Read Online Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux - Free Book Online Page B

better health.
    An added thrill was that many British settlers were still in residence. Some of these were old-timers—wog bashers, as they sometimes called themselves—who remembered the place when it was even wilder and more wooded. They had little contact with Africans—the place had never been a colony in the strict sense, only a backwater—and they resented us. Most of us hated them and mocked them, and we had a special loathing for the few volunteers who began moving in settler society. These pompous creeps—so we said—went to gymkhanas and cocktail parties at the local club and dated the settler children when they returned from their Rhodesian boarding schools. We saw them as social climbers and traitors. It was not uncommon for a Peace Corps volunteer, in town for supplies, to approach a group of settlers in a bar and say something crudely provocative, such as "The queen's a whore" (Elizabeth's portrait always hung above the bottles behind the bar), and nearly always a fight would start. To Africans these antagonisms were very exciting.
    We had arrived in the country speaking Chinyanja fairly well, and we had plunged in—made friends, taught school, ran literacy programs, coached sports, and generally made ourselves useful. We were, as the English say, "at the sharp end," on our own and exposed, and doing the toughest jobs. The Africans were eager. Afterward it occurred to me that over the years of British rule the Africans had become sidelined, always seeing whites at a distance and wondering what the hell they were like. The Peace Corps volunteers were the first foreigners to offer them a drink. They were amazed that we were interested in them, and they repaid our interest with hospitality.
    In addition to my teaching, I collaborated with a man at the Ministry of Education on writing two English textbooks, to replace the miserable ones that had been written for schools in Ghana many years before.
Foundation Secondary English
(Book One and Book Two) is still being used in Malawi twenty years after it appeared, and I am still receiving royalties on it.
    We were pestered by Israeli soldiers who had been taken on to train our students to become single-minded cadets in a goon squad, but apart from them the school ran well. I planted trees, and we put a road through. I was proud of the place; I liked my students, and I enjoyed working with my colleagues. The country affected me as no other country has, before or since. I felt I belonged there. I was having a good time as well as doing something worthwhile—what could have been better?
    Now and then I remembered that I was in the Peace Corps. I disliked the idea that I was with an outfit, and I rejected the suggestion that I was an American official working abroad. I had never been easy with the concept of the Peace Corps as an example to spineless Marxists, and the implications of fresh-faced youngsters wooing Third Worlders away from communism. I knew that American officialdom used us to deflect criticism of Vietnam and more robust and spread-eagled diplomacy.
    I wanted the Peace Corps to be something vague and unorganized, and to a large extent it was. Consequently we were left alone. I was glad to be able to call my soul my own. The Peace Corps was only proprietorial when it suited them, and generally speaking they took an interest in volunteers only when an official visitor arrived in the country. Then we were visited or invited to parties. "You're doing wonderful work ... They're saying great things about you." But I didn't want attention. I didn't want help. I wanted to be self-sufficient. Anyway, most of our jobs were too simple to require any backup, and we seldom wrote reports.
    We were not trusted by the embassy personnel or the State Department hacks—all those whispering middle-aged aunties who couldn't speak the language. We felt embassy people were overpaid and ignorant, always being fussed over by spoiled African