Fifty years ago today, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy announced from the steps of the University of Michigan’s Union that if elected, he would form the Peace Corps to use young Americans to help underdeveloped countries.
Twenty years ago, my employer, the Detroit Free Press, sent me back to Togo, West Africa, where I’d been a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1970s.
Nineteen-ninety was the thirtieth anniversary of then presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s proposal for a service “to promote world peace and friendship through a Peace Corps, which shall make available to interested countries and areas men and women of the United States qualified for service abroad and willing to serve, under conditions of hardship if necessary, to help the peoples of such countries and areas in meeting their needs for trained manpower.”
My assignment from my editors was to locate my Togolese friends and neighbors, people I’d worked with, and see if anything remained of the school and well projects I’d worked on.
Here we are in 2010, and the Peace Corps, this magnificent idea announced on the steps of the University of Michigan Union at two in the morning October 14, 1960, is still with us and celebrating its fiftieth birthday. Because it was proposed in 1960 and enacted by law in 1961, the organization seems willing and able to spread its golden anniversary over two years. Well and good. My wife, Karen Fonde, MD, and I both consider our Peace Corps service the best things we have done.
I’d like to share the article I wrote soon after my return in June 1990 from two weeks re-visiting the scenes of my Peace Corps work in the early 1970s. My story ran in the August 19, 1990 edition of the Detroit Free Press Magazine. I’m reprinting it by permission of the Detroit Free Press.
— Joel Thurtell
DEEP IN MY HEART
THE DELUGE HAD WASHED DEEP GULLEYS IN THE DIRT road, and the rented Toyota’s wipers slapped at top speed as I bounced across the drenched savannah. Here and there, impressionistic blobs of color marked the yellow cone of a thatched roof or the orange crown of a flamboyant tree.
The northern Togo road was the same one I had boomed along on my motorcycle 16 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer, and it felt odd to be riding the familiar route like a yovo — a rich foreigner — in an enclosed, four-wheel vehicle. Another time, I might have waited out the storm in the hotel bar back in Dapango, but this morning, after flying and driving more than 7,000 miles from Detroit, my impatience to cover the last half-dozen kilometers had been overwhelming.
I was headed for a village called Django, and a well. The well would be hard to see from the road, if it still existed. But I knew what to look for: the tamarind tree, the holy tree near the spot my divining rod had pointed out that day in 1973.
The tree lay near the end of a lane that leads to the Django primary school, which I had helped to complete during my Peace Corps service. But when I reached the spot where the lane branches off from the main road, I found it a creek, impassable by car.
The orange muck nearly sucked my new Rockports from my feet as I stepped into the rain. Visions of hookworm and poisonous snakes ran through my head. Should I wait out the storm in the car? Drive back to the hotel in Dapango?
I yanked my shoes off and sprinted barefoot toward that sacred tree.
FIVE DAYS EARLIER, OUR GREEN-AND-WHITE AIR AFRIQUE DC10 had barely lifted off the ground when a flight attendant offered drinks. The American passengers ordered mineral water and furtively stuffed the little plastic containers into their luggage.
Water. Such a simple thing. How we do take it for granted. Yet now, anticipating West Africa’s contaminated water, we greedily stashed as much of the bottled stuff as we could.
When I returned home from Togo in 1974, it was difficult for my friends to understand why that crude hole in the ground at Django was so important. In Michigan, water is as near as the kitchen faucet. Our glaciated soil easily passes water, and wells can draw it from long distances. But in sub-Saharan Africa, water is scarce. It is extremely hot, rain falls briefly in the summer, followed by long months of heat and dryness. The hard laterite soil passes water grudgingly.
In Dapango, the regional government seat in northern Togo where my wife, Karen Fonde, and I worked, our water came from wide, hand-dug wells. They were dangerous things: Kids and dogs strayed into them and drowned. I recall one local genius who planted fish in our well, making it stinky and useless. Even when a well wasn’t contaminated, the water came up so chalky we had to filter it. And then, to be sure, we boiled it.
I built a well in Africa once. It was a small thing, unless you were used to walking 14 kilometers to fetch a single bucket of water, as the women of Django were. The day we struck water, they had hailed me as a magician.
What seemed several lifetimes later, I was on my way back to Togo. I wanted to find the well, or what was left of it. More than that, I wanted to find out what was left of me in Africa. Had my wife and I and the Peace Corps volunteers who came before and after us in Togo made any difference in the life of that tiny, complex nation?
IT WAS RAINING HARD IN Ann Arbor on Oct. 14, 1960, and it was near 2 a.m. when the Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John F. Kennedy, arrived to address the 8,000 people who had gathered outside the University of Michigan’s student union. To the reporters present, Kennedy’s speech seemed uneventful, essentially similar to a half-dozen others he had delivered over the previous 18 hours. That morning’s Ann Arbor News and the following day’s Detroit Free Press reported the candidate’s quip that he had attended “the Michigan of the East — Harvard University.” Both papers ignored a new proposal Kennedy threw out to the world that day.
At first, Kennedy’s idea for a “peace corps” of young volunteers seemed little more than a public relations ploy. “I am convinced that our young men and women, dedicated to freedom, are fully capable of overcoming the efforts of Mr. Khruschev’s missionaries, who are dedicated to undermining that freedom,” Kennedy said. The Peace Corps initiative was a new weapon that allowed Kennedy to oppose communism while appearing less of a sword-waver than his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon.
