Chapter 7: Africa

CHAPTER 7: AFRICA

The week before we arrived in Venezuela, USA Today published an article on the ten best places to live in the USA. Number 1 was Hattiesburg and number 2 was Ft. Myers. When my second wife and I moved back to the USA from Ecuador with our two year old son and new born daughter, we moved to Hattiesburg. After three years there getting graduate degrees, growing into parenthood, and struggling to find happiness in our relationship, we moved to Ft. Myers for a job closer to my wife’s sister. Happiness continued to elude us. At one point a marriage counselor offered the sage advice, “You know, some people just shouldn’t be married.”

To try to rebuild the life and relationship we had as young single childless teachers  working in international schools, we decided to take our family overseas. As the bus full of new teachers for Escuela Campo Alegre crept through the smog filled tunnels that pierced the mountains between the airport in the coastal town of Maiquetia and Caracas, I was wondering if we were being punished and sent to hell because we couldn’t find happiness in the top two places

in the USA. 

By the third year in Venezuela it was clear there was no way to bridge the gap that had grown between us. The country proved to be incredibly beautiful with wonderful friendly people, seemingly unlimited natural resources,  and scenic beauty that rivaled anywhere in the world. The school was fantastic and run by a legend in international education, Forrest Broman. He attracted an incredibly talented faculty and encouraged our efforts to build integrated curricula that built relevance between instruction and real life. The housing the school provided was amazing. Our multi-story home allowed my wife and I to separate physically to separate floors.

When I was hired, I was looking for an administrative job. I had a new PhD in Educational Leadership and was anxious to see what I could do in charge of a school.  I started as the elementary science co-ordinator and the third year I became an assistant principal. When the fourth year was being staffed, Forrest was looking for someone who would commit to stay for at least another two years as assistant principal. I couldn’t make this commitment. My marital relationship had completely unraveled, and my wife was intent on moving back to Florida close to her sister. I took the professional step backwards to be elementary science coordinator, again. The end of our fourth year was approaching rapidly. I don’t remember what I was planning to do. Forrest knew I was looking for a headship. One afternoon less than a month before the end of school, he called me to his office. He said he had a friend who was recruiting for the head of a school in Togo. I said, “I’ll do it.”

I had a vague idea that Togo was someplace in the South Pacific. Forrest called the recruiter. We had a brief conversation. The recruiter said he placed total faith in Forrest’s recommendation. I later found out he was probably a little desperate. He offered the job on the phone. I accepted and went to the library to find out exactly where in the south Pacific I was moving. I don’t think it would have mattered, but the atlas clarified that I wasn’t moving to Tonga but to Togo in Africa.

Within a week of landing in Togo I realized the school had a big problem. My predecessor had been a teacher in the school several years before my arrival. When the head of school suddenly died from a heart attack, she took over as temporary school director. The temporary job stretched into seven years as head of the school. She was married to a Togolese man and was supposedly having an affair with a Togolese teacher in the school. In the seven years of her control the faculty of the American International School of Lome’ became totally Togolese with one Nigerian pre-K teacher. The salary schedule that had been approved by the board to attract international teachers  was being paid to Togolese teachers who had no certification from an English speaking country if you exclude the pre-k Nigerian teacher. These teachers were making over six times what a university professor made in Togo. The person I was replacing was told by the board to not sign any contracts. The first day I went into my office I found a folder with a stack of signed contracts. There was, also, a letter from the US Embassy saying our grant was being cut in half. I did the math. By Christmas break the school would be broke.

The board had made it clear they wanted me to work to staff the school with U.S. certified teachers. There was one board member in town over the summer holiday. He was an elderly Indian man who was manager of a bank. I showed him the budget. He agreed that the school would go bankrupt. He knew Togolese law. We had a week to cancel the contracts, or the school would be bound by them. Through the US Embassy I made contact with the president of the school board. We prepared two plans. One plan rehired the old employees based on an hourly wage for their actual contact time and Plan B was to close the school for two weeks and recruit and hire US certified teachers. I contacted an international teacher recruiting agency and began lining up prospects. 

