THE LAST OF THE DRAWING ROOM AUTHORS, JAMES BRANCH CABELL, AMERICA’S OSCAR WILDE

Tags

Essay, Fantasy, James Bransch Cabwll, Nonfiction

“It is my foible, one among a great many, to be a devotee of the niceties, of the overtones, and of the precision of very often rewritten and suitably colored prose.” (All JBC quotes are in italics)

This is not a scholarly essay, but rather a reader’s and in a small way fellow writer’s homage to a unique American literary figure who deserves better than to lie almost completely forgotten, at least by the general public, in a Richmond grave. Perhaps with the exception of his home state, since VCU has a James Branch Cabell Library. In the 1920’s he was one of the most popular authors in America. The decadence and desperate frivolity of that era suited him; however his star quickly faded in the pregnant gloom of the 1930’s. In the words of Alfred Kazim: “Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe.” I have been unable to find the source or the exact quote, but someone wrote that he painted exquisite miniature portraits in an age of industrial murals. Twain and Mencken were fans, and Heinlein consciously patterned Stranger in a Strange Land after Jurgen, himself calling it “Cabellesque.” Mencken disputed the common belief that Cabell was a romantic, claiming that Cabell was the ultimate anti-romantic: “Cabell’s hereos hunt dragons … as stockbrokers chase golf balls.”

“Tell the rabble my name is Cabell.” The first Cabell settled in Virginia in 1664, and the family remained prominent throughout the history of Virginia. James was born in 1879 and died in 1958. For an American his blood was the bluest of blue, a true southern aristocrat. At the age of fifteen he matriculated at William and Mary, and later still as an undergraduate he taught Greek and Latin there, until he was suspended for having a “too intimate” relationship with a professor. He was later readmitted and subsequently graduated in 1898. In 1901, the year in which his stories were first published, he was suspected of murdering a prominent Richmond man, John Scott, who was rumored to be romantically involved with Cabell’s mother. Whatever his other proclivities, and as vividly indicated by his writings, it is evident that he enjoyed women. In addition to rumored escapades, he married and when his first wife died in 1949, remarried within a year. Between 1905 and 1955 he published some fifty books. He is often described as an author of satirical fantasy fiction and belles lettres. I confess that I’ve only read six or seven of his books, the reason being that, although well written, for a modern reader the novelty of his once shocking sexual innuendo wears a bit thin after awhile and his themes become repetitive. And I’ve only reread two of his early novels, the ones that I and most people consider his best and most important works, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice and Figures of Earth, A Comedy of Manners. Also noteworthy are The Silver Stallion, a sort of sequel to Figures of Earth, and The Cream of the Jest: A Comedy of Evasions, both of which I intend to reread un de ces beaux jours.

“If we assiduously cultivate our power of exaggeration, perhaps we too shall obtain the Paradise of Liars. And there Raphael shall paint for us scores and scores of his manifestly impossible pictures … and Shakespeare will lie to us of fabulous islands far past ‘ the still vex’d Bemooths,’ and bring us fresh tales from the coast of Bohemia. For no one shall speak the truth there, and we shall be perfectly happy.”

 

 

 

A genetically inclined iconoclast, Cabell described WWI as having been fought “to make the world safe for hypocrisy.” The setting for most of his novels is the Province of Poictesme,  inexactly located in the south of a France that never was in a world that never was. His protagonists tended to be solipsistic, morally ambiguous men who, having made largely implied Faustian bargains, set out on fantastic quests, some of cosmic scope, to renew their youth or gain fame and fortune, goals which they usually obtained in one form or another. However,  they also sought the eternal love of the perfect woman, which being unobtainable, of course they never obtained. “The transfiguring touch was to come, it seemed from a girl’s lips; but it had not; he kissed, and life remained uncharmed.”