It was a dark age. Nikita Khruschev, furious about U.S. spy planes over Russia, threatened to make war. Americans were building backyard bomb shelters. Doomsday seemed around the corner. The idea that individuals might do something to help assure world peace was heartening. “There is not enough money in all America to relieve the misery of the underdeveloped world in a giant and endless soup kitchen,” Kennedy said, “but there is enough know-how and enough knowledgeable people to help those nations help themselves.”
MY FIANCEE, KAREN FONDE, had enlisted in the Peace Corps and been assigned to Togo in 1972. I had planned to wait for her in Ann Arbor, where I had abandoned a PhD dissertation in Latin American history to drive a taxi and work on a novel.
But when my loneliness grew insupportable, I bought a round-trip ticket from New York to Lome, Togo’s capital. I crammed myself and my suitcase into a crowded bush taxi and began the two-day trip to Dapango, Togo’s northernmost administrative center. One afternoon, when Karen drove her Peace Corps-issue motorcycle to meet the twice-weekly mail delivery, she found me trying to find a ride to her village, Korbongou.
People in Dapango (today known as Dapaong), population 17,000, still like to joke that their market town is at the end of the earth, but Korbongou, the village 13 kilometers east where Karen was living, was unreal. There was no electricity other than our flashlight batteries, no pump, no drain, no latrine or well. I washed the dinner dishes that first night in a big pan by the light of Karen’s kerosene lamp.
In the distance, I saw the dark shapes of those tall, serpentine kapok trees the Germans planted before they lost their model colony of Togoland at the outbreak of World War I. Only 20 feet from the porch of our adobe dwelling was a traditional earthen compound. Three small round buildings topped with cone-shaped thatched roofs were attached by a circular clay wall about the height of my chest. A fire flickered on the ground, making lumpy shadows of the little round buildings. The yellow light gleamed on the dark flesh of the women, wrapped from the waist down in dark cotton sheets. They chatted in Ghourma, a babble to me. It was as if I had stumbled into a museum diorama come alive.
Each day, Karen rode her motorcycle to a school in a distant village and taught health lessons. In the evenings, she prepared the next day’s lessons and visited with our Togolese neighbors.
I studied French, the official language of Togo, with a Berlitz book. I tried to chat with Karen’s colleagues, mixing my pidgin French with Spanish and poorly remembered Latin. Once you knew the French verb endings, I discovered, you could fake it by attaching a French sound to a Latin-base English word.
People were friendly. Karen liked her work. She had an idea: Maybe I could join the Peace Corps and stick around?
The Peace Corps director in Togo was a romantic. He liked the idea of an American couple living at the end of the earth. Any particular reason why I wanted to join?
I can’t remember exactly what I answered. I think I said I wanted to materially improve the Togolese people’s way of life.
What I meant was: To do good work.
MUCH HAS CHANGED IN DAPANGO since the day I returned from the director’s office in Lome. There are 15 Peace Corps volunteers in the vicinity now, five times as many as in 1973. The international highway, then a dusty, dangerous stretch of washboard, is paved now, making it possible for Dapango volunteers to draw other volunteers from the south to big weekend parties. There are hotels in Dapango now with air conditioning. Bars have draft beer. Restaurant menus offer lobster and ice cream.
Togo could be hostile in 1974. The president, Gnassingbe Eyadema, was jockeying with the French for control of the phosphate mines. When his airplane crashed in January 1974, Eyadema’s propagandists charged that the French had tried to assassinate him. “We’re going to heat things up for the whites,” a Togolese friend warned me.
Life in Togo could be alienating. When we came home, hot, tired and frustrated, we found comfort in Assana and Seydou.
Assana Boukari was two years younger than I. Karen and I were the last of a succession of Peace Corps volunteers to live in the tar-coated mud house next to her zinc-roofed concession. Assana couldn’t read or write, yet she spoke eight or nine African languages and learned French while trying to communicate with Peace Corps volunteers. It was a point of pride with her, actually part of her identity, that she be the guide and protector of the Americans, her neighbors.
Assana: A blue and yellow scarf wrapped turban-style around her dark hair, chewing a barkless stick or chomping on wads of kola nuts, indigenous speed of the savannah; a beautiful woman laughing uproariously at some ungrammatical remark of mine, or suddenly bellowing in anger at someone’s rudeness or stupidity.
Our house backed onto her husband’s property. We were privy to every sound they made, and unless we were very, very careful, they heard every noise we made. If the muezzin — the man who calls Muslim men to prayer — didn’t wake me with his early morning chant, I would be roused by Assana’s rich, deep voice issuing orders to women and children in Mossi. Polygamy was not uncommon in northern Togo, but Assana’s husband didn’t have a second wife; she would never have survived the rock solid will of Assana. Assana insisted that her young son, Seydou, act as interpreter, water-getter, guide and general majordomo to the Americans. It was a tough act for an 11-year-old kid. The rules were clear: The Americans must not spoil her son. Seydou was to receive a fair wage by Togolese standards for the work that he did, no more.
It was Seydou, the little Muslim kid, who showed us where to get a Christmas tree on the dry-baked savannah. A Christmas tree in Africa? Well, really, it was a kind of scraggly thorn bush, but who cared? We learned something about Christmas from Seydou that year.
