AN ESSAY ON THE RELATIONSHIP OF COMMON BEVERAGES TO INCREASING ENTROPY (NO REAL SCIENTISTS ALLOWED)

Tags

Beer, Coffee, Humor, Humorous Essay, Increasing Entropy

There are a bunch of scientific formulas about increasing entropy. They are all way over my head, although I think they suggest that everything will disintegrate (or be ripped apart if you’re a fan of the macabre) into tiny little nothings drifting around in near absolute zero un de ces beaux jours. The kind of ending the Norse gods would have appreciated, gloomy gusses one and all. Recalling Twain’s adage that knowing you are to be hanged in the morning focuses the mind wonderfully, there is a slim chance that if people are around billions of years from now, they will have figured out some solution, having increased their intelligence exponentially, no doubt without increasing their wisdom one iota. So instead of getting bogged down in real science, I will use a lay definition of the term “increasing entropy” (namely this lay person’s definition). I cite two impeccable sources to justify this. Back in the day (if you think I’m going to actually research this for dates and stuff you’re nuts) a NY produce importer appealed a tax case all the way to The Supreme Court. NY taxed fruit and vegetables at different rates. The importer claimed that botanically tomatoes were fruit and should be taxed at the lower rate. The Court ruled that the science didn’t matter. If commonly tomatoes are considered vegetables and eaten like vegetables, then they are vegetables. For my second impeccable source, I will quote Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean — nothing more nor less.”

Therefore increasing entropy is the process of moving from the one to the many, from a state of unity to a state of division, from three television channels to three hundred (all filled with reality shows featuring people I wouldn’t hire to clean my pool), from the harmony of Mozart to Pink Floyd (unless you’re stoned), from pure fresh snow to polluted slush. Speaking of which, Tullulah Bankhead once said that she was as pure as the driven slush, which is neither here nor there, well maybe mostly there. It certainly isn’t here. I don’t think I’d want Tullulah here. Her reputation was worse than Joan Crawford’s, and we know what Bette Davis said about Joan Crawford: “I wouldn’t sit on her toilet.” But I digress. Anyway, I consider increasing entropy to be the quantifiable (but not by me) manifestation of evil in the universe, the festering hand of Satan at work, and nowhere is this more evident than in the proliferation of frivolous choices. We all have a friend who dithers forever over a menu or a wine list. This is the mark of someone who has been touched by evil. They should be banished from civilized society. Fortunately most of those lost souls move to Florida and manage homeowners associations, where they can foreclose on some poor guy who has neglected his lawn because his little girl has cancer.

When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chad, Africa, on the southern border of the Sahara, where it’s very hot and dry, we used to play volleyball at the Ambassador’s Residence, and then say five or so of us very dehydrated PCVs would head to a bar. We’d sit outside at tables. When the waitress approached, before she even got to the table, in Chadian Arabic I’d order five cokes and five Galas (the excellent local beer brewed by Heineken). I wasn’t going to permit individual ordering until I’d quenched my thirst. We’d drink the old-fashioned fully loaded cokes first to rehydrate, then the beers. And yes there was usually some grumbling about my high handedness, but I wasn’t going to sit there dying of thirst while some nimrod decided whether or not he/she wanted an orangina. Plus the more complicated the order, the more likely to get screwed up. Nothing was ever left undrunk. Now I just know that there is some self-styled expert out there right now screaming that cokes have caffeine and therefore are not good for rehydration. Nonsense. In Chad you could actually feel your body rehydrating when you drank a coke, and don’t get me started on the proliferation of experts on everything, another sign of increasing entropy. Go to any hot dry place in the world, and you’ll find people drinking lots and lots of tea, usually really strong tea. I’ll give you a gallon of water and a Chadian a teapot full of his strong super sweet tea, send you both out walking in the Sahara, and we’ll see who drops first. But once again I digress.

Now I’m not saying that choices don’t matter. Some do. In the words of Patrick H. T. Doyle, “If Pavlov had tested a cat he would have failed.” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “We are our choices.” Think about that the next time you order a decaffeinated almond vanilla latte. Perhaps the most troubling satanic abomination to plague the earth in recent years are those ridiculous individual cup coffee makers. I want to pull a Belushi every time I see one. Not only do they create litter with every cup, but they represent the ultimate example of frivolous chaotic self-indulgence, in other words increasing entropy. A good cup of coffee is a beautiful thing, a natural work of art. Making a thousand variations of it, none of which taste as good as the original, is an act of spiritual disintegration.

“You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline — it helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but in the very least you need a beer.” (Frank Zappa) And finally I come to beer. Finally I always come to beer. To paraphrase and totally abuse a couple of speeches from Kennedy I think, for someone out on the cutting edge of freedom engaged in the long twilight struggle against increasing entropy, it is disheartening to see respected beer brands like Leinenkugel and Sam Adams brag about all the different kinds of beer they brew. My reaction is to resolve never to drink any of those again. I have this vision of their most experienced brewer working on the vats of their signature beer, when a boss approaches. “Frank, it’s summer, we need you down on the shandy vats. You know, where we dump lemon juice and sugar into the beer. Mergatroid will take over for you here.” I don’t even like the concept of light beer, but I lost that battle long ago. One man can only do so much. Me? Heeding the immortal words of Willie Nelson, “There are more old drunks than old doctors,” I’ll just have a Beck’s. Gotterdammerung y’all!

 

 

THE WISE FROG DOESN’T PLAY IN HOT WATER

Tags

Africa, Cameroon, Chad, Humor, Nonfiction, Peace Corps, USAID

As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chad working on a USAID funded project, I’d spent a good bit of time in the USAID office in N’Djamena. Also we mixed a lot socially. One of the senior USAID guys and maybe the best of the breed, Ed Costello, had been to my house for pig roasts, and I had been to his house to watch recordings of football games. So my interview with him near the end of my three years of service went smoothly. At the end he said that they probably had something for me lined up. He smiled, “But George, don’t go out and buy a cadillac yet.” So as soon as I was a free man again, I was hired on a short term personal services contract to figure out where the money they’d spent on a big multi-donor agriculture project had actually gone. Apparently they didn’t have a clue, or at least they pretended not to have one. I suspected that it was a bureaucratic hot potato thing. That project was a complicated mess and way too far gone to rectify. The folks back in Foggy Bottom must have demanded accountability or closure or something, and nobody wanted to have their names attached to that final ugly post-mortem report.

Since the project was potentially career tarnishing, the responsibility for supervising it had drifted down to the least common denominator, Stephen (don’t remember his real name). Stephen was the youngest and least experienced USAID direct hire employee in Chad. Let’s define that further to just one of the least experienced human beings anywhere period. He had spent some years as a monk in India (I think). I believe he even mentioned having taken a vow of silence for awhile. He was a likeable guy, academically smart, who exuded pleasantness and calmness and blissful ignorance about all things Chadian. Unfortunately he had become infamous in Foreign Service circles when he’d had some special honey shipped to him through the diplomatic pouch. A jar had broken, and from one stop to another the package had leaked the sticky stuff. Apparently the pouch had made several stops along the way to Chad, each one generating an angry cable. The ambassador was not amused. The point here is that sending Stephen up to the project site in remote Bol would have just been cruel. So they hired me, a rough and tumble well driller with language skills who knew his way around up there.

I spent a few weeks in the USAID office going over all the project files and learning to navigate my way through that bureaucratic sea. If that sounds like an exorbitant amount of time, then you have no idea how much paper a USAID project can generate in four years or so. USAID might be the preeminent bureaucracy in the entire US Government. If not it’s a contender. Until Jack Anderson wrote about it, they had an actual official job title: The Administrative Assistant to The Assistant Administrator for Administration, United States Agency for International Development. I mean when an agency’s “handbook” surpasses twenty-five volumes, that pretty much tells the story. We wells vols used to goof on USAID. When we wrote the subsequently approved two million dollar extension to our current project, we stated in it that once approved the first thing we needed to do was to go out and take a PISS (a pre-installation site survey).

A word about the Ag project. The polders are finger-shaped valleys at the edges of Lake Chad. Lake Chad has no observable outlets but it remains fresh water. It floods in the winter months when the accumulated water from earlier rains much farther south finally reach it via the Chari River. The river pours fresh water into the lake, and the higher salt content stagnent water is pushed to the fringes, flooding the polders. When the lake recedes again, shallow pools are left in the polders to evaporate during the dry season. There are also other ways the lake sheds salt, like natron formation and harvesting, that are not relevant here. Since the water table in the polders is near the surface, pumping up fresh water and flooding them to desalinate them if needed is not a big deal. Then build a little earthen damn across the usually narrow entrance to keep the lake from flooding it again, and you have a very fertile easily irrigated little valley. Traditionally when irrigation in Chad’s hot dry climate built the salt content of the soil back up, the locals would break down the damn and flood the polders again. The polders have been used for local agriculture for thousands of years, however up to that point never on a grand mechanized scale.

When that huge multi-donor project was conceived, in most years for a few months the open water reached Bol during the fall and winter, and then barges could navigate the lake and river between N’Djamena and Bol. So the idea was to grow wheat on a large scale and send it by barge down to N’Djamena to be processed and turned into delicious baguettes. Seemed like a great idea. Then the great Sahelian drought of the early to mid seventies hit just as the project was getting underway. The open water no longer came within miles of Bol, and never has since, even in wetter years. Lake Chad shrank. And tropical vegetation soon filled the void. Given the significant infrastructure investment and the lure of the fertile polders, they looked for solutions. For years at great effort and expense they kept a channel open through miles of vegetation, but the barge thing never panned out. So they decided to grow vegetables in the polders and ship them by truck over sand pistes (just tracks in the sand) and rough roads. Vegetables sold to expats at the project store in N’Djamena generated cash. Useful stuff cash.

