Gentle Winds of Change

Donald Holm

Tilting at windmills…or trying to build them where they have no business being: perhaps that’s the joy of Peace Corps.

As if out of a fairy tale, on one side of Makele, Tigray, in northern Ethiopia, on a rise, stood the castle of Ras (or prince) Mengesha, descendant of centuries of Tigray’s monarchy. His lovely wife, Princess Aida, was a granddaughter of Emperor Haile Selassie.

Since the dawn of civilization, Makele had been a caravan-trading center, especially for salt. Perched at 8,000 feet in the Abyssinian Highlands, to the east an escarpment plunged below sea level to the Danakil Desert in the Great Rift Valley. There, nomads cut salt into blocks from evaporated lakes. Camel caravans toted their precious cargo on ancient paths that snaked up the escarpment.

Not everyone lived happily ever after, however. In the era of Solomon and Sheba, whose legendary kingdom was located there, Tigray was a granary, producing an abundance of the millet-like grain called teff, the main ingredient of Ethiopian flatbread, injera. After millennia of cultivation in a gradually drying climate, yields steadily declined. Precious little topsoil remained. Farmers steered their oxen-pulled plows around rocks littering the fields. The specter of famine loomed.

My task was to teach English as a second language to seventh and eighth graders in the town’s lone school. I was honored that one of my students was the son of Ras Mengesha and Princess Aida, who may normally have sent him away to a boarding school for his education, but had elected to keep him at home now that the Peace Corps had arrived.

My students taught me practical things about their world, as I taught them about mine. They showed me local points of interest, like the market. Trading in salt was the centerpiece. At the teeming camel section, my students gave me tips on how to select a good one. Strangely enough, one of the most important ways to recognize a camel’s mettle, I learned, involved the animal’s ability to stick its long tongue way out, halfway to its knees, with saliva drooling to the ground as the camel went into a stupor. “Oh, sir, gobez, gobez (the Amharic word for strong, awesome),” they would shout.

We were always looking for ways to enrich our contribution. One PCV developed expertise in building latrines, which he succeeded in erecting at various points around town.

Another Volunteer, Dick, and I stumbled across an abandoned windmill kit in a field behind the school, in wooden crates with weeds canopied around them, displaying fading logos of the clasped hands of the U.S. Agency for International Development. To cynical PCVs, this was typical of USAID. Our school had two General Electric stoves collecting dust in our faculty room, with ovens used as filing cabinets. Just the thing if you were looking to track down a “hot item.” The problem: our school had no electricity. At a Peace Corps conference in Addis Ababa, I asked a USAID rep attending how it was possible they would send us electric stoves. His nonchalant response: “We had new stuff coming in, so we had to move it out.”

But was the windmill kit, like the electric stoves, really a white elephant? Strangely enough, it seemed to Dick and me that a windmill might actually make sense. With the persistently encroaching desertification, ladies had to fetch water for their households from muddy pools in a river trickling miles from town. They lugged the essential liquid on swayed backs in earthen jugs that weighed as much as the water they carried, an agonizing task. As I slept at night, I dreamt of these ladies smiling as water gushed from an imaginary windmill in the center of town.

We picked a central spot that the local government said we could use. It was like an erector set on Christmas morning, trying to figure out which part went where. Our efforts drew amusement from people on their way to the market. What were these zany Americans trying to do? Construct a launch pad for a moon rocket?

Over many Saturdays, we put together the first tier, then the second. Complexities sprang up. How on earth were we going to drill the well under the windmill? Just as intimidating, how in the world were we going to be able to lift its heavy motor to the apex? We blindly worked on, with the spirit and enthusiasm typical of early Volunteers, that we could change the world by force of will alone.

We needed a miracle. Then, one quiet afternoon, a small plane dropped down at the airstrip, a pasture on the edge of town where goats grazed. The American Ambassador had breezed in from Addis Ababa on a field trip. He was staying at the castle hotel at the other end of town, a bookend to the castle of Ras Mengesha and Princess Aida, constructed for the occasional VIPs and to encourage fledgling tourism.