Seydou: Bouncing a soccer ball against the black tarred wall of our latrine, tapping it with his head, his rump, his knee, always moving. A poor student in the rigid, French-model Togolese school, but an ingenious tinkerer, always overhauling his little bike. Its small wheels wouldn’t take normal tires or inner tubes. Seydou figured out how to cut standard tires and tubes to his bike’s size. He would glue the tube and the tires. Between the sometimes hourly blowouts, the bike worked fine.
Like most Togolese, Seydou hated to see anyone left alone. In the mornings, when I would go outside to write before the 115- to 120-degree heat began roasting us alive, Seydou would be there, watching. “Joel,” he would murmur, smiling, pleased to be witness to my silent ritual. “Joel.”
I FOUND MY LETTERS TO ASSANA and Seydou lying in a Peace Corps hostel in Dapango. Two days before I boarded the plane to Togo, a Peace Corps desk officer in Washington had called to let me know that volunteers in Togo couldn’t find my old friends in Dapango.
There were many reasons to believe I wouldn’t find them, either. The life expectancy in Togo is still short: 51 years for men and 54 years for women.
In a country where polio, meningitis, cholera and a host of other diseases routinely run wild, and in a region where the annual harvest often yielded too little grain for the farmers themselves, there were many ways to die, and many reasons to relocate.
Yet, if I didn’t find Assana and Seydou, my four days in Dapango would be long and very lonely. When we’d come home dusty, hot, tired and sometimes angry and frustrated, Assana and Seydou had reached out to us. When Togo made us feel isolated and alien, Assana had given it a human face.
If I had been thinking clearly, in a reporter-like way, I’d have started at the police station or the post office. Instead, I turned down the bumpy dirt road that skirts the big Dapango market and runs by the Societe Generale du Golfe de Guinee store. How many times had I come down this road to the “S-Trois-G” to buy a bottle of wine, a ton of cement, or simply pass the time?
The S-Trois-G looked much the same, a general store where you could buy, if not anything, at least anything that was available — mineral water, wine, tinned butter, vegetable oil, matches, mosquito coils. I bought a couple of notebooks. Then I saw the small sign: “Sanitaire.”
Plumbing?
In the 1970s, you couldn’t have sold a plunger in Dapango. The town had no running water, no sewer; most people used the great outdoors as a bathroom.
I approached the manager. In French, I asked him if he knew Assana’s husband, El Hadji Boukari.
Certainly, he’s a businessman, the manager said.
I guessed so, maybe. I mostly remembered El Hadji kneeling in his open-air mosque and praying, or lying asleep under a mango tree. I was never sure what El Hadji did to make money.
A clerk from the store took me to a compound in a section of town I didn’t know. El Hadji Boukari wasn’t home. A younger man who greeted me had never heard of Assana or Seydou.
“I’m looking for an El Hadji Boukari who is a Mossi from Ougadougou,” I
told him.
“Aha!” the man said. “The El Hadji here is of the Cotokoli people.”
With the S-Trois-G clerk’s help, I found my way to a Mossi neighborhood in another section of the city. He stopped a Mossi man he knew, and I quickly explained in French that I was looking for a family with a mother named Assana, a son, Seydou.
“Seydou?” he said. “C’est Seydou le mecanicien!”
Seydou — the 11-year-old tinkerer, the kid with the jury- rigged bicycle — a mechanic? I have photos of him with that goofy, pint-sized bike sitting upside down, a couple of buddies looking on, wrenches spread out.
Seydou the mechanic?
Of course.
I stood on the dusty road and yelled it: Seydou le mecanicien!
Now my guide knew right where to go. Everyone, it turns out, knows where to find Seydou le mecanicien. I began to recognize things. We drove up to a long, tar-covered house. Nearby was a small adobe house — our old place! An old man in a long brown bou-bou lay in the shade of a mango tree. El Hadji Boukari!
I rolled the Toyota to a stop, and there he was. That broad mouth, the high, wide cheeks and long sloping forehead. Working on a motorcycle in the shade of a mango tree. Seydou.
Seydou the man.
Through the windshield, I watched his mouth drop open and his eyes widen. (“It was like a dream,” he told me later. “Cars never come to our house.”) I flung open the door and leapt out.
“Joel! Is it you?”
Assana shrieked, danced halfway around the inner compound, grabbed my hand. She pulled me along, making introductions. Here was Ramatou, Seydou’s first wife. Here were Assana’s grandchildren, Ousman, Ibrahim, Idi, Sadia, Jamalu. Seydou’s second wife, Damba, was in the hospital, having delivered Seydou’s sixth child — later to be named Kande — earlier that day. We would go to the hospital later and see the baby. But right now, I must sit down on this bench and try some of Assana’s famous millet pate with beef and gumbo stew.
Seydou, 28 years old now, sat beside me, his mature voice murmuring over and over, “Joel. Joel.”
Seydou’s shop is the ground underneath a mango tree beside his parents’ house. He has six apprentices, has trained scores of local motorcycle mechanics. “You should have asked for me at the police station,” he said. “I fix all their motorcycles. They know me well.”
There had been other changes: El Hadji had turned the old open mosque into a real building, where he and other neighborhood men met for prayers.