In the beginning of Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra Expedition, he writes of his trip from N’Djamena to Bol to study the papyrus boats on Lake Chad as a great harrowing adventure, fraught with danger. I found his hyperbole amusing. At one point I almost fell out of my seat laughing as he described his acute anxiety at being surrounded by “swarthy bedouins.” He was talking about Kanembous. In N’Djamena the street vendors carrying bright colored towels and scarfs on their heads who insistently tried to sell you cigarettes and heart-shaped sunglasses were Kanembous. Also Kanembou ladies were renowned for friendliness. En brousse I found them to be generous, hospitable, and quick to laugh, but stubborn at times. Once a bunch of young Kanembou men piled into the bed of my pickup and refused to budge until I drove them to a not too distant village for a wedding. A fellow wells vol compared them to the Hekawi Indian tribe in the TV show F-Troop. Honestly I never for one moment felt threatened by Kanembous, annoyed at times, but never threatened. I’m sure they found me annoying at times too. Anyway a trip to Bol was just a day at the office for me, albeit a long dirty one. I must have made that trip thirty/forty times. Still and all, it was difficult enough that I knew it couldn’t make economic sense to ship perishable vegetables that way.

Other than some cement and construction materials which went into the project infrastructure in the early days, the USAID part of the project consisted of underwriting the costs of improving and maintaining roads in and around the polders. The Chadian governing agency, the World Bank and the UN were really the major players. So it was my job to find out if the USAID money had gone and was still going where it was supposed to go. USAID did ask me to try and find out exactly what their construction materials had been used for. However, short of any authority to access the files of the other project participants, that was a fool’s errand, water under the bridge, and I ignored it. Within two days up in Bol I had confirmed what I’d suspected from the files, that the USAID polder road maintenance funds were financing nearly all of the operating costs of transporting vegetables to N’Djamena by truck, including fuel, vehicle repairs, even driver salaries. I stayed up in Bol for two weeks anyway. I had friends up there, fresh vegetables aplenty, and as long as you had shelter from the mosquito swarms coming off the lake at night, Bol wasn’t a bad place. I was in no hurry, earning some real money was nice.

One of my friends, Mike Bouchard, was a PCV mechanic in Bol working on the ag project, and whatever else they asked him to do. He was the youngest vol in Chad, and very unusual for Peace Corps didn’t have a college degree. Apparently he had been in college and had been questioning if it was really the thing for him at that time, sitting around in a dorm with some buddies (maybe drinking, maybe stoned, I don’t remember him telling me that part), when they saw a Peace Corps recruiting ad on TV that enigmatically asked if the glass they were showing was half full or half empty, call this number to find out. He called. The recruiter never answered the question, but she did ask Mike if he had any skills. Mike figured that electric guitar probably didn’t count, so he answered with his other main skill. “Well, I’m a diesel mechanic.” There was a pause. “Hold on, let me get your information.”

Once during what passed for the rainy season up there, when Mike had been in Bol over a year, I stopped the landrover on top of a dune, and we looked out over an expanse of small dunes sparsely covered in light green cram cram grass. Cram cram is a burr grass, and where even cram cram no longer grows is considered by some botanists as the demarcation of the true desert. If we gazed at the most distant dunes, they appeared to be totally covered in a light green fuzz, but closer you could clearly see the sand beneath. Mike turned to me: “It kind of reminds me of the Shenandoah Valley.” After I took that in, I replied, “You know Mike, perhaps you should consider going home for a visit.”

Mike worked with David Girven, one of the true Chad legends. David had been a Chad vol back in the early days when Peace Corps did fun things, like teach new vols the wrong language and dump them without a structured job in isolated villages. Psychovacs were not uncommon in those days. David had stayed on in Chad working for the Chadian Government agency running the ag project as a mechanic. He fixed everything that needed fixing, and invented things like a plowing shield to put on the bow of the boat that cleared the papyrus blocking the channel to open water. He had a Chadian family, lived in a humble mud brick compound, and was bigger than life, a Chadian Jeremiah Johnson, liked and respected by Chadians all over that region. He was a humble, compassionate, and generous man.

Since a good portion of Bol used our wells, we vols were up there fairly frequently. Many a night we’d camped out in David’s compound, huddled under our mosquito nets. You didn’t walk around much in Bol at night. The massed whining of mosquitos coming in off the lake at sunset compared to a big jet preparing for takeoff. One night David stood outside the nets and held out his bare arm until no skin was visible, just mosquitos. David was not loquacious by nature, but it was a real treat when we could coax one of the old stories out of him.

So after a couple of weeks I went back to N’Djamena, spent another couple weeks in the USAID office slugging through the bureaucracy, and then turned in my final report. I was still being paid to hang around while people digested my report, in case they had any questions. The initial reactions had been favorable, and I had hopes USAID would find something else for me to do. At that moment all hell broke loose in N’Djamena. It was a civil war, fighting in the streets, a total breakdown in order. Leaving the war stories to be told separately, after several days when the fighting had diminished enough to risk it, I made my way out to the airport. All non-essential personnel were being evacuated to Yaounde, Cameroon, and from there to the states. Baggage was limited to two suitcases per person. Apparently some of the “essential” personnel decided that my language and practical skills could come in handy, so I was asked to stay on and help with logistics, first and foremost the loose packing of abandoned homes. I accepted.

LILOMBO AND NKUMBA (A TRADITIONAL CONGOLESE FABLE)

Tags

Africa, Congolese Fable, Humor, Morality Tale

Folks this one requires a little introduction. I did not write this. I exercised a light editorial touch, preserved the source material for almost thirty years, arranged for the translation, supplied the Congolese artwork, and put it all together. However real credit goes to the original Congolese story tellers, Pere Paul Lepoutre who assembled and transcribed these stories into written Lingala, and then published them, thus saving them from oblivion, as well as to Stan Hotalen who translated the story from what he described as esoteric King James Lingala. Stan has spent most of his life in the Congo, with some years stateside for college, grad studies and work experience in the middle. He has traversed the Congo teaching the Bible, health programs and community development. I had no luck trying to translate the stories. Lingala dictionaries and the online translation services could only translate about forty percent of the words. Modern street Lingala is very different. I appealed for help on the RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteers) Facebook page. Someone pointed me toward Stan and Stan toward me. Thanks. So those guys deserve the credit. Enjoy!

Lilombo and Nkumba lived in the same village. One year during the rainy season, they went hunting with some friends from their village. An animal got caught in Nkumba’s trap. Nkumba cast his spear killing the animal, and then yelled, “Clap your hands! Clap your hands!” But his fiends didn’t hear him because Nkumba had a weak voice. Lilombo happened to be standing next to Nkumba and he yelled loudly, “Clap your hands! Clap your hands! Clap your hands for me, Lilombo!” Everyone heard him and they said to themselves, “Lilombo has killed an animal!” When it was time to divide things up, they gave Lilombo the heart of the animal because he was the one who killed it. When Nkumba saw that he was angry and said, “The heart is mine because I am the one who killed it.” But Lilombo replied, “Whose voice did all of you hear?”  All of their friends answered, “We heard only Lilombo’s voice.” So they gave the heart to him.

The next time the men went hunting, Lilombo used the same strategy and stayed close to Nkumba. Nkumba again killed an animal and cried out, “Clap your hands! Clap your hands!”  His friends heard nothing. So Lilombo yelled again in his very strong and loud voice and everyone heard him. They came together and again divided up the animal, and again they gave the heart to Lilombo. Each time they hunted Lilombo did the same thing to Nkumba.

Nkumba became depressed and frustrated. “What can I do to resolve this problem?” he wondered. “Every animal that I kill, Lilombo ends up getting credit for it.” When they went out hunting again, Nkumba saw an animal moving nearby. He threw his spear, but this time he missed. The spear flew past the animal, striking and killing another hunter who had been stalking it. Thinking quickly, Nkumba called out, “Clap your hands! Clap your hands!” When Lilombo heard Nkumba he did as he always did and yelled loudly,  “Clap your hands! Clap your hands! Clap for me Lilombo.” All of the other hunters said among themselves, “Oh! Lilombo has again killed an animal!” They went to see and divide up the animal, however what they found dead on the ground was a human. Everyone was shocked and began to cry out, “Brothers! Lilombo has killed a man!” Lilombo responded and said, “What are you talking about? I didn’t kill him. It was Nkumba who killed him!”  However Nkumba denied it and played dumb.

The two of them began to fight, until the other hunters broke it up and took them before the Mokonzi (the village chief) to be judged. Lilombo spoke first: “Mokonzi, every animal that people thought I killed was really killed by Nkumba. I just outsmarted him. He is the one who killed that man, not me.” Then Nkumba responded, “Mokonzi ask the other hunters whose voice they heard claiming credit for the kill?” All the others answered, “We only heard Lilombo. From the start of the hunt until the end we never heard Nkumba’s voice.” Then the Mokonzi decided the matter and pronounced his punishment on Lilombo: that Lilombo should pay a large sum of money to the family of the dead man. When Lilombo couldn’t come up with the money, the Mokonzi ruled: “Since you don’t have the money, it is just and fair that you become a slave to the family of the dead man.” From that day on Lilombo remained a slave. Eventually he lost all of his hair because of the hard work and shame of slavery, and now he lives in the village of slaves down by the water.

