Libya (1968-1969) by Peter Crall

In the spring of 1968 I was finishing my first year of graduate studies in film making at the Boston School of Public Communications. Those were turbulent times in our country. LBJ had halted the bombing of North Viet Nam and announced that he would not run for re-election. Eugene McCarthy won the Democratic primary in Wisconsin. Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, and Washington and Chicago rioted and burned. One weekend's entertainment was the film "The Battle of Algiers" with its gruesome but accurate depiction of the French-Arab colonial war. Royse and I got engaged and planned a June wedding. I was still eligible for the draft and we had been looking for a course of action that would provide a deferment from military service.

Earlier in the year we had applied to the Peace Corps and expressed an interest in South America, Micronesia and India. The first week of May we received notification that we had been selected to enter training to teach English in Libya. The program was to start in Bisbee, Arizona in early July. This was a welcome development since I didn't want to tote a rifle in Vietnam if I could avoid it. Ironically and inexplicably, I had also gotten a letter from the National Security Agency inviting me to apply for employment there. Really? The selective service board had already gotten me down to my underpants once, so the Peace Corps was an attractive and legal alternative. I knew (barely) where Libya was, but, for a while, Royse thought (to her delight) that Libya was Liberia and that we were headed for the jungles of sub-Saharan Africa. In short order, however, we both understood that we were destined for a Muslim oil kingdom - and former colony of Italy - on the arid southern shore of the Mediterranean.

We had given some thought - but not much - to our aptitude for teaching. The Peace Corps, which was founded on the concept of amateur voluntarism, had looked over our applications and seemed to think we could manage in the classroom, but who really knew? I was just glad to be able to avoid military service and neither of us was following a deep-seated urge to teach. Our primary assets were being native speakers of English. The host nation wouldn't be paying much for our services and probably thought we were a bargain. The reality check - working week after week in classrooms filled with kids - was yet to come.

In the month of May, there had been week after week of street rioting in France by a coalition of students and workers. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 6. Our nation's violent streak was on full display. We were headed into a presidential election in the fall with Eugene McCarthy and Nelson Rockefeller on the left and Richard Nixon and George Wallace on the right. Much debate on gun-control. Change was needed but nothing ever got done.

We headed back to Cleveland and I stayed with my parents at their house in Gates Mills as I prepared for our wedding. During this time, we got mandatory pre-Peace Corps dental work done at the Case School of Dentistry. In 2019 I still had some of those gold inlays. Since we were both near-sighted, we got the required low-cost, wire-rimmed glasses. All the new volunteers had them and, with our improved vision, we could spot one another from across an airport concourse.

On the 26th of June, we got married at St. Christopher's Church in Gates Mills, Ohio with a wedding reception at the Hunt Club across the street. My dad sprang for the honeymoon and so we flew off that afternoon (via an overnight at the Plaza Hotel in New York City) for the Water Isle Colony Club in the town of Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. It was a beautiful place for relaxation but, with our young anti-establishment mindset, we couldn't help but notice the stark disparities in wealth between black and white. The grinding poverty we saw made a mockery of the Virgin Island's slogan: "American Paradise". Since we were headed to our Libya training in Arizona, we were very interested to pay a brief visit to another Peace Corps training program which was being run close to our hotel.

After our honeymoon, we flew from St. Thomas to Tucson, Arizona on July 13 and spent the night in an airport motel. As an indicator of the approaching change in life style, we air freighted our fancy wedding clothing back to Cleveland.

July 14, 1968 was the first day of pacifist boot camp and sensitivity training - officially the Libya II program - and it got off to a slow start. The plan was for all incoming trainees to assemble at the Tucson airport, and it took all day for everyone to trickle in. Finally, we jammed ourselves and our luggage onto buses for the trip to Bisbee. In those days, the Peace Corps allowed newlyweds to enter training programs fresh from the altar, but we heard rumors that, because of the high divorce rate, the policy would be changed to require a year of marriage. There were 126 of us - more than expected. There was a second site in Utah with another 110 trainees. That makes a total of 236 candidates for a final delegation of 175 volunteers. It's clear that the program directors feel that the candidates would have to scale a very steep cliff to complete the training. We were all required to meet regularly with staff psychiatrists to have our heads shrunk. Some of those shrunken heads would roll through the weaning and "de-selection" process. Naturally, trainees felt under pressure in a situation like this and, in my case, I reacted by surrounding myself with a bubble of optimism and brave talk. I convinced myself that if someone got axed, it wouldn't be me. I had made a mental investment in succeeding - I had to succeed. Survival instincts told me that, as I tackled the individual components of language, culture and teaching, I would need to appear as a capable and confident future volunteer teacher, regardless of how much fear and anxiety might be stewing inside me. Basically, my goal was to give the program administrators what they wanted to see.

Bisbee, the little burg blessed by fate to be the site of our training, was a rather funky place. A run- down mining town owned by the Phelps Dodge company, it featured the world's largest open pit copper mine - the Lavender Pit - with all the associated mountains of "dump rock" and environmental damage. Every day at noon they would set off explosives that loosened the ore and rattled windows. Trainees were distributed among several run-down hotels in town. We lived in the Golden Hotel with other trainee couples and a colorful selection of intoxicated transients. During this time, I had my one and only relationship with a musical instrument. I bought a nice Hohner harmonica and learned to play several songs, but by the time we reached North Africa that phase of my life was over.

There was a good-sized contingent of Libyans on the training staff to teach us their local Arabic dialect and to introduce us to their culture. They did hard, tiring work in the classroom teaching us lump heads, but were always cheerful and good-hearted. They were a mix of Libya's various regions - big city and remote village, Mediterranean coast and desert oasis. Most were brown-skinned in various shades, but a few were jet black like sub-Saharan Africans. My personal theory was that these blacks came to Libya as part of the trans-Saharan slave trade in centuries past. In Libyan villages, women stay at home and never socialize with men outside their family, but in our program we had two single women from Tripoli - Aisha and Fawzia- - who didn't fit this traditional mold. They were college-educated, emancipated and confident, and stood as professional equals with their male peers. You sensed that this made the Libyan men slightly uncomfortable but the zeitgeist in training was to be modern and forward, so they dealt with it. The women, however, were not so progressive that they played soccer. Instead, they cheered from the sidelines as the Libyan men played several exciting and hilarious pick-up matches against some locals from Bisbee.

The aptitude for learning language varied considerably among the trainees, and Royse and I were strictly in the middle of the pack. One of the linguistic hot shots in our program was Jay Shetterly, who already had several languages under his belt. He picked up Arabic faster than the Libyans could teach him and reminded me of Richard Burton, the nineteenth century explorer who mastered twenty nine tongues. Jay was also an enthusiastic amateur entomologist who had an uncanny knack for discovering previously unknown bugs and already had several species named after him by the time he came to training. In later years, he practiced law in the Boston area and ran the risk of bumping into my son James since they had a shared interest in insects.

The Westinghouse Corporation, which was known for making kitchen appliances, had decided that they could also make money selling training services, and that was how their Learning Division came to be the primary contractor for running our program. They ran a tight ship and day to day there was very little free time after the relentless demands of Arabic classes, TEFL instruction and cross-cultural indoctrination. They even managed to throw in motorcycle training for the guys since some of us would be assigned schools in more than one town. We got some hands-on practice in teaching real students with classroom sessions across the border in the desolate, sunburnt village of Naco, Mexico. I'm not sure those little Latino kids learned anything but they were eager and we gave it our best effort. The Naco village elders showed their appreciation by hosting a pulled-pork feast for us and hiring a mariachi band. The best things the Libyan men liked about Naco were the whorehouses Mostly, after a typical day of activities, we just staggered back to our hotel and fell asleep. On rare occasions we got out of Bisbee. One day we teamed up with another couple and hitched a ride to Tombstone courtesy of a couple of GIs returning to Fort Huachuca from a weekend of brothel-hopping across the border. They dropped us near the OK corral where Wyatt Earp had his thirty second shootout. Hitchhiking was pretty common in those days and after waiting in the rain for a long time we got a ride back to Bisbee from a nurse who somehow recognized us as Peace Corps. We talked about gully washers on the way back to town.

