Post date: Aug 11, 2014 3:57:10 PM
11 February 1965
I guess I haven’t written in a quite a time. Our school finally started, but with only about half staff. Many subjects are going untaught. I have been helping the Rev. Fathers [in Ututu] wire their new school for electricity and plan a water system. Only one month old and they are way ahead of Aggrey, which has no ceilings, mosquito screens, water, etc. The Father tells me a good established school makes about £5000 or $14,000 a year. The missions use this to build new schools.
There is much grumbling among the volunteers about the Regional administration and poor contact with volunteers. For all their talk about grass roots, their heads are in the clouds and some disasters have resulted. Last term we sent three volunteers home because of breakdowns. I went to have a talk with the Doc about mental health and see if we can’t find a solution to the psychologically isolated volunteers. All three boys would have terminated within two moths of their breakdowns!
Friday I have to go 40 miles (one way) for a bottle of wine for a housewarming party 110 miles (by road) away on Saturday. Sat AM I go to Aba with the Roman Father to buy power poles, generator, heavy wire, insulators, fluorescent fixtures, etc. for the school. Much of the small wiring is finished. Getting on top of some of the ceilings is a joke: 2” x 3” joists spaced four feet apart.
Turning on the light at the new school was great! About 1,000 villagers came and cheered. They are very interested. They saw a movie for the first time last night. The school has mosquito screens and ceilings— which our 33-year-old school has not yet, or probably ever.
It may rain. It is blowing and thundering—ah, here it is. Just in time to fill the newly-repaired water barrel. I must rescue some wood for breakfast fire.
My steward now has a young “brother” living with him. The boy’s father died and his mother can’t support five children. I will pay his school fees of $14 per year and he will help the steward carry water, cut wood, etc. The social security works well except for orphan babies, when it is hard to get a nursing foster mother. But with all the people moving to the towns it is breaking down.
1 March 1965
We had a track meet here and I had to repair the hurdles. The Fathers opened their new school and I spent a week of “spare” time getting the generator and wiring installed. Miracle! Every light worked the first time! I must add more in front of the dorms and classrooms to light the pathways.
The Regional Director came a week go in a worthless trip on which he accomplished nothing and insulted my Principal. The Lagos Representative, his wife, and the PC doctors from the North and East came Saturday night. I had a fairly good talk with the doctors, as they slept on my floor, but the Rep was on a diplomatic tour, eyeing 74 volunteers in 11 days.
In seven or eight weeks is our termination conference at which we hope to draft a petition protesting Peace Corps policy of testing us as children and the local PC staff as messenger-boys. They are proposing to stop all travel and make us freaks among non-PC teachers which will, I fear, impose undue mental hardships in already difficult situations, as well as being impossible to enforce.