The moral: One way or the other, in the end theft and deception don’t go unpunished.

THE DOGS BARK BUT THE CARAVAN MOVES ON (INTERESTING CHARACTERS I’VE KNOWN — USAID BOSSES)

Tags

Africa, Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, David Wilson, Humor, John Lundgren, Mali, Nonfiction, Peace Corps, Togo, USAID

I first came into contact with John Lundgren when I was a PCV well driller. Our project was funded by and required a good bit of contact with USAID. In addition living in N’Djamena there was a great deal of interaction in general between PCVs and embassy/USAID personnel, far more than most places I’ve lived and worked. It was the mid-seventies and things were decidedly less uptight than now. Characters abounded, people were allowed to be a touch eccentric. And John, the USAID Director, was a five star character. Everybody knew he was a nudist. Usually he drove to work without a shirt on and put it on in his parking space. Once in later years when I knew him better, I asked him what he thought about going to his new post as AID Affairs Officer in Djibouti. He replied, “Maybe I can find a beach where I can walk around naked.” Also in later years a female consultant friend told me she had stayed at John’s house once for a few days. She’d known about his nudist proclivities, but it hadn’t bothered her. He wasn’t going to walk around naked in front of her. John had class. But one night she went down for some water and surprised John as he was getting something out of the frig. The refrigerator door was between them. They chatted a few minutes until she realized he was getting cold.

John had a pronounced theatrical streak. He never seemed to be off stage, but he was a likable guy. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body and he was loyal to his people. Somehow he was contacted by a guy named Pruitt from the University of Tennessee (I think). I don’t remember if he was a professor, PhD student or what. Anyway, from his ivory tower in Knoxville this guy had developed an elaborate and unbelievable project proposal to stop the spread of the Sahara. He wanted to build dykes along three to four hundred kilometers of the Logone river to keep it from its annual flooding, thus greatly increasing the water flow into Lake Chad and doubling its size. He postulated that that would greatly increase humidity and rainfall in a large area of the Sahel — a dubious assumption, there are desert islands. Also that annual flooding that he wanted to stop allowed for extensive rice cultivation. The funniest part was that he estimated the labor costs using the labor production and cost stats of the Chinese coolies who had worked on the transcontinental railroads in the nineteenth century. Everybody laughed at the project except John. Of course he knew it was total pie in the sky, but the grand scale of it appealed to him. Twice this poor fellow flew out to Chad convinced that John was pushing to get his project approved. If anybody mentioned the project in the USAID Office when John wasn’t around, a chorus of “Pruitt…Screw it!” was sure to follow.

John was the AID Affairs Officer for Togo and Benin, two small narrow adjacent countries, when I worked in Cotonou, Benin with a colleague, Sarah, on a potable water project. I worked on the technical side and she handled the health side. John’s office was in Lome, Togo which was a only a few hours drive from Cotonou. About a year into the project relations between the US and Benin deteriorated and the project was suspended. Benin’s UN Ambassador shouting “Vive Peurto Rico Libre!” in front of the General Assembly didn’t help matters. When a drunk American diplomat drove into and became “lost” inside a large military camp (at least that was the embassy line), things went south fast. Sceptics at heart, the Benin Government was in no hurry to release him. The resulting standoff threatened to become a major diplomatic incident, so the embassy ordered Sarah and me, the only non Peace Corps Americans without diplomatic passports, to leave for Lome immediately to avoid potential complications like house arrest. Since officially the project was suspended and not canceled, John kept us on the payroll for months until we could land other jobs. He caught considerable grief from USAID Washington, but refused to budge. I was and am grateful to him for that. However it made for a very crowded little USAID Office in Lome. John had a spacious office, but everybody else was crowded into small spaces. When John went on vacation, and without his approval, his deputy immediately called in a crew and created another office. Upon his return John wasn’t happy. They’d sawn his stage in half.

In order to relieve some of the crowding, I proposed to John that I take my project’s little 404 Peugeot pickup and make technical visits (cough cough) to some other wells projects in West Africa. John approved it with no qualms. I don’t believe any other professional bureaucrat in the world would have, but John danced to a different tune. Given the turmoil in Africa today, the idea of  an American driving by himself across three countries more or less on a lark seems incredible, but in 1982 I never gave a thought to my safety. I mean the road was paved the whole way, albeit a bit rough in spots. To someone used  to driving on sand tracks up and over dunes, that seemed like a piece of cake. I drove north all the way through Togo to Ougadougou, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) where I thought I could get a visa for neighboring Mali. I couldn’t. Relations between the two countries weren’t good. I did purchase a couple of nice Ougadougou bronzes.

I planned to meet my buddy Mark in Bamako where he was coming through on business. The USAID Director there, David Wilson and his wonderful wife Tatsie, old friends, had invited us anytime. Tatsie was a serious vegetarian. I once asked her if she ate fish. She replied, “I don’t eat any of my friends.” Dave had replaced John in Chad and had been the USAID Director during the civil disturbances when I was working on a USAID contract. He personally asked me to come back to Chad during an interim of nearly a year when things had calmed down some, before renewed fighting closed everything down for years. It’s an odd thing, but even intelligent people can become accustomed to abnormal conditions and totally lose perspective. During that false hope interim period in Chad we desperately tried to get the foreign assistance train back on track, convincing ourselves, all evidence to the contrary, that conditions had improved sufficiently.

At one point we went so far as to invite a UN and World Bank delegation to Chad to see about starting back up a multi-donor road building project. There were only a few of us at USAID Chad at that time, a skeleton crew, so I was unofficially handling the project management side of that and several other dormant projects, unheard of for a contract employee and against USAID regs — hence unofficial. They  arrived and we went to the USAID conference room and sat around the big table. As we were making our presentation, a few distance shots could be heard, a common occurrence. Then the shots got louder and nearer. I noticed some flinching. Finally an AK47 went into rapid fire just outside the building. I looked down the long empty table to Dave and shrugged. Our distinguished visitors were all under it.

FAP – Force Armee Populare FAN – Force Armee du Nord

It so happened that a couple, old Chad PCV friends, were living close to the Mali border, working on a water/health project. So I continued west across Upper Volta until I reached Scotty and Charlotte’s place. I asked around about the border and was told that there was only a little offset border station a few kilometers inside Mali where you were supposed to present credentials, but it was all pretty sleepy. The USAID logo on the side of a vehicle had proven useful to me in the past, so I decided to chance it. I blew right past the border station, no problem. I had some time to kill so I stayed in Mopti a few days and visited the Dogon country. The cliff houses were fascinating. On the way down to Bamako I took the ferry over the great Niger and visited the ancient city of Djenne with its truely stunning architecture.

I had a fun time in Bamako. One of the highlights of the trip was a party at the Ambassador’s Residence to which Dave and Tatsie insisted we accompany them. The US Ambassador was new, unusually young (maybe early forties), single, liked to dance, and not bad looking either. Unsurprisingly there were quite a few attractive women there. On more than one occasion Mark had stated that his greatest fantasy was to be in bed with a French woman and have her say “Ooh la la!” That night he spent some time chatting with an attractive French lady. He had a big smile on his face the next day. That round trip was some 1,600 miles across the heart of North Africa.

Recently I learned that John is an actor now, usually playing odd old men in music videos and strange cult movies, but lately branching out to more mainstream parts. He looks great for his age.

ONE DAY HONEY, THE NEXT DAY ONIONS (GREGORY “GROMO” ALEX’S STORY)

Tags

Africa, Beer, Cameroon, Chad, Gregory "Gromo" Alex, Humor, Nonfiction, Peace Corps

Gromo died young as the result of a fall at his home. I believe he was fighting cancer at the time. He was a truly great man, awarded for valor by the UNDP for his heroic efforts to save lives during the horrors of Rwanda. I wrote this story long before his passing and without any knowledge of his time in Rwanda. It reflects a happier time. The Chadian Arabic proverb translated for the title is: “Yom assal, wa yom basal.”

Gromo came to Chad as a Peace Corps Volunteer almost two years after I did. He was a big muscular English teacher, reminding me of Mongo in Blazing Saddles, not that he lacked intelligence, but rather he exuded an aura of placid strength. It was impossible not to like Gromo. Chadians loved him, especially children. He couldn’t go anywhere without attracting a flock of kids. For reasons known only to him, he chose to make Princess his girlfriend. Princess was the name we vols gave her, one of those contrary nicknames like calling a huge man Tiny. We knew all the street ladies, some better than others. Remember this was the mid seventies, before AIDS, or at least before anybody knew about it. Most of them had come to N’Djamena as runaway brides who couldn’t stand being married to a much older man, or a cruel one. Or they had failed to produce children in the allotted time frame. In Chad it was never the man’s fault. In general they weren’t callous hardened prostitutes. One older vol advised us to think of them as old-fashioned New England town tarts. That said they looked to establish a longterm relationship with a rich man. And to them all white men were rich, even Peace Corps Vols. They weren’t above using a trick or two to accomplish that task. A few volunteers had been surprised by eleven month pregnancies.

