From Masai Mara to Da Nang: Memoirs of a World Traveler

By Xlibris US

In this book, I present a number of often-exciting and sometimes very unusual experiences I have had while visiting, living, and/or working in several foreign countries over a thirty-year period from 1967 until 1997. Contained in this volume, one of three, I have selected thirty of the over two hundred stories I wrote during my working career while traveling to and from overseas assignments.

The stories detail actual events and conditions that include surviving a Peace Corps experience in the savannah area in Kenya in the 1960s, working in the swamps and jungles of Indonesia, the rain forests of Brazil, the desert and delta of Egypt, and the varied terrain in Pakistan, and inspecting the irrigation facilities of the war-torn country of Vietnam eighteen years after the war with the United States ended.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499056815

Book preview

CHAPTER I

KENYA, AFRICA

The beginning of my many memorable experiences in foreign countries began in Kenya, Africa, in 1967 when I decided to join the Peace Corps and save the world. It was in 1966 during my junior year in college that I decided to join the Corps, an organization and philosophy first conceived of by Hubert Humphrey and initiated by the charismatic president John F. Kennedy in 1961. JFK encouraged all Americans—especially college kids like me with no particular career goal in mind after college—to ask what they could do for their country, as so many patriots had done in the past. He inspired a large number of us to volunteer a few years of our lives to help make our country even stronger and to do our part in bringing about world peace.

After attending an extensive advanced training program designed to teach our group all about agriculture and how to function well in another culture—which for most of the other trainees, it did not—I was assigned to work in Kenya, Africa.

My initial assignment was in southwest Kenya in an area called Masai Mara, which is the south Kenyan part of the Serengeti Plains. After an initial assignment to supervise a wheat-planting operation from a tent on the Masai Mara, I was placed up-country at Njoro, near the city of Nakuru, where from 1967 to 1969 I lived and worked as an extension and training officer in several parts of that beautiful and exciting country.

Most of us gung-ho volunteers learned some Kiswahili before going to Kenya and had studied enough East African agriculture that we felt we were ready to bring about peace in the world all by ourselves. Reading Robert Ruark’s Uhuru and Something of Value somewhat warped our view of the colonial period and the descendants living there. This proved to be problematic, especially since the person managing the project I was assigned to as well as my home owner—whose racist Boer family had trekked to the area from South Africa some years before—were from that group of racist characters.

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Photo #1 – Me overlooking the rift valley with Mt. Kenya in the background

Memoir KEN #1 – Living in Masai Mara with Lions

On August 15, 1967, I arrived in the capital city of Nairobi when the preppie in-country Peace Corps director, Bob Prank, informed me I had been assigned to live in a tent with my good buddy, John Sherlock, in the Masai Mara plains in a remote area of Kenya. John and I were to assist fifty Kenyan tractor drivers in planting six hundred acres of wheat in the middle of nowhere to help build the nation of Kenya that had gained independence from the British in 1963.

Say what! I asked myself. How in the heck was I going to be able to save the world while busily changing oil in fifty noisy tractors and living in a tent with no water or electricity located at the end of the earth? Worst of all, there was no transportation provided so that at least on the weekends we could go to a village of some kind located in the real world no less than forty miles away to carry out my planned mission.

But there we were—stranded at our outpost and looking at a four-month sentence until the wheat was planted, all the time hoping the universe would notice our plight and get us something worthwhile to do, which eventually did happen. Even today I think the opening of the movie Dances with Wolves was modeled after our initial experience, which was so lonesome, scary at times, and too often, a depressing way to live life void of purpose after being willing to give it our all to make a difference.

So having no recourse at the time, John and I settled in and decided this would be an extended camping trip void of a river and a chance to catch some nice trout. After the first month and very dirty, we were taken to the nearby Ngata Baragoi River, where we took turns bathing at night while one of us held a flashlight to keep the crocodiles away.

The first night in the field I clearly remember was both exciting and at the same time terrifying. After finally falling asleep, just after midnight, I awoke to a strange noise and asked John what he thought the deep growling noise could be, especially being so near our tent. I groped around in the dark for my machete while squirming farther into the false safety of my sleeping bag. We were spending the first night of our two-year tour in an old army tent somewhere in the Mara and had no idea what beasts lived in the area or, more importantly, what they ate. That morning, Ian—our caustic, English, racist, expatriate supervisor

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Photo #2 – John in our tent in Masai Mara

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Photo #3 – Fred washing dishes in Masai Mara

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Photo #4 – An old lion on the prowl

whom I soon nicknamed The Jerk—had dropped us, our tent, and some basic supplies off in the middle of nowhere without saying a thing concerning what animals roamed in the area at night.