“Some few there must be in every age and land of whom life claims nothing very insistently save that they write perfectly of beautiful happenings.” And after the subdued receptions for his first few books, that seemed to be his preordained fate. However he also wrote: “Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony.”  Time’s sense of irony was evidently at play when Cabell published Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice in 1919, and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice moved quickly to block publication, seizing the printing plates in January 1920, which resulted in one of the first famous court cases concerning free speech and the definition of obscenity. The Society was a private institution which became charted by the state, and whose members in almost Taliban-like fashion were granted broad powers of search, seizure and arrest, also receiving 50% of any subsequent fines levied by the state. They are most famous for the many books they had banned, including Ulysses. Members patrolled the streets making sure the newsstands didn’t sell girly magazines. They devoted particular attention to the suppression of anything concerning homosexuality or birth control. They were fond of raids on bath houses, which was a bit ironic too, since The Society’s founding members were prominent in the YMCA movement. The case went on for two years, eventually being decided in Cabell’s favor. Interestingly the prosecutor seemed more incensed by the book’s mocking of papal infallibility, several popes were guests of the Devil, than he was about the book’s alleged obscenity. In his ruling Judge Charles Cooper Nott, Jr. said: “It is doubtful that the book could be read or understood at all by more than a very limited number of readers.” Of course in that he was wrong. The publicity surrounding the case made it a favorite in ladies’ drawing rooms. It was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its day. When Cabell published a revised edition in 1926, he exacted the perfect author’s revenge. He added  a chapter in which Jurgen is put on trial by the Philistines and the prosecutor is a giant dung beetle. Later in a book he thanked The Society for the publicity.

Another thing that made Cabell’s novels popular, especially with the ladies, at least once they wet their beaks with Jurgen, is that his novels are filled with sexual innuendo, double entendres, wordplay, anagrams, puzzles and codes, all of which made for fun group discussion. Many of the strange names he gives people and places are anagrams. The castle Storisende in Poictesme is a simple anagram for “stories end.” The decipherable Sigil of Scoteia is a prime example of one of his codes.

 

“The optimist believes this is the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”  I was not a literature major, so I am uncertain as to where the border between satire and allegory lies. To me Jurgen is decidedly Swiftian, and I believe that it is as allegory that it has true literary merit. In it Cabell assails the cultural, religious, and political beliefs of his time. Jurgen, who considers himself “a monstrous clever fellow,” regains his youth via a not clearly described Faustian bargain and sets out on grand adventures to find, not for altruistic purposes of course, the true creator and ruler of the universe, seducing women all along the way. He first stumbles through a twisted version of the Arthurian Legends, while greatly entertaining The Lady of The Lake and Queen Guinevere. Throughout the book there is a lot of him unsheathing his long gleaming sword for various ladies to admire. He visits Heaven and Hell. Heaven turns out to be an exact replica of an elderly church lady relative’s vision of what Heaven should be — a place of strict rules and no freedom governed by a despotic patron God. When she died, she never stopped complaining that the afterlife was simply not up to snuff, so the Powers That Be created Heaven just to shut her up. By contrast Hell is a democracy with the Devil as President. However Hell is engaged in an eternal war with Heaven to make the world safe for democracy, and during the duration of the war, namely all eternity, democratic privileges are suspended. And of course Jurgen seduces the Devil’s wife. Eventually Jurgen discovers the true ruler of the universe, Koshchei The Deathless — a disheveled, overworked and underappreciated bureaucrat in a small, document strewn, windowless office, whom Jurgen is quick to flatter.

“Good and evil keep very exact accounts … and the face of every man is their ledger.”

When I was fresh out of college and very pleased with myself for “discovering,” with the assistance of Ballantine Books, several great fantasy authors, including Cabell, I wrote in simple rhyming verse a synopsis of Figures of Earth that cherrypicks a couple of the plot lines. It has no literary merit, and I had no intention of including it here, but I chuckled a couple of times while rereading it, and that is good enough to conclude with. Please note that Manuel the pig tender later became Dom Manuel, also known as Manuel The Redeemer.

CABELL’S REDEEMER

Young Manuel in his sty,
he seemed so free of care,
and the odd squint in his eye
gave him an impish air.
But his dear mother was firm
before she passed away,
charging him to make for her
a fine figure one day.
Manuel pondered her geas,
just how best to take it,
then he went down on his knees
to sculpt a statuette.