Most of the street ladies were delicate boned and lightish colored, from the northern Islamic tribes. Many had tribal scars, but these tended to be shallow scars on the upper jaw or under the eyes, more decoration than disfigurement. A smattering had blue tattooed lips, permanently appearing to be wearing smeared blue lipstick. The tribal scars didn’t bother me, but I admit to finding the tattooed lips a bit off putting. Princess was a big southern Chadian woman, not fat, but strong, big-hipped and very black. She was no wilting flower. I remember sitting at an outside table at a bar one night. None of the tables were far from the caniveau (concrete open sewer) that ran alongside the road. That perfume was part of a night out in N’Djamena. I heard a commotion and looked several tables away where Princess shouted at a French soldier. Suddenly she picked up a twenty-two ounce beer bottle and hit him over the head. Then she hoisted the stunned soldier on her shoulders and tossed him in the caniveau.

As a rule Chadian women were proud, jealous, quick to anger, and not adverse to violence. Nasaras (white people or sometimes foreigners in general) were strange creatures from a mysterious culture. Like most women they wanted to gauge the worth of their relationships. A friend of mine’s girlfriend made him so angry he smashed a favorite piece of furniture, which delighted her. He must have valued her highly. Another male vol invited a female vol to dinner, thinking nothing of it. When his Chadian wife found out a woman was coming, she broke every dish in the house one by one. Nobody was coming to dinner at that house. One night in the same bar where I witnessed Princess conk the soldier, Joe, another vol, publicly admonished his girlfriend because he had given her a scarf and her female Chadian friend was wearing it, not her. The girlfriend jumped across the table and bit into his well worn Levi’s thigh high. He tried to pry her loose, but she kept at it as blood began to run down his pants. Finally he punched her hard. That worked.

Sitting and drinking with Gromo and Princess at another outside bar one late afternoon, I noticed a fly in my beer glass. In the states I would have tossed the beer, but not a poor PCV. I fished the fly out. I was feeling magnanimous. “Fly on little buddy and live.” But I really should have known, you can’t fly with beer suds on your wings. Suddenly Princess stood up and walked to a table with four legionnaires. Soon she was laughing and flirting. Being the more experienced vol, I explained to Gromo how this was going to play out. She would keep at it until he walked away, in which case she would know he didn’t value her highly. Or he could intervene and probably get the crap beaten out of him. Four French Foreign Legionnaires were more than a match even for Gromo. Further I explained that I was leaving. I had no intention of fighting legionnaires over Princess. I left. Gromo took a beating. Princess was happy. Eventually Gromo went so far as to take her to the states. Not long after he attended a party a bit roughed up from a recent fight with her.

I finished my Peace Corps service in December of 1978 and immediately went to work for USAID/Chad on contract. Just two months later in February of 79 civil war broke out in N’Djamena. I was asked to stay on and help with administrative tasks. After a few days of fighting, when the firing had slowed enough to permit movement, all Peace Corps Vols and non-essential personnel were evacuated to Yaounde, Cameroon. Since I stayed on in N’Djamena, I heard the rest of the story from my Peace Corps buddy Mark. After experiencing that ordeal and being suddenly uprooted, the vols were in a fey mood. Their lives had been turned upside down. The afternoon after their arrival in Yaounde, they gathered at some welcoming function at the Ambassador’s Residence. Unfortunately the pool was under repair and dry. After who knows how many beers, somebody dared Gromo to dive in anyway. He did. He didn’t kill himself, but he bloodied his head badly.

That same night in the bar district of Yaounde, Gromo sported a bloody swath of bandages and suffered a severe headache. There was a disturbance in the street. A large long-horned steer had escaped its owner and was running free trailing a rope. A crowd of laughing and shouting people chased it. This was tremendous entertainment. Gromo stepped into the street directly in front of the steer. The steer stopped. For a minute or two there was a High Noon style face off. Then Gromo reached forward and grabbed both horns. His arm muscles bulged as he held the steer. Then the steer lowered its head and flipped him up and over the steer’s back. He somersaulted in the air, landing on his back behind the steer. Thankfully part of the fall was broken by the crowd. However, his heroics allowed the owner to grab the rope and control the steer. The crowd hoisted Gromo on their shoulders and paraded him up and down the street – the conquering hero. For reward a taxi driver offered to take him anywhere he wanted to go for free. Instead Gromo asked if he could just ride around with the taxi driver all night while he picked up fares. And that’s what he did.

YOU CAN’T FLY WITH BEER SUDS ON YOUR WINGS

Tags

Africa, Chad, Humor, Nonfiction, Peace Corps

Arriving in Chad was a shock that I enjoyed experiencing and subsequently observing in others. Chad defied anticipation. One night shortly after my arrival, my nascent French being close to useless in a common Chadian bar, I asked an older vol how to order beer in Chadian Arabic. He called the bar maid over and with a smile said: “Jiba lena Gala hamsa.” (Bring us five beers.) I figured the joke out, but used the entire phrase anyway the first time I walked into a bar by myself. Normally I am not superstitious, but for some reason I felt ordering the five beers would be auspicious. I made some friends that night.

At one point Peace Corps Chad’s doctor was a brand new, wet behind the ears, young for a doctor fellow stationed in Yaounde, Cameroon. He covered several countries, and on his first trip up to Chad he gave us an extensive lecture on the importance of boiling drinking water. In case worse came to worse and we had to drink bad water, he made sure we knew how to dissolve an iodine tablet in a gallon of water. We were all old hands by that time and had difficulty hiding our amusement. On his next trip up one of the wells vols interrupted him. “Doc, I just want to thank you. The other day I drank some of the dirtiest water you ever saw, but just like you said I swallowed a couple of those iodine pills and I feel great.”

Once I took our Chadian workers out with me to the airport to greet the new wells vols. I told them that “water, chicken, shoehorn,” was a traditional American greeting. I failed to convince them. They had spent years drilling wells with vols and were familiar enough with the words “water” and especially “chicken” to be suspicious. “Shoehorn” by itself might have worked. Mark and Doug were two of the new vols. After they completed their on the job incountry training, they moved into the house formerly occupied by another vol, Dague. Dague had given the old guardian (watchman) a radio. The old fellow would sit on his straw mat and listen to the radio all day, only turning it off for his five times a day prayers. That had earned him the nickname of Mr. Radio. Mr. Radio only spoke Chadian Arabic, and Doug and Mark were still learning French. Therefore communication between them was challenging. One day the new vols were feeling especially homesick for some American food. Mark had brought a large can of peaches in heavy syrup with him from the U.S., and they dug into it with gusto. It was a hot day, and they couldn’t quite finish the can. There was one peach left. They decided to give it to Mr. Radio. Mr. Radio had taken his shirt off and was readying to wash himself in preparation for prayers. They showed him the can with the peach in it. He looked at them blankly. “Yum, yum, yum,” Mark chanted. Still no reaction from Mr. Radio. Doug tried his hand at communication. He thrust the can toward the old man, while rubbing his stomach with the other hand and chanting, “Yum, yum, yum.” Mr. Radio looked toward the heavens beseeching Allah for guidance. Then he reached inside the can, grabbed the dripping peach, and mashed it into his stomach.

My first two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chad we had no single female vols, hadn’t been any in years due to some ugly incident in the past. So they caused a stir when they started coming back in. Barbara was an interesting young lady with a fun personality (dam hafif – light blood, as the Chadians would put it). Attractive in a tomboyish way, the daughter of missionaries, virginal but not naive, she was fluent and literate in Classical Arabic, not the creole Chadian Arabic most of us spoke. She just seemed a cut above the average. All the new female volunteers were English teachers. Of course I was one of the hard-drinking, cowboyish water well drillers. Although none of the male vols ever got very far sexually with her, she seemed to like my company. It might have been wishful thinking but I thought there was a little Bogart/Hepburn chemistry thing going on.

New Year’s Eve party. Barbara was on the far side of the room, bent over, back to me, stone sober, playing chess with another vol, oblivious to the chaos behind her. I sat on the floor, back against a pillar, having lost the ability to stand for long periods of time. The Peace Corps Director, Bill, was feeling no pain, standing with a lampshade on his head singing Elvis Presley songs. Things were looser in those days, including Bill’s two front false teeth. From my vantage with Bill between me and the light, I watched as an especially enthusiastic version of Heartbreak Hotel ejected Bill’s teeth and caused them to arc upward and finally drop unnoticed by any but me down the gap in Barbara’s pants. An immediate search began. I tried to be helpful, but all I could say was “teeth.” Somebody patted me on the head. ”Yes, George, we’re looking for Bill’s teeth.” I staggered to my feet and looked at Barbara, still oblivious. It then occurred to me that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I meandered across the room and plunged my hand down Barbara’s pants. She screamed and whipped around, beet red, chess pieces flying, and yelled, “What!!!”. Sensing the urgency of my situation, I managed to double my vocabulary. “Teeth pants!” “What!!!” “Teeth pants!” “What?!” At that point someone intervened, “I think he’s saying that Bill’s teeth are in your pants.” To this day I thank whatever gods may be that when she reached back she found them.

Shortly after that party civil war broke out in Chad and all volunteers were evacuated. Eight years later I landed in Khartoum on a job for a private voluntary organization, only to find that the US had bombed Libya the night before and there was anti-American rioting in the streets of Khartoum. One American had been shot. I was restricted to my hotel until the embassy could arrange an evacuation of non-essential personnel. The next day in the hotel I chatted with a missionary who turned out to be working with Barbara at a mission outside of town. He wasn’t under the control of the embassy and was heading back to the mission. I asked him to say hi to Barbara for me. The next day Barbara showed up on a mobylette, a risky thing to do, and we had lunch together. It was nice to see her again.