There was electricity now — fluorescent tubes lit the compound. Seydou showed me the well that had been contaminated by fish. Now it has been replaced with a small-bore pipe and an electric pump.
Yet it was all so familiar. I might have just driven the 35 kilometers back from Nano, home from working on the three-room primary school there. Had the school been completed? What about the one I had built at Django? And the well?
Seydou smiled. “You’ll see.”
IN MY FIRST WEEKS AS A Peace Corps trainee, I learned French and received masonry and carpentry training designed for liberal arts majors: level lines, buttering bricks with mortar, cement-to-sand-to-water ratios. I had also been schooled in the politics of construction: Always inflate your cost estimates.
Keep a sharp eye on your masons; don’t let them short-ration the cement. Watch for theft. Most of all, peddle the idea of prefabrication.
Two Peace Corps architects had drawn up wonderful blueprints for a sturdy yet sparely built school, well lighted and open to the breeze. The plans were like a cookbook. “If you can read,” our training leaders used to say, “you can build these schools.” But the Togolese had learned their building trades under French bosses who had made individual coffering for each pillar and poured the concrete for each part individually, and the notion of prefab construction was mysterious and suspect.
For two months, we waited to start the school because there was no cement anywhere in Togo. In those harmattan months, with steady strong winds from the Sahara laden with grit beating against us, we measured the foundation and dug the hole. There wasn’t enough water in the Nano well to serve villagers’ cooking needs, let alone mix concrete and mortar, so we built a cistern at the work site and trucked water 35 kilometers from Dapango. I bought a charcoal forge so a blacksmith could make nuts and bolts from pieces of reinforcing rod and flat iron.
But the biggest obstacle at Nano was not the lack of water or cement, or even the masons’ suspicions. It was the village’s mendacious, greedy chief, Banguesacre.
BANGUESACRE WAS AN obese man with bulging, gouty legs. His normal condition was drunk. I recall passing him one day on my way to Nano. He was riding his light blue moped. I stopped and said good morning. There was a huge brown scab running across his forehead and down his cheek; in a drunken stupor, he had pitched off his motorbike and smashed his face on the ground. Banguesacre used his weight to intimidate people, and now he leaned toward me threateningly.
The chief knew I had U.S. Embassy vouchers worth $2,000 to build the school, and he wanted his cut. First, he told me to hire his buddy as my assistant. When I refused, he demanded construction materials as bribes before he’d provide the workmen he was required by contract to deliver gratis.
If I paid once, I knew, I’d never stop. But we couldn’t possibly build a school without workers. When the chief offered to drop his opposition in return for the empty cement bags, I was ready to relent. Then I learned that the bags were used in the markets as wrappers and worth 300 francs apiece. “We will sell them and give the money back to the school,” I told the chief.
In a rage, Banguesacre summoned me to a meeting with the director of the unbuilt school, its teachers, and Nano’s village elders.
It was time for my tirade.
Speech-making is an important part of life in Togo. I rehearsed my diatribe as I drove my motorcycle along the goat path that led to Nano. The meeting was in a big room in Banguesacre’s house. When the chief pushed me for some contribution to his household, I blew up.
There would be no school in Nano if this nonsense didn’t stop, I shouted. I felt my face flushing. I would take the $2,000 of American aid money and build a school in a more deserving town.
Suddenly, I was not alone. The director of the school was lighting into Banguesacre. The chief was the sole cause of this situation; the villagers wanted the school. The village elders in attendance agreed.
The next morning, I bounced down the old German road leading to Nano and saw something new and exciting. Half a dozen farmers were on hand, pushing wheelbarrows of sand and mixing mortar.
THE HOT SEASON HAD REALLY COME on that winter of 1974 — the midday high typically reached 115 degrees or more — when the Peace Corps director in Togo wired us that he would be coming on a tour of northern Togo.
Fantastic, I thought. A Peace Corps director rarely visited Dapango in those days. The single, four-room hotel didn’t have air conditioning, and running water and lights were big maybes. Anyway, the city generators always shut down between midnight and 8 a.m. to save fuel. Directors could always sleep in a volunteer’s house, but that would mean living for a few hours like a volunteer, using a latrine, kerosene lantern and bucket baths. Too much to ask of a politically appointed Peace Corps country director. So when they did visit, directors never spent the night.
My idea was to have the director make an appearance at both of my work sites. It wouldn’t take long. He could show up in his chauffeur-driven, air-conditioned car. Maybe he’d impress old Chief Banguesacre.
But as it turned out, the director didn’t have time to visit my work sites. He had brought a tall bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey with him, and poured me a long drink as he sat in our little living room in Dapango,
listening to me detail my woes in Nano.
The director was utterly unperturbed by my glacial progress on the school.
“Well,” he said, taking a long, juicy suck off his pipe, “I think the United States government is satisfied that it’s getting a high return in good will created by you between Togo and the U.S.”
I wasn’t sure my blowing up at the Nano chief had improved American-Togolese relations. But wasn’t my job to build a new school for the kids at Nano?
NOT EVEN KOMPOI, MY HEAD MASON at Nano, believed the long hunks of prefabricated concrete we had lying on the dirt at Nano would someday support a roof over a noisy bunch of schoolkids. At the government offices in Dapango, the old city council president chortled, “M’sieur Thurtell, I was in Nano yesterday and I saw your pillars. They’re on the ground! Ha-ha!”
