analyzes the difficulty of her work. “If condoms are unavailable,” she writes, “it’s futile to recommend their use. If daily brushing protects teeth, toothbrushes are needed. A balanced diet requires access to a variety of foods. Our conundrum as PCVs was educating people who often lacked the means to follow through.”

  After her fellow Volunteer, a young man, leaves El Triunfo at the end of the first year, Barbara becomes even more immersed in the culture and begins to think like a Honduran. Her tone is even-handed as she discusses the lack of modern conveniences in her village. “Americans often recoil when I mention using an outhouse or bathing bucket, but where that’s customary, it’s really no big deal and has been the norm throughout human history,” she writes. “On vacation visits to the States, I view hot water and flush toilets as terrible extravagances. Honduran peasants would welcome electricity and running water, but their lack is not felt as a daily deprivation.”