The school board president wanted me to run the plans by the ambassador, so at a weekend social function on the beach I told the ambassador. He agreed with what we were going to do. On Monday after being on the job for less than two weeks, I fired the entire faculty.

This was my first headship. My career dream at the time was to be the head of a school. I now had that dream and around forty students in kinder through eighth grade and  twelve children in a pre-k program were going to be starting in my school school in two weeks, and I had just fired all the teachers.

They all accepted the hourly rate contract, but under protest. Soon after school started the faculty had a meeting with the school board. The faculty consisted of the previously mentioned pre-k teacher and the following teachers: The K-1 teacher was the non-college trained English wife of somebody who worked in “communications” in the US embassy. The second and third grade teacher was a nice Indian lady who did not have a teaching certificate but was very well connected in the Indian community and the main reason eight Indian students were at the American school and not at our crosstown rivals the British school. The other children were in different classes based on grade level groups and rotated between my class in language arts, Bob the Togolese math teacher, the Togolese French teacher who was rumored to have had the affair with my predecessor, a German technology teacher, Mr. Kent the Togolese PE teacher, and Mr. Aliti a large Togolese man who taught art dressed in the batiks he made himself. I had contacted the recruiting agency and had replacement teachers lined up. We were prepared to let the teachers walk. 

During the meeting one teacher stood up to declare, “It isn’t the money.” They knew even on part time salary they were still making more than twice what university professors made. “It is the time we can’t spend with the kids. That is really hurting the kids.” 

The reply was they were certainly welcome to stay outside their contracted hours to help a child whom they thought needed extra help.

The faculty group ended up having influence on the ambassador. The teachers worked full time on their part time contracts while a committee composed of the French teacher, Bob the math teacher, myself, two parent representatives, a representative from the German embassy, and the committee chair person from the US embassy. We opened up the budget and cut everything we could to give the teachers as much as possible without jeopardizing the school’s future existence. Several meetings later we came to an agreed budget. The US Embassy representative who was managing the conflict called the committee to an end with a smile that said this little success will be good for my career.

The parent representative sitting next to me, Ian, was an Australian ex-boxer/ex-rugby player married to a US Embassy employee. They had a child in the pre-k program. As everyone was about to shake hands, he said to the teacher representatives, “I still don’t think you are worth it.”

The French teacher went to the door and made a gesture for Ian to come outside and fight. Ian was more than happy to oblige and was on his way out the door when I grabbed the back of his belt. I was skiing behind Ian while yelling at the French teacher to run. Going through my head was, ‘First I fire all the teachers, and then a parent kills a teacher. And school has only been in session a month.’

Things calmed down after the budget settlement. I began to get the feel of being head of a school. Ian and his wife took their child out of the school. They said they didn’t feel safe with the French teacher in the building. The embassy increased the grant to its former amount. The school would survive. We attracted some students, and it felt like we were flourishing.

A few months before leaving Venezuela I had started a relationship with a teacher I met in a faculty theatrical production. She had another year on her contract in Venezuela. I thought our shared dream was for her to come to Africa the following school year. At first there were letters every day. After a week they were every week. By October my letters were not being answered. I decided to call her.

To make a long distance call I had to go to a small wooden shack on the side of the dirt road that ran in front of the school. There a kindly couple would make the call, take a deposit, and wait beside you as you talked. It was noon on a Saturday in Africa and early morning in Venezuela. The tone of her voice when she answered told me it was over between us. When she said she didn’t want to do this over the phone, I knew he was there with her. The partner I was dreaming of sharing my emerging life as an international school director with vanished in that dusty shack.

