Interview for Peace Corps Writers

There's now an interview relating to my novel Hard as Kerosene up on the Peace Corps Worldwide site. The book is published through the Peace Corps Writers imprint that is part of the Peace Corps Worldwide project of John Coyne and Marian Haley Beil. It allows those of us who want to publish our stories (fiction and fact) based on our Peace Corps experiences without having to go through traditional publishing processes. Peace Corps Writers is perfect for someone like me, who is not trying to be a writer of fiction but who does believe there is a story to be told.

While I am on the subject, I should link to One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo, the volume I edited in Jane Albritton's series of four books of essays by Returned Peace Corps Volunteers for the 50th anniversary of Peace Corps. They are published by Travelers' Tales and, to my mind, provide the best picture of the first half century of Peace Corps that one will ever find. 

"A Beautiful, Lasting Homage" to Peace Corps

Tony D'Souza has reviewed our book One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo for John Coyne's "Peace Corps Writers."

Press Release on One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo

City Tech’s Aaron Barlow Marks 50th Anniversary of Peace Corps With New Book Focused on Volunteers’ Experiences in Africa

Brooklyn, NY -- May 18, 2011 -- The Peace Corps is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and Aaron Barlow, assistant professor of English at New York City College of Technology (City Tech), is providing the perfect gift. He has edited One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo: 50 Years of Amazing Peace Corps Stories, Volume One-Africa (Travelers' Tales/Solas House, $18.95), a hand-picked collection of 76 essays by Peace Corps volunteers from 31 countries in Africa.

Although not an official publication of the Peace Corps, the book is the first of its kind to provide an overview of 50 years of Peace Corps service. The book just took the silver award for travel essays in the 2011 Independent Publisher (IP) Book Awards. The "IPPY" Awards, launched in 1996, are designed to bring increased recognition to “the deserving but often unsung titles published by independent authors and publishers,” the organization’s website proclaims.

The title of Barlow’s book, One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo, is based on a proverb in Ewe, one of the languages spoken in Ghana, Benin, Nigeria and Togo. The meaning is universal: “Many hands make light work,” “There is strength in unity” or “It takes a village.” In Africa, trying to hunt a water buffalo, which may be even more dangerous than a lion or elephant, takes more than one individual.

Professor Barlow, who has been teaching at City Tech since 2006, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo from 1988 through 1990. The book is a labor of love; as a senior Fulbright lecturer in American studies, he taught in Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso, before moving to Tambaong in rural northern Togo to help villagers learn to farm with ox-drawn ploughs.

“Wanting to know more about the wider culture, I got to know Peace Corps volunteers, allowing them to stay in my house in the city so that I could stay with them in their villages,” explains Professor Barlow. “I became more interested in what they were doing and learning, especially in relation to rural African cultures.”

The Marine Park, Brooklyn resident contributed his own essay to the book. "Elephant Morning" describes his near-fatal and puzzling encounter with an elephant bent on destroying his radio and camera equipment. Other stories in the collection range from amusing to wrenching, presenting a diverse spectrum of volunteers’ experiences, much like the stories many Americans have heard from friends and family members returning from Peace Corps service.

“Your Parents Visited You in Africa?” was written by a young woman volunteering in Ethiopia, who saw another volunteer killed by a car. Back home in the U.S., she realized she was glad that her parents had not visited her during her stay in Africa. Says Professor Barlow, “This story encapsulates so much of the Peace Corps experience -- the emotional distance from families who will never understand the experience, and the sudden death that is always a disquieting potential.” In contrast, Thor Hanson's "Bury My Shorts at Chamborro Gorge" is a humorous take on the intestinal problems that are part of life as a Peace Corps volunteer.

“Together, these stories present a picture as true to the Peace Corps experience in Africa as I could make it,” says Professor Barlow. “I did it because of what my own experience means to me.”

The three subsequent volumes in the series, which will be published over the next few months, are: Gather the Fruit One by One, Volume Two-The Americas (Ed. Barnie and Pat Alter), A Small Key Opens Big Doors, Volume Three-The Heart of Eurasia (Ed. Jay Chen), and Even the Smallest Crab Has Teeth, Volume Four-Asia and the Pacific (Ed. Jane Albritton).

Professor Barlow is also the author of The Rise of the Blogosphere, The DVD Revolution: Movies, Culture, and Technology, and last year’s Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes. He already is thinking of editing another book – a collection of stories written by Africans about their experiences with Peace Corps volunteers.

This Is the Picture...

...I took just seconds before the elephant charged up the small hill I was standing on.

I still have the Yashica-D twin-lens reflex camera I took this with.  The Leica that took the slide I snapped just after, just before the elephant charged, has disappeared--as has the slide itself.  As has the negative for this print.  Ten moves over twenty years, and things just vanish.

The picture never was much better than this damaged print.  I took it soon after dawn and the light really wasn't sufficient.  Plus, I was in a hurry.  I knew I was too close to the elephant--but I had never been this close before and wanted to get a picture.  I was sick of elephants appearing as little black dots in the distance (I lacked a telephoto lens).

When the elephant charged, I turned and ran down the hill and then circled to what would be the left in this picture--and fell somewhere to the left side of the picture.  To the right, and somewhat behind, was my compound, but I could not have managed to get around to the entrance, which was down the path the elephant was walking on.

In the upper left, near that ridge in the background, is the village of Nassiett, where I was working on a hedgerow project, where I constructed a small culvert easing rainy season flooding of the road, and where I built a tree nursery.  Directly to the left was the main part of my village, Tambaong.  That way, down the path, several people were watching as I took my pictures and the elephant charged.

