Island People: Finding Our Way

When I think of what Julie and I did, it humbles me. We were right out of college, just married, working in a job I didn't care for. She got the invitation, I took a test, and we both accepted. I was of draft age, but there would be no deferment. Can you imagine joining the Peace Corps, where you would train to teach in segregated Macon County, Alabama? You and your wife, northern whites, in 1967, would train to teach in a segregated all-black school. How would you manage? Think of going to Likoma Island on Lake Malawi in Central Africa. You would live for two years on a two-by-five-mile island with no gun, no civil authority, no police. The island was home to crocodiles, spitting cobras, green mambas, puff adders, and other deadly vipers and often fatal illnesses, but no resident physician, just five thousand Africans and you. Think about teaching school to eighty adolescent African kids, forty in a classroom, none of whom had any notion of Western culture. What if your home were attacked by a raging African man whose family had been killed by white soldiers? What would you do? Ever thought about what it is like to be a teacher in Western New York? How would you deal with 125 adolescents daily? Imagine preparing lessons for five classes each day, grading papers, teaching, and then driving thirty miles to graduate school and back before a late dinner each night. Suppose you had summers off and you and your wife learned to sail, and on your twenty-fifth anniversary, you sailed the six hundred miles offshore to the island of Bermuda! Ever been in a full gale on a little boat at sea? We were island people, finding our way!