A fine self-image he formed,
from the clay around him,
with but a single small flaw,
a shortness in one limb.
Now there were those who counseled
that he had missed her gist,
but he would squint and tell them
she'd meant precisely this.
Now some thought the boy insane,
while others thought him sly,
because how could someone so inane
sport such a squinty eye.

For in day a warm sun shone on him,
and at night the stars above,
and although his life was easy,
the boy still longed for love.

Then a stranger came to visit
with aim to titillate,
asking him to quit his pigs
and chance a greater fate.
Manuel just shook his head,
displaying soiled attire,
claiming one from his estate
should not aspire higher.
Then the black clad man stared
deeply into his soul;
then smiled a secretive smile,
a glimpse of something droll.

"Once a cradled babe squalling,
now a boy drowsing in the sun.
Soon you'll be a young hero;
there's a fair maid to be won.
Miramon, The Lord of Madness
And The Nine Kinds Of Sleep,
abides in a mountain mansion
and emprisons her in his keep.
I'd undertake this quest myself,
but the prize, you see, is her hand,
and I already have a wife
who would not understand."

For in day a warm sun shone on him,
and at night the stars above,
and although his life was easy,
the boy still longed for love.

"Fair Gisele pines for justice,
pacing those dream misted halls.
My magic sword will suffice.
Take it boy! Destiny calls!"
So Manuel took the magic blade
and climbed up daunting tracks,
where he braved perilous falls
and mythic beasts' attacks.
When he reached the castle high
and faced his foe with steel,
it looked to be the same guy
who'd set up the whole deal.

The wizard seemed delighted,
as he wore a toothy grin.
Then he bowed with regal grace
and invited Manuel in.
"No one can best that blade.
By now that must be plain.
So then, I concede. You win!
A fight would be in vain.
A point I failed to mention,
fair Gisele is my wife,
and it is my intention
to try the single life."

They lead shadow-haunted lives,
these fashioners of dreams.
Once you dip your hands in fantasy,
then nothing is what it seems.

Then Manuel understood
the motives of the man,
but wondered why he'd formed
so intricate a plan.
"Lord, you're a famous wizard,
Yet before Gisele you balk,
helpless before this mere woman
whose only barb is talk."
Miramon stroked his forehead,
as on his magnificent throne he sat.
Then gazing downward at Manuel:
"Yes unmarried men do wonder about that."

Miramon sat deep in thought,
then spoke most plaintively.
"For all the husbands that were
and for all there ever will be,
where is the girl I married,
bright of smile, flowing hair,
and who is this woman beside me,
meddling in my affairs?
Love of a sort I have still,
but not that magic state
that transformed her might to will,
once touched that dissipates."

Young Manuel in his sty,
he seemed so free of care,
and the odd squint in his eye
gave him an impish air.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MY STUMBLES THROUGH THE SIXTIES AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA

Tags

Civil Rights, Football, Gloria Steinem, Low Country, Nonfiction, Pat Conroy, South Carolina, That Was The Week That Was, The Sixties

I have a great memory, but fifty years ago is a long time. If some of the people mentioned have different memories, then that is to be expected. I also depended on the valuable memories of my old friend Dicky Strozier and my brother Charlie. Charlie’s differ a bit from mine, but not in any significant way. 

At times I look back on the sixties in the deep south and see a foreign place. I think that sense of alienation may have been enhanced by the fact that I joined the Peace Corps in 1975, and except for a year or so living in DC and a few extended visits, I lived and worked in Africa until the early nineties, and only returned to live in the south in the mid-nineties. When change happens gradually you can adjust almost unnoticed, but after a twenty year absence, I experienced culture shock. In Columbus, Ga. the elderly husband of my neighbor had been rushed to the hospital, a very sweet couple. A few neighbors, including me, had gathered around her when we saw her outside to give her our best wishes. One of them said something about bearing witness for her husband. She started dancing around, flailing her arms and chanting, “He’s been bathed in the blood of the lamb! He’s been bathed in the blood of the lamb!” It reminded me of the time I had inadvertently stopped my truck in the middle of a female circumcision ceremony in Chad. This was alien to me, strange ritualistic stuff. Things had changed over the years. There has been a great deal of mythology and revisionist history written about the sixties. Perhaps one personalized account can reset reality for those who read it.

