Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (3 page)

But what did not happen was any sense of panic in the Hill household that afternoon. My father came home to see how we were doing. As if to explain that nothing much had really happened at our house, he
told me what had been going on at the Belgian embassy that day. A mob broke into the Belgian compound, located just a few blocks down from the American Embassy, and threatened to come up the main stairway inside the building before the Belgian ambassador, wielding a pistol, yelled to the crowd from the top of the stairs:
“Ça suffit!”
That’s enough! They left. My father enjoyed telling that story that night as he sat in the living room next to the fire, making his way through his usual evening pack of cigarettes. I’d often sit with my parents at night, getting my dad to tell me about the embassy while they both had their martinis, and I wondered how anyone could drink such a thing (though I did always lay claim to the olives).

My father had a special affinity for Belgians, having served his first assignment in Antwerp immediately after World War II, and admired them for the suffering they had endured in that conflict. Dad explained to me who Lumumba was, and why the connection with the Belgians, and for that matter the connection with Tito’s nonaligned Yugoslavia. “Everything has a reason,” he always explained. “Our task is at least to try to understand what that reason is, even if we don’t agree with it.” I couldn’t understand why a Yugoslav mob was attacking our home over something we obviously had nothing to do with. “Well, not everything has an easy explanation,” he said, as if to negate what he had just explained. “We’d probably have to talk to them.”

“Talk to
them
?”

“Of course. How else would you find out what they are thinking?”

I don’t remember my father ever telling the story about the pistol-wielding Belgian ambassador again. It just wasn’t that big a deal. Stories like that had a short life span in the Hill household. We would get on to the next issue quickly.

Late that afternoon my mother was still dealing with some remaining shards of glass that had become stuck in her hair-sprayed hair when she had dropped to the glass- and stone-littered floor of the living room to shield Jonny and Nick. Embassy carpenters came the next afternoon
to repair the windows (with my assistance in the form of passing them their cigarettes). Apart from those two policemen, who had seemed more interested in their own cigarettes than in protecting our home, there was no additional security and no routines altered or created. My father went to work the next day. I went to school, after the usual argument with my mother about what to wear to my third-grade classroom. I do not remember my parents ever talking about the incident again. It never became part of family lore. I talked to them years later, but it fell to me to jog their memories with my own.

Just two and a half years later, in May 1963, the seven Hills were living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. François Duvalier had just declared himself president for life, and from our second-floor porch, which had a view overlooking much of the city, I could see fires and hear gunshots. As luck would have it, my dad, the embassy’s economic officer, was the duty officer that week, meaning that he would make frequent trips to the embassy in the dead of night to check on telegram traffic that required immediate attention. This night he had gone to the embassy at 11
P.M.,
but now at 1
A.M.
had still not returned. My mother radioed the marine guard (there were no phones) and was told he had left an hour earlier to make the twenty-minute drive home in an embassy car. She woke up my older sister, Prudy, and me to explain the situation, and we sat on the upstairs porch, our mother with her cigarette, and I with my worries.

He soon returned, to our great relief. He explained that he had been ordered out of the car at gunpoint by Duvalier’s not-so-secret police, the dreaded Ton Ton Macoutes, and held there for some thirty minutes while the TTMs decided what to do with him and his embassy driver. The next evening Mother and Dad told me the situation was deteriorating, that we all might be evacuated, but wanted me—I was ten years old—to know that we had a revolver (with five shots) in the event it was needed. Dad showed me how to aim and fire, while I focused on the fact it had only five chambers and not the six that I assumed every revolver had. “Don’t use it unless you have to,” my mother helpfully told me.

Just a day later my dad came home to tell us that all families were being evacuated and that we needed to pack. “Where are you going to be?” I asked him anxiously. “I’ll be fine,” he told us.