Don’t know, Fred, but it sounded something like something on the prowl, John whispered back. I wondered if it was hungry. In the distance, the very loud thundering sound of a million migrating hoofs drowned out the scary snuffling noises and most of his answer. Both of us decided to hold our breath as long as possible before breathing again very slowly and quietly while trying to determine what was out there tormenting these two gung-ho volunteers.

For what seemed like hours, we listened carefully to what sounded like a very large cat roaming around a few feet outside our tent, occasionally bumping against the guy ropes. Eventually, the unforgettable horrifying noise faded away off into the darkness and we sighed in relief. We were so very aware that the thin canvas between whatever and us was out there that night provided very little protection from us becoming dinner. We lay there for a while longer, silent, and motionless in total darkness in our sleeping bags, which were set on very low-lying sleeping cots. Full of fear, we eventually fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. Our first night away from home in a strange country had finally passed, and we were relieved we had survived the ordeal without incident in a land considerably more exciting and frightful than we had ever dreamed possible.

The sun was up when we awoke a few hours later, and I peeped through the slit in the front of the tent to see whether or not any creatures were still out there somewhere and had already eaten something or someone other than us for breakfast. No sign of carnivores here, I shouted to the world. We got up and washed our hands and faces with the cold water still in the canvas safari washbowl, which we had set up outside the tent the night before. John rolled out off his cot, which had proven much too small for his tall frame, to mix up a batch of cornmeal posho for breakfast. He cooked it and heated a pot of coffee on our company-provided two-burner kerosene pump-up camping stove. I located some stale bread and heated it up with our acetylene metal cutting torch equipped with a large rosebud tip that blasted out a large flame.

After coffee, most of the nausea from the night before had worn off, and we began to feel almost human again. We talked about what had happened the night before and wondered what in the world we were thinking when we signed up for the Peace Corps! Being dumped somewhere in Africa to maintain farm equipment planting six hundred

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Photo #5 – Fred with Kenyan counterpart in Masai Mara

acres of wheat was NOT what we had in mind. We had answered President Kennedy’s call to do something for our country, not something for a bunch of used tractors.

Our discussion changed to reminiscing and laughing at times about the exhausting sixteen-month training program we had gone through stateside before landing in Nairobi a few weeks before coming to the Mara. The ill-conceived program was the longest in the history of the Corps, and we were doomed to failure since it was clearly unrealistic to try to transform urban social scientists into qualified agriculturalists in just a year and a half. John and I were among the few in our group who had been raised on farms and knew that even with these skills it would take considerable time before we would be useful in a foreign setting.

A few days later, The Jerk and his noisy, smoking Land Rover finally showed up to see how his green American technicians were doing and to replenish our food and supplies. He seemed to relish his power over us, and being so defensive, we thought he had to be concerned that we were so much smarter than he would ever hope to be. He noticed he could irritate us by openly talking down to us as he did to the Kenyans working on the project, and so he did so continually. From the day we met this guy, we were forced to listen to incessant whining and at times even his rants about how great the British had made this beautiful country and how they had recently lost control of his second home to these bloody wogs. While the British colonials to degrade their colonials commonly used the term wog after Kenya gained independence, the term was no longer allowed, and when asked to clarify just what it meant, the official definition given was worthy oriental gentlemen. This explanation managed to keep most colonials from being kicked out of the country, at least for the time being. I learned later that one farmer up-country named his cow Mama Ngina as an insult to President Kenyata’s wife by the same name. When this story became known in Nairobi, the farmer was given forty-eight hours to get out of the country.

The Jerk explained to John and me that his family settled in Kenya many years ago into what the British colonials affectionately called the exclusive fertile White Highlands. After colonizing the country, he related, the newcomers tried their best with limited success to properly civilize, Christianize, and educate the poor, backward, ignorant, pagan locals. He seemed baffled by what he thought were thankless people wanting to manage their country, who even tried to use Mau Mau soldiers and their terrorist tactics to scare off the unwelcome foreign community. He was not aware that Mau Mau activities resulted in only a handful of expatriated deaths, but leaders like General China and others were delighted that their secret society helped bring independence to their country.

Remembering again that during Corps training John and I both read Robert Ruark’s books about the colonials in this country, we snarled at this mzungu’s (foreigner’s) arrogance. It wasn’t long before we both decided we could no longer tolerate him and his arrogant attitude. Many years later after graduate school, I reflected back on our stay in the Mara and fully understood how upset The Jerk must have been with it all. His colonial ancestors seriously believed it was their God-given DUTY to Christianize and civilize Kenyan people in the name of the British crown. This ethnocentric attitude persisted among most colonialists usually to the detriment and often the death of countless numbers of aboriginal people. Countries such as Australia and