I was born in Charleston, but spent years 2-10 in the outer suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri being my father’s home state. Then we moved back to the Charleston area, to Johns Island, in 1959. Distance wise Johns Island is not far from Charleston, but in those days it was still mostly rural with a 70% black population, many of whom spoke Gullah. Blacks lived right down the road, any road, but there was no mingling of the races. Black kids and white kids never played together, or went to the same churches, or attended the same schools. Blacks and Mexicans harvested the produce, and white kids worked the sheds packing it. There was a palpable sense of arrogance bordering on animosity shown by all white people toward black people. The n-word was commonly used. The only pro civil rights whites were “northern agitators,” often Jews. There were no Jews on Johns Island that I ever heard of; they all lived in downtown Charleston; and I only knew of one Catholic family. As I would learn later, most of the Jews in Charleston shared the prevailing prejudices. In fact some had ancestors who had fought for the Confederacy. I don’t think there were any white liberals on Johns Island. If there were, they kept a very low profile. I remember asking my father why he had voted for Kennedy. He replied, “Because Lincoln was a Republican.”

I’m going to tell a little anecdote here that I have included in another story, because it provides some insight into the times. My mother grew up on a farm in St. George, SC. She had a limited education, sixth grade I think, but she was literate and enjoyed reading newspapers and such. She was ignorant of many things, but she wasn’t stupid. She had a bevy of strange beliefs and superstitions. Now the point of this is not so much the tale itself, but her absolute unawareness that there was any sexual component to it. Of course as a precocious teenage boy I saw the sexual connotations, but I never mentioned them. That was ground best not trod on.

You see there is an actual long, slender, nonpoisonous black snake in the SC low country called the coachwhip. My mother believed it would lie in wait for a young woman to walk by. Then it would rise up, head waving back and forth, and make a perfect wolf whistle, just like a brash construction worker might. When the woman looked toward the sound, the snake would stare into her eyes and hypnotize her. Then it would crawl up, wrap around her, and squeeze her to death.

The black culture on Johns Island and adjacent Wadmalaw Island was quite different from the white one. Many blacks spoke the Gullah dialect, although almost all of them could and would speak something much closer to regular English to white people. They had their own music and superstitions. I remember the shack like houses with blue panted doors, window trim, and porch ceilings. That color was called haint blue. They believed that ghosts (haints) wouldn’t cross water, so the blue would keep them from entering their homes. One of my great regrets is that I never immersed myself in such an interesting culture. That was impossible for me at that time. I had evolutionary miles to go.

I was a product of my environment. I was just as prejudiced as the other white kids, used the n-word, and generally tried to fit in with everybody else. There was one difference though, I loved to read. No one ever read bedtime stories to me or even encouraged me to read, so I started out reading comic books. I later branched out to kid’s adventure stories, then sports books, and soon I was reading anything I could get my hands on. My one year younger brother and I thirsted for knowledge in a wasteland. How I envy the children of today. In those days encyclopedia publishers would send the first book, the “A” book, to people free, hoping they would go on to buy the set. We could never afford a set, but Charlie and I memorized the “A” book from cover to cover. I still have a warm place in my heart for aardvarks. Also it probably explains why I haul two old encyclopedia sets around with me every time I move. I just like looking at them.

The small sexually censored, but surprisingly philosophically uncensored, school library was my only source of literature. I read anything and everything, Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, just to name a couple. These days I would probably be put on a watch list. What I discovered from reading those books was that even the most abhorrent philosophies have some appealing truths at their core, which are then warped and twisted into something evil. There is an Arabic proverb: “That which is learned in youth is carved in stone.” However, thanks mostly to my voracious reading, gradually, very gradually, I began to question my own beliefs.

Because of the association of the Republican party with Lincoln, as well as being the party of blacks during Reconstruction, almost all whites were Democrats. I never heard of a white Republican on Johns Island. That would have been a curiosity like a two-headed calf. Since blacks were kept from voting by one means or another, that meant that in South Carolina the Republican Party only existed on paper. Oh every now and again some guy with a big ego would run for office as a Republican simply because he could, but it was just token stuff. For all the statewide offices, the general election was a joke. The Democratic primary was the only real election.