That evening a friend who had been the German embassy’s representative to the budget crisis committee had a party. There were teachers at the party from the British school. I had already met Carolyn at an international ex-pat social event involving running and drinking, usually not simultaneously, called the Hash House Harriers. She did not remember, so we were re-introduced. There was an upcoming conference in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, for international schools in Africa. She was the director of primary education at the British school and was going as one of her school’s representatives. I was going from the American school. The presenters at the conference were all from the USA. Carolyn had never been around many Americans. She was a little apprehensive about the imminent experience of being at a conference with a lot of Americans and with sessions run by Americans. Our hostess asked me to try to show her that Americans were not all gunslinging cowboys ready to high-five just for the fun of it. In my current state of dejection I certainly didn’t come across as the exuberant high-fiving American. We found it easy to talk to each other, but I was so self-absorbed with trying to get over the recent shock to my mid-life fantasy solution to a failed marriage that this nice British lady who seemed to be happily married and not particularly favorable towards Americans didn’t have any immediate appeal. With promises to chat at the conference, I moved on to explore my chances with a single woman with the German embassy.

The last few days at school before the conference passed in a fog of despair. I arrived in Abidjan a day before the conference began. There was a group of Americans on the bus from the airport to the hotel where the conference was being held. I could tell they were educators and we started talking. They were the presenters for the conference. 

While spending almost every  waking hour evolving into my head of school responsibilities, I did take Saturday afternoons off to learn jazz piano. The band at the Mandingue Jazz Club gave a class for anyone who wanted to learn to play with a band. In the evening you could sit in with them for a song or two. I didn’t practice enough to learn much jazz, but I got a good education in blues and pop piano. I also made friends with the members of the band. They had suggested places to go in Abidjan for music. After a couple months in Togo I had developed what I called grocery store and taxi cab French and felt comfortable getting around in a west African country. I invited the presenters to come along. There were a few adventurous types. The next day was just registration and the welcoming cocktail party in the evening, so nobody really had anything to do. 

 We had fun. They were a wild creative bunch of educator trainers. They were career driven as was I. The life of the educator trainer was appealing and definitely if what you were selling was something you believed in.  They liked to dance, and so did I. Dancing is a very good way to find out if someone is physically interested in you. I began to get signs from one of the presenters whom I’ll call Liza because she looked like Liza Minnelli. 

That night led to us spending each night together and a complete purge of my vision of rebuilding a life with a younger woman an ocean away. Liza’s enthusiasm for learning and challenging not just children but everyone involved in the educational process was a needed injection of professional vision. I was returning to Togo with renewed focus and confidence and Liza was coming to visit in a couple months. Erickson’s theory of human development was wrong. I felt confident I could move forward with just a commitment to career and an open approach to relationships without commitments.

On the flight back to Togo the person sitting next to me changed seats with Carolyn, so he could sit next to his wife. Again we found it very easy to talk to each other. The Air Afrique flight from Abidjan to Lome’ literally and figuratively flew by. When talking about what we liked about the conference, Carolyn said she liked having room service and having a nice quiet meal on her own. Since moving to Africa I had eaten almost every meal alone. I pathetically offered my wish to never have another meal on my own. In a couple months during Liza’s visit we would be invited to Carolyn’s for dinner.

By Christmas I had established casual relationships with several women my own age in Togo of  several nationalities. They were smart professional women working there for organizations like the Peace Corps, international NGOs, The US Embassy, and a sister visiting the mother of a child in my school. Regardless of how hard I tried to feel that my work and work relationships would fill the void of not having someone sharing life with me, the pull to have that bond with someone was creeping back into who I wanted to be. I knew it would be difficult with someone who had their own career trajectory or was passionate about what they were doing in Togo. 

The spring vacation before I left Venezuela I visited Ecuador with teachers and friends I had played rugby with in Caracas. Moya and I met and she traveled with us a little. I was in my new relationship with the younger teacher whom had not come on the Ecuador trip. Moya was in a bad relationship with someone she had an on-again-off-again bad relationship with for years. We talked about how our timing always seemed to be just slightly off. In many ways it was like old times, but with the wall of our separate, perhaps pointless, commitments. From Africa I started writing Moya in Ecuador. To send a letter and get a response to that letter took about a month, but by February we would be writing about her taking a trip to Africa.