My involvement in the "Peace Corps @ 50" project began with my submission of a personal essay recounting this incident.  With it, I offered any assistance I could give.  Series Editor Jane Albritton, when the original editor of the Africa volume had to step aside, contacted me and asked if I would be interested in taking over.  I was and did--and, though it has been a great deal of work, have enjoyed every minute of it.

The book, One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo, is now available from Amazon.com and will be in many Barnes and Noble stores within days.  You will have to buy it, if you want to get the whole of my story.  [I get no money out of this, but I really, really want it to be a success.]

The essays, together (and with the three forthcoming volumes focusing on other areas of the world) present one of the great stories of the last half-century, the story of Americans moving into the world peacefully and with purpose, the story of the lives of Americans in cultures absolutely distinct from their native land, the story of Americans coming home changed completely.

Reading One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo, one begins to recognize the commonalities of the diverse experiences of Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs), the challenges, the growth, and the learning.  There are some sixty essays in this book, each one a gem.  Even if you have had no experience with Peace Corps or with Africa, the quality of the writing here will surely impress you.

In many ways, I am more excited by the publication of One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo than I've been by any book I've written on my own.  With this, I feel part of something much bigger, much more important than my academic books.

If you buy the book and read it, I would love to hear reactions.  Please contact me.

"One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo"

Jane Albritton, series editor and guiding force behind the "Peace Corps @ 50" series, tells me that the publisher is about to send the proofs of One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo off to the printer--which means that it should be in stores in March.  As usual, there are further changes I would like, but that's only a sign that I have become more and more passionate about the book as time has passed and want it as perfect as I can make it.  Jane also tells me that pre-orders from bookstores are strong, another reason for making it as good as I can.

There are seventy-six essays in the book, all of them first-rate.  They cover the Peace Corps experience in Africa from its earliest days.  What pleases me most is that they don't seem like a jumbled collection of different thoughts, but something closer to a continuous narrative.  Though I had to work hard to pare things down to the point where I could fit all the stories I wanted into the volume but two (which are both long and rather too complex to withstand the type of cutting that would have been necessary--and which will both appear on the website, I hope, as will stories that have come in since we closed the volume and as will additional stories by many of the writers represented), I think the book is actually better as a result.  There is no single volume, at least not one I have seen, that encapsulates as much of the Peace Corps experience in Africa as this one does.

Because this project is not connected with Peace Corps itself, we've also had the freedom to present aspects of the experience that the organization might prefer remain in the background.  No organization, after all, likes to see its failures pointed out.  But failure is part of success, and the success of Peace Corps cannot be understood without examination of what went wrong along the way.

One of the things I've been thinking about while editing this volume is the side not seen here--the African perspective on Peace Corps.  Given limitations of space and time (not to mention money), that would not be possible in this book--which, after all, is about the experiences of the volunteers themselves.  Having finished this, however, I would love to be able to return to Africa for a year and collect stories from Africans about their experiences with Peace Corps Volunteers.  Then we'd really have a complete picture of the Peace Corps experience in Africa.

In the meantime, this book adds something to our American lore about Peace Corps, the stories like many that Americans have heard from the returned Volunteers amongst their friends and families, but stories never before collected in a single volume for a single, comprehensive picture of the experience.

The buzz about the book, so far, is good.  I hope it will be even better as people get a chance to read it.

And here I am as a Peace Corps Volunteer in northern Togo (Tambaong), working on my primary task of training farmers to use oxen for plowing, working with them on caring for the animals and the tools and--as in the picture--actually plowing the fields.  This was probably in 1989:

On a day just like this, plowing this very demonstration field, the oxen were startled by two elephants fighting in the Fosse aux lions (its boundary being off to the right from this picture, a road with woods beyond).  They panicked and ran.  I tried to keep hold of the plow, but eventually had to let go.  The blade continued to dig for a bit, creating a long, arced furrow away from the field until it lifted from the dirt and bounced behind the team until the oxen calmed and stopped, some several-hundred meters away.  I've never seen oxen run like those two did.  I don't blame them: the noise from the elephants, including the snapping of branches as they crashed into trees, was spectacular.

That elephant story is not in the book, but another, which took place within sight of this field, makes up my own contribution to the volume.

The Peace Corps Legacy

The death of Sargent Shriver reminds me once more of what government can do, when its people rise above parsimony and act as though they believe in themselves, their country, and the world. For thousands of us Americans, Peace Corps was defining, bringing us out of the narrow confines of home and into the large and often dangerous world--teaching us. We may have helped a few others along the way, but the greatest impact of Peace Corps has always been on us, the Volunteers, and on the country we returned home to.

The expansiveness, the open arms of the vision--this is something we've nearly lost over the past thirty years. Something we've nearly lost as a country, that is. Fortunately, Jimmy Carter continues to promote it, as does Peace Corps itself, struggling along into its fiftieth year. But, then, it always did have to struggle.

Peace Corps has never been easy--for the Volunteers, for the in-country staff, or for its administrators in DC or its supporters on Capitol Hill. Sometimes it has looked as though it would just say 'to hell with it' and lie down and die. But it continues, and gives hope to an idea of the world as an interconnected, interdependent place filled with beauty and mystery among the failures and horrors that dominate our media visions. A world of possibility and growth.

All of this has been reinforced for me over the past year or so, as I have worked to help produce the first volume in Jane Albritton's 50th Anniversary set of collected essays by Peace Corps Volunteers. It's called One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo and is being published by Travelers' Tales/Solas House, with me as the volume editor.

Together, the essays present as good a picture as I've ever seen of the Peace Corps experience in Africa. The writers are brilliant and thoughtful... and observant. If either Africa, the American experience in Africa, or Peace Corps interest you, keep an eye out for the book. I hope I will be able to conduct a few readings from it in New York City bookstores in the spring, and will announce any here.