The wrecking ball that is this new Trump administration is harming and will continue to harm countless people, not only in the United (truly Divided) States of America but all over the world. One glaring example of this, for me, is the destruction of USAID.
“Starting Wednesday afternoon [Feb. 26],” a recent NYTimes article (*) reported, “a wave of emails went out from the State Department in Washington around the world, landing in inboxes for refugee camps, tuberculosis clinics, polio vaccination projects and thousands of other organizations that received crucial funding from the United States for lifesaving work. ‘This award is being terminated for convenience and the interest of the U.S. government,’ they began. The terse notes ended funding for some 5,800 projects that had been financed by the United States Agency for International Development [USAID]. …”
I remember clearly the time I went on a polio vaccination drive, no doubt made possible by USAID, when I served as a public health volunteer in the U.S. Peace Corps in thickly rainforested francophone Gabon, Central Africa, in my early fifties. I wrote about this “golden” experience — and many others like it — in my award-winning Peace Corps memoir HOW TO COOK A CROCODILE (Peace Corps Writers 2010), and I’d like to share it with you here (below), to take you back there to experience it with me then.
But first, I wonder: Will the U.S. Peace Corps be next to be struck by Trump’s wrecking ball? I don’t know. Does anyone know what this tyrant will do next? Today, March 1st, marks the 64th anniversary of the day President John F. Kennedy – whom I and my teenage pals worshipfully revered – established the Peace Corps by executive order. Will the Peace Corps see its 65th anniversary a year from today? Or will it die a tragic death and break countless hearts for decades to come, as JFK’s assassination did?
In my strong and unflinching opinion, the harm that Trump is doing to the people of this world is incalculably inhumane and unforgivable.
Following is an excerpt from the chapter “Come and See” in HOW TO COOK A CROCODILE. Please come and see this life-saving effort with me:
On the third day of our polio vaccination drive, Friday, September 9, [1998], our team traveled the farthest – over 50 kilometers deep into the forest. We took the road toward Bambidie but veered left into Ndangui, one of the two gold-mining regions of Gabon.
Augustin, the hospital’s ambulance driver, was driving Dr. Djimet’s four-door Toyota pickup truck, doing at least 60 mph on the dusty, red-dirt roads. Caroline, head nurse at the PMI [mother-infant clinic where I taught most mornings] and the directrice of this vaccination drive, sat in front with Augustin, and three of the young nurses sat in the back seat. [My friend] Youssef and I, by choice, because we wanted a full view of the lush forest scenery, sat in the bed of the speeding pickup, holding on to both our belongings and to the truck’s sides so as not to fly out.
… We drove deeper and deeper into the forest, where the villages, with their tiny, rectangular mud-wattle houses with natural grass roofs were the most authentic and traditional I’d yet to see in Gabon. At the end of the line, after whipping up and down winding dirt roads – cut by the forestry companies at great expense in hopes of even greater profits – we parked at a charming and friendly village called La Chute and continued the rest of our journey toward villages inaccessible by car or truck or anything else, except on foot.
From there we hiked toward our destination (“pas loin,” we were told – “not far”), a village ironically called “Venez Voir” – Come and See. As we walked – and walked and walked and walked – for over an hour, along a narrow, well-trod pathway, winding through jungled underbrush, over wobbly log footbridges, past sandy dunes and craters created by the many gold diggers, beside swamps of yellowish still water, the village’s name Venez Voir became something of a joke among the members of our team. With our increasing perspiration and thirst, we renamed this Oz-like place, Venez Boir – Come and Drink.
But when we finally reached the by-now fabled village, we found the effort worthwhile. The people were warm and welcoming, and the children – unlike the littlest ones in other remote villages we’d visited on this drive who had run screaming when they saw me, the first white person they’d obviously ever seen in their young lives – weren’t terrified by my whiteness. To the children of Venez Voir, I wasn’t a frightful ghost. So I happily rewarded them with a puppet show in which Chantal Chanson [my most popular puppet] taught them the wash-your-hands-for-good-health song.
(Peace Corps Volunteer me with my puppet Chantal Chanson at a different village [Mana-Mana] on a different occasion)
As our vaccination team paraded through Venez Voir, with Augustin leading the way carrying the polio-vaccine-filled cooler on his head, village life went on as usual. People looked up, said bonjour, smiled genuinely friendly, unfazed smiles, then went back to whatever they’d been doing: trimming someone’s hair, making something out of wood, weaving a reed basket, preparing a meal at an open fire, mashing manioc in a basin-like mortier.
The young mothers brought their five-years-old-and-under children to receive their two drops of oral polio vaccine at the town’s main meeting hall. … Evidently, this was a special outing for some of the littlest girls: They were dressed in their prettiest, frilliest dresses with matching lacy bonnets; and they marched proudly along with their other siblings in new, clean plastic shoes.
Some of our entourage stayed behind in the town hall after all the eligible little ones were vaccinated. But others of us pressed on: There were more villages deeper still into this forest-jungle-swamp territory, and we still had the energy and interest to reach them. More long, log footbridges followed; more narrow, well-trod paths.
As I wrote in my journal the next morning, “This experience, for me, was pure gold.”
(A photo by Martha Cooper from HOW TO COOK A CROCODILE)
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