I didn’t care. With half a dozen strong backs, I knew we’d have those 16 pillars up. Besides, now that he could see the pillars, Kompoi was getting the idea.
Kompoi was an old-timer, a veteran of the French army who spoke a kind of Army French and, despite his misgivings, regarded me as his commander. If we could get just one of those monster pillars in place! That was all I wanted — then Kompoi would believe, and there’d be one Togolese mason who could adapt prefab pillars to any project.
Out at Nano, we hoisted four pillars in one day, sweating under a cloudless sky. For the first time in my life, I had a tan, but my nose was a red, peeling mess. The next day, we couldn’t stop — we raised the remaining 12 pillars, easing them into their concrete sockets, walking them up with six pairs of straining arms. I’d quickly check for level, pounding wedges between the pillar bottoms and their tapered (prefabbed!) concrete sockets, sealing them in with mortar. Fini!
Sixteen pillars straight and level.
I told Kompoi he could have the pillar forms, and I drank an extra calabash of tchakpa. That’s when I decided to install a vent in the roof. That god-awful heat — how could kids possibly concentrate in school when it was so hot? There was no electricity, no running water in Nano, but at least we could put in our own natural air conditioning.
Nobody had ever tried the vent — some of the workmen as well as other volunteers down country worried that the heavy harmattan winds would blow through it and take the roof off. But it was hot in Nano. I decided to take the chance. Let’s put the vent in, I said, and from then on, I would wonder if I hadn’t set that school up for destruction.
I drove back to Dapango and parked at the government office. The old president of the council was there.
“My pillars are up!” I yelled.
THE OLD GOAT TRACK I USED TO take on my motorcycle had been turned into a road. Bumpy, washed out in many places, but wide enough for a car, slowly, to move along. Seydou and I passed round adobe houses that looked like they had grown out of the earth, but I knew when I was last here these were only millet fields.
As a boy, Seydou had clutched my hips as he rode out to Nano on the back of my motorcycle. Now, beside me in the Toyota, he pointed at thorny trees beside the road: “Arbres de Noel!” he laughed. They were our 1974 Christmas trees.
Seydou guided me past the newly expanded Nano market. I was disoriented, took a wrong turn, and then, suddenly beyond the kapok trees I could see it.
That familiar building.
My school!
Several sheets of the corrugated zinc roof were dented, but the roof was still firmly attached. Slowly, methodically, I inspected the building. The yellow paint — probably the original coat — had faded. On the west end, a whole chunk of plaster had broken off. But our mahogany trusses were in great shape — not a sign of sagging. And those homemade nuts and bolts were as sturdy and fast as when we tightened them 16 years ago.
Hey, the place needed a paint job, but it’ll last a thousand years!
A young man in his mid-20s approached. Did I remember him? He had been 4 when I was out there working on the school. I used to send him for tchakpa at the end of the day, and we’d all sit sipping from calabashes in the shade of the kapok tree with pigs grazing beside us.
I had wondered what I would say upon confronting Banguesacre after 17 years, but I never got the chance. Roger Buck, a Lutheran missionary living in Nano, told me the chief had died of complications brought on by alcoholism.
Banguesacre’s house looked like it had been bombed. The walls were caved in, parts of the roof torn off. “He left 70 widows,” Roger said.
“Everybody hated him,” Seydou said. “Nobody helps the women.”
Roger speaks Moba and is a student of local history. “Banguesacre had a
certain reputation,” he said. “He used to get rid of people. People who opposed him would die,” Roger said. “He got them out of the way — poisoned them, or had them poisoned. Usually slipped it into their tchakpa.”
Lucky for me, I had never drunk any tchakpa at Banguesacre’s house.
SEYDOU TOOK ME TO A NEWER PRIMARY school in Nano, and I was sorry to see that it had been built along traditional lines — an airless building, lots of concrete, narrow windows, dark interiors. Our Peace Corps model school hadn’t stuck.
I had always wondered if Kompoi, my head mason at Nano, the reluctant believer who took the prefab forms when I left Togo, had built more model schools.
Now I found out. Kompoi had died three years after I left Togo. The prefabricated school plans died with him.
Kompoi was dead, but there was still a chance I’d find one more modern school in the area.
My hope now was Joseph Tiem. He was another of my old friends the Peace
Corps folks couldn’t find. Tiem is an important politician, and now chief of Pana, a beautiful town 18 kilometers south of Dapango set at the foot of tall bluffs with stately rows of kapoks lining its road and a telephone line that ends at the home of Chief Tiem.
In 1974, I had secured a $2,000 U.S. Embassy Self-Help Grant to build a school at Pana. Joseph had befriended me when I was having my worst troubles with old Banguesacre of Nano.
“You’ll never have problems like that at Pana,” he assured me.
I left Togo before starting the Pana school, but Seydou was certain that my replacement had built the school I had planned for Pana. In the little blue Toyota, Seydou and I ran down the dirt road, crested the tall ridge over Pana and drove past the ancient crocodile pit to the house where the phone line ended.
I shook hands with Joseph Tiem and handed him my letter. Sure, he said, he remembered me, and he invited me in for a beer.
“You know, I have a little project — a museum of my Ghourma tribe’s past,” Joseph said abruptly. “I’m looking for someone to support it.” Was Joseph hitting me up for money? I asked to see his museum.