During language class one day, I caught a fly with my bare hands and popped it in my mouth. Now, I didn't do this because I was hungry and had become an insectivore. It was simply a case of showing off too successfully, and there is a perfectly logical explanation for this unusual event. We were seated in our chairs in a semi-circle waiting for our Libyan instructor to show up. I and my fellow trainees passed the time in our usual manner by loafing, talking nonsense and not paying much attention to anything. A girl was having a conversation with herself in Arabic. One guy talked about buying a fancy car. Another bragged that his hands were faster than Muhammed Ali's. When I heard that, I said, "Oh, yeah, watch this!", and grabbed at a fly in front of me and pretended to pop it in my mouth. Of course, no one was watching when - to my surprise - I felt a buzzing on my tongue and then opened my trap to see an offended bluebottle escape to safety. I never had an audience for that once-in-a-lifetime grab, but I did prove to myself that I had pretty quick hands, and perhaps could "float like a butterfly and sting like a bee" as well as Ali, and didn't need the long, sticky tongue of a chameleon. One activity which is prominent in my memory was the twenty four hour isolation experience designed to toughen us mentally and encourage self-reliance. Each trainee was driven into the mountains near town and left there in the mesquite and sagebrush for a day with a tent and minimal supplies. I saw a bobcat. A skunk strolled into Royse's tent in the middle of the night and curled up on her sleeping bag. Both of us recall the wind and the silence, and the realization that we didn't see another human for an entire day. One trainee made the observation that people in such situations are seldom inclined to engage in idle philosophical contemplation about the meaning of life until they have taken care of more urgent issues like, where am I going to sleep, what's my next meal, and will I become a snack for a mountain lion.

A finale to the training was a day-long picnic retreat for staff and trainees at the Cochise Stronghold Memorial Park high up in the Dragoon Mountains about fifty miles north of Bisbee. We cooked couscous and got to watch the Libyans slaughter two sheep for the party. Butchering sheep is second nature to Libyans, but for us delicate little white kids, it was a bit of a shock - a gory and fascinating process. As the meal was being prepared I had fun blowing up a pair of sheep lungs like a balloon.

As expected, some trainees fell involuntarily by the wayside during the selection process, some left of their own accord, and the remainder received site assignments. Those survivors were excited, if a little apprehensive, at the prospect of a teaching job in what was truly terra incognita for us all . Most of us made brief dashes home to say goodbye to family. With farewells completed, we all rendezvoused at New York's Kennedy Airport for the flight to North Africa.

Overall, it was a long, strange trip. The transition from the US to Libya, from Bisbee training to Tripoli, then to Benghazi and finally to our assignment in Qaminis was mostly a blur: airports, no sleep, standing in line, terrifying bus rides. It hugely distorted time and reality for me - literally a mind-altering journey. And all without THC or other herbals! Bob Pearson was the Cyrenaica regional Peace Corps director in Benghazi and it was his task to drive us down the murderously fast, Yugoslav-built highway to our rendezvous with fate. After we met some local dignitaries, including Wanis Sewehli, the mudeer [headmaster] for both our schools, Bob deposited us in our empty cinder-block government house. We stood there in the hallway with our suitcases and looked out the front door at our bleak and dusty village. As the scene sunk in, we regarded one another in silence, considered the $125 per month we were to be paid, and finally said "Well, here we are. So here we go".

And the two dazed and confused volunteers started their new life. The process of settling in was like walking through a fog and watching various tableaux emerge from the mist and resolve in detail. Our house presented its four empty rooms - more than enough space - and its enclosed rear courtyard, which offered privacy as well as a brackish well seething with cockroaches. Well-used Italianate furniture appeared later that day: it seemed that our headmaster-to-be had appropriated all the furnishings from our house in the belief that we would never show up and, as we waited, was forced to collect them from his relatives. Teaching staff from our schools revealed to us the dreary classrooms with their cracked chalkboards and worn wooden benches that would be our field of academic combat. Our students would now be expected to use the respectful term ustadh [teacher] when they spoke to us. In Bisbee we had met the Libyan Minister of Education, one Mohammed Gusbi, and he was the proud author of the textbook we were to use. It was called "English for Libya" and starred two fictional little Arabs named Nuri and Selma. This was a part of the world that had exiled the coconut palm but kept the date palm and the olive tree. The center of our village offered a mosque and half a dozen shops nestled under several very large and ancient trees, a tiny dot of green on an endless dun canvas.

When the Yugoslavs built their high-speed race track, they routed it around Qaminis a mile to the east and gave the village three interchanges. In the bad old days, all the coastal traffic roared right through the center of town. Our house sat right on that former main drag, and as I stood at our front door, twenty five feet from the road, I could picture those former times as a juggernaut of trucks rolled by, scoring an occasional direct hit on a goat or a pedestrian. Even though drunk driving was not a problem in this alcohol-free Muslim society, the amount of highway carnage we were to witness was quite considerable.

Libya's geography is so boring, so utterly lacking in novelty, that I wrote this little creation myth in an attempt to hold the reader's attention as its unremarkable terrain is described:

"It had been a busy, tiring year for Mother Nature. She started off in January with a long list of features to create, and she thought she had gotten them all. The Amazon. Check. The Rocky Mountains. Check. That Himalayan masterwork stretching from the Hindu Kush to Hkakabo Razi in Burma. Check. Although there was genuine pride in what had been accomplished, now she felt worn out, and she savored her plans to spend the last two weeks of December on Cat Island in the Bahamas, sitting in a beach chair and once again digging her toes into that soft white sand.

Then the order came to finish North Africa.

'But I did that in April!', she thought, immediately pulling a map from her desk to check her work. There were the Atlas mountains in Morocco. Done. There was the Nile, wandering against all logic through the desert to reach the Mediterranean. Nice creative touch, she thought. Done. Algeria and Tunisia. Both done. And right next to Egypt to the west, there was.....

'Rats!!', she said with a sigh of surprise and resignation. 'I forgot Libya. How could I have missed that?'.

She rubbed her forehead, drummed her fingers on the table, and looked at the great blank space that stood between her and her tropical getaway. Then she glanced in her supply box to see what she had to work with. Not much, she realized. Sand, rock, water. This did not improve her mood. 'I want to get this done, and quick.'

Libya's coastline was straight and lacked character, so she gouged out a great gulf in the middle and piled that material to the east near Egypt to make a modest range of mountains. Those hills and the nearby coastal plains were given enough water for some trees and some crops, but not much. She mostly spread sand and rock from border to border - a no-brainer.

While she considered what to do with the bulk of the water, she realized she had overlooked some oil at the bottom of the box.

'Oil and water may not mix', she thought, 'but I'll make both of them hard for humans to get their hands on'. So before she left the office for her long-awaited vacation, she buried the water and the oil deep underground. The fossil water would be equal to two hundred years of the flow of the Nile and there would be over forty five billion barrels of black gold. These were treasures sufficient, once discovered, to make the heart of man burn with desire.

'They can have it but they'll have to work for it'.

She left town with several good books and had a great time on Cat Island."

One thing that struck us early on about our new home was, surprisingly, the sense of utter and complete safety, for our property as well as our persons. We locked our doors but we knew we didn't have to. I left my motorcycle outside on occasion and never worried about it. Nothing was ever taken from us. There were never any circumstances in Qaminis in which we felt threatened. Royse could walk unaccompanied to her school and to the houses of female friends. It was a wonderful and remarkable situation, but it should not be forgotten that while there may be the village, there's also the city. Benghazi, while still safe, operated by different rules. Perhaps the explanation is that smaller communities - where everybody knows everybody else - are by nature safer than larger communities . Additionally, for the Muslim world, the Koran contains exceptionally strong prohibitions against theft, which is traditionally punishable by having one's right hand cut off, leaving you to proceed through life with only the hand you use to wipe your bottom, so that essentially you're an outcast and cannot eat with others.

