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We Did It! The New York Marathon
A Singular Man
Come Out, Son of our People
Peace Corps Nigeria in the 1990s 
Mbari Revisited



WE DID IT!  THE NEW YORK MARATHON

Last January, Barb announced that as we would turn 70 in 1999, we really ought to mark the occasion by doing something special.  We should, she concluded, run the New York Marathon.  Oof, responded I.  But, I wasn’t surprised.  When we turned 55, she got me to bicycle across America with her.  When we turned 60, we returned to Africa for a five-year Peace Corps stint. 

In fact, when I finished my contract with Peace Corps in 1994, Barb led us off on our own COS (completion of service) trip, backpacking for six months through Africa and Asia.  In the process we bicycled in Zimbabwe, climbed Mount Kenya, and trekked around Nepal’s Annapurna massif for 24 days.

Our marathon training commenced in February with the moderate pace of running an hour three times a week.  It quickly built up after that.  We followed a guide for first-time marathoners published in 1988 by the Honolulu Marathon Clinic. 

By June, we had increased our mileage to 30 miles a week and in July were working toward 50 miles a week in our New Hampshire hills.  That’s when Barb developed some foot problems that defied diagnosis, but eventually cleared after six worrisome weeks and the purchase of new shoes. 

We discovered an alternative first-time marathon training schedule in Runners World, and I found additional programs on the internet.  In the end, we made an amalgamation that emphasized weekly, long runs over total mileage and adopted a pattern of walking briskly one out of every six minutes.

By September, our days were structured around running.  Each morning we’d ask when we’d hit the pavement that day.  The highlight was a Friday in mid-October when we completed our 22-mile long run.  We looked at each other in delight and knew that we should be able to complete a marathon.

Tapering mileage was the mantra the final two weeks with complete rest the final three days.

On a cloudy, windy, 50-degree Sunday we ran with 32,000 folks—including 10,000 from overseas—through all five boroughs of New York City.  Starting at the far side of the Varazano Bridge on Staten Island, we ended crossing the finish line at the Tavern on the Green.

Not only had we finished, we had done the course in less than six hours.  The marathon organization was fantastic.  The crowds were unbelievably supportive.  The total experience simply marvelous.

I wonder what Barb will want to do as we turn 80.

Editor’s Note:  Don Carey ran the University of Ibadan Virus Laboratory 1968-71 and served as a Peace Corps regional staff physician based in Lome, Togo, 1989-94.
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A SINGULAR MAN

David was my best friend in Peace Corps.  Our first talk on a balcony at Michigan State University during training began a lifetime of the best conversations I ever had. 

Arrival in Nigeria was not auspicious.  Parliament was debating whether Peace Corps was another insidious arm of colonialism and should be sent packing.  Our staff doctor warned us to avoid Nigerian WHIFF—water, heat, insects, food and females.  The advance man for our project rushed back to Lagos to report that our site, the new University of Nigeria campus, was infested with venomous snakes.  If we survived Parliament, we still couldn’t travel until snake-bite kits arrived from the US. 

We never saw a snake in two years. But the university was just a clearing in the bush near Nsukka with a cluster of  buildings still under construction. We were moved into tiny dorm rooms with students.   Then demonstrations began against “neocolonial spies.”  Student activists stuck Yankee-Go-Home posters on our doors and  chanted as they snake-danced in spectacular Ibo style down the halls.  It would have been more unnerving except that they also piled into our rooms to introduce themselves, saying that the demonstrations were only political statements and we were welcome as individuals. 

Students arose at daybreak, turned radios full blast to highlife music, crowded into the showers with us, and strolled into our rooms without knocking.  It was all a bit jarring.  Half our group moved to a nearby resthouse.  David and I stayed, but the bruhaha grated on his nerves so much he holed up in his room for weeks complaining about how much he missed New York City and reading Madame Bovary.

 All this blew over.  We took long hikes with students into Nsukka’s beautiful domed hills to visit clan compounds with rambling gardens and yam fields tucked under patches of rainforest.  Early morning and cool evening cook-fire smoke hovered under the tree canopy, mingling with sounds of village life.  Strangers were welcomed with elaborate greetings and kola nuts.  Portals opened to all sorts of adventures.  David sweet-talked me into saving half my meager monthly allowance to join him in ordering a motorcycle from Britain through a greasy mechanics shop near the Enugu market.  We shared a thousand good times with Nigerians at bars with names like Go Slow Hotel and No Telephone to God, weekends at harvest festivals and student weddings, excursions to the Cross river, and other vintage experiences. 