Joseph reached to the wall and pushed a button. A doorbell rang, and one of his sons (he has many sons from his 13 wives) came running. Tiem told him to show me the museum and then take me to the school.
The museum was a small house with mementos of his dead father, the former chief. The old man’s blankets, his ancient, rotting shirts, the bones of his dead horse. Not a museum, but a shrine to honor the house of Tiem.
Later, Seydou told me Tiem approached him in Moba so I wouldn’t understand and said I should pay him 5,000 francs to photograph the museum.
That’s about $15 — not a lot of money by American standards, but a tidy sum in Togo.
“What?” I said indignantly. “I got $2,000 for his village to have a good school!”
Joseph wouldn’t come with me to see the school. I found it on the hillside where I had measured it years ago. But it had never been finished. No plaster, no paint — not a thing to be proud of. There were great, gaping pits in the concrete floor. Whole sections of walls had caved in. Long cracks ran in the mortar between ranks of blocks. I could see daylight through holes in the roof.
There had been plenty of money to finish the Pana school, I knew; I had written the proposal for it. But somehow it had never found its way to the construction site.
I remembered Joseph’s promise: Everything would be aboveboard at Pana. I had believed him. Now this wreck of a school made a bad joke of my credulity.
THE SUN DROPS EARLY AND FAST IN Africa. They save light for the front end of the day. By 6:30, it was dark. I was sitting in the bar of my hotel, on my second bottle of lemon pop, when a big dirt motorcycle thumped to a stop, the husky rider took off his helmet and walked over to my table.
Garth Van’t Hul, a Peace Corps volunteer from Ann Arbor, wanted to talk. Reporters occasionally made it to Lome, down country, but a journalist from his own state, and one who had been in the Peace Corps right here in Dapango, was unique.
Garth has lived in the village of Nanergou, a few kilometers north of Dapango, for about two years. He was assigned to help millet farmers raise fish as a crop to supplement income from their grain harvests. Garth was convinced that his program had a reasonable chance of succeeding if his own work of training and giving moral support to farmers were continued a couple of years more. Eventually, he said, the program will have to run on its own merits. If the farmers make money raising fish, they will continue to raise fish. If not, they’ll quit. Right now, they need more help, more nurturing. It is too soon to take the volunteer away.
Garth’s two-year term ends soon. Peace Corps doesn’t plan to replace him.
The techniques he has worked so hard to introduce could vanish without continued support. By declining to replace him, is the Peace Corps saying it doesn’t care whether fisheries take hold in Dapango?
Noreen O’Donnell is in a similar situation. She is a natural resources graduate from Ohio State University, and her job is trying to plant trees as part of a long-term strategy of turning the dry savannah region green. Trees send moisture into the atmosphere; they also reflect less sunlight skyward, giving clouds a better chance of forming and hopefully increasing the amount of rainfall. Trees also enrich the soil with nitrogen.
But Noreen has no Togolese counterpart, and there’s no assurance a local person will take over her job when she leaves this fall. And like Garth, Peace Corps isn’t replacing her.
Throughout this return visit to northern Togo, I had been struck by the lack of continuity of Peace Corps programs. In Lome, Greg Austreng, the Peace Corps’s associate director for rural development for 12 years, confessed ignorance of our model school with its low, airy walls and standardized construction.
“I came here in 1978, and I’ve never heard of prefab pillars,” Austreng said. “I’ve never heard of this model school you’re talking about. Peace Corps doesn’t build schools anymore. The U.S. Embassy says the Togolese don’t really need more schools.”
In the village of Korbongou, where my wife, Karen, first based her regional health education program, I found Shirley Zylstra living in a small house, the new Peace Corps health educator. Though her mission was identical to Karen’s, she had no indication anyone had preceded her in the small village, and no idea what had happened to the textbooks Karen and her colleagues had developed in the early ’70s.
Mike Squires, a volunteer planting gardens at Dapango area schools, told me that Lome Peace Corps officials don’t keep files, don’t always require volunteers to write reports on projects and thus have no consistent way of tracking what Peace Corps has accomplished in Togo. Robert Nicolas, the corps’ current director in Togo, conceded as much, but said he has ordered that records be retained.
“There is no history of our educational activities,” commiserated Nicolas, who was coming to the end of a three-year stint in Togo when I visited him in Lome. “You can’t tell me Peace Corps has invested 25 years and millions of dollars just for lots of goodwill. As an institution, we have nothing to show for it. For instance, Peace Corps has been doing agricultural extension for years and years, but ag records are a dark hole. Since I arrived, we’ve been keeping records on health programs, but there’s zero before.”
But the record-keeping problem is more profound than simple amnesia about individual buildings or programs. At one point, I wanted to find out exactly what I put down on my application as my reason for wanting to join Peace Corps. The agency’s Washington office told me it destroys volunteers’ files four years after they leave. As far as Peace Corps was concerned, I had never existed.
The scant information on extinct programs makes it hard to find out why they were phased out. Why, for instance, has Peace Corps decided not to build schools?
Austreng told me schools are expensive, costing $9,000 to $10,000 apiece.
They were running around $2,000 each in 1974. Taking inflation into account, $10,000 for a three-classroom school sounded about right. It also sounded like a pretty good deal.
