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

transactions so that the sum of the individual loans would, together with money in the bank in Muyuka and the cash on hand, actually equal the total assets of the credit union. I would also add people’s savings ledgers to make sure that together with some other issues they would prove out the actual liabilities amount showing in the credit union’s statement.
    In the early afternoon, farmers in from their coffee farms would drift over to the credit union to see what was going on. Some would bring their own paperwork, consisting of tiny scraps of mildewed receipts, received from the coffee cooperative and subsequently stashed in their homes, to see whether in having savings and loan repayments garnished from their coffee payments they were actually credited with them.
    I looked at each of them, disrupting as it was to the task of adding long lists of numbers (in my second year I received a hand-crank adding machine with a roll of paper that I strapped on to the back of the motorcycle). I was pleased to see that the numbers added up, and most important that there were no signs of fraud. Fraud was rare. I can only imagine the bookkeeper’s prospects in that village if the rest of the village saw him as cheating them out of their life savings. At around 4 P.M., I would wrap things up and once again tell the bookkeeper to try to stay up-to-date with postings so that I didn’t have to do them all on my next visit a month later. He, of course, promised it wouldn’t happen again, thathis child had been sick, etc. I smiled and thought about where I was a year before: writing an independent study for Professor Vail, my economics professor, and coming up with all kinds of excuses why I hadn’t finished it on time.
    I walked back to the village elders, the number of accompanying children having diminished since earlier in the day (though I could see the motorcycle was still attracting a crowd, while a slightly older kid was now organizing the turn taking and how long each was allowed to sit on the seat).
    People came up and thanked me in ways I had never been thanked for anything like that in my life before, and I thought what that had meant to me. I sat in the village chief’s home, his several wives scurrying around to offer food and drink, the latter consisting of palm wine, a milky fermented liquid tapped from a palm tree. He asked how I thought the credit union was doing and told me how much he supported it because it was helping people in his village. He said it was more important than any single person because it would stay to help different people in the future. He never used the word institution, but I understood what he meant by something not made of any physical materials but made by people who were very real and might help others in the future. He suggested I come more often, not just to work or worry (he could see I was a little grouchy at having to do a month’s worth of bookkeeping during that day), or even to address problems, but just to be there with his people. He then ranged further—a lot further—and asked about the moon landings, and how it was my country had decided to accomplish that. I told him about President Kennedy’s vision, and he was very moved by that. He asked whether I thought a Cameroonian might go to the moon someday. I said I surely hoped so. We’ll go together, I told him optimistically. He liked that idea. I felt a little troubled that I had come up with such an insincere thought so effortlessly, but its effect seemed to be to draw us closer and I was pleased with that. Besides, I don’t really think he believed it, either.
    But mostly he thanked me for my work that day. And then hethanked America for sending me there, and thanked President Kennedy, whose picture sat in the corner of the room, for thinking of the idea in the first place.
    He accompanied me to my motorcycle (whose seat by then needed a certain amount of cleaning off, having been sat on by every kid in the village with