The British school was putting on their annual Christmas play. Carolyn was the organizer/stage manager for the production which was an English pantomime. If you have never seen an English pantomime, it is not what you think it is. They needed a piano player. The head of the British school had become a friend.  We often met at the Mandingue Jazz Club on Saturday night. He told her she should ask me, and our friendship blossomed. Even though there wasn’t a lot of rehearsals needed and she had plenty of other things to do with the production, we seemed to gravitate to each other during free moments. Then the show was over, and we went our separate ways for the holidays. I came back to the USA to go for a post-Christmas holiday cruise with my kids which became a holiday tradition for the next few years. Carolyn and family enjoyed the holiday in Lome’.

After the holiday and right before school was to start Kevin, the British teacher who directed and starred in the holiday pantomime, had a birthday party for himself and Carolyn. I was invited. There are many foggy moments as I try to remember this night over twenty years ago, but I still have a clear image of dancing under a pergola in the yard. On the cruise with my kids they offered a rumba dance class . At the party I was sharing my new found movement prowess with my Peace Corp friend and others, including Carolyn. At one point there were 3 couples from different parts of the world on a small dance floor on a warm January night in a small west African country. Because it was a birthday party, we shared our birth dates and realized we were all forty four and all born in the year of the dragon. That has always seemed to me to have some sort of cosmic significance.

As I was leaving I went to say good-bye to the host (Kevin) and the hostess (Carolyn). I found Carolyn in a hallway and wished her happy birthday, and as I was going to kiss her goodbye on the cheek, we kissed HELLO on the lips!

My board had hired me with a few specific goals. One was to replace the staff with certified teachers and relations were still a little strained with a couple teachers who were making no effort to get certified. Another was to make better relations with the British school. My emerging friendship with Ian, co-head with his wife Jenny of the British School, and my participation in their holiday show had already eliminated the hostilities that existed between the schools while my predecessor was in charge. Plans began for basketball matches between the two schools and co-operative after school activities. Our school was going to host a music festival (you can take the boy out of N’awlins) in late spring. The British school was going to participate with student group performances, a food booth, and sponsorship of one of the professional acts. Carolyn and I were planning to work together on a couple projects.

On our first meeting after the holiday break we talked in my office about the basketball after school activity and music festival.  She invited me to dinner in a few weeks. It would be when Liza visited. Carolyn had been to a couple of Liza’s presentations in Abidjan and had enjoyed them. It was very polite. I wondered if I had imagined the HELLO Kiss. I took Carolyn on a tour. It was after school. There was no one in the building except the school secretary, maintenance crew in the bathrooms, and the guard at the door. We walked upstairs from my office to my classroom at the far end of a walkway that opened onto the sandy playground area with tables under a tiki hut and an open basketball court. This was all enclosed by a cement block wall. We closed the door and kissed. We then agreed it would never happen again. We would stay professional. We had families. We rushed through the rest of the tour. At the gate we did the French two cheek kiss. I watched as she drove away. I was unaware it was meant to be. The drive for the right partner was strong, but there were several candidates.

In less than a year the school would have email connection with Ecuador. Letters that were taking weeks to develop the idea of Moya leaving her life in Ecuador to  come to Africa would a year later take a day.

Liza’s visit went well; except, the weekend before Liza arrived I was at the Mandingue on a Saturday night. There was a fairly large group of the ex-pat community in the bar. I had had enough rum and cokes that when Edu, the leader of the club’s band and instructor of the jazz class, called me up to play a couple songs, I didn’t care if I made a complete fool of myself. The crowd was appreciative of my efforts and a few bought me more rum and cokes.

Carolyn’s husband was there. She came in later. He left and Carolyn and I started talking. Our conversation ended as we drove along the ocean road at sunrise. The orange colored sand speckled with folks taking their morning constitutional  was on our right and the military presence around the presidential palace on our left.  I remember thinking this will end tragically.