I don’t believe that Togo has no further need of schools. I saw schools with their roofs caved in, schools with their roofs blown off, schools with thatched roofs and no walls. Since I was there, Togo’s population has doubled.
There must be twice the need for schools now as there was in 1974. Or would Peace Corps’ current administrators maintain that the schools we built weren’t really needed then? If so, then why did Peace Corps train me and dozens of other young men to build schools? Why provide us motorcycles, grants and send us to battle local corruption and infernal heat, flies, malaria and tapeworms?
FOR SOME TIME NOW, Garth has been chewing on a remark a high- level Peace Corps functionary from Washington made to volunteers in Togo.
“Peace Corps is not a development agency,” the bureaucrat said. “The purpose of Peace Corps is to foster a better understanding between the United States and host countries.”
No doubt about it, Noreen and Garth are good, enthusiastic people who have made strong friendships among Togolese with whom they live and work.
They have indeed helped foster a better understanding of Americans by Togolese.
But public relations didn’t bring them to Togo.
In my day, nobody came to Togo to do public relations, either. And today, volunteers are there for one reason — to do what John Kennedy said they should do. To help the Togolese people to help themselves.
But Peace Corps administrators have a different idea. Soon, volunteers in Togo won’t be allowed to have motorized transportation. Bureaucrats in Washington have decreed that there have been too many accidents with motorcycles, so Peace Corps staffers in Lome now are planning programs based on volunteers in far-flung villages with bicycles for transportation.
I tried to imagine how I’d have worked if my only way of traveling was by bike. Impossible. My work was predicated on commuting to distant work sites, providing liaison and organization. How would Karen have taken health lessons to rural schools? Impossible. Our jobs would have been out of the question.
Peace Corps had a pat answer to my objections: The agency is no longer doing construction. It sounded to me as if the agency was letting its lawyers and accountants set its mission statement. But how would volunteers help poor countries to help themselves when when they couldn’t even get to town for groceries?
EVERY DAY DURING THOSE hot months of 1973-74, with the temperature somewhere above 115 and the water table sinking every hour, I’d blast out to Django on my Yamaha. Originally, I was just supposed to finish the school. But this spectacle of village women walking seven kilometers — the location of the nearest well — to get water haunted me. I knew there was some play in the school repair budget, so I diverted some money to build a well for the school.
A friend of my Dad had taught my whole family once how to cut supple forked pieces of willow and hold them stressed, thumbs out, until you felt the end pull down.
And did it pull! Hey, who could say that stick wasn’t about to twist right out of my hands? I was 10. I believed.
I was 28 in 1973, and I no longer believed in the forked stick, or dowsing as I had learned to call it. But I didn’t disbelieve in it, either.
If there were no strong reason to put a well in once place over another, then there was no argument against a village chief who insisted that it be dug by his house so he could hog it. But my dowsing stick — or baton magique, as the villagers styled it — could select a site from several candidates and never mention the places rejected.
At Django, the stick pulled hardest on school property near an ancient tamarind tree. Tingban, the chief of Django said. There was an earth shrine near that tree.
The chief, an old man who wore a white goatee and tattered cotton shirts, was summoned. Speaking in a loud, histrionic voice, the chief talked for a long time to the tree. Finally, the chief turned and spoke to me in Moba. A teacher translated: “The shrine would be pleased to have a well nearby. God is thirsty, too.”
The digging began with short-handled hoes and pick- axes. It seemed to go on without end. Workers would get discouraged and stop coming.
One man, Andre Lamboni Larlene, came every day. Squatting in that two-meter wide hole cross- legged, he chopped at the ground all day long. Some days, he only moved it six inches deeper. Andre was a believer.
Every day, I’d park my maroon bike by the big pile of dirt and yell down the hole. Andre was squatting down there in the darkness, scraping hard clay into a bucket.
“Dam be?” I’d yell down the hole.
“Dam k’be,” he’d yell back.
No water.
WORD HAD SPREAD FAST the day we finally hit water in Django. Seven meters down — about 21 feet. Not a deep well. Forty feet away, the old well, now dry, was considerably deeper. This was late in May, the end of the dry season when the water table is at its lowest.
A woman showed up at the well with a pail and a tin can on a cord. The day before, she had walked seven kilometers with a clay pot on her head, scooped muddy water from a sluggish stream, then walked seven kilometers back to her round thatched adobe compound.
Today she walked a hundred yards and set her dented gray bucket beside the concrete lip that encircled our broad-mouthed new well. She was a farm wife with close-cropped hair to ward off the 115-degree heat and the flies. Her biceps were hard and round, the arms of a woman who swung a short-handled hoe at weeds in her millet field. She wore a large yellow-and-blue print cloth wrapped around her waist. Strapped to her back was a baby, asleep.
Over the well she stretched an arm and dropped the can. There was a muffled splash. Then up swung the can, slopping silvery streams of fresh, clear water onto the ground.
It was great to know I had achieved something so basic, so meaningful, for these people. But I knew something they didn’t: It wouldn’t last.
The plan had been to get a mason down there and install concrete blocks to keep the earthen walls from caving in. But the rains had come before we could finish the job. The well’s clay sides inevitably would erode, I knew.
Those Django women would once again be hiking for water.