MY CONTINUING WILDLIFE ADVENTURES IN CAMEROON AND BENIN

Tags

Africa, African Widlife, Benin, Cameroon, Gameparks, Humor, Nonfiction, USAID

Waza National Park is located between Maroua and N’Djamena on the main road. It is a large gamepark and has a wide variety of wildlife. During my time in northern Cameroon I found the hotel at Waza a pleasant place to stay. It is nestled in a group of rock buttes just across the road from and facing the park. Since it was in Joel’s territory, sometimes I helped him out by providing transportation. However because Waza was usually a convenient stopover after I had driven someone to or from N’Djamena or Maroua. More often than not I was there by myself.

While staying at the hotel for a couple of days enjoying the park and the hotel, I perused some park literature that mentioned a colony of hyrax living on top of the big butte behind the hotel. I had never seen hyrax. They looked cute from pictures, a bit like guinea pigs. I went out to take a look at the butte. I wasn’t a pick and rope climber, but I was in good shape. A shallow fissure ran almost all the way up, petering out maybe four feet from the top. It looked to be a tough scramble but doable. Other than taking a lot of energy the climb wasn’t bad. The only tricky part was at the very top where the edge bulged out more than I’d anticipated. I had to dangle my feet in the air a few seconds before I pulled myself up and over. However even if I had fallen at that point I would have dropped back into the shallow crevice, maybe spraining an ankle but not risking death.

The butte was rather flat on top until it began a gentle decline to my right, perhaps offering an easier descent than straight down the face. In the middle of my end of the plateau in a jumble of boulders a hyrax stood guard at a small entrance. Seeing me he made a half barking half piping sound and ruffled his fur causing a strange little off color tuft of fur to rise up in the middle of his back. Make no mistake rock hyrax are cute critters. I suppose tree hyrax are too but I never saw one of those. Don’t ask me but the experts say that the animal most closely related to hyrax is the elephant. They also say that any rabbits mentioned in the Bible were actually hyrax. European translators weren’t familiar with hyrax, and the descriptions more or less fit rabbits. Makes you wonder what else could have been mistranslated. At first there was a mad scramble of hyrax seeking shelter from the intruder. I settled myself on a boulder at some distance and waited patiently. I needed the rest. Eventually a few brave souls ventured out again so I could observe them, but they didn’t stray far from safety.

While sitting there a troop of baboons wandered by, including a mommy with a baby on her back. They headed down the decline to my right. For inexplicable reasons, perhaps a suppressed death wish, I decided to follow them at a distance. Baboons are incredibly strong animals and can be very aggressive. Jurassic Park dinosaur petting nonsense aside, any strong wild animal is dangerous regardless of whether they are interested in eating you or not. More people in Africa are killed by buffalos than lions. Suddenly the baboons stopped and huddled. Then while the main troop continued on, two young males turned and faced me, not advancing, just holding their ground. Message received five by five. I decided to go back and observe the hyrax.

I was thirsty. It was time to leave, my dreams of finding an easier path down thwarted lest I risk running into the baboons, wisely concluding that further interaction should be avoided. It was about here that I realized I had made a rookie climbing mistake by not making note of precisely where I came up. I couldn’t see the beginning of the fissure from up top because of the edge’s outward bulge. I mean I knew the general area, but that wasn’t good enough to risk dangling myself out over a cliff. An intelligent person would have brought some rope. I didn’t qualify. I looked around. A bit further down a thin rocky outcrop jutted out precariously, resembling a diving platform. Carefully I worked my way out to the very end of it where I could see my crevice. I wished I had skipped breakfast. I marked the exact spot I needed to descend from and presently dropped a couple of feet into the crevice without twisting an ankle. The rest was perfunctory.

During that same period in Cameroon I briefly visited Benoue National Park, a giant gamepark just south of Garoua. Garoua was a bit south of my usual purview, but due to the Chad disturbances there was a temporary logistical office there manned by embassy personnel. The next large city south, NGoundare, was the northern terminus of the railway. I had to make a few trips to Garoua. The park ran along the Benoue River, a major tributary of the Niger River. The park area was so huge that it encompassed some villages, whereas in more manageable Waza they had moved villages to just outside the park. As one might assume, poaching was a problem. Nevertheless I remember large herds of waterbuck, western hartebeest, and buffalo.

That was my first encounter with tsetse flies. Damn they hurt. A single bite hurts about like a horsefly bite, but more needle like. Of course horseflies don’t swarm or leave big itchy red welts, and tsetse fly bites can penetrate normal clothing. Sleeping sickness aside, no wonder the presence of tsetse flies inhibits animal husbandry. In Chad we had bot flies. They lay eggs on moist clothing. If you wear the tainted clothing without killing the eggs first, an ugly boil with a worm inside forms on your skin. Very few people had clothes dryers in Chad. Ironing everything including underwear and socks solved the problem. The common people used irons filled with coals.

Speaking of dastardly insects, I was stung by scorpions a couple times — no big deal, a kind of take a benadryl thing. Perhaps Chad’s scorpions were less poisonous than some others. My great adventure with African bees and termites was covered in another story. Perhaps my worst personal experience with African insects was getting bitten or stung (not sure) on the knee by a spider one night when I was out in the great beyond drilling wells. The wound developed an odd transparent skin window with something dark deep down there. It hurt like hell. After two days I could barely walk. The nearest doctor worthy of the name was two days away mostly on pistes (tire tracks in the sand). Therefore I thrust a big needle into a fire and pushed it inches down into my knee until I managed to get everything out. Goliath beetles are worthy of mention. They are huge winged beetles attracted to light. En brousse we could hear one heading for our flashlights and lanterns from a distance. The sound they made flying reminded me of a helicopter, stopping and starting, getting closer and closer. When it neared we would douse the lights until it headed off elsewhere. We called them flying turtles. It was no fun to run into one on a mobylette.

I have one other tsetse fly story. Honestly my memory on this one is rather vague except for the core story which I remember pretty well. It might have occurred in either Benin or Togo, as the three of us were together in both countries one soon after the other. Logically I’m going with Benin, since we all worked on the same project there. I was the USAID contract project manager in Benin for a multi-donor potable water/health project. Sarah was my colleague on the health side, and Agma was a health consultant. The three of us went up to northern Benin on project related business. I have a fleeting memory of staying at the house of some vols in the town of Nikki. As always when the work was done I wanted to visit the nearest gamepark, or in this case I believe it was a lesser category of protected area, a forest reserve or nature preserve, something in that ballpark. Agma passed on the reserve. She had grown somewhat fatigued with my habit of stopping vehicles to look at birds, thus lengthening the journey. Somehow I managed to drag Sarah along. It didn’t take long for me to get the truck stuck. I had a talent for that. We were both gathering sticks when tsetse flies attacked. I received a bite or two, but they loved Sarah. By the time we made it out, she had a fine collection of itchy red welts, some in interesting places. Being a southern gentleman, when we got back to where we were staying I offered to powder her backside. She demurred. Actually in colorful language she told me to take a hike, or something roughly equivalent. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

My memory is clearer about this next story. Agma and I and a visiting young lady acquaintance of Agma’s drove up to Natitingou in northwestern Benin and stayed at the Tata Somba Hotel. That region is famous for the fairyland like Tata Somba houses, and the hotel was designed with that architecture in mind. It also had a great pool. Agma did her health stuff. I met my Benin project director and the UN project manager, M. Bouton, along with local officials, and we set out to visit some spring sites for possible inclusion in the project. I insisted on driving my little project pickup. They had a sedan and a chauffeur. I liked to control my own transportation whenever possible. I’d had some close calls in Africa, most often at night where a big truck had broken down and parked in one lane of a two lane road. West African roads rarely had decent shoulders. Without street lights, and maybe with an oncoming vehicle’s lights in your eyes, you would see the dark looming shape of the truck too late to do anything but swerve off the road or into the other lane. Off the road was a near certain crash with no medical help nearby. So you usually tried the oncoming lane. If you were lucky, it would be clear long enough for you to pass the truck. If not you died. I’d been lucky twice. I made it a rule never to drive at night on rural African roads. We spent a long day climbing hills and looking at springs. We were about an hour from Natitingou as sunset neared. Men in groups get macho disease. They wanted to drive to one more site. I refused. I told them my reasons and drove back to the hotel. I still arrived after dark. I ruffled a few feathers, but they got over it.

When the work was over I wanted to visit the not too distant Pendjari National Park, often touted as one of the best in West Africa. Our hotel had glossy brochures on the front desk trumpeting a nice hotel right in the middle of the park. Agma passed on the park, but she asked me to take her companion along. Fine. The young lady was over from England to visit her intended. I got the impression that everything wasn’t all orange blossoms with that. She was young, but I had no idea how young. I thought mid-twenties. She was on plump side, polite but aloof, wore makeup even out in the African bush, and dressed in a style I would describe as British matron. Later I found out that she was much younger than I’d thought, eighteen or nineteen I think. I’ve never been good at guessing the ages of European women. Had I known, I would have had to think long and hard about taking her with me.