Royse taught at the girls' school. I taught at the boys'. These were elementary schools and that's where education stopped in Qaminis. Since I had met Wanis Sewehli during the introductory furniture fiasco, I tended to view him as a sly operator. He was short and stocky and intense, kept himself very well-groomed and sported a pencil-thin mustache. His wife kept having twins. The teachers in the school joked behind his back that his wife was probably a cat since she always had litters. The one child of his that I met was a smart and confident nine year old girl. The day after the Apollo 11 moon landing she came up to me in the street and said "mabruk al menzel!" [congratulations on the landing!].

Like the kid mentioned above, many Libyans followed the news and had a mostly modern outlook, although after fourteen hundred years, Islam had not completely cleansed the Arab people of superstition and folk belief. There was still fear of the "evil eye" and, in many markets, an apprehensive person could purchase a hamsa - a talisman shaped like a right hand - to ward it off. One day I was chatting with my shopkeeper friend Mohammed Nowah and some of his boys. His son Hassan told a funny story and I jokingly said that he was mezhnoon [crazy]. Mohammed was clearly alarmed at my comment and waved his hand over the entire group and said that everyone was mezhnoon, so as to diffuse the power of my remark and make sure that evil spirits wouldn't focus on Hassan. Mudeer Sewehli also had a streak of traditional belief that would surface now and then and peek through his contemporary facade. He related a lengthy story of a young boy who was chronically ill and unresponsive to the best that available medicine could offer him. The parents and family were at their wits end until an elderly haj [pilgrim] prevailed upon them to give the kid a desert cure. The young patient was sent to a remote oasis and, under the guidance of an elder, was placed on a strict regimen of dates and olive oil for several months. My eyes widened as I listened to Wanis describe this treatment plan. He must have seen the skepticism in my face because he held up his hand as if in solemn oath and said, "I swear by Allah that the boy regained perfect health!" Well, who was I to question? I'll bet, at the very least, his skin was moist and shiny from all that olive oil.

There was no long tradition of secular public school education in Libya, and the boys in my English class, as newcomers to the process, were very rambunctious. They were to be the source - at least for me - of some significant discipline issues. The most refined kid was Omar, the son of a police officer. He boasted to me that his family bathed once a week. The least sophisticated ones lived out in the bush in tents and would show up in class with straw and grass in their hair. There had been a Libya I volunteer in Qaminis, a Japanese-American named Bill Tsukida, whose Asian appearance undoubtedly ran counter to local expectations of what an American should look like. There were expatriate Palestinian teachers who lived and worked in our village, and one I recall in particular was Mohammed Hather. He was well- travelled and quite urbane. For him, teaching in the wild and uncultured hinterlands of Libya was a painful sacrifice for a paycheck . One of his favorite jokes was that, in Palestine, intellectually curious students would ask, "Teacher, how far is it from the earth to the moon?", whereas in Libya, a student would only ask, "Teacher, your shoes. How much did they cost?"

For the first few weeks of school, I was flying on adrenaline and the excitement of the new situation. The kids were trying to figure out this unfamiliar classroom environment with the English-speaking foreigner, so initially I didn't really have any discipline issues. The problems started when the struggling kids started to give up their effort to learn. They goofed off and talked to their friends and noticed that the American teacher didn't know how to deal with it. The Peace Corps volunteers in Libya II, generally speaking, were young and green and lacked a resevoir of experience they could draw on. For me, at least, that was the beginning of discipline problems that I didn't manage well. Royse had similar experiences but not as bad as mine. It was cold comfort to us that the Libyan teachers also struggled.

Royse remembered that many of her coworkers at her school were very young. Selma was fifteen years old. Aziza and Lutfiya were also teenagers. Those teachers were only a few years older than their students. The most common snack at school was a sweet, halva-like peanut concoction spread over bread. A charcoal brazier was always glowing to boil the endless rounds of sweet tea that were consumed.

As promised during training, I was given a single-cylinder Moto Guzzi motorcycle - courtesy of the Libyan Ministry of Education - so that I could teach twice a week at a scattering of houses called Naxul Shahawi, which was about three miles up the highway. It wasn't a real village, didn't show up on any maps, and the elementary school classes were so small that boys and girls - still pre-adolescents - sat together. I particularly remember the school's guffir [janitor], a burly and gruff fellow named Dengis. He had fought as a young man in one of the numerous wars against Israel. He took a fancy to the briar pipe I smoked, and in Arab culture if someone admires something you have, you're generally expected to give it to that person. Well, I really liked that pipe and was upset when Dengis literally took it from my hand and made it intimate with his saliva and his rotten teeth. In the end, I think he kept it for his own. Both Royse and I were still smoking cigarettes at that time. We couldn't get the Marlboro and Kent brands we smoked in college, so we settled for the wretched Libyan brands, Sport and Safir, when we needed to yeshrub duxan [drink tobacco]. The Naxul Shahawi students would daily materialize out of the flat, desolate landscape and then disappear when school let out. The Libyan educational system did nothing to involve parents in their children's education. There was no parent-teacher association, there were no school open houses. I remember meeting only one parent the whole year I was there. The father of a girl in my Shahawi class saw me in the market and asked, "Kwais, Rabha?" [Is my daughter Rabha good?].

There was a well near the Shahawi school which was unusual for its sweet water. It was very large and deep with irregular sides and presented real danger of falling in for anyone hauling up a full bucket of water. It was not a place to have an accident. It had an ancient feeling - a watering hole that might have been in use for a thousand years. Bir [wells] figure prominently in Arab history and I recalled T. E. Lawrence describing in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom how the warring Arabs and Turks would spoil each others wells by throwing in dead camels. I would fill up plastic jerrycans at the Shahawi well and take them home bungee-corded to the back seat of the Moto Guzzi. There was always a risk of contracting schistosomiasis [intestinal parasites] from untreated water so we used iodine tablets. The Yugoslavian road construction crews would periodically send a tanker truck with fresh water into town for free distribution but I can't remember that we ever got any. There was no such thing as commercial bottled water in those days.

When I travelled that asphalt gauntlet on my motorcycle, I trusted both to fate and to my helmet with a full-face visor. One day a truck ahead of me kicked up a fist-sized rock which hit that visor dead center. I lived to tell about it. When a specialized shopping need arose which required a trip to Benghazi, there were a number of highly unreliable transportation options available, including vans, trucks and station wagons - all privately operated without fixed schedules. On those trips up to the big city, there was often some grim traffic event to witness. It's important to keep in mind that Libyans mostly learned to drive from their Italian colonial masters, who have never been known for their cautious, defensive driving skills. Once we saw a car simply fly off the road at 60 mph and roll over several times down an embankment. Our driver stopped to help. There were injuries but no one was killed. Another time we came upon an empty wrecked car, and our driver's morbid curiosity made him pull over to inspect the tangled mess. The bodies had been removed but the interior was splattered with blood and chunks of brain.

Our weekly routine came as no surprise. Out the door at 8:00 AM for a short walk to our schools. Honestly I can't remember what I did for lunch. Maybe I went home. We were done teaching by mid- afternoon then headed back to the house to unwind, grade papers and do lesson plans. The local market had a good selection of locally grown produce so we weren't short on veggies, although occasionally dinner came from a can. One tin of string beans, packed in Belgium, contained a rat's foot. The chocolate bars from Holland which were available in the Qaminis sook [market] must have taken a long, wandering path through many heated warehouses because, unwrapped, they looked horrible and tasted worse.

