Page 38 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Road Kill

executed in uncured wood and coated with shoe polish, and a grab-
bag of baskets, beads, gourds, and anything else the merchants in the
Grand Marché could unload on her at top price in the course of an
early morning’s shopping trip.
The heat could make one a bit testy, it is true. I really had nothing
against the Weatheralls. They were simply residing full-time in a
different world, one I and every other Foreign Service officer were
glad to escape to at the end of a hard day’s work trying to accomplish
relatively simple tasks in an alien and unsympathetic environment.
Peace Corps volunteers, who had to maintain the fiction that they
were not really employees of the United States government, had no
such recourse. They were in the local culture most of the time; their
only refuge was whatever social life they could cobble together
among themselves. For some it meant sex, drugs and rock and roll:
the majority of the PCV’s were in their early twenties, just out of
college and going through the pangs of American late adolescence in
the midst of a more radical culture shock than the ambassador could
ever dream of.
In my other posts around what used to be called the Third World
I had gathered some experience in dealing with Peace Corps
problems. When these kids got sick, it was often with a rare and
intractable tropical disease requiring immediate evacuation. Drug
overdoses and self-inflicted wounds also triggered official responses
from the embassy. Those tragedies reflected poorly on the screening
prospective volunteers received, but the Peace Corps in the late
Seventies was not what it had been in the glory days of Jack Kennedy
and Camelot in Washington. The hopelessness of improving
conditions in the Sahel, following decades of disastrous foreign
intervention and ineffective management by local governments, had a
grinding effect on anyone arriving starry-eyed and idealistic, full of
impracticable plans and naive enthusiasm. Burn-outs and high
turnover were inevitable. The West Africa desk in Washington did
not care much about either the human cost or the abandoned
projects, as long as the budget allocations were spent during the fiscal
year.
But I digress. I have already described the function of the
American mission in Africa, both as stated and as executed, in earlier
chapters. It is enough to say that on one particular night in the

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