The Ambassador invited all eight Volunteers in Makele for drinks at the castle that evening, following his call on Ras Mengesha and Princess Aida.

I put on my ratty, rust-colored sports coat and my green polka-dot tie that didn’t match. As we arrived, we overheard the Ambassador speaking to one of the staff working at the hotel, who was presenting a bottle of tej honey mead, Ethiopia’s national drink, as a gift to the Ambassador from the Ras and Princess. The servant asked the Ambassador what he would like him to do with the tej, and the Ambassador growled, “Dump it down the toilet, I’ve given enough of my intestines to this country.” We looked at each other and shuddered, knowing this insult would be reported back to the Ras and the Princess. It was not an auspicious start to the evening.

The Ambassador went around and asked each of us what we were doing in Makele as Volunteers. When most of us responded that we were secondary school teachers, he impatiently raised his voice and tiredly blurted out, “But what are you really doing to help these people?” This sparked pangs of guilt. We harbored such high expectations when we had idealistically answered President Kennedy’s call to do our part in bringing the developing world out of poverty.

Dick and I volunteered that, well, we were working on weekends to build a windmill. The Ambassador’s mood changed. “Why that’s ideal,” he beamed. Given the increasingly arid climate, and the steady strong winds coming up from the escarpment, we sensed that he was thinking big, chasing windmills in his mind spreading across the horizon like oil derricks.

In the weeks that followed, Dick and I felt even more inspired to complete the windmill, constructing a third tier.

One Saturday afternoon as we were lunching at the town’s only restaurant, a great commotion occurred. A helicopter swooped down into the market, scattering camels and donkeys and people in every direction. Most of the people in the market had undoubtedly never even heard of a helicopter, much less seen one. For them, it was as if a spaceship had docked. Dick and I took swigs from our warm beers, and wondered what this could possibly be about.

Two well-built men in U.S. Army fatigues stormed into the restaurant asking where they could find Perry and Holm (Dick and me). The lead man, with blond crew-cut hair and sporting colonel eagles on his lapels, snapped to us long-haired, unkempt PCVs, with obvious irritation, that they were Army engineers sent by the Ambassador from the small Army base in Asmara to team with us to finish the windmill. Their helicopter was capable of lifting the windmill’s gearbox into place. But first, they wanted to check out the overall feasibility of the project.

We took them to the site. The Army engineers went back to their helicopter and returned with sounding gear and augers. They launched into tests. Whenever we tried to assist, they barked that we were getting in their way, so Dick and I returned to the restaurant and sipped some more on our warm beers.

A couple of hours passed. The two Army engineers, by now sunburnt with sweat dripping down their faces, paraded into the restaurant again. The colonel snarled that that there was no aquifer below. The site we had chosen would produce not more than “a cup a day.” The two stomped out of the restaurant; their helicopter thrashed up a repeat whirlwind of dust and commotion as they departed in their “spaceship.”

And the windmill? Dick and I thought about tearing it down, but our final days crept up on us so quickly, we never got around to doing it. For all I know, it stands today as a metaphorical monument to the spirit of the Peace Corps in its early days, a testament to tireless effort and goodwill, tempered by the sobering acknowledgement that development remains a worthwhile goal, but one which cannot be achieved nearly as easily or as quickly as early Volunteers may have imagined.

With it comes the resignation, call it wisdom if you like, that the impact of the Peace Corps has not been in spectacular, strong gusts of wind, in showy projects like windmills, but rather in day-to-day tasks like teaching school in remote locales, acts of kindness that are good in themselves, fostering gentle, yet steady, zephyrs of change that enhance the image of America, and through us, increase America’s understanding of perspectives of the developing world. That is what we have really been doing.

Donald Holm, PCV in Ethiopia from 1965-67, is a semi-retired Foreign Service officer whose career has taken him to South America, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, the Eastern Caribbean, and back to Africa. He currently lives on a ridge, often buffeted by Chinook winds, looking out on snow-capped mountains above Boulder, Colorado. Come to think of it, with the emerging energy crisis, what an ideal spot for a…?