It took an hour and a half to get to the park entrance, and, with stops along the way to watch animals, another two hours to reach the hotel. We arrived just at dusk to find that the hotel had burned down years before. I should have verified things, but it never occurred to me that my hotel in Natitingou would be passing out brochures to a burned out hotel. Maybe they had boxes of them leftover and just thought they were pretty. Sometimes Africa wins. Fortunately I usually pack some camping equipment when I go upcountry. As I wasn’t about to drive three and a half hours at night, most of it through a gamepark on a dirt road, I found a room mostly intact, no roof or door but it had four sturdy walls. I cleaned it up some and set up mats, sleeping bags, and tall tent-like mosquito nets for both of us. It was hot, so I put her by the door to catch the breeze and myself in the far corner. The young lady later told people that she had been half convinced that I had planned all this just so I could ravish her in the night, and she had been certain that I’d placed her by the door so that a lion would take her first. I’d camped out in gameparks with far less shelter than four solid walls. I did park the pickup close to the door, but I wanted to leave some space for air. As for the ravishing, she was somebody’s fiance, and I wasn’t the least bit attracted to her. Even if I had been, at most I would have tossed her a few compliments to see if she was interested. Uninvited pouncing was not in my repertoire.

I slept soundly. I suppose I’m bragging here, but my ability to sleep in odd places and strange conditions was legendary. I once slept curled up inside a large truck tire hanging off the back of the truck on a rough road. We all have our little talents. I wish I still had that one. She didn’t sleep at all, listening to animal sounds all night long. I wanted to get a very early start. Before dawn the next morning when I offered her some sardines and crackers for breakfast, she told me she’d thought that I had set her up as lion bait. She said it half humorously, so I wouldn’t take offense. She didn’t mention the ravishing part. I laughed. I asked her why she didn’t ask to switch places with me or sleep in the truck. Then I explained how rare it was to see lions in West African gameparks. I told her to get in the truck and try to nap while I loaded everything. Dawn was just touching the eastern sky when I got in the truck, started the motor, and turned on the headlights. A lioness passed right in front of us, just a few yards from where we’d slept. You know, all my life I’d heard the phrase if looks could kill. Up to that moment I had never really experienced it.

MY WILDLIFE ADVENTURES (OR GOOD NIGHT RAMAR OF THE JUNGLE WHEREVER YOU ARE)

Tags

African Widlife, Birding, Cameroon, Chad, Gameparks, Humor, Kenya, Peace Corps

“So geographers in Afric-maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er uninhabitable downs,
Place elephants for want of towns.”
(Jonathan Swift)

The gameparks in Kenya are grand. I enjoyed several of them while visiting dear friends stationed in Nairobi. It was wonderful to have use of a vehicle and driver thanks to them. However I wasn’t there long enough to develop many stories. There was one that is worthy of note. Nairobi National Park is just seven kilometers from the city. You can see skyscrapers. They had to put up a fence on the city side. Surprisingly it has a wide variety of animals, some like chetahs I had not seen in West Africa. It is a beautiful thing to watch a chetah run. I happened to be in Nairobi at the time of the annual animal census in which my friend Paul and a friend of his, both Foreign Service Officers, regularly participated. They invited me to go along, but the lady who ran the thing was a class conscious Brit. There were still colonial remnants in Kenya and apparently the gamepark census was one of the them. The participants had to be vetted by her. Paul solved this problem by introducing me as Doctor Branson. “Yes, yes, delighted to have you aboard Dr. Branson.” It was a fun day. No doubt the gameparks of East Africa were where to go for a tourist in those days. They had more animals and were far better organized. However the rough and tumble gameparks of West Africa, where I had the great fortune to spend significant time, had their own charms. I mean who gets the chance to live in a gamepark for months on end, an obscure little park to be sure, but quite beautiful in its way. There was an unpolished beauty in those less traveled environs.

My first visit to a gamepark occurred before I was officially a Peace Corps Volunteer. Peace Corps has a trick. They don’t count training or vacations as time served. They put me on a plane to Africa in July, 1975 and officially mustered me out in December of 1978. They credited me with three years of service. Not that I’m complaining, it was a great experience. Just before my fellow wells project recruits and I finished our on-the-job training, we took a trip to southern Chad, the city of Sarh, to a small project spin off where one or two of us would be posted. Manda gamepark is just north of Sarh and on the main road. We decided to camp out there and go into Sarh the next day. In the park they had a raised platform for such purposes. Fortunately the park didn’t have any big cats. We arrived just before dusk and barely had time to set up camp before dark. Extremely excited, when the night animal sounds started up a strange feyness overcame us. We grabbed flashlights and ran out into the elephant grass looking for animals. The park had elephants, hippos, buffalo, and poisonous snakes, among others, stumbling upon any of which could be fatal. Hippos come out of the river at night to graze and are particularly dangerous. Perhaps God does look after fools or the noise we made drove everything away, anyway we didn’t find anything. The next day herds of antelope leaped the road in front of us as we drove around the park, and a buffalo even gave the door of one of our two Land Rovers a head thump. Very satisfying that.

As a PCV my gamepark experience was limited to a visit or two to Manda when I was stationed in Sarh for some months. However while drilling wells in the north, on rare occasions we would run across gazelles, warthogs, jackals, and majestic roan antelopes (antelope cheval in French), among others. A few wild animals like monkeys and lizards were ubiquitous. Interestingly our Chadian counterparts used one word “laham” (Chadian Arabic for meat) to describe any edible animal we encountered. Even though our counterparts save one were not Muslim, a few of the Muslim dietary restrictions had become more or less generalized in Chad, with the notable exception of pork which they ate with gusto. They refused to eat carrion eaters like shellfish, not that dry Chad had a lot of shellfish, and animals that had hands like monkeys or even appendages that vaguely resembled hands. One of the night guards at the Peace Corps Office did a favor for an Air France pilot. The pilot repaid him with a bucket of shrimp, a rare and expensive treat in Chad. The guard approached me with bucket in hand and explained that he hadn’t wanted to hurt the pilot’s feelings, but he couldn’t possibly eat those creepy little things. He asked me rather doubtfully if nasaras (white people) really ate them. I recalled the old line about it being a brave man who first ate an oyster. In my best Lewis Carroll Walrus voice, I replied: “Yes, yes, indeed we do, as disgusting as that may seem. My good man, I will gladly take them off your hands. I mean what are friends for?”

In the spring of 1979 everything changed for me. While working on contract for USAID Chad civil disturbances broke out. My experiences in Chad are covered elsewhere. After a few weeks, with the airport closed and bridges blocked, I was assigned to northern Cameroon to provide logistical support to the US Embassy in N’Djamena, chiefly transportation of personnel. My expenses were covered generously. I could have stayed anywhere I wanted between Maroua and the Cameroonian border directly across the Chari River from N’Djamena. There were three nice hotels in Maroua and one at Waza, the big gamepark between Maroua and N’Djamena. Over a period of roughly five months I tried them all out from time to time. I enjoyed the amenities they had to offer, hot showers, AC, excellent meals. However after years of simple food as a PCV, I appeciated rich French restaurant cuisine more as a sometime thing, not everyday fare. From my visits to France, probably the average Frenchman feels the same way. They don’t eat like that everyday either.

For the most part I chose to stay in Kalamaloue National Park, located just ten or so kilometers from N’Djamena. As a consequence I ate a lot of sardines and crackers, but I could always buy baguettes and basic supplies in nearby Kousseri. The park had one round hut with no electricity and only cold water that the park guards would pump up to barrels on a tower. Actually when the sun had been shining on the barrels all day late afternoon showers weren’t that bad, but morning ones were best avoided. Because I paid my modest fees in cash and stayed so long, I was their cash cow and they treated me like royalty, useful since they weren’t about to question my iffy credentials. The park was so strapped for funds that the guards were issued only three bullets each annually and had to strictly account for them. Kalamaloue was a tiny park as these things go. I’m not sure of the exact measurements, but having walked it I would estimate the size at thirteen thousand acres give or take, which is extremely small by African standards.

My hut had windows without screens or glass, just wooden shutters that you could prop open. The beds had mosquito nets. The hut sat on the only hill in the park and looked out over a plain. I suspected that the hill’s origin was not natural, most probably the result of successive habitation. Not far to one side was a steep decline to a water hole where a large crocodile lived. He would often crawl out on a sandbar to sun with his mouth gaping open. I nicknamed him Walter. We were friends. We played games. I would walk around the top of his hole, and he would sink down with just his eyes showing and stalk me, hoping I would come down for a drink. Toward sunset with the heat retreating somewhat, I would pull out the metal table and chair and sit there looking out over that plain at gazelles, kob antelope, waterbuck, jackals, warthogs, and whatever unusual treat that would choose to show itself that day. As a kid I was a big fan of the TV show Ramar of The Jungle, a show way too politically incorrect to ever be shown again except on youtube. OK I didn’t get to live in a neat treehouse like they did, but this was about as close to a childhood fantasy as it gets. An hour or so before dusk the park’s three guards would go home, leaving just me and the animals. Usually I could manage a glass of wine or perhaps Ricard as the sun drifted downward. Those were moments of profound contentment.

Sometimes for a few days here and there I would share my hut with Joel, a PCV assigned to the gameparks in northern Cameroon. He worked alone, but when I was available I would help out with various projects. This was before Caddy Shack, but anyone who’d met him after seeing that movie would have compared him to the Bill Murray character, the main difference being that Joel wasn’t mentally slow. He had been a grunt in Vietnam and bore the scars. He was awkward socially and half deaf. He was taciturn at times and talked incessantly at others with the loud voice of the hearing impaired. He was best taken in small doses, but he was a really good guy. I liked him.