The next morning we were at the airport, boarding a chartered Pan Am flight bound for Miami. My dad, and other Foreign Service dads, stood on the tarmac as we made our way up the stairs. He was waving at us, telling us all to take care of our mother, who was holding on to Nick and Jonny, now four years old, while my two sisters, Prudence and Elizabeth, and I followed. He was still waving at us when the plane pulled away. I was so struck by the fact that if he was worried about anything, he sure didn’t show it.

E
leven years later, in 1974, during my senior year at Bowdoin College, I knew I wanted to serve my country. The military draft was over. I decided to join the Peace Corps. Many Foreign Service officers trace their first jobs in diplomacy to their decision to answer President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to spend part of their lives working in the developing world. In October 1960, at 2
A.
M.,
in what he called the “longest short speech” he had ever made, one given to a University of Michigan crowd of five thousand, President Kennedy told students that on their willingness to perform such service would depend “whether a free society can compete.” Generations of Americans joined the Peace Corps filled with a sense of Kennedy’s idealism and many returned with an even stronger dose of realism about what we encountered, and how we needed to manage—and sometimes not—other people’s problems. Whenever I am asked what my favorite Foreign Service job was, I invariably answer that it was my time as a Peace Corps volunteer, the position from which I entered the Foreign Service.

I waited a few weeks before receiving an offer to join a credit union project in Cameroon, West Africa. A few weeks after graduation I was in a credit union accounting training course in Washington, D.C., and on August 11, a day after my twenty-second birthday, with twenty other nervous and excited volunteers I boarded a flight from New York City to West Africa. The Pan Am Boeing 707 stopped at every coastal capital on its way to Central Africa. On the fifth stop, we arrived in hot and steamy Douala, Cameroon. We staggered down the stairway off the airplane into sheets of warm rain and headed to the terminal, where we collected our bags and went through customs, all the while wondering whether we could get a flight the next day to go home. A rented bus whisked us off to a hotel for late-night briefings by an endlessly cheerful Peace Corps staff. The next morning we got on that same dripping-wet bus and headed to a small airstrip in the town of Tiko to board a Twin Otter aircraft. It groaned audibly as it somehow managed to lift off the dirt and muddy runway and begin the one-hour trip to Bamenda in the highlands of the Northwest Province of Cameroon, where the temperatures were far more comfortable than in the coastal south. Our three-week training took place in a Catholic mission where we were housed in a two-room, whitewashed, cinder-block building, ten cots jammed into each room. We had our meals in a similarly austere cafeteria, where we received tips in Cameroonian culture and the basics for communicating in Pidgin English. At the end of the program I was assigned to supervise the credit unions of Fako Division in the Southwest Province, so I packed my bags for the trip to the town of Buea.

Buea had been an administrative capital in the latter half of the nineteenth century, during Germany’s ill-fated colonial era, which came to an abrupt end at the conclusion of World War I, when Germany lost its entire colonial empire to the French and the British. The town is located some 3,500 feet up on the slopes of Mount Cameroon, a volcanic peak that rises from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, the Bight of Biafra, to reach 13,270 feet. With its cool and pleasant weather, albeit with a long
rainy season, it is easy to see why the Germans chose Buea at the turn of the century as an administrative capital for its vast plantation system in “Kamerun.” The plantations, which were mostly within one hundred miles of the Cameroon coast, produced rubber, palm oil, bananas, and, in one plantation along the side of the mountain, tea.

Signs of the Germans’ fifty-year stay were visible throughout the town, but especially in the form of the occasional two- and even three-story terraced stone buildings with red metal roofs that seemed so out of place in the lush green natural scenery.

