Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

most of which fell during the summer months through the end of September. That first night in September, with the dry season still a few weeks away, the rain came down on the tin roof in a deafening torrent that I thought would punch holes through it. In the morning, however, a bright sun was up in a cloudless sky, the grassland slopes of Mount Cameroon had become an emerald green, and every insect in the world, it seemed, along with a few newly formed columns of ants, seemed hard at work on the cement stoop or nearby in the thick, green tall grass.
    I was assigned to the Department of Cooperatives, under the Ministry of Agriculture, with duties to serve as a credit union field-worker. Catholic priests from the Netherlands had introduced credit unions about a decade before. They had studied the local “Njangi” savings societies, a system of monthly savings against an eventual payout of everyone’s savings. Thus if each person saved a dollar a month and there were twentypersons in the group, that person would, every twentieth month, receive twenty dollars, which, less the funding for food and drink for the monthly party, was a substantial payout, almost like winning the lottery. The priests, carefully building on the Njangi system, created a rudimentary but effective standardized bookkeeping system that allowed people to take loans against their savings or those of a cosigner. The Cameroonian government supported the program and had asked the Peace Corps to send volunteers to help supervise the credit unions.
    Credit unions were often the only access to credit that anyone had. And even though the word microcredit had not yet become the subject of Nobel Peace Prizes, loans from tiny credit unions in places were instrumental in helping people create small businesses (foot-pump sewing machines were a popular loan request), buy schoolbooks for their children, and replace thatched roofs (the smells and sight of which bore no relation to thatch roofs in the English countryside) with shiny corrugated metal.
    My job was to get to each credit union over the course of the month to check the loan balances, tie up the individual accounts with the general accounts, meet the board of directors, and otherwise make sure that nothing unusual had taken place. The Peace Corps gave me a Suzuki 125cc dirt bike. It was large by local standards, and with its four gears and another four lower gears, activated with the click of one’s heel, it could climb the steepest trails even with Mr. Timti, my Cameroonian credit union trainee, holding on to the rear seat for dear life.
    In some villages, especially those up on the mountain, my arrival on a motorcycle was not so much an important event as it was the only event happening in the village that day or even that week. While most adults had at some point been down the mountain to the market towns of Tiko and Muyuka, most of the children had not. Thus dismounting the motorcycle also involved clearing a path to escape the circle of kids that would form around the bike, some interested in the machine, others simply fascinated by my white skin and determined, for a start, to cure me by rubbing it off my hands.
    After a meeting with the village elders, with the help of the local schoolteacher, who translated local dialect into something between English and West African Pidgin English, I would make my way to where the credit union was housed, usually a tiny one-room hut with a table and two chairs, and not much more room than that. The bookkeeper, who was also the schoolteacher, would hand me the stacks of individual ledgers, probably about 150 of them, a cash book, and the “files” of monthly statements, with pretty much the last sign of any work traced to the last time I was there. I would get to work under the watchful eyes of the small children, who by this time seemed to include every child in the village, except for those still taking turns sitting on my motorcycle. The task was to update the