The red meats available in town were mostly lamb and camel. Lamb was obligatory for any festival but somehow we wound up eating the occasional camel that had outlived it's useful working life. When one was slaughtered, the owner would distribute some of the meat to friends and family. Then, because there was no refrigeration, he would promptly hang the remainder on hooks inside a screened cabinet and offer it for sale in the market. Prospective customers, as they considered a purchase, had to disregard the swarm of flies which had been trapped in the cabinet and were walking over the meat and spreading disease with their dainty feet. Shoppers also had to buy quickly since that warmed-up flesh lasted less than a day. One memorable meal was some stewed camel which carried a powerful bouquet of kerosene from our little burner stove. Periodically we would be given live chickens as a gift, which would require a decision. One option was to keep the birds, feed and house them, and enjoy the eggs that would appear daily. That seemed like a lot of work, especially since eggs were cheap and readily available in the market. It made more sense to eat them. Since I had recently seen those sheep slaughtered in training, I became the resident executioner and could, without the slightest twinge of remorse, hang a chicken upside down from the clothesline in the courtyard, slit its throat and drain the blood, then scald it with boiling water to get the feathers off. Doing the same to a gift pigeon, however, always seemed like infanticide.

The traditional breakfast in Libya and throughout much of the Arab world is asida, which is boiled wheat flour. Normally, this incredibly thick and tasteless concoction is eaten plain, with family members dipping their fingers into the communal bowl. Royse and I hated it from the beginning. It gave you carbohydrates but also constipation - all without an enjoyable eating experience. For special occasions, Libyans would dress it up with butter and honey. To us, that seemed like putting lipstick on a pig. On one holiday occasion, a thoughtful and well-meaning neighbor brought over an enormous bowel of asida swimming in its special sauce. We offered profuse thanks to the friend, then stood in the kitchen looking at this thing that nature did not intend. After one bite each, Royse handed me a spoon and sent me to the bathroom, where I spent a long time on my knees carving out slippery, turd-sized chunks and flushing them down the toilet. Our neighbor was very impressed that we returned the empty bowl so quickly.

For communication with the outside world, we had a short wave radio and preferred the BBC over Voice of America. Libya did not have any television stations at the time and I do not think our village had any telephones. The Libyan postal service delivered mail with reasonable regularity and, to the credit of its letter handlers, they knew the Roman alphabet much better then we knew the Arabic alphabet. The Qaminis maktab al barid [post office] was just a small building, inside of which was a small man sitting behind a small desk, but when he gave us our mail - proving that he knew our ABCs - he always had a big smile. My mother stepped up her letter-writing game by learning to write our address in the flowing right-to-left Arabic script. On one occasion, I got an envelope addressed to the Chinese national soccer teaming touring in Sierra Leone. That was a puzzler.

Royse had established herself in the left front room of our house, where our one table and our two chairs were placed. There she would grade papers, prepare lesson plans and use her treasured Singer portable sewing machine, which had to be connected to a clunky transformer to step the local 230 volts down to the Singer's 120 volts. If she had ever been forced to make a split-second decision between saving either me or her beloved sewing machine from falling off a cliff, I was a goner. She may have had a tiny portable iron but she also had a heavy old-school monster that had to be set on live coals to be heated up. All things considered, though, she kept busy in her room, did great sewing projects and had fun. I'm pretty sure we ate our meals at the table in her room since it was the only one we had. Besides our bed, we had an armoire in our bedroom along with our Peace Corps trunks. We had no living room furniture so that room was essentially bare, Libyan-style. We put down some mats and cushions and I had the task of applying zheer [whitewash] to the living room walls, which gave them a clean, fresh look.

Qaminis did have a modest claim to fame within the subculture of Libyan hospitality since it was regarded as growing the finest mint in the country, and mint was an essential part of the tea ritual. In Libyan homes, hosts would serve a series of teas to their guests - ironically in real whiskey shot glasses. Although each mix of tea always had so much sugar that it needed to be followed by a trip to the dentist, it was the mint added to the final round that provided a burst of flavor and a flourish of style - as long as that mint came from our little town.

Perhaps I was prompted by the local farmers' success with growing mint, but one day, as I stood looking out the front door of our house, I was possessed by an urge to grow something and wondered what it would be like to have a tree in our front yard. Our yard, like those of all the houses around us, was a barren wasteland of dirt. Imagine, I thought to myself, a stately and soaring shazara spreading a cool, leafy umbrella of green over our sunbaked house. I wondered how the neighbors would react. They would be surprised, of course, to see the two young Americans industriously digging away with picks and shovels as they prepared the earth. Then, after we had explained our plans to them and returned diligently to our work, they would all surely become a bit envious of our green miracle and debate amongst themselves what they should do. I was confident they would eventually be inspired to imitate us and plant their own trees, swiftly transforming our village into a renowned oasis of woods and gardens, the epitome of the Arab paradise. Royse and I would enter local oral history as legendary Johnny Appleseeds of North Africa. But, as I built this fantasy world in my head, I could feel reality tugging at my sleeve. Yes, the obstacles to such a project would certainly be considerable and might easily deter a normal person equipped with reason and common sense. Nonetheless, since I chronically daydream about impossible undertakings, I let my mind wander. First, there was the problem of the ground, which seemed as hard-packed and lifeless as cement. A very large hole would have to be dug and then filled with nutrient-rich top soil to get the sapling started. I wasn't sure how far down I'd have to dig, but, judging from the Shahawi well, the water table varied between fifteen and twenty feet. The tree would require daily watering for an indefinite time until its roots reached that ground water. Further, since I never could identify the trees that grew at the center of town, I wasn't sure what species would grow well in the local climate. Predation by wandering donkeys and camels had to be considered. The sapling would need a strong enclosure to protect it until four-footed browsers could no longer get at tender leaves and twigs. I was thankful that giraffes, with their eighteen foot reach, weren't native to Libya. I burned a lot of mental calories on this long list of challenges, and, fatigued by all the calculations, never did manage to come up with a realistic plan. In the end, all I did was buy a roll of barbed wire and place it on our front step - as a warning to the donkeys and camels, and the aspirations of Qaminis' would-be arborist came to naught.

Our Arabic slowly became good enough that we could have simple conversations with our Libyan friends and make most of our needs known, and I think people appreciated the effort we made. Yet I seem to have space in my head for only one language besides English and, after about six months in Qaminis, I learned how completely Arabic had driven out my French. One day in the market, I was introduced to a young Arab from Tunisia who was visiting friends in the village before returning to his home in Tunis. He spoke to me in French, which was his second language. I was a reasonably fluent Francophone in college and wanted to respond to him in kind but, when I opened my mouth, nothing came out. The French shelf in my brain had been stripped bare and it took me forever just to muster "ou allez-vous?", to which he responded, "chez moi".