Joel asked me to walk the park with him while he did an animal inventory. We were unarmed, but Kalamaloue wasn’t supposed to have any of the more dangerous mammals except for the hippos from the river, and they stayed in or near the water during the day. Nevertheless there were dangers on foot, snakes, feral dogs, and such, and it was safer with two people. We walked systematically the grid Joel had developed. At one point we heard frenzied yapping and approached a jackal raising hell at a big bush. We walked around the other side and came face to face with a lion. That was a come to Jesus moment. He was an old male and from his belly it looked like he had just eaten. Lucky us. We backed away slowly. Another time Joel was in the park when a troop of elephants migrated through, a ragtag troop, a mere remnant of the vast numbers of bygone times. Somehow Joel talked me into climbing trees along the likely trails and dropping paint on elephant butts as they passed below. He wanted to document their migration. That lasted until a female became annoyed and made a mock charge toward my tree. At my insistence we called it a day.

I was blessed to be in Kalamaloue during the summer rainy season and able to help Joel with bird counts. Fortunately that could be done from my vehicle. I was pretty good at identifying birds, but Joel was way above my class. We would come across temporary ponds that were chock full of all kinds of birds, some resident but most migratory — spoonbills, crowned cranes, sacred ibis, four or five different duck species, kingfishers, and marabou storks standing like a row of undertakers. Maybe en route we would watch an Abyssinian roller with its electric colors, in tumbling flight one of the most beautiful birds in the world, or possibly spy a majestic African fish eagle. The rainy season in off the beaten path Kalamaloue was one of nature’s great secrets, a once in a lifetime birder’s paradise.

One night by myself at Kalamaloue, sleeping with the shutters propped open, I heard some noise. I picked up my powerful flashlight and illuminated a civet in my hut. Now a civet is about the size of a very large domestic cat or a small raccoon, which it kind of resembles although it is not related. The poor thing panicked and began running around the perimeter of the round hut, which included jumping on my bed and stomach and bringing down my mosquito net. I was afraid to make a sudden move for risk of getting bitten. Rabies shots were no fun in those days. The civet made three round trips total, landing on my belly on every lap. Eventually I gathered my wits about me and turned off the flashlight. Then the critter lost no time figuring out where the exit was and departing out the open window.

WHAT LIES BEYOND BEING BORED TO DEATH

Tags

Africa, African Bees, Chad, Humor, Non-Fiction, Patas Monkey, Peace Corps, Swiss, Termites

My first year in Chad I spent a good bit of time living in Sarh, the most significant city in southern Chad. Apparently Sarh was built with delusions of grandeur. Maybe the French were planning to make it a capital of something in the early days of colonization. In the words of another Peace Corps Volunteer, it’s largely unpaved but nevertheless extremely wide streets seemed to be waiting for a parade that never came. The French liked to call that region “Le Tchad Utile,” because the comparatively wetter climate permitted the cultivation of cotton, peanuts, and some rice along the rivers, with cotton and beef being Chad’s only important export commodities. Cattle could walk across many miles of borders in a country more than twice the size of France, but the harvest and sale of cotton lent itself to central control, and thus it was the most significant cash crop and a major source of tax revenue. Sarh was a medium sized city, maybe 40,000 give or take, with a largish expat community that disappeared during the rainy season, although the rainy season was really no worse than a summer in Florida, albeit one without paved roads. Just before he went home, Francois, the former wells PCV in Sarh, had advised us: “In Sarh you’ll discover what lies beyond being bored to death.”

The wells project in Sarh was the poor stepchild of the well financed project up north, and my fellow wells vol Scotty was often up in N’Djamena trying to secure some funding. My Chadian workers were all blue collar guys, friendly enough, but not much for in depth conversation. I did take them out for beers on occasion, but they felt they had to return the favor by having me over for billy billy, the local home-fermented millet beer. The next week I’d spend a good part of it in the bathroom. I went to work at our warehouse workshop on time every work day, but Scotty had the only functioning vehicle, and the workshop like much of the town only received intermittent electricity. I’d sit there in that dark warehouse until I couldn’t stand it anymore, then hop on my mobylette (French moped) and ride around town some before heading back, hoping that the lights had come back on in my absence. I always felt guilty about doing that. My Chadian workers could sit for hours in a hot dark warehouse doing absolutely nothing, didn’t seem to bother them at all, but I had my limits.

Scotty and I shared a house in a three house compound. One house was occupied by two Swiss vols, Hans and Giscard, and the other by a male French Canadian vol. There was a great looking female French Canadian vol living elsewhere in town who would visit her compatriot. She was cordial, but clearly she hadn’t come all the way to a French speaking country in Africa to date an American with still rudimentary French. The Swiss vols said Americans all smelled like milk and put ketchup on everything. Not wanting to disappoint, if I saw them coming I would put ketchup on anything I was eating. The compound was heavily shaded by dense-leaved mango trees. Occasionally, perhaps it only seemed like always in the middle of the night, a mango would drop on my tin roof, sounding like a bomb going off.

I find the cultural myths we all have amusing. The noble fight at the Alamo is one of ours. I eventually learned that war was really all about slavery which was illegal in Mexico. The well-to-do southerners there wanted to cultivate cotton on plantations, and for that they needed slaves. One day in discussion with Giscard, he revealed a Swiss myth. He honestly believed that the Germans hadn’t invaded Switzerland because they were afraid of all the old Swiss men on bicycles in the mountains with their long rifles. Every able bodied male in Switzerland received some military training, and apparently that terrified the Nazi panzer divisions. That is what he’d been taught since childhood. I laughed and suggested that perhaps the Germans had had other reasons. I couldn’t convince him. It reminded me of a lady I knew who was jogging along the beach one day just registering things she passed, crab, gulls, dog, driftwood, peanut butter foam. Suddenly she realized that that tan foam everywhere couldn’t be peanut butter foam. When she was a little girl she had asked her grandmother about it. No doubt with a smile, her grandmother had explained that it came from ships at sea washing out their peanut butter jars. Maybe one day Giscard would recognize his peanut butter foam. Some of us never do. The Arabs have a proverb: That which is learned in youth is carved in stone.

Inside the compound Hans had some duck and turkey pens, and Scotty and I had a patas monkey that we had inherited from the former vol. Patas monkeys are fairly good-sized reddish brown savannah monkeys. The female monkey was tied to a mango tree off to the side of our house. I hated that, but I couldn’t keep her in the house. She would chew through her rope from time to time. My house wasn’t all that far from open land, but she never left the compound. Instead, since she never bit anybody, I would let her terrorize the compound for a couple days. If someone left a door open, she would steal food. When she was loose, mine was often open with a convenient bowl of fruit on the table. A bit riskier, from time to time when the lady fruit sellers came into the compound with their platters on their heads, she would leap out of a tree on a back scattering fruit everywhere. Of course I would pay for the fruit. After the initial shock, the Chadian ladies would laugh good naturedly about it. When I decided it was time to put her back in her tree, I’d buy some chocolate bonbons. She loved chocolate. She was female. So I would stand by her tree and noisily eat bonbons, until she gave up and came over for some.

As the rainy season moved in, with Scotty in N’Djamena, the expats all leaving, and the electricity becoming more problematic, boredom settled down over everything. The house did have quite a few books, but I’m a fast reader, and soon the only book left was The Book of Mormon. The three page introduction, I believe called The Testimony of Joseph Smith, is actually a nice piece of creative science fiction. However Twain aptly described the main text as “chloroform in print.” I won’t critique it further. It is easy to mock someone else’s peanut butter foam. It was a mark of my desperation that I read it all the way through anyway.  Around that time the last of my expat acquaintances, Hans, left for vacation. Before he left he asked his cook to do something about the bee’s nest under the overhang of his tin roof. To paraphrase what Eldredge Cleaver said about Rosa Parks: That day somewhere in the universe a gear shifted.

The next morning I awoke to ungodly screeching. I ran to my front door and looked out. It was snowing, at least that was the first thing it looked like. Then I realized that bees filled the air. Most of the noise came from Hans’ duck pen, but some came from the monkey. I saw Hans’ cat running across his roof, swatting at bees. It backed up to the edge and fell off. Landing of course on its feet, it saw me and made a beeline (pun intended) straight for me. I opened the door. The cat ran in and cowered under the coffee table. I decided I had to try to save the monkey, so I donned layers of clothes, sunglasses, work gloves, and a motorcycle helmet and headed out. I’d made it about five steps when I was stung at least ten times. Worse, the bees kept going for my eyes. It was only a matter of time before they got around the side and under the glasses. Plus it was obvious that I would be stung several hundred times before I could free the monkey. Be they African or American, honey bees don’t pack much venom punch, but several hundred stings can kill you. I turned and ran back in. I was swatting the bees that came in with me, when someone pounded on the door. The monkey had chewed through the rope and wanted in. She ran under the coffee table too, grabbing and hugging the cat. I surmised that the thick leaves of the mango tree must have provided some protection. Still I half expected her to go into shock, but she survived, none of the blinded ducks did. And there we sat all that day and late into the next before the bees disappeared. Later I learned that that entire section of town had been shut down.

