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How the Peace Corps Saved My Life
| Article
# : |
18688 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
3,711 Words |
| Author
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Charles R. Larson
Charles R. Larson is an internationally known authority on
Third World literature. He is the author of The Emergence of
African Fiction, The Novel in the Third World, and American
Indian Fiction. His novel The Insect Colony is set in West
Africa during the Nigerian civil war. He has edited several
anthologies of international writing and served as general
editor of Collier Books' African/American Library. He teaches
literature at American University in Washington, D.C. |
In September 1962, after a summer of training at UCLA, I flew to Nigeria with eighty other Americans to begin a two-year stint as a Peace Corps volunteer. I had joined the Peace Corps earlier that summer out of no sense of liberalism or altruism for the world in general. I regarded the Peace Corps as my escape hatch from the draft. I simply did not want to be a soldier; I did not want to fight anywhere. I did not want to go through basic training or learn how to use a gun. I was twenty-four years old, had an M.A. in English, and two years of high school teaching experience. My deferments had run out. Thus, I joined the Peace Corps.
My childhood and my early education had ill-prepared me for much of what was about to happen. Growing up in Iowa, I was almost unaware of minority concerns. My education had been academically strong but narrowly provincial. The day in May when I received a call from the Peace Corps inviting me to train for Nigeria, I had to look at a map to learn where the country was located. All through the months of summer training, I had a sense that something was happening to me that I didn't fully understand and that I would probably regret at a later date. My parents weren't particularly pleased with my decision. My father feared that I might marry a Nigerian. I believe that my apprehensions about the whole experience were fairly common among many other volunteers at the time. The Peace Corps was still an unknown quantity in American life (and foreign policy); I was one of the first thousand volunteers. When our plane touched down in Lagos, most of us were hung over and scared.
We sobered up rather quickly--since many of us, including myself, discovered that we were not going to be stationed with other volunteers but separately in villages in the "bush." In my own instance, it was a village called Oraukwu, in Eastern Nigeria, in the heart of Iboland. My assignment was to teach English at a recently established boys' secondary school. In the first month after I was dumped at my school (which is what it felt like at the time), I was the only person from another country who had ever lived in Oraukwu. Yet loneliness was only a temporary problem--in spite of my multiple worries. My other fears (the absence of taken-for-granted amenities, the weather, the food, cultural differences) quickly disappeared.
Once the Peace Corps provided me with a motor scooter, my isolation ended. To get my provisions, I rode over hard laterite roads fourteen miles into Onitsha. In the rainy season, it was a little like skiing on mud, with just about as many tumbles as a novice out on the slopes. During the first few months, I
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