The electricity came on in the evening for about six hours. That was just enough time for our tiny Singer refrigerator to chill soft drinks. We often asked ourselves why, in a country awash in petroleum, they couldn't refine enough of that oil locally to run their generators all day long. I remember hunting down the building that housed Qaminis' power plant, expecting to see a tiny, overworked machine held together with baling wire. Instead, I saw a large state-of-the-art diesel generator that certainly seemed like it could have given us a little more help. It remained a mystery why all that muscle power sat there unused. If the electric grid involved underutilized resources, the town's waste collection system was the complete opposite. The task of collecting Qaminis' considerable rubbish fell to a single, very old and overwhelmed Land Rover which had had its roof and back seats removed and replaced by one of the smallest trash containers in municipal history. Once a week it would collect the residential offerings and head off to a remote site on the outskirts of town where it was slowly building a little Mount Trashmore. There was a tall and modernistic water tower just across the street which cast a very sleek, impressive shadow but never became operational during the time we were there. The Yugoslav road crews would periodically send a tanker truck to distribute free water to residents, so once in a rare while we would get our rooftop water tank filled so that we could flush our toilets, take a shower and wash vegetables from the kitchen faucet. Usually, though, we flushed our squat toilet with buckets filled from our well and let our barely adequate septic field deal with the results. We were lucky our toilet flushed at all. One neighbor, who must have allowed her children to flush toys and other non-degradables, would regularly have to stand in her back yard (after properly veiling herself), lift off the septic tank cover and use a homemade metal snake to clear her obstructed pipes. When the roof tank was empty, I punched holes in the bottom of a large can and hung it from the ceiling in the bathroom for an improvised shower. I bought a hand-powered water pump and some hose in an effort to lift our insect-flavored well water up to that tank, but the resident cockroaches must have led an organized resistance because I don't remember our own water ever flowing from our taps. Of course, Qaminis did not have a coin- operated laundromat, so we hand-washed our own clothes in a large pan with Dixan detergent and our brackish well water. After our things had dried on the clothes line in the courtyard, they were mostly clean but always seemed a little dingy and had a faint scent of eau de roach So while we dipped and measured water by the bucket and cupful, Libya sat on that vast untapped aquifer, which the authorities were always - almost - about to exploit. The temperature once reached 130 F and after you showered you didn't need a towel because you dried off so fast. By contrast, in winter it got very cold and we almost killed ourselves one night with carbon monoxide by heating our bedroom with the kerosene stove. I was sure that if I just got a nice hot flame going things would be fine. So we climbed into bed, started feeling drowsy and I remember debating whether or not to turn the heater off. I finally did (obviously, since we were alive the next day) but didn't open any doors or windows, so in the morning we were both sick and had splitting headaches. When I related this story to my headmaster, he threw a fit at our foolishness and said that, just the week before in nearby Suluq, an entire family had died from CO poisoning under similar circumstances. I appreciated his concern but I think he was just worried about being short a teacher.

With thoughts of hospitality and cultural exchange in our minds, we came up with a plan to invite a group of my male friends over for dinner and serve them a Libyan style meal. My invitations to four or five friends, primarily teachers from my school, were met with polite hesitation and confusion. I couldn't quite figure out how they felt about the proposal, but, since we had more or less committed ourselves, we plunged ahead with preparations. I cleaned the house from top to bottom. Royse prepared huge quantities of food and stayed out of sight in the kitchen as expected, but when the guests showed up they were clearly uncomfortable being in our house and barely ate anything. They made some polite conversation, took a few nibbles and then started making excuses to leave. As the last guest left and the scale of this social disaster became clear, I felt terrible and Royse broke into tears. Did they think our house was unclean? Were they worried because the food hadn't been prepared by a Muslim? We couldn't figure it out, but safe to say we didn't throw any more dinner parties. Men and women in Libyan villages - as suggested above - lead entirely separate social lives. In the whole time we were in Qaminis, I never met - or even saw - the wives of any of my married male friends and likewise for Royse with the husbands of her lady friends. I would catch glimpses of women working outdoors - like the septic field lady - but the only time I saw a Libyan woman's face after training was during a taxi trip up to Benghazi. We stopped along the highway to pick up a family. As the young wife climbed in with her baskets, the corner of cloth that she held just below her eyes fell away and there was her entire naked face, complete with chin tattoos, on full display. It was quite an extraordinary moment. I actually felt embarrassed. She knew I was a foreigner and didn't count in the local scheme of proper behavior, so she let herself be exposed for a few seconds and gave me a good hard look before restoring the cloth of modesty. That surely was her social adventure of the year. Another instructive taxi incident taught me that men who know each other well can routinely enquire about one another's spouses without giving offense. In this case, an elderly man climbed aboard and, when he saw an old friend, shouted, "Ya, Ahmed, kaif haalek w' haal azooz?" [Hey, Ahmed, how are you and how's your old lady?].

One of the volunteers in the Libya II group had the ultimate cross-cultural adventure. She was one of the brave single women in our program and was assigned to teach in Tripoli. In the course of her work duties, she met a Libyan man and fell in love. She probably converted to Islam before they got married and settled in Trablus, the big city. Her husband was an engineer and part of the country's progressive vanguard which included Muammer Qaddafi. She reportedly had several boys and likely led an essentially modern life - certainly conservative from our viewpoint but relatively emancipated by Libyan standards.

In my opinion, Muslim culture's segregation of the genders and sexual conservatism is accompanied in the cities by male sexual aggression in anonymous public settings, directed particularly at Western women, who, with their perceived loose morals, are open targets for men's advances. Even though Royse always wore a head scarf and baggy clothing in Benghazi, she still got groped and touched when out on the street. John and Sarah Jenks, Libya I volunteers who spoke at our training, said they had this problem repeatedly even when they were out together. John knew judo, however, and, on more than one occasion, a Libyan man's questing hands bought him a quick trip to the pavement. It should have come as no surprise to us that women did not do the shopping in small villages. This was hard on Royse because she had to send me out to the market with a list and just hope for the best. I could take care of most of our basic needs with purchases in the local shops but for more specialized items (toilet paper!!!) one had to go to Benghazi.

There is a strong emphasis on the family unit in Libyan and Arab society . Young adults, especially in rural areas, are expected to get married, have children, and stay married, almost always at the expense of a woman's education and career. Islam allows a man four wives if he can support them. There may have been polygamous men in Qaminis but I was not aware of them. Married Peace Corps women were asked repeatedly by their female friends when they were going to have children. Explanations and justifications for their childless status always fell on deaf ears. Benghazi volunteers Janna and Jim Fox said that Janna was pressured so incessantly that she finally told her Libyan lady friends - incorrectly - that she was pregnant. For several months all her friends were happy. Then she went on a scheduled vacation. When she came back she told them - again incorrectly - that she had lost the child. All her friends were distraught. Janna reasoned that, by means of this charade, she had let her friends believe that she was really with child (which made them happy) and then by reporting the loss of the pregnancy she gave them a chance to mourn (which earned her sympathy). Perhaps a little cynical and calculated, but I thought it was quite funny. It is hard for me to fathom how the single female volunteers were able to manage in such a cultural environment. One Libya II volunteer told me that she gave up trying to be proper in her small town. She got hold of a motorcycle, would ride around in blue jeans with a cigarette in her mouth, and reported that her best social experiences were with other volunteers. Well, at least she had the courage of her own convictions.

Benghazi is the capital of Cyrenaica, Libya's eastern province. Certainly not a cultural hotspot or a tourist destination, but it was relatively cosmopolitan and the shopping selections were plentiful for our needs and we enjoyed heading out together to explore the crowded, noisy markets. I did a little carpentry and woodworking and would have to obtain both tools and lumber in the big city. When we took the taxi up from Qaminis, we usually stayed with volunteer friends Ed and Marcia Quinlin. Even though we slept in the hallway of their small apartment, it was free and fun and we didn't mind a bit. I listened to the Voice of America broadcast of the Apollo 11 landing on a tinny-sounding short wave radio while sitting in that hallway. Our weekends with the Quinlins always seemed short and this was primarily due to the fact that Libya - and the Moslem world generally - has a six-day work week, which in my opinion is very uncivilized. That gave us one measly day off - Friday, Islam's holy day - before we had to face another very long week in the classroom. Still, we cherished our time with the Quinlins and we stayed in touch with them after we all returned to the States.

Muslims fast for the month of Ramadan every lunar year and in 1968 that period started on November 22. That meant for those thirty days a practicing Muslim could not eat or drink anything between sunrise and sunset. Since Ramadan fell during cool weather, our Libyan friends suffered less than if they had been fasting during the blazing heat of summer and also - Allah forbid - working outdoors. Royse and I never once considered trying that ourselves but we were extremely careful never to consume anything in front of our acquaintances, because fasting was hard enough without someone guzzling a soda in front of them. Small wonder that the Eid al Fitr [Festival of Breaking the Fast], which marks the end of Ramadan, is an occasion of great celebration with much socializing and festive meals. Islam also requires its followers to pray towards Mecca five times per day. We were irreligious, idolatrous slackers by comparison, although for Christmas, I nailed strips of wood in the shape of a tree to the living room wall and glued shredded green paper to them. We managed a very modest gift exchange. I received some clothing and Royse got a mortar and pestle for grinding spices. December 25 was a normal school day in Qaminis, but we got the day off by telling headmaster Wanis that our faith required us to stay home all day and pray. Although we may have muttered, "Thank God!", really we just slept late and goofed off.

