A couple of months ago, I finished George Packer's The Village of Waiting, an impuse buy spurred by one of Martha's comments here.
I'm pretty familiar with the PCV-in-West-Africa genre, as my sister-in-law spent 2001-2003 teaching math in Koundara, Guinea, and we embarked on a flurry of reading after we found out where she'd be assigned. Packer's done a much better job than many, as he really concentrates on describing Togo itself. As a result, the book explains what it's like to be in West Africa, instead of what it's like to be George Packer, and his descriptions seem to be spot on. The overwhelming sights and smells of a capital city, the friendly neighbors and polio victims, the taxi rides and roadblocks were all so reminiscent of my brief visit that the first half of the book actually seemed a bit boring. The book picks up in its second half, though, as Packer tries to dig a bit deeper into the history of the country and the the lives of the people in it.
One strange thing about the genre is that almost all books written by Peace Corps Volunteers about their experience are written by people who never finished their 2 year term. Packer went AWOL during his Christmas vacation on his second year. I've read books by volunteers who never made it more than nine months. The result is a self-selecting sample, in which an inordinate amount of time is spent on a 22-year-old's experience of meltdown, rather than on their surroundings.. With the exception of two chapters, Packer manages to rise above this, and so is very much worth reading.
Posted by Ben Brumfield at November 6, 2004 04:16 AMThanks for the recommendation. So interesting what you say about the meltdown cases being the ones who write about it. Maybe it's the urge to justify a decision that felt shameful at the time?
I gather there are a lot of different kinds of Peace Corps experiences, maybe some more exhausting than others. It had seemed like most volunteers dug wells, taught English, etc., but in college in the '80s we had a (very unhelpful) residential advisor who had spent his Peace Corps term as a political advisor on a Micronesian territory's transition to greater formal autonomy under the U.S. umbrella. His wife, a doctor, had also been working there. I imagined she might have had a fair amount of contact with suffering but it sounded like he had mostly been conferring with mucky-mucks. I don't know because they weren't the sort of people to talk about their experiences. (Actually they talked about nothing whatsoever with the students they were supposed to advise, and a solemn boy from the Great Plains committed suicide at Christmas. Of course all the human warmth in the world sometimes can't stop a thing like that, and then again you never know what might have helped. Yes, I could have been nicer to him too. But I digress.)
Why was it math that she taught in Guinea?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at November 6, 2004 12:19 PMWhy was it math that she taught in Guinea?
She was a math major. Very few people with science or engineering backgrounds go into the PC in west africa, near as I can tell. Mostly liberal-arts grads teach English or work on the business development, environmental, or AIDS-education projects.
These latter seem to spawn more early terminations among young volunteers than teaching positions do. Being a 22-year-old northeastern college graduate doesn't increase your confidence when you're trying to convince farmers to build fish ponds. In addition, the unstructured nature of your day probably lends itself to too much reflection.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 6, 2004 12:42 PM