Several years back, author/editor Jon Thiem mentioned to a young woman (with a Ph.D.) that in the late 1960s he had served with the Peace Corps in Ghana, West Africa. She thought he was referring to a United Nations Peace Keeping operation! The incident inspired him to compile this collection of letters.
from A TELESCOPE COMES TO ACHERENSUA
The goal of the Apollo 11 space mission was to land U.S. astronauts on the moon. The landing was scheduled for July 1969. Ghanaians were curious about this imminent turning point in the history of human exploration. At Jon Thiem’s secondary school in Acherensua, the physics course included astronomy, yet there was no telescope. John McClure, the other Peace Corps volunteer, taught physics. In May 1969, McClure went by “mammy wagon” to the closest city, three hours away, to borrow a telescope so that his first-form class could see the craters of the moon.
Several months before Apollo 11 took place, Thiem and McClure visited the elders of Acherensua (McClure 4/5/69). The volunteers asked the opanyin: What is your idea of the moon? How big is it? One elder pointed to a white enameled basin lying in the compound of the house. The moon is that big, he said.
Jon asked students what they thought of the enterprise. One said that Onyame, the supreme god of Akan religion, would kill any men who intruded into his realm. Another said the added weight on the moon would make it fall from the sky onto the village of Acherensua. Other students, however, held less apocalyptic views.
[Cap Thiem donates a telescope to Acherensua Secondary School]
With the help of volunteers Dave Fitzjarrald (U.S.) and Nestor Kwasnycia (Canada), Jon learned to use the telescope. On clear nights, he set up the instrument in the grassy school compound and invited students to observe the heavens. There, with their own eyes, they saw what few of them had seen: the rings of Saturn, lunar topographies, the satellites of Jupiter, spiral nebulae, the multiform galaxies of the stars. These young Ghanaians caught a glimpse of the universe—a vision of worlds strewn through the wide darkness of space.
Just as the telescope offered students a larger view of the cosmos than they had previously known, so too did Peace Corps expand Jon’s worldview.
from PEACE CORPS IN A TIME OF WAR
War was a large factor in the high name-recognition of the Peace Corps, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Vietnam and Peace Corps were antitheses, and yet oddly interdependent. In the 1950s and 1960s, Third World nations existed under the threat of U.S. military intervention. Countries were routinely invaded. One thinks of the U.S troops sent into Lebanon in 1958. Of the CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba in 1961. Of the military occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965-1966 by the U.S. Marines. It is worth noting here that during the latter incident, in-country Peace Corps volunteers, largely opposed to the invasion, exposed themselves to danger by aiding wounded Dominicans (Hoffman 69).
As this episode indicates, Peace Corps offered a striking contrast to military intervention, especially at a time of global protests against the U.S. policy in Vietnam.
from MISERIES AND SPLENDORS
From left to right: Ohene, Jon and Nestor
Another source of estrangement was the tedium of rural life. Jon himself had chosen a “bush” school, but his preconceived idea of the rainforest as an earthly paradise was overturned by the realities of isolation and the lack of urban resources and intellectual stimulus. [. . .]
It was not a simple thing to sort out the parts he felt he had to play: exemplary white man in Africa, U.S. goodwill ambassador, Peace Corps teacher, modernizer, amateur folklorist, apprentice scholar, poet, colleague, friend, son, brother, lover, and misanthrope.
Symbolic of Jon’s condition is the procession of names that trail along with him through his sojourn in Ghana, and even after. To fellow volunteers he is Jon. To close Ghanaian friends, “Kofi” (his Akan name). To students and colleagues, Mr. Thiem. People in the village streets cry out to him with gleeful irreverence, “Kwasi Obroni, Kwasi Obroni” (Kwasi White Man, Kwasi White Man). As if to reconcile these several selves through a single formula, he signs one of his letters “Jon Edgar Africanus Thiem.”