One day in January, Royse came home from school with the news that the father of her co-worker Aziza had died unexpectedly. We couldn't recall anything in our training that had dealt with funeral protocol, but we felt that, at the very least, it would be proper for Royse to pay a visit to the house where the women of the family would be mourning for at least three days. It wasn't clear if I should go along, since I had never met the father and only knew Aziza's brother as a casual acquaintance. Finally we decided that, when she thought the time was right, I would walk her to the house and then join the men.

On the afternoon he died, we could hear wailing and the beating of sticks from across town - a distance of a quarter mile. We decided that it was best to wait until the next day, when the intense initial mourning would have run its course, and so we went the afternoon of the following day. Royse disappeared into the house while I sat outside with the men, who were seated on long rows of chairs. I was there for two hours and was joined by teachers from my school. We didn't say much at all during that time, but that seemed appropriate under the circumstances. As men arrived at the house and greeted the son, I could hear them repeat traditional expressions of sorrow, often with an embrace if the visitor was a close relative or friend. As I sat there, I heard no references whatever to the deceased or to the problems that the widow and her family would confront. The long silences were broken by intermittent conversation. A teacher from my school casually pointed out that the small white flag flying three houses away meant that someone was off to Mecca on a haj [pilgrimage]. Another told me that the man I had just greeted was the best tooth puller in town. A collection was taken up to help the widow and her children pay their way through life. I saw two men counting a thick wad of bills and checking the amounts donated against a list of names. Towards sunset, the family next door invited the fifty male mourners to have dinner in shifts. Fortunately they had mountains of sheep left over from the Eid Kabeer [Great Festival] the day before. Over dinner the conversation was still subdued. I chatted with a teacher from a neighboring town who knew a friend of mine. One man recounted the story of a boy falling into a well. As I was sipping my second round of tea after the leftover sheep, someone came into inform me that Royse had left. I used this as my chance to say my goodbyes and head home. My two hour visit had been appropriate to my relationship with the deceased's family. Some mourners had stayed all three days and nights.

Royse's account of her time in the house with the women was quite a story. She wasn't sure what to do, so upon arrival she just hugged and kissed Aziza, swaying back and forth endlessly. The poor girl kept moaning that her father was dead, that her mother had no husband, that there was only one son in the family and that they had no money. In addition to the shrill keening, she was greeted by the sight of scratched faces, which is a traditional way for women to express grief. The dripping blood had been collected in a bowl. All the rooms of the house were filled with groups of women with baracan [wool outer wrap] over their heads and their arms around each other, crying and muttering. The members of the immediate family were seated with close relatives in the house's central courtyard. The wailing and crying would come in spells, continue for a few minutes and then subside. Although my friends insisted that the scratching of faces is prohibited by the Koran and that they disapproved of it themselves, Royse saw that all the daughters of the deceased had torn themselves with their fingernails, the only exception, oddly enough, being the widow. For days after the funeral, they were a sorry sight with their faces scabbed and swollen and their eyes red from exhaustion.

Mohammed Nowah the shopkeeper had become my closest acquaintance in town. He was rather prosperous, had excellent produce and was always willing to share his personal opinion on any subject. I was immensely jealous of his state-of-the art Singer brand kerosene-powered refrigerator, which could operate twenty-four a day - independent of the town's power supply. His store, though, was a ramshackle mess and the drawer he kept his money in was always falling apart and spilling coins on the floor. My pity for this disorganized rich man reached the point that I used some of my scrap lumber scavenged from the dumps of Benghazi to make him a new and sturdy shikmeez [drawer] to house his daily receipts. He made good enough money that when he got himself into a frenzy over installing a gigantic TV antenna (for the Malta station) he once payed a taxi driver a full day's wages to run up to Benghazi and buy some part he needed. On one occasion I went to his house and waited in his courtyard while he got something for me. It was a lively scene with his many young children and his goats all running around. While I was trying my Arabic on one of his little girls, a goat came up quietly behind me and chomped away on a zucchini sticking out of my shopping basket. The children got a big laugh out of that and cried "yakul koos" [He's eating your koos!]. I got to know two of his boys, Hassan the story teller and his brother Hussein. They were smart as whips and spoke good English. I corresponded with them after we left, although one of those letters from Hassan had the sad news that Hussein had died, apparently from a cause related to his chronic migraines and seizures. Mohammed had spent vast sums flying Hussein to Germany to see neurologists but to no avail. I got the impression that the German physicians had happily taken their money but treated them like third-world trash and provided substandard care.

Libyan men in the villages typically wore a long shirt which came down to the knees over their pants. A vest went on over the shirt. I seem to remember their feet being jammed into tight, pointy-toed Italian shoes. These rustic outfits were topped off by a white cotton skull cap. Royse was my researcher and only source of information on what the women wore, and she reported that the typical village lady wore a tunic-like blouse and baggy pants covered with a six meter wrap called an erday. This outfit was completed by the heavy baracan, especially when leaving the house. Women wore facial tattoos -chin, forehead and cheeks - which varied by region and tribe. Jewelry was the primary indicator of wealth. Bracelets, necklaces and earrings - preferably gold - were always worn to excess.

Mohammed remembered selling food as a young boy to Montgomery's troops when they stopped in Qaminis on their way west in pursuit of Rommel during the North Africa campaign. That history was evident along the streets in town. Even after twenty-five years, there were still open fields filled with mounds of rubble and the foundations of buildings destroyed in the fighting. For most of the year these moonscapes of destruction were dusty and dry, and as compacted and lifeless as concrete. After the winter rains, however, and with the coming of spring, there was a modest miracle of growth and color as the reluctant soil allowed itself to be covered for a few days with a bright carpet of tiny wild flowers. Many land mines remained from the war and we would hear periodic reports that a camel or donkey walking through a field had been suddenly reduced to dinner-size pieces. Of course, the southern shore of the Mediterranean has seen a lot of human traffic over the millennia - Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, you name it. We noticed several very large earthen mounds out in the countryside - about twenty five feet tall and obviously man-made. The locals said they were Ottoman watch towers, but there was no way of really knowing. There was a story of a volunteer who, when eating at an outdoor restaurant, looked down and found a Roman coin right between his feet.

I don't recall being taught much in training about the Arab tribal structure in Libya but it seemed to be an important component of group identity. King Idris belonged to the Senussi clan and, along with Omar Mukhtar, was a hero in the Cyrenaican resistance against the Italian colonial occupation. Egypt's border with Libya marked the beginning of the Mahgreb - the western Arab world - which prior to the influx of Islamic Arab culture was primarily Berber. The historic record identifies at least three Bedouin tribes which migrated into Cyrenaica. It appeared that those tribes had become mostly settled town dwellers by the time of our arrival in 1968, although they seasonally would live in tents near their houses. One young teacher from Shahawi took me out to visit his family's tent north of Qaminis. As we stepped inside away from the heat of the day, we were greeted by shade and cool air, and the pleasant animal smell of wool and leather. I was invited to sit on the carpeted floor and, after a round of tea and a chat with the elder, there was the offer of some leben [fermented goat's milk] from a leather flagon. It had a sharp, refreshing buttermilk taste, and as I sat there enjoying the silence and gazing out through the tent flap at the open country, I understood the importance my friends attached to these links to their nomadic past.