During the Kennedy Administration, southern whites became increasingly alarmed and angry with the progressive tendencies of the Democratic Party. The solid south held together one last time for Johnson in 1964, only because he was a fellow southerner. Johnson’s relentless support for civil rights was the killing axe blow among whites to the Democratic Party in the south. Oh the tree didn’t fall immediately, but it was doomed. On the other hand the Republican Party was a blank slate, an empty vessel just waiting to be filled. And fill it they did. The Republican Party in the south was reborn as the party of racism and intolerance. That didn’t mean that the whites who remained in the Democratic Party weren’t racists too, most were, just of a more moderate variety, some of whom were capable of adjusting their beliefs. Also a few hardcore racists remained Democrats for seniority or other personal reasons.

The exodus to the Republicans continued over the years, particularly as the Republicans began to tone down the racist rhetoric. The fight over integration and voting rights was over. They began to couch their policies in terms of states rights, limited federal government, and the pro-life movement. The last time that I looked, around the turn of the century, less than fifteen percent of registered white voters in South Carolina were Democrats. It well might be less today. Even with the exodus of the hardcore racists, it was still difficult for blacks in the sixties, seventies, and eighties to win Democratic primaries. This was the era of Clinton, Carter, the Gores, etc. White Democrats were more progressive than white Republicans, but it was still tough for them to vote for a black person, especially one who had never held a major elected office, and almost none had. Eventually this led to the tacit acceptance by southern blacks of Republican gerrymandering, which assured that fewer Democrats would  be elected, but most of those that were would be black. Also it meant that Republican candidates in gerrymandered districts did not have to moderate their positions in order to get elected, in fact quite the opposite.

MY OWN LITTLE GHOST STORY

Tags

Ghosts, Nonfiction, South Carolina

My mother had a sixth grade education. She was a southern girl raised on a farm in the South Carolina low country. My Uncle George, her brother, died in The Battle of The Bulge. He was my grandmother’s youngest and the apple of her eye. My grandmother was dying from a brain tumor when my mother was pregnant with me, her first child. She told my mother that I was a boy and made her promise to name me George. Mom also said that my grandmother’s ghost visited her the night after she died.

Mom had many superstitions and odd beliefs. She believed that sea shells were bad luck, and that eating a banana after drinking a coke was certain death. Of course I tested that one out. I swear that she never had an inkling that there was anything sexual about this, but she believed the coachwhip snake, a long black snake, would hide in fields and wait for a woman to pass by. Then it would rise up, make a perfect construction worker like wolf whistle. When the woman looked at it, presumably a white woman, it would hypnotize her. Then it would crawl up to her, wrap around her, and squeeze her to death.

I have a brother one year younger and a much younger sister. Our parents loved us and sacrificed a great deal for us, but both were severely flawed, and the family unit deteriorated as the years went by. Mom suffered from ever worsening bipolar depression and dad had an ever worsening drinking problem. If anything mom was overprotective of us when we were young and her mental condition less pronounced. Dad was from Missouri, a child of the great depression, which intelligence aside limited a poor farm boy like him to an eighth grade education. He worked hard all his life at a dirty job, a welder in a naval shipyard. I liked the members of his Missouri family. However from age ten on we lived in the south, and mom’s family always seemed disdainful, almost hostile to us kids. I don’t think they cared for dad, and somehow that extended to us. Often my brother and I were treated like cheap labor. I was a bright kid with good grades, my brother valedictorian of his class, but my Greek uncle by marriage told us on several occasions that we should quit school and get a job washing dishes. When Uncle Jim lay dying, my brother and I had to sit death watch in the hospital in the wee hours.

Eventually our family disintegrated entirely when dad’s alcoholism finally cost him his job. My brother and I were in college, and due to scholarships, government loans and grants, and some work, we were able to get by on our own, if barely. My younger sister went to Missouri to live with her godparents, a wonderful childless couple who eventually adopted her. Perhaps the greatest thing my mother ever did for any of her children was befriend Lee and Nina back when we lived in Missouri and make them my sister’s godparents. I think they were the only non-related friends my parents ever had, and maintaining that friendship would have been impossible had we not moved away to South Carolina. Whether it was divine intervention or just lucky circumstance, I was grateful that she was taken care of. When things fell apart, mom followed my sister up there to Missouri. By that time her mental conditon had made her impossible to live with, and she would have fought institutionalization tooth and nail. Her family would have crucified us as well. As the oldest I experienced a great deal of guilt and anxiety about her, but there just wasn’t much I could do. I keep telling myself that.