Another volunteer, Jim Wilson, and I arrived there on the first day of September, having survived an eight-hour trip in a Peace Corps Land Rover. The roads in Cameroon would be familiar to anyone who has been to West Africa: a laterite clay, hard almost to the point of feeling like cement in the dry season, but soft like tomato soup during the rainy season. Four-wheel-drive vehicles used in rural Cameroon in the mid-1970s bore no relation to those parked in front of hotels today in Vail or Aspen, Colorado. The shock absorbers seem to have been left out of the undercarriage and a ride of longer than an hour made one feel like a jackhammer operator. Our driver seemed to be in constant road races with the “bush taxis,” Peugeot 404 station wagons that seated nine passengers—two in the front, four in the second seat, and three people stuffed in the rear—and would carry them between towns. Luggage on those taxis (which included live goats and chickens) was stored on roof racks made locally of crude metal and covered with garish signage to encourage repeat customers. The names of the taxis painted on the front of the roof racks were quite varied, often a line from the Bible, or a movie character (“007”), or sometimes just a philosophical expression that the proud driver may have been inspired to make up himself, such as (my favorite) “Man Must Die.”

Getting out of our Peace Corps vehicle was a welcome moment indeed. The driver helped pull our bags out of the back of the vehicle, wished us good luck and told us not to drink the water, and sped off. Jim and I looked at each other and then at our house and our waiting motorcycles
sitting against the side of the house. A neighbor who had been watching over the property since the last volunteers had left a few months before emerged from a nearby house with our keys. Our house was made of cinder block and cement and sat incongruously in the midst of a patch of five-foot-high grass off a dirt road. With occasional running water, it was the lap of luxury for a Peace Corps volunteer, a cheerful thought I conveyed to Jim as we surveyed the mauve interior walls and the ubiquitous spiderwebs and, a first for me, a two-inch-wide ant column that had effortlessly marched its way under the front door to what presumably had been a feast of insects inside. Groups of small children started emerging from the tall grass to stare at us, a sight they never lost interest in during the two years we were there. There wasn’t any furniture, but Jim and I used our Peace Corps allowance to build wooden bed frames for our foam rubber mattresses (which we both decided we didn’t want to place directly on the floor) and to buy a few chairs and straw mats.

The best part of the house was its roof. Made of corrugated tin, it stubbornly, albeit loudly, withstood the pounding monsoon rain. Buea had 265 inches of annual rainfall, most of which fell during the summer months through the end of September. That first night in September, with the dry season still a few weeks away, the rain came down on the tin roof in a deafening torrent that I thought would punch holes through it. In the morning, however, a bright sun was up in a cloudless sky, the grassland slopes of Mount Cameroon had become an emerald green, and every insect in the world, it seemed, along with a few newly formed columns of ants, seemed hard at work on the cement stoop or nearby in the thick, green tall grass.

I was assigned to the Department of Cooperatives, under the Ministry of Agriculture, with duties to serve as a credit union field-worker. Catholic priests from the Netherlands had introduced credit unions about a decade before. They had studied the local “Njangi” savings societies, a system of monthly savings against an eventual payout of everyone’s savings. Thus if each person saved a dollar a month and there were twenty
persons in the group, that person would, every twentieth month, receive twenty dollars, which, less the funding for food and drink for the monthly party, was a substantial payout, almost like winning the lottery. The priests, carefully building on the Njangi system, created a rudimentary but effective standardized bookkeeping system that allowed people to take loans against their savings or those of a cosigner. The Cameroonian government supported the program and had asked the Peace Corps to send volunteers to help supervise the credit unions.

Credit unions were often the only access to credit that anyone had. And even though the word
microcredit
had not yet become the subject of Nobel Peace Prizes, loans from tiny credit unions in places were instrumental in helping people create small businesses (foot-pump sewing machines were a popular loan request), buy schoolbooks for their children, and replace thatched roofs (the smells and sight of which bore no relation to thatch roofs in the English countryside) with shiny corrugated metal.

My job was to get to each credit union over the course of the month to check the loan balances, tie up the individual accounts with the general accounts, meet the board of directors, and otherwise make sure that nothing unusual had taken place. The Peace Corps gave me a Suzuki 125cc dirt bike. It was large by local standards, and with its four gears and another four lower gears, activated with the click of one’s heel, it could climb the steepest trails even with Mr. Timti, my Cameroonian credit union trainee, holding on to the rear seat for dear life.