In April I attended a second funeral occasioned by the death in a family with whom I was very close. I went on the second and third days of mourning. This time the men gathered in one house and the women were next door. On my first visit to the men's side, I had the dubious pleasure of sitting next to my boss Wanis. I made sure my conversation with him was carefully innocuous. The long silences were interrupted by speculation on the upcoming harvest and a story about travelling on dirt roads at night in a Land Rover. On my visit the next day, I went to the inner room of the house where the brothers of the deceased - all elderly - sat in white robes against a wall. They were all tired, but their dignity was immense. During his conversational ramblings, my mudeer offered some very interesting insights into the local social structure. He pointed out that nearly everyone at the funeral was from the deceased's tribe. The head of this local clan - merely a farmer but a man deeply respected - attended for all three nights. The daily contact between the scattered families of a tribe may be slight, but, in the case of a funeral, the residual loyalty and closeness of the tribe is affirmed in the sense of duty to come and pay one's respects.

There was an occasion of patriotic entertainment for the locals when the king and his entourage drove past Qaminis on the main coastal highway. There was quite a crowd gathered on the berm (at risk of their own lives) as he sailed past in his limousine. This was before the day of decoy cars and we actually got a glimpse of the old haj. No one knew it, of course, but his days as a monarch were numbered.

Although Qaminis was only a mile or so inland, the life of our village had almost no connection with the sea. The shore had a pristine and savage beauty, and Royse and I enjoyed the salt breeze, the endless untouched beaches and the pounding surf, but it seemed to mean nothing to our Arab friends. No swimming, no picnics, no beachcombing, no sunbathing. The only exception was some fishing which was done with dynamite, and occasionally we'd see a man with his basket of mutilated catch in the market shouting "Hout! Hout!" [Fish! Fish!]

Our brief sojourn in Libya gave us limited opportunities to travel around the country, although I should tip my hat to our adventurous mothers, both of whom came to see us. My mother came by herself, rented a car in Benghazi and drove down to see us. Royse's mother, Jane Hardy, came with Royse's sister Marisa, age eleven. We met them at the airport and, as Jane stepped off the plane, she stopped and waved two American flags just to remind everyone where she came from. They spent several days with us in Qaminis and Royse took them around to neighbors' houses so they could meet the local ladies. They were showered with food and drink as a part of warm-hearted Arab hospitality. One unforgettable scene was deeply impressed upon their memories as food was presented. The day was hot and the hostess had not only opened all the windows but had also - unwisely - removed all the screens to maximize air circulation. This resulted in a swarm of flies which invaded the house and, of course, settled on the main dish as it was presented. Without missing a beat, the hostess whipped out a can of bug spray and killed those flies dead in their tracks but also coated the entree with a health-giving layer of DDT. Marisa also remembered the hostesses pouring long streams of foaming tea from pot to glass between outstretched hands. Jane and Marisa accompanied us on part of our vacation in Greece.

I was always excited to see the desert-going trucks that would stop in Qaminis for supplies before pushing south off the main road. They ran on huge dune tires that put the driver's cab higher than the surrounding homes. You could see the top of the truck moving slowly like a giant beast behind the line of roofs as it approached the center of the village. Once, coming back from a shopping trip to Benghazi, we hitched a ride on one those behemoths, sitting in the cab ten feet above the road and chatting with the cheerful young driver until he dropped us at our house before turning his rig south off the highway into the trackless waste headed for some distant oasis. We went to Ajdabiya once to visit volunteers John and Gail Kaye, who had done a lovely job of decorating their home in a minimalist, Japanese style. Bob Pearson took us to a tiny place called Magrun fifteen miles south of Qaminis and offered his opinion that it would be a good site for a volunteer. We never did get to Suluq, which was ten miles inland and the teaching site for volunteer John Ziolkowski. He was a very good writer and contributed some nice work to "East of the Marble Arch", a collection of essays by Cyrenican volunteers. My contribution was a description of the men's side of the two funerals mentioned above.

Our big adventure was a trip in the spring of 1969 to the little town of Shahat in the Jebel Akhdar [Green Mountains] and we found it to be a delightful change from the hot coastal flatlands. It's one of the prettiest places in North Africa, high in the forested hills overlooking a plain with a view out over the ocean. Cool, pine-scented air sighed in the trees outside our modest tourist bungalow. After it rained and the sun came out, the land around us seemed fresh and lustrous. We walked from our little cabin to the town along a road lined with cypress trees past Greek ruins scattered in grassy fields. The colonies that grew and prospered here in Cyrenaica over twenty five hundred years ago were vital agricultural lands and granaries for Mother Athens. The archeological site at Shahat was only partially excavated and we didn't see any ongoing work. In fact there was hardly anyone there, Libyans or foreigners. I remember looking at an earth wall three or four feet high where a hillside had been cut away to clear an ancient plaza. The exposed soil was literally packed solid with pottery fragments. I found a coin and part of a terra cotta dish. In Greece or Turkey there would have been guards with whistles and truncheons around such a place.

As we looked out over the lovely wooded countryside around Shahat, it occurred to me that, since we had been in Libya, I had not seen a single wild animal. In fact, I never would. There must have been some birds but I don't remember any. That probably shouldn't have surprised me considering the fact that hunters kill about five hundred million birds yearly throughout the Mediterranean. The Jebel Akhdar seemed a logical place to observe some kind of wildlife, but nary a fox or a gerbil hove into view. The explanation, at least in part, is that the country's severely arid ecosystem can only support very small wild animal populations, and the bigger the animal, the lower the numbers. If you add in the human factor, it spells trouble. In Morocco, shrinking habitat and hunting pressures spelled the end for the dark-maned barbary lion which once patrolled the Atlas mountains. In our village, I heard old men tell second-hand stories about alfuhud [cheetahs] stalking gazelles around oases, but I'm sure there were few, if any, of those big cats left in the country when we lived there. Although in the present day small herds of gazelles may still roam the Fezzan in the south of Libya, the cheetah is almost certainly no longer there to hunt them.

When the academic year ended in late July, we headed to Greece - with Jane and Marisa in tow - for an August vacation. We had temples and culture coming out our ears and our itinerary included the mandatory visit to the Acropolis and the Parthenon. Royse immediately noticed that in Greece she wasn't hassled on the streets and was able to relax and enjoy her sightseeing. We made a short side trip to Istanbul to see the wonderful sights there but, since we were back in a Muslim society, she promptly started getting pinched on the butt again. Some of our best memories of Greece were the simple things: whitewashed buildings, cats sleeping in the sun, and leisurely meals on light-dappled stone terraces under a canopy of grape vines. One evening, as we were finishing a wonderful and relaxed dinner in the Plaka district below the Acropolis, complemented by a bottle of pine-flavored retsina wine, an old man who looked like a vagrant came up to us and tried to sell us wooden dolls equipped with pop-up genitals. I looked at him and said, "You are a dirty old man." He paused in his sales pitch, regarded me calmly for a moment and then replied, in perfect Oxford-educated English, "No, I am a clean old man and this is how I make my living." Royse and Jane looked embarrassed and seemed to feel sorry for the guy, but I was darned if I was going to buy a doll with a wooden penis.

To get to the oracle at Delphi, I rented a decrepit Citroen deux cheveaux which had a gearshift coming out of the ashtray. This piece of minimalist automotive history was also missing some floorboards, which allowed you to see the road zipping by beneath you. On the way there, we passed a caravan of gypsies in horse-drawn carriages, which for me was a timeless vignette of those wandering people. Once in Delphi, and as we waited for the oracle to render an opinion, Jane fell into a pool of water.

