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.