David captured this spirit several years later in his documentary film for Peace Corps.  Give Me A Riddle is about revelations to be had on entering into another culture.  It is still shown at alumni conferences.

Our job was to be teachers.  Nnamdi Azikiwe himself urged “you young Americans make education relevant to Nigerian independence.”  Our courses became half Afro-centric, with Achebe’s early novels, Soyinka’s plays, the poetry of Senghor and Diop, and student research into their own linguistic traditions.

We bombarded our students with pop quizzes, Socratic discussions, and unorthodox writing assignments.  The rest was Great Books.  David and I sorted through the Western Canon for works with some plausible relevance to the students’ experience and the birth of their nation.  David staged readings of King Lear, taking the role of the old King sinking into madness.  He spent hours polishing lectures about Shakespeare’s plays and the works of Achebe and Soyinka. 

Our shared English Department office became a lively gathering spot for students.  Whatever else they thought about our teaching antics, they knew they were getting their money’s worth.  David later wrote about this in a brilliant essay, When the Right Hand Washes the Left, widely reprinted as a classic of volunteer experience.

After Peace Corps, we lived on different coasts but our friendship never abated.  We returned to Nigeria together in 1965 to make Give Me A Riddle.  When I directed Peace Corps  training programs in Boston, I brought David’s best Nigerian friend, Paul Okpokam, to America under the ruse of expertise in rare Cross River languages.  My little gift to David.  Paul became the star of his indy film Bushman, which won the Best First Feature award at the Chicago International Film Festival and is archived at the New York Museum of Modern Art . 

David’s home was always a respite for me from battle fatigue.  What a singular and wonderful man he was.  David stood utterly apart from the usual conventions.  He listened to his own inner music.  A free-lace musician, he produced five albums of original songs.  His last film, Tuscarora, was made in 1992.  Although he never enjoyed great commercial success, among his assembly of friends he was a majetic presence. 

David’s last piece of writing, Letter to Nighttrain, was for his four-year old son who, if he is lucky, will grow up to ride motorcycles and make music like his father.
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COME OUT, SON OF OUR PEOPLE

Puzzled, I hesitated.  Then I remembered that in the local polygamous society, each wife had her own hut in which her children were raised.  I smiled, perhaps condescendingly.  "In America the mother and father live in the same house, so that sort of thing really isn't necessary."

Thirty-five years later, I'm dismayed by the memory of my naivete in that exchange—and by the irony of how skyrocketing divorce rates have made America like that Ibo village in which boy and father do not live in the same house.

Is the breakdown of our families today linked to the fact that as boys we American males are not called into the fellowship of men?  As a result, do we lack the security in our manhood necessary for enduring commitment to a woman?

Fortunately (though I didn’t appreciate it at the time) I later asked an Ibo teacher on our staff to describe his initiation rite into manhood.  Like a seed planted in dry ground, his story remained dormant in my heart until middle age, when I began to soak in the longings of fellow, uninitiated American males.

In my village of Umuezoka, a boy lives in his mother's house until he reaches the proper age, usually around twelve.  The father has been watching his son grow, and when he decides the boy is ready, he seeks the village elders to officiate this sacred rite of passage for his son.

Unlike our American compulsion to eliminate men from social usefulness when they become 65, among Ibos the older a man gets, the more authority he gains.  Old Ibo men are not paid; they make the currency.   In America, old men hinder the advancing young man’s career; among Ibos, old men enable his manhood.

When the elders agree, one night they and the boy's father gather on the edge of the mother's compound.  They are joined by a drummer and a masked man called the nmoo--which in Ibo translates as, "mask" or "spirit."  Everyone waits quietly for the nmoo to move.         

The father and elders are not allowed to approach the mother or the boy.  This is a job for the spirit.  Ibo men understand this essential truth lost to our Western materialistic pride.  It is the spirit that initiates the call to manhood.  Authentic manhood cannot be approached apart from a deliberate spiritual worldview and its palpable experience.

As the spirit/mask begins to move away from the men into the mother's yard, the drummer picks up the beat.  The nmoo dances in the mother’s yard to claim the territory between her and the men.  Honest men know great power lies here between the mother and the man.

When the nmoo is ready, he turns and faces the mother's door.  The drummer switches to