A year or two later mom died. We brought the body back down to Charleston. I was working at the time, fresh out of college during a recession, just getting by. My brother stayed with me in a big house I shared with friends. My sister stayed with the family of another friend of mine. Mom’s family blamed us of course. I don’t think they ever acknowledged her mental condition. Even toward the end she could hold things together to some degree for an hour or two when a sister visited. Still it was there if you looked, but family doesn’t always look. I coordinated the arrangements with them but otherwise we didn’t have any face to face contact until the day of the funeral. My main concern was shielding my siblings as much as possible. As expected they were pretty cold toward us, barely civil, but we got through it.

That night I slept downstairs on the couch, having given my brother my room. I felt drained from the whole experience, sad but relieved that the ordeal was over. Sometime in the night I felt something land on my stomach. I sat up. I suspected that the cat had jumped down from the couch back, but I couldn’t find the cat. I went back to sleep. Sometime later I opened my eyes, and by the light from the street side window, I saw a key on a string twirling around above my head. I quickly closed my eyes. I told myself that understandably I had taken things harder than I thought. So I opened my eyes again and now the key was twirling faster and closer. I was scared. I closed my eyes. I took a few minutes to screw up my courage before I opened them again. Thank God the twirling key was gone. I sat up and took some deep breaths. I lay back down and had just closed my eyes, when I felt two hands touch me firmly three times top to bottom like a body search. At that point I jumped up and started yelling. Lights came on and people rushed down. I think all I said to them was that something strange was going on. That was the end of it. The next morning I noticed a key on a string hanging on the inside of the nearby window frame. Perhaps the most likely explanation is that it was all a dream due to extreme stress, combined with my childhood memories of mom’s superstitious tales. All I can say is that looking back I acted quite rationally in that dream, if indeed it was a dream.

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.

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.

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?”

ACCIDENT PRONE (GREAT CHARACTERS I HAVE KNOWN — DAGUE’S STORY)

Tags

Africa, Beer, Chad, Humor, Nonfiction, Peace Corps

 

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Le gout de bonheur

 

“Dague, it rhymes with vague,” was how he introduced himself. He came from Minnesota and looked it, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, tall. After a few beers he might tell the story about the time he fell off a tractor facedown in a field. The metal spikes of the trailing equipment had planted him two inches deep, breaking a bunch of bones in the process and leaving him with a back that looked topographical. Then there was the metal plate in his head, the scar on his abdomen, and the faded burns on his forearms, each with its own story.

He served four years in Chad as a Peace Corps Volunteer, working in N’Djamena’s parks and gardens, such as they were. A normal tour of duty was two years. Extensions for one year were fairly common, but serving four years was unusual. He was in charge of a small crew of Chadians who worked daily to ward off the encroaching desert and create little, usually temporary, pockets of beauty. He fit the city’s Beau Geste ambiance. He would have looked good in a kepi. Buildings were made of either earthen or concrete blocks with a plaster finish, often painted in dull pastels like smoky blue or leaden yellow that tended to fade gracefully. Since independence all of Chad’s infrastructure had deteriorated, but N’Djamena’s architecture had worn rather well. Visitors often mistook Dague for some unfortunate foreigner condemned to swing a pick on a work gang, but the people of N’Djamena found his indefatigable work ethic uplifting. Towards the end of his service the Chadian Government held a special ceremony to award him a medal, the only PCV ever to be so honored. A week later he received a bill for the medal.nexplicably, N’Djamena produced one of the world’s great beers, Gala. It was as if the universe decreed that if we had to endure the horrible dust storms in winter and unbearable heat in the hot season, we would be given some boon to balance things out. Gala was ambrosia. Blond men with Teutonic accents brewed Gala, importing everything save the water, and that came from a deep well, a well that tapped the ancient water trapped beneath Chad, water from pristine rain that fell long before the industrial revolution. Gala came in serious twenty-two ounce bottles which sold for about thirty cents, a price even volunteers could afford, at least for a good part of the month. Toward the end of the month many a vol was limited to eating Peace Corps sandwiches (bread and mustard), but still washed down with Gala if they could afford it. I once heard a rookie volunteer ask an older vol, “How about we split a beer?” To which the older vol replied, “Let’s split two.” It changed some with the seasons, but the Chadian Government favored a split work day for employees involved in manual labor to avoid the worst of the heat. It became a ritual for wells vols and Dague and a few others to break at midday, meet at Moustapha’s store for a beer, then go home for lunch and a siesta. After several hours of lying on your back in the dirt, trying to coax rusted bolts loose from an old land rover transmission, a cold Gala tasted mighty good.