The non-stop buzz among young American travelers in Greece was about the upcoming Woodstock music festival. It was a few weeks away and people were changing their plans to head back to the States because, even beforehand, they knew it was going to be a historic event. That wasn't an option for us since we had our second year of teaching ahead of us. However, before returning to the classroom, we were determined to do more vacationing. After Jane and Marisa had flown on to Italy, we did some island-hopping. We went to Crete and, with Mary Renault's spirit guiding us, explored the place of Knossos looking for the minotaur, but no bull. A bus ride from Heraklion took us across the island to its remote southern shore, which only had a scattering of tiny fishing villages. There were hippies in the area living in caves, but since we were employed, we opted for a little whitewashed guest house overlooking the water and brightened by blue shutters and red geraniums. We paid one dollar per night for the two of us, and an evening seafood dinner in the village plaza, complete with ocean breezes and a view of the harbor, didn't cost much more.

Mykonos was considered the jewel of the Aegean and was a must-see for us. So one day, as we were boarding an overnight boat headed there, we saw a newspaper with a picture of Libya's King Idris on the front page. We thought something might be up but we had an island to visit. Mykonos was really the perfect travel-poster destination. Little houses and sleepy tavernas crowd the hillside overlooking the harbor where fishing boats rock gently under the Mediterranean sun. An ancient four- armed windmill stretched with sailcloth moved in the breeze and turned a great grindstone at its base. We walked inside it and watched as an old man patiently dropped grain into the wheel and collected the flour that came out the bottom.

Back in Athens, we learned that a military coup in Libya, led by a Lt. Moammar Qaddafi, had taken place on September 1. All Libyan ports had been temporarily closed, so, until they reopened, we were stranded wards of the US government. The American embassy in Athens provided a generous daily stipend which allowed us to sponge off the taxpayer and spend almost three weeks sightseeing, dining out and generally loafing around. We bought a beautiful hand-loomed nineteenth century wool bedspread. It was dark red and was decorated with tassels and embroidered folk motifs. With the extra money and time on our hands, it was an easy choice to see more islands, and so we took an overnight ferry to Kos, the birthplace of medicine's founder, Hippocrates. We were in an adventurous mood, so we rented a motor scooter to see the remote back country of the island. It was glorious fun until we came to the one section of rural road that the local paving crew hadn't finished. There was a long stretch of deep gravel that I approached too fast. The wheels spun and lost traction, and we wiped out, going down hard, squarely on Royse's left ankle. She's not a complainer, but she walked with a limp afterwards and had a lot of pain. We would have turned to Hippocrates himself for advice, but he had long since retired.

It wasn't until September 19, with Royse on crutches, that we got a boat from Piraeus back to Benghazi and went to the Seventh Day Adventist hospital for an x-ray of her ankle. She had a fracture that was non-displaced but still required a plaster cast and would keep her on crutches for several months. Bob Pearson and the Libya Peace Corps administration were closely monitoring the new political situation to see if our program would be affected. Once back in Qaminis, all the talk, of course, was about Brother Qaddafi and the new era his coup had ushered in. Amongst my Arab friends, there were mixed feelings about the change. Some spoke wistfully, but privately, about their affection for the King. Others pointed out resentfully that the King ate with kashik theheb [golden spoons] while many of his subjects struggled to make ends meet.

I had been to a Bedouin wedding just before we left on vacation and all my friends who had been at that ceremony with me pointed out that Moammer himself attended the event and had been seated close to me. I remember clearly that he was sitting one man over to my left and, though he didn't talk much, he regarded me with keen and skeptical interest as I rambled on in my bad Arabic about various local and international issues. I like to think that I was the last Westerner he met before he staged his revolution and that whatever negative impression I gave him helped shape his anti-West foreign policy for years to come. So naturally - with me in mind - he threw the Peace Corps out within a matter of weeks, although we did get about $1500 in severance pay as stipulated in our contracts, as well as the standard Peace Corps readjustment allowance. There were rumors of armed resistance to the coup by factions loyal to the King and so we were a little on edge as we packed up and headed to Benghazi to make our exit.

There were not many sentimental goodbyes when we left Qaminis for good on October 24, 1969. Our headmaster and others were, again, quite literally dragging furniture out of our house as we climbed into the taxi to leave. We made our final trip up the highway to Benghazi and stayed with the Quinlins while we took care of paperwork and bought airplane tickets. One night there was gunfire in the streets and we had to spend the night sleeping on the floor away from the windows. Bob Pearson turned to Dylan to sum up the whole sad situation and said, "It's all over now, baby blue". We hoped to pick up another teaching program and our plan was to fly back to Washington, DC and check with Peace Corps headquarters about our options. We stopped in Salzburg on our return and stayed at Die Blaue Gans hotel and ate at Der Wilde Mann restaurant.

The Libya II volunteers scattered across the world to various destinations. Some went back home to America to stay. Others, like us, found new programs. Dean and Stephanie Bliss made the move from Sabha in southwest Libya to a program in Afghanistan. One couple, Jim and Judy Putnam, had an extraordinary adventure before they ended up reuniting with us in the Thailand 30 training program. They bought a Land Rover in Tripoli, loaded it to the gunnels with gas, water and food, and drove south alone across the Sahara desert, then east across the entire continent. People may have told them the idea was sheer madness but they didn't listen. They drove for days across roadless sand dune country, following the oil barrels which at very distant intervals mark the north-south truck route from the Mediterranean to the Sahel. After the days had started to blur together, they stopped one night in the pitch dark to camp and awoke to find themselves in the middle of a village in Niger, complete with grass and trees and little kids herding goats. They had completed stage one of their epic journey. From Niger they headed east towards the rising sun through a long string of countries with friendly people and unspeakably bad roads: Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Uganda and finally Kenya. On more than one occasion they encountered decrepit bridges that they themselves had to repair before they could move on. Eventually they arrived in Nairobi where they sold the Land Rover at a nice profit and flew back to the States.

When I heard the Putnam's story and saw their pictures during Thai 30 training, I was immediately and irrationally inflamed with an urge to make the same journey, even though I knew of a vivid example of the risks of desert travel: a group of Tripoli-area volunteers with a director driving had gone joy riding in dune country and flew off a sand cliff at high speed, putting most of them in the hospital. Still, I poured over maps, wrote out detailed plans, and visited a Land Rover dealer in Bangkok as part my preparation. I was even thinking of taking the Trans-Siberian railroad back from Asia before we hit the desert. I can't say "our preparation" because Royse was having no part of my hare-brained scheme. I finally returned to the path of sanity and planned other less life-threatening adventures. The turning point was a letter I got from L'ambassade du France en Niger [The French Embassy in Niger] in response to an enquiry I had sent regarding two foolish Frenchmen who died in a poorly-equipped desert crossing. Essentially the letter, with its sober details, told me "don't be an idiot".

Thus it was that in October of 1969 we found ourselves wandering through the Peace Corps headquarters in Washington. We spoke to a number of people about available programs and initially came up with nothing. Then, walking down a hallway, we saw an open office door with the sign "Thailand Desk" by it. We thought, what the heck, stuck our heads in, pleaded our case and a fellow named Art Pettaway said that he would put our names on a waiting list. We returned to Cleveland and, after a few weeks of contemplating our navels and mooching off my parents, we got a phone call that we had been accepted to Thai 30 training starting February 8. This was truly a godsend since without a Peace Corps gig, I was still draft bait and that issue dogged me the whole time I was in Cleveland. I finally got a deferment after the stress of an extended appeal process, including a personal appearance before an inquisition committee at the local draft board. That left us with several months on our hands, and to fill that time we took a series of odd jobs, the most memorable and humiliating of which was selling aluminum siding door to door. Royse also worked as a file clerk at Stouffer's Restaurant and I had a three day stint doing inventory at a Chrysler parts depot in Twinsburg. On December 12, we took off east to visit friends and spent Christmas with Royse's brother Dewitt and his wife Patty. We were quite the social butterflies.

The Southeast Asian chapter in our lives began with a flight to San Francisco where we had a brief layover before heading on to Hilo, Hawaii to begin Thai training. During the layover we met fellow volunteer-to-be Susie Miller. She immediately identified us as Peace Corps by our wire-rimmed glasses. She was to become our dear, life-long friend..