| AFRICA |
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Author: Sarah Erdman
When Erdman, a Peace Corps volunteer,
arrived in Nambonkaha, she became the
first Caucasian to venture there since
the French colonialists. But even though
she was thousands of miles away from
the United States, completely on her
own in this tiny village in the West
African nation of Côte d'Ivoire,
she did not feel like a stranger for
long.
As her vivid narrative unfolds, Erdman
draws us into the changing world of
the village that became her home. Here
is a place where electricity is expected
but never arrives, where sorcerers still
conjure magic, where the tok-tok sound
of women grinding corn with pestles
rings out in the mornings like church
bells. Rare rains provoke bathing in
the streets and the most coveted fashion
trend is fabric with illustrations of
Western cell phones. Yet Nambonkaha
is also a place where AIDS threatens
and poverty is constant, where women
suffer the indignities of patriarchal
customs, where children work like adults
while still managing to dream.
Lyrical and topical, Erdman captures
the astonishing spirit of an unforgettable
community.
From Publishers Weekly
Erdman, who now works for the Peace Corps in Washington, D.C., spent two
years in Nambonkaha, a northern Ivory Coast village, starting in 1998.
As a culturally sensitive community development volunteer, she took her
time finding her niche. She started working on maternal and child health
by introducing the regular weighing of babies, as a means of monitoring
malnutrition and as a way of opening the door to a wider range of health-care
interventions. Without funds or equipment, this boiled down to rudimentary
first aid: cleaning and bandaging wounds, cooling down a fever or recognizing
malaria and going to the nurse for pills. By the end of Erdman's stay,
with the support of the village, she'd moved on, very successfully, to
birth control and AIDS prevention education. Happily, Erdman focuses on
the story behind the story: how she learned local ways, how she gained
the confidence and friendship of assorted villagers and even how she couldn't
do anything about some atrocities, like female genital mutilation. In
the end, she understands the village world view so well, she can imagine
better ways to deal with certain issues, like promoting condom usage:
what if international health organizations had depicted AIDS as a sorcery
problem and "introduced condoms, with the help of chiefs and fetisheurs,
as the only fetish that can stave off" the disease? This is an engrossing,
well-told tale certain to appeal to armchair travelers and to anyone-especially
women-considering international volunteer work.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. |
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$23.00 (hardcover)
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