Liza’s visit was at times surreal. I knew something strong was growing between Carolyn and I, but we had avoided talk of our situation or what would come next. To have an affair with a married woman in a small west African country had complications, but we plunged forward like teenagers. During Liza’s dinner at Carolyn’s house, we played footsy under the table with Liza sitting next to me and Carolyn’s husband at the other end of the table. We would see each other at meetings for planning the music fest. Relations between the schools were becoming much better. Our desire to see each other fueled an explosion of intercollegiate activity. 

The board remained firm on certified teachers. I was going to a recruiting fair in the Washington, DC, area in June. During Liza’s visit we arranged that she would meet me in Washington. Our numbers had increased over the year and I was looking to hire three teachers. One to teach a kinder to second grade class. One to teach either a third-fifth or sixth-eighth class. I would teach whichever I couldn’t find the teacher for, and a French teacher who would teach all the grades. Currently I was teaching sixteen children in a third to eighth grade group for language arts and science. The math teacher, Bob, was working on certification, so he was staying. 

As time approached for the June recruiting fair, things had progressed with Carolyn and me.  Letters crossed with Moya. A trip to visit the Peace Corp friend in Albania conflicted with the possibility to go home for my daughter’s eleventh birthday, so that relationship fizzled. Another month of letter exchanges with Moya. I wrote about my developing relationship with Carolyn. Moya sincerely wished us well and cancelled her trip. By the time the school year came to a dusty halt on a hot June day after a very successful music fest and talk of a bigger and better one next year, Carolyn had moved out. She moved into the apartment of a friend in downtown Lome’. She was coming back to Togo the next school year, but her family was moving back to England. Would we survive the summer and my upcoming week with Liza recruiting teachers?

It is probably obvious since Carolyn and I are still together that we survived the summer. My recruiting trip had a couple of setbacks, though. I couldn’t find a kinder-second grade teacher who wanted to come to Africa. Wendy was a wonderful find. She was Canadian and wanted to teach French and would end up covering some other classes for the 5th-8th class. Alex was willing but limited in his range and felt comfortable with a 3rd and 4th grade group. I was lucky  through an old friend to find Katie. Katie was a certified teacher and was enthusiastic about emerging  technology. Katie was hired to support me with the K-2 class, but she was much more comfortable with the older kids. I ended up with the K-2 class. It would be my first time teaching non-readers how to read. My relationship with Liza became strained as I was honest and conflicted about my  connection with Carolyn, 

By the end of July I was back in Togo ready for year two as head of a school and getting ready for housing the three certified foreign-hired teachers. The previous year I had rented a house with four bedrooms and three bathrooms. Before going to the hiring fair I was taking pictures of the house and neighborhood to show potential teachers what their housing would look like. As I was walking back to the gate, a deranged man in ragged clothes came running at me from a block away with a large rock in his hand. He demanded I give him my camera. He was claiming I had captured his soul. I had developed several relationships in the neighborhood over the months I had lived there. Friends on the block, including my body-building barber who lived across the street, saw the scene unfold and were quick to come to my rescue. The fear that my brains were going to be scattered in the Togolese dust passed as my barber snatched the rock away and ran my assailant off.

My three new hired teachers and I all started off living together, but soon after the start of the school year, I moved in with Carolyn. This ended causing some conflict with the new teachers as there was an inability to work out who was going to get my room with its attached bathroom. The result being it sat empty for the school year.

Soon after my return, I found out our eight Indian students were moving to the British school as a result of the uncertified Indian teacher not being rehired. We had an Indian parent on the school board. The whole time we were planning the budget and who to recruit for the coming year, he knew this was going to happen, said nothing, and supported the board’s position on hiring only certified or current teachers working toward certification. We were now overstaffed by one foreign hired teacher. The Deputy Chief of Mission of the US Embassy’s wife was South African and was insisting she wanted her first grade child to move to the British School. This move was being done supposedly in secret except the child would be moving to Carolyn’s class,  and she was telling me about the interviews and plans. The school was starting the year with budget problems, again.