OUTSIDE THE TOYOTA, THE RAIN beaded on my glasses. I whipped them off, gauged the width of an orange stream of water, and jumped. I didn’t need glasses to see the fetish tree. I ran on, passing the place where the old well had been.
No sign of it now. That’s what happens to dry wells — they fill them in.
Beyond the fetish tree, I could see a low circular wall of mud bricks. Underneath was a concrete collar. I’d insisted that we start the well by laying this round concrete foundation. It was unusual in these parts — my signature.
It was much wider than I remembered it. But this was it. My well. At the bottom, water. But this was the rainy season. What had it been like a month ago, at the end of the ferocious savannah dry season? Would it give water when the rains stopped?
The next day was beautiful — bright blue sky, a steady breeze. The mango and nere trees stood out bright green against the orange laterite earth. The three-month millet was better than ankle high, streaking the ground with thin sprays of green.
Today, the lane to Django was dry. I parked under a flamboyant tree.
Orange blossoms fell on the blue Carolla.
It was like a party. Dozens of kids ran out of the school, charging for us. They had been waiting. Yesterday, I had told a couple of kids at the well that I was the one who found water there, by the tamarind. They had spread the word. There was a man in the village of Django who knew what that meant.
He dashed around the corner, sprinted up to me. I knew that wide grin — Andre!
He grabbed me, we hugged.
“I knew it had to be you. This is like a dream!”
And the well?
“Joel,” Andre said, “it’s a powerful well. You found a true water source here. Even in drought times that well gives water all year long. Anyone who’d mess with this well, I’d hang them from that tree! Each year, I climb down on a rope and dig it out. It’s down to eight meters now, water still coming on strong.”
The teachers brought over the old chief. He laughed his deep, loud Moba laugh. Of course he remembered very well how I witched the well, and how he prayed to the fetish tree.
I asked the chief what exactly it was that he said so long ago when he spoke to the fetish in the tree. A teacher translated my question from French to Moba.
“When you found water beside God,” the chief replied, “I asked God to help us get the water. I told Him this is a village without water, a poor village, a village where the life is very hard. I asked that God help us to have water for ourselves and for our children forevermore.
“God didn’t respond with a voice,” the chief continued. “But nevertheless, we know that he heard us. We dug, we found water and the water has stayed with us. God answered our prayer.”
“WHEN WILL TOGO BE MODERN?” MY 10-year-old son asked a few days after I had returned to Detroit. Karen and I responded at the same time: “Never.”
It is true that a few TV antennas hang over Dapango, catching fuzzy images for a tiny minority of more affluent citizens. There are city water mains now, and some of the houses have running water. More homes have electricity. But outside the regional capital, in villages like Django and Nano, none of these modern amenities exist. People still cultivate their millet fields by hand, with hoes, as they have done here for centuries.
In a village like Nano, a three-room school is something. In Django, an all-year well is a giant step forward.
For 16 years, I tended to think of these projects as mine. That’s because I often wondered how much local people wanted these things. I was there to push, goad, wheedle, politic and do what it took to complete these things.
Sixteen years later, I realize that the villagers in Nano wanted a school badly enough to risk defying a chief who murdered his opponents. In Django, people wanted water badly enough to come out and dig, day after day, straight down, never using a plumb line. Andre carried the torch. I was the cheerleader, the catalyst, making connections with the government, urging people to keep digging, the magic stick says it’s there.
Over the years, I tended to think of myself as a lone operator in Togo, pounding the washboard on my Yamaha, buying cement here, fast-talking a functionary to lend me a truck there, giving pep talks, always on the run. On this trip, I saw the schools being used, appreciated, and I recalled that these were not one-man shows but collective efforts.
Mike Squires told me he attended a Christmas festival in the Nano school last year, not knowing it was a Peace Corps project. More than 2,000 people danced and sang in and around our low-walled, prefab, three-room school.
It was not my school anymore, nor my well.
Caption:
Before Peace Corps volunteer Joel Thurtell built this well in 1974, residents of django walked 14 kilometers for water.
When he was 11 years old, Seydou Boukari was a master at fixing his own and his pals’ bikes. Today he is a top motorcycle mechanic in Dapango.
Assana Boukari (left) and her son, Seydou (center),with then-Peace Corps health educator Karen Fonde (right) in 1973. Today, Assana sells cigarettes and runs a household in Dapango.
Karen is a physician in Greater Detroit.
Assana Boukari lived next door to a succession of Peace Corps volunteers and was surrogate mother to Americans living a long way from home. Its paint has faded after 16 years, but Nano’s Peace Corps- built primary school still gets heavy use for instruction and as a community center.
Students from Nano mug for the camera inside the primary school. One of the controversial prefabricated pillars — a Peace Corps innovation — is at left rear.
A traditional Moba house in Togo’s savannah region comprises several round buildings of mud brick with thatched roofs.
Hacking at the hard clay ground with his short-handled hoe, millet farmer Andre Lamboni Larlene, shown here in a recent photo, spent most of every day of the 1974 dry season digging the Django well.
Before a well could be dug near the fetish tree, or earth shrine, the chief of Django prayed for permission to dig. In 1973, the chief said it was okay to dig a well there, because the spirit was thirsty, too.
Sixteen years after it was built, people still draw water from the Django well. The well is the villagers’ only source of water through the long savannah dry season.