When the air cleared shortly before sunset on the second day, I decided to get out of stir and find a cold beer. There was a Chadian bar on the far side of town that I liked. I’d gone there once with my Chadian co-workers. So I headed out across town on my mobylette. I stopped on top of a rise to view an accident scene below. There was an ambulance and policemen and a victim. The victim was one of the ubiquitous thin old white-bearded men of Chad. He lay on the pavement beside his smashed bicycle. He was smashed too. Even from a distance I could see the odd angle of his leg, and jagged bones, and blood. The policemen were busy drawing a chalk outline around him. No one seemed concerned by his serious injuries. The old man had propped his elbow on the pavement to hold his head up. While he watched as the policemen chalked away, he had a look of utter disgust on his face. To me he seemed some Old Testament prophet prophesying doom. And I knew, as he knew, whose doom it was he prophesied.

I detoured around. As I drove, a full moon peeked above the horizon. Fitting. Although the phrase was not original to him, one of the older volunteers was fond of saying that one day in Chad they would discover immense deposits of time. On occasion I’d felt like I’d slipped into some alternate universe where the rules of time and space were slightly different. I called these “Fellini moments.” This seemed like one of them.

I walked through the enclosed bar to the brightly lit courtyard behind and ordered a beer. The tinny repetitive electric guitar music of West Africa played through bad speakers. I sat at an empty metal table and looked to the east. A huge yellow-orange moon rose behind a picket of kapok trees. The tall stark trees were eerie enough, with their broad fluked trunks near the ground. The full moon completed the scene. As I drank my beer, it started to snow again. I had a moment of panic before I realized that the air was filling with termites, not bees. Whenever the termites struck a wall, a chair, me, they dropped their wings and began to crawl. I looked around the courtyard. The Chadians were picking up termites and eating them. I was adventurous in those days. I tried a couple. Not much flavor, but they crunched nicely.

“Tonight is the night of the termites,” said a deep voice in booming French. At my side stood a big broad Chadian. From one of the southern tribes, he bore three large raised scars on his face, three arcs, one on each cheek and one on his forehead, suggesting a circle. “Tonight the young queen flies toward the full moon. She is bigger and stronger than any of the males. Only the strongest most determined male can fly as high as she can fly. When they collide they lose their wings and tumble leaflike back to earth, making love the whole way down. Where they land they form a new nest.” Then he waved his arms dismissively and gazed out with disdain over the termite filled courtyard. “These termites have mistaken bar lights for the moon.”

A FEW AMUSING GUINEA VIGNETTES (INCLUDING MY DR. STRANGELOVE STORY)

Tags

Africa, Dr. Strangelove, Earthquake, Guinea, Humor, Nonfiction, USAID

This is a collection of short amusing and/or interesting stories from my years in Guinea (1982-1985). It is a complement to my previous blog Sekou Toure’s Funeral.

One of the projects I oversaw in Guinea was a NGO Small Enterprise Project. In the absence of a banking system that would loan to small businesses, they would loan small amounts to worthwhile applicants. The project worked well because they were diligent in the approval process. The vast majority of people paid back their loans. A former PCV, Steve Connolly was the NGO on-site manager. From time to time I would ride with him as he looked over the applicant enterprises, any excuse to get out and about. One day we drove out to assess a poultry farm. We had no trouble finding the place. There was a huge professionally done sign proudly proclaiming the applicant’s poultry farm. It was a really beautiful sign. Unfortunately it sat in a barren field, not a coop or chicken to be seen anywhere. Instead of spending his money on infrastructure or livestock, it all went to impress us with a sign. We laughed and drove off.

I worked for USAID in offices inside the US Embassy in Conakry, and the US Ambassador had a tendency to call on me for odd jobs from time to time. It wasn’t like I could refuse. Once he asked me to escort a visiting Israeli military attaché upcountry for no particular purpose. The attaché didn’t seem to care where he went. He just wanted to see some of the country. So I drove him up to our big agricultural project where we had a contract team and a decent place to stay. That guy was impressive and friendly enough in a taciturn macho way. He looked like a commando. While up there he had an attack of kidney stones. They had to medevac him by helicopter. I can still hear him screaming. I guess if something hurts badly enough, we all scream.

There was an earthquake in a hilly/mountainous area of Guinea. We felt it in Conakry. I don’t remember what it registered, but it did a good bit of damage to the stone and concrete buildings near the epicenter. USAID had a technical office in Abidjan, Ivory Coast that served the region, providing engineers, agronomists, economists, and disaster relief specialists as needed. So they sent a lady named Sam over to assess the damage. I was the Conakry AID Affairs Office’s handy all purpose tool for that sort of thing, so they gave me a brand new Jeep Cherokee and told me to take her up to the site. My years of experience had taught me to plan for the worst, so I packed well.

It was a tricky trip because we had to travel on narrow mountain roads that now had loose boulders on them. We made it to the site and she did her thing. While there we experienced several aftershocks, which made the drive back more dangerous, the aftershocks having enhanced the obstacle course. A large boulder required that I drive near the edge of a cliff to get around it. For safety reasons I told Sam to get out and walk. I hadn’t anticipated the weakened shoulder collapsing. The front half of the vehicle hung out over the precipice at an angle. I crawled through the vehicle and out the back. I had a solid rope which I tied to rear chassis and then across the road to a tree, drawing it tight. Once that was secure, very carefully I worked my way out as far as I could go beside and partially underneath the jeep, until I managed to release the winch cable mounted on the front. I clung to bushes to keep from falling and half expected the jeep to crash down on me any minute. Sam was telling me not to do it the whole time. It was one of the scarier things I have ever done. I mean it was a brand new vehicle. I pulled the cable across and secured it to another tree at an angle from the first rope. At that point absent the road crumbling further the jeep was reasonably secure.

A local guy appeared. In Africa you can always count on somebody showing up no matter in what God forsaken place you find yourself. It’s reassuring. I asked him to go to the nearest village a few miles away and bring all hands. Then I removed blankets and provisions from the vehicle. Sam and I had lunch. For emergency purposes I had brought some camembert, pate, French crackers, and a nice Beaujolais. I even had a couple of wine glasses. Our straits aside, Sam seemed amused. A few hours later the whole village showed up. In order to get the front tires high enough to clear the edge, we had to bounce the jeep up and down and have everybody on the winch cable pull inward on the high bounce. The folks on the rope just had to keep up a steady pull. While waiting I had unloaded everything I could without significant risk to lighten the vehicle, not that that made much difference in the overall weight. My major concern was keeping people far enough back so that nobody would be hurt. It was touch and go, but somehow we managed to bounce the vehicle back on the road. I thanked them profusely and gave them all the money I had. We made it back without further incident. With a wry smile Sam thanked me for the adventure and the lunch. There were times in Africa when I felt that I had too much luck, that somebody had tilted the pinball machine in my favor. That was one of them.

One of my favorite movies is Dr. Strangelove, and whenever I watch it I flash back to Guinea. One morning the ambassador called me up to his office. He asked me to go down to the docks and go out with the Guinean Harbor Master to meet a navy cruiser that was bringing the fleet admiral in on a standard Show-The-Flag visit. It sounded like fun, but I did wonder why this task fell to me. I found out. In moderately rough seas we went out on a little tug boat to meet a very big ship. Cruisers are huge. When we got to it they threw a rope ladder over the side. It was a long way up in choppy waters. My oh-so-careful ascent garnered a few smiles. For the next few days I became the embassy liaison to the navy for a variety of logistical tasks. What the hey, they served great ice cream on board.

On the admiral’s last night the ambassador held a dinner for him, to which I was invited. Everyone else there was either a career diplomat or a naval officer. I’ve known many ambassadors, and honestly I rarely met one I didn’t like. They were bastions of sanity compared to some of the USAID Directors I have encountered. I guess I had mentally placed admirals in the same category. So I was caught off guard when after thanking me for my assistance and getting a little chuckle in about the rope ladder, the admiral began to wax philosophic about the Vietnam War. Sterling Hayden could have played him. He went on and on about how the war could have been won if we’d taken the next logical step and defoliated the rice fields in southern China. My God! Funny thing was all the diplomats and subordinate officers nodded their heads in agreement, like everything he said was perfecly reasonable. I guess that is what they are trained to do. Kudos to their training. I was the only loose cannon on deck. Several of the diplomats glanced nervously at me. I wanted to ask the admiral if he had considered that that might have made the Chinese very very angry, but I was a good boy and kept my mouth shut. Still it was a chilling thought that in the mid-eighties we still had very high level people who thought that way. Then again he was commanding the fleet off the coast of West Africa. Kind of hard to start World War III from there. Hard but Sterling Hayden might have managed it.

Listening to pundits give their opinions about the economy brought a story to mind. I was visiting a forestry project upcountry. David Laframboise was the NGO on-site manager. I liked David and his African wife and always enjoyed getting out of the capital. He and I headed out in his small jeep to visit a village woodlot. It had been raining, and since we were on a very rough little road, the jeep got stuck. We took turns, one pushing and the other driving, with no success. Soon we were both covered in mud and still very stuck. Rummaging in the back of a jeep, I found a board. We wedged it under one rear tire and tried again, but the other tire just sank deeper. Then we tried the other rear tire, with the same result reversed. Wiping mud from my face, I looked at David: “You know David, if we just had another board, we could get out of this mess.” He looked back at me: “What are you, an economist?”