 

Mr. Natural At Door, Dague On Right

 

Moustapha made an interesting character study. Casablanca-like, he was a dark-haired, olive-skinned, slightly built, obsequious, shrewd fellow of indeterminate age and origin. Arabic seemed his native language, though he spoke several others nearly as well. He had his hand in pots on both sides of the law, while giving the impression that he would never dream of cheating his customers, unless the amount involved was substantial, and even then he would have the good grace to feel badly about it. He did what he had to do to prosper in a hard land, and he kept his beer cold. His store sat right in the middle of town on the main street. It was rather small and cluttered, however a high ceiling and two open arched entrances gave the illusion of space. Vols would sit on coke crates and observe the passing scene.

Me on left at Moustapha’s with my late buddy Roger Jones

N’Djamena’s indigent knew where they were at noon, and though vols had but little, that little was a lot in Chad. So every weekday at noon a procession of the blind, the crippled, and those touched by the gods passed by Moustapha’s to garner a few coins. Dague’s favorite was an old man that he had nicknamed Mr. Natural. Mr. Natural wore “a twisty piece o’ rag” that just might have been a uniform once and ancient combat boots, invariably balancing a nearly empty burlap sack on his head. Rumor had it that the sack contained memorabilia from wartime service with DeGaulle’s Brassaville garrison of Free French, where Rick and his friend went at the end of Casablanca, but no one would compromise the old man’s dignity by looking. Mr. Natural had strong rough hands, a grizzled beard, and eyes that looked into places others couldn’t see, vast empty places. He always smiled and shook every available hand while mumbling strings of greetings and thank yous in Chadian Arabic. He demonstrated the same effusive gratitude for gifts worth pennies as for larger amounts. It was all the same to Mr. Natural.

One hot day the usual crowd gathered, plus Richard, a teacher vol down due to rebel activity from his remote post in a desert oasis, when Phil, the Assistant Peace Corps Director in Chad, and a middle-aged American walked into Moustapha’s. The stranger was a former Congressman who, having lost his last election, had received a Presidential appointment to some new position that had something or other to do with overseeing The Peace Corps. When he extended his hand toward a vol, Mr. Natural took it instead, and since the Congressman didn’t shake Mr. Natural’s hand, Mr. Natural didn’t let go. The Congressman tried walking to the other end of the store, but Mr. Natural just followed in tow, Harpo-like. Finally the Congressman yanked his hand away. Mr. Natural just smiled and wandered around looking for the next hand.

After introductions the Congressman started criticizing the wells vols for using “advanced” technologies. It should be noted that auguring wells is as low tech as it gets in the machine-driven well drilling business. It works on the Archimedes Screw Principle, which has been around, well, since Archimedes. Anyway It was an old tired song. Peace Corps loved the one man and a shovel concept. It was very Peace Corpsish. Dague represented the ideal volunteer, but volunteers driving Mercedes trucks with mounted drilling rigs made them very nervous. Never mind that for years, dating back to the mid-sixties, even though in those days it was done at an even lower tech level, the wells project had provided many thousands of villagers with potable water. It wasn’t quantifiable, but many children were alive that would have died from dysentery, and many women had avoided years of back-breaking labor because drilling closed tube wells allowed them to be located up on the dunes in the middle of the villages, not down in the ouadis where open wells had to be dug. Fortunately, the U.S. Embassy, the Chadian Government, and USAID (the funding agency) all loved the project. So there was little Peace Corps could do except lecture us from time to time on the evil of our ways. Not getting a reaction bothered the Congressman, so he escalated: “How can Peace Corps Volunteers afford to swizzle beer like this?” Now that hit a nerve. Dague finished his beer and approached the Congressman. For a second I thought Dague was going to grab his collar, but he just stared, then turned and walked out. The rest of us followed.

