Yaka

Kelly J. Morris

One of the best things a Peace Corps Volunteer can do is make himself or herself unneeded.

In January 1969, I went to Togo as a Peace Corps Volunteer to work as a community development extension worker for community self-help construction. It was my job to help communities and their leaders determine their needs for classrooms, clinics, bridges and culverts on farm-to-market roads, and other infrastructure; to prioritize their needs and inventory their resources; and to organize self-help projects to address their highest priority needs. The community provided labor and local materials (sand, gravel, rocks, and water); the local officials provided transport and skilled artisans; and Peace Corps helped to obtain grants for the materials that were not locally available (e.g., cement, reinforcing steel rods, wood planks, tin roofing sheets, etc.) and organizational and technical support, i.e. me.

I was shocked when I went to visit one of the village chiefs with whom I was to work. It was less than ten years since Togo had become independent. To my surprise, the chief of Yaka welcomed me by lamenting the departure of the colonial government and complained that the country had “gone to hell in a handbasket” since the whites departed! We had been told that our mission was to “work ourselves out of a job.” This was not what I was expecting.

I persevered, nonetheless, and worked with the chief, the neighborhood sub-chiefs, the women’s group leaders, and local artisans to build several bridges and culverts on farm-to-market roads. The work went well. The people needed the bridges and worked hard to help obtain something that was in their own interest.

During the dry season, I had to go to Lomé, the capital city, to buy building materials and transport them back to our worksite about 450 kilometers inland. I rode my red CZ Czechoslovak motorcycle down to the railhead about 200 kilometers to the south. My motorcycle and I spent the rest of the voyage sitting on 100-kilogram sacks of millet in a freight car with a squad of soldiers. We bought sodabi, the distilled palm wine that is Africa’s “White Lightning,” from women who crowded the railcar at rural whistle stops and punished our innards with it for the remainder of the agonizingly slow trip.

I spent several days in Lomé buying materials, arranging to hire seven-ton trucks, loading them, and expediting them northward. My plan was to hoist my motorcycle onto the last truck and to ride back to my site on it. Fate, however, intervened in the form of a mangy street dog. As I was riding on my motorcycle down the street the night before my proposed departure, the dog rushed out from an alley, bit me on my ankle, and disappeared.

The next morning, before departing, I dutifully reported the incident to the Peace Corps Medical Office.

“Where is the dog?” the doctor asked.

“Long gone,” I replied.

“Well, I have to assume that the dog was rabid and treat you accordingly,” he announced.

There began a series of sixteen daily shots that he mercifully rotated in four-shot cycles between my biceps and thighs.

“I’ll give you the vials of serum and the throw-away sterile needles to take with you to your post,” the doctor said. “You can have the nurse at the nearest clinic inject you.” I was ready to depart, only one day behind schedule.

My plan was foiled again in a most unexpected way. For several hours after my first injection, I had a reaction to the shot that left me woozy, light-headed, and unsteady on my feet.

“You aren’t going anywhere,” the doctor decided, “until your shots are completed.”

I sent the trucks ahead and then whiled away an unplanned sixteen days in the capital city.

When I finally completed my shots and was liberated, I hopped the next train back north to my post.

The chief of Yaka was not too pleased with me when I went to check on our worksite. He berated me for my extended absence that he characterized as a vacation. Then he treated me to a long list of all the things that he and his collaborators had to do in order to keep the project going in my absence. Thanks to them, the work had continued.

“I know what you were doing,” he concluded. “You were drinking beer and chasing after women. That’s what you were really doing!”

Of course, he was right. Young, single, trapped, and bored in Lomé, I had spent my time, after the dizziness from each day’s injection wore off, drinking beer and chasing women.

My local friends who caught up with me at the beer bar that evening found me in a deliriously good mood. I described my saga and my dressing-down by the chief, which pleased me no end.

“You white people are crazy,” they said. “Why does getting chewed out by that old chief make you happy?’

“Because,” I replied, “in Yaka they figured out that they didn’t need me. In this one village, at least, I worked myself out of a job. Mission accomplished.”

Kelly J. Morris is an international development consultant and writer who served nineteen years with the Peace Corps. Beginning in 1969, he was a Volunteer and country staff for eleven years in Togo and staff for two tours in Washington. He is the author of the Bight of Benin: Short Fiction and the upcoming African Democracy: A Primer. He is the founder and list owner of the Friends of Togo.