It was US Embassy policy that the children of the employees of the US government in the country went to the American school. The British school was a much better facility and had largely separate grade levels. The previous years we had six grade levels together. This year our grade level groupings were smaller, but still we were grouping at least three grades together. I was teaching most of the k-2 groups subjects and science to a 3rd-8th grade group. The Sergeant Major in charge of the US Marines guarding the embassy had two children. One was in third grade. The other was sixth grade. He wanted them to go to the British school, but was being told by the Deputy Chief of Mission that they had to go to the American school. He charged into my office furious about being told his kids had to go to what he thought was an inferior school and about class groupings that put his two children in the same class.

In graduate classes I had  studied quite a bit about communication with parents. I had heard a theory for dealing with angry parents, but had never tried the approach of mimicking the parent’s body actions while paraphrasing sympathetically what they were angry about while gradually reducing tension with empathy and moving to less confrontational body language. I thought I was possibly going to get the crap beat out of me, but I decided to give the mimicry tactic a try. As he approached my desk and angrily protested the class grouping and being forced to put his children in this inferior school, I stood up and modeled his posture and with the same tone he was using I paraphrased exactly what he was saying, agreeing that it would be very upsetting to be put in this position. Still modeling his aggressive posture I asked question about his concerns. Slowly changing my posture to less confrontational. I moved around my desk and we eased into chairs and started dealing with his concerns. I gave the information on the incredible value to learning and children that multi-grade classrooms provide. I spoke about the special events we had planned for the year and that we had US or Canadian certified teachers teaching a US curriculum that would relate well to curricula that the children would return to in the USA and not some bizarre British system. Ironically in less than a year and a half I would be living in London training university students to teach the British system. He left skeptical but placated. By the end of the school year, he would tell me how pleased he was with the growth his children made not just academically, but also in self-confidence. Both kids became classroom leaders and starred in our bigger and better end of year music festival.

The  board’s main goal for my second year was to get the school accredited by a US school accreditation association. That would involve putting the staff and parents into groups to start writing a multi-part document that would describe everything from the philosophy of the school to how that philosophy was implemented and communicated in all aspects of the school’s influence. We started the school year with an ambitious extra goal beyond the usual challenge s in providing for the safety and education of the students entrusted to us. Extraordinary effort would be required of all staff to create this document and prepare for a visit that would hopefully end in the school being recognized as a school that was clear on its goals and objectives and was working in accordance with its philosophy.

The school wobbled a little at the beginning, but then we steadied and became phenomenal. The faculty, staff, parents, and students pulled together for the accreditation effort. The faculty embraced the multi-grade groupings that were a necessity in a school our size. Integrated and relevant activities were made part of curricula. On one day I remember standing in the school courtyard while the members of the band from the Mandingue gave drumming, bass, guitar, keyboard, and singing lessons to a group of students, while another group baked bread and croissants with the French teacher, and another group made batiks with the art teacher. Every student was engaged in activities that could be enriching for them for the rest of their lives. It was a very bitter sweet moment as I stood there with tears in my eyes for the wonderful learning environment I felt we had created, but sad because my own children were not in this school.

There had been occasional power outages during my first year in Togo. They would usually last a couple hours. In August Carolyn and I had pledged our commitment to each other and our relationship while sitting outside a little French bistro on the Boulevard du 13 Javier with a generator purring in the background. As the new year started and the push to get our accreditation document finalized, the main source of Togolese electricity, which was the hydroelectric dam in Ghana on the Volta River, stopped. The hydroelectric system had not been properly serviced and had silted up. Electricity supply in Lome’ became rationed on a rotating system through the city. For several weeks it fell to thirty-six hours no electricity followed by twelve hours of power.

Life changed in many ways. For the accreditation if power came on at midnight, I would get up and start typing the documents. It was hot. This was equatorial Africa. There were a few generators around to purchase. Those went quickly. It would be weeks before the next shipment came and most of those were spoken for. The expense of a generator to run the school would leave the school broke at the end of the school year. Some board members with children in the school were for this, so a month went by with no authorization for a generator. Most days there was now no electricity during school. The music fest was approaching. The board thought about cancelling the accreditation visit, but the faculty, staff, and parent committees continued their efforts.