Dague and Richard hopped on mobylettes (French mopeds) and headed down to the Peace Corps office to check their mail. Dague exited the office grumbling to find Richard standing by his mobylette reading a letter. “What’s the problem Dague?” Richard asked. “First that Congressman jerk and now no mail.” “Well why don’t you punch your mobylette? That always makes me feel better.” And Dague did. Of course he only hit the cushioned seat and not all that hard, but there was a metal plate that ran underneath the center of the seat, and Dague hurt his wrist. They decided since they were at the office anyway, he’d better go on in and let Sue, the nurse, take a look at it.

Sue was a plump red-headed Boston-Irish force of nature, reeking of rubbing alcohol and cinnamon. She and her diplomat African-American husband had seven adopted children, a catholic jumble of genders, nationalities, and races. She tended her flock of PCVs with a sense of inexorable purpose, as relentless as a firetruck. The condom barrel by her door exemplified her style, seeming to shout, “Partake! That which I contain is crucial to your health, and I have them in abundance.” A few minutes after Dague had entered her domain, Sue’s piercing voice transcended brick and plaster, dominating the city’s competing sounds, like the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. “You did what???” “I punched my mobylette,” was Dague’s matter-of-fact reply. Dague was long on honesty, perhaps, in this case, to a fault. “You moron! You idiot! You broke your damn wrist!” As her vocabulary grew more colorful, Richard slipped away, lest her attention turn to him.

There was a volleyball game at the Ambassador’s Residence after work that day. It was played on the driveway inside the security gates. It was informal, coed, and fun – a social event. Things were well underway when Dague peddled in on a bicycle. His wrist cast covered most of his hand, making it impossible for him to twist the handlebar accelerator on a mobylette. Of course he couldn’t play, but he cheered everybody on and responded good-naturedly to jibes about his broken wrist. When it became too dark to see the ball, the game ended and most people headed to a nearby bar. Dague peddled off. At some point Richard pulled up beside him. “Want to race?” he asked Dague. “Sure” Dague replied. They were both just kidding around, but Dague raised himself up on the pedals in pretense. That’s when the chain broke and Dague fell off the bike, tumbling down into a three-foot deep caniveau (concrete drainage channel) and breaking his other arm. They say Sue waxed poetic that night.

The following Saturday the wells vols used a land rover to transport Dague as they went bar hopping. He now sported a full sling type cast as well as his wrist cast. They wound up in a Chadian bar that they rarely frequented. The owner was delighted to have them. Crowds packed the isles just to watch Dague drink. He couldn’t handle a glass, but placing the bottle on the very edge of the table he’d squeeze the neck between his casts and slide down slowly in his chair, tilting the bottle ever downward until gravity transferred the beer to the general vicinity of his mouth. The excited crowd drew the attention of a passing beggar. Seeing some white faces, he decided to try his luck. He marched in waving a hand missing two fingers. “Life is hard!” he shouted in Chadian Arabic. “Allah has been generous to you white people, therefore you should be generous to me.” Dague took this as a personal challenge. He held up his sling, “See that”. Then he thrust his wrist cast under the beggar’s nose, “And that.” Dague jumped up, “Somebody help me get this shirt off.” Dague proudly presented a back with the texture of playdough that some child had left out in the rain. He pivoted, displaying the impressive purple saber-shaped scar on his abdomen Then brushing his hair back to reveal a ruddy scar, “In there is a metal plate as thick as a land rover fender.” The bar paused in absolute silence. Dague winked and began to fumble with his belt buckle. “Allah be merciful!” the beggar cried, breaking for the entrance and fleeing the bar.