At night Carolyn and I would pull our mattress in front of the screen door at her house in the ex-pat neighborhood by the British school. When the electricity came on, we would haul the mattress into the bedroom, turn on the air conditioning,  and go to sleep or type accreditation reports. Because there was no electricity to run pumps, you took a shower using a bowl next to a 55 gallon barrel in the bathroom. You only ate fresh food or canned. There was this stuff called Long Life which was some kind of boxed unrefrigerated milk. I hesitate to even Google what might have been in it. 

As April approached the electricity was going back to twelve on and  twelve off. The board had continued to debate each month whether we should spend the money on a generator or not, but by April we had saved enough money in the utility budget because of the lack of electricity  that I was able to rent one for the remaining months of the school year. It was a big loud thing that had limited capacity. It wouldn’t power the school for the music fest. 

Early in my second year the woman who had been the school secretary for many years watched all the Indian students move to the British school. She soon followed. John, who had been the school messenger, was promoted to school secretary. John was Togolese with an incredible range of skills. He spoke English, French, and a couple African languages. He had a personable nature that you warmed to immediately, and he could climb a coconut tree and pick coconuts with just his hands. John knew someone who could help with the potential electricity problem

On the afternoon of the music fest John came into my office with the man who could apparently make the electricity happen. For some free tickets to the fest and some raffle tickets we were guaranteed power. (There might have been a little money changing hands.) As the sun went down and people began to show-up, we were still running the struggling generator. John made a phone call and five minutes later as the power czar entered the fest the electricity came on, and the second annual and last American School of Lomé Music Fest was much bigger and better than the year before. I even had a gig playing keyboard for Margret, a teacher at the British school who had been a professional singer in a previous life.

With only weeks left in the the school year our accreditation visit was going forward. Our documents were prepared. The committees had embraced the philosophy of multi-grade classrooms and all that they bring to students. Even if our numbers increased so that our student population would  economically support individual grade levels, we were saying the school would still use multi-grade groupings. The school community gathered to review and comment on the final document. At the meeting was the US Deputy Chief of Mission’s wife. The one who had moved her child to the British school. I was not sure why she had come. As the meeting progressed it became more and more obvious. If the school got accredited by a US accrediting organization the possibility of keeping their child in the British school would be more difficult. She repeatedly questioned the multi-grade philosophy. The meeting dragged on. There were people who had spent hours putting this document together in countless committee meetings under  incredibly difficult circumstances. Finally her husband, who was a very pleasant and skilled diplomat, put the matter to rest, and she sat in belligerent silence for the rest of the meeting. The accreditation visit from the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools found our philosophy sound and that it was being implemented. American International School of Lome’, which had been in existence for decades, was finally accredited.

 It was an election year in Togo. The ruler of Togo, Eyadema, had been in control of the country since he took over in a coup in 1967. Taxi drivers liked to point out the US Embassy wall where the duly elected president had been shot dead by Eyadema supporters as he tried to scale the wall to safety. One day at school John came into my office and said I needed to go visit the woman who owned the house across the street from the house the school rented for our teachers. Her husband had been a candidate for president and he had been killed. The news that was being spread by the Eyadema controlled media was claiming my neighbor’s husband had been killed by his own supporters in some emotional response to something he said in a campaign rally. I relied on John to keep me informed about what were my cultural obligations in the community around the school. Occasionally he would tell me someone had died, and I should make a donation to the funeral. It was a culture where people who had an annual income of less than five hundred dollars saved their entire life for their funeral. Birthdays and weddings were not celebrated like a funeral. A dusty street would be blocked off for a few nights and the celebration of the deceased’s life would go on night after night until funds ran out. When I entered the widow’s house, I felt immediately this was different. This was not a celebration of a life, but a funeral of despair for a country that could not pull itself out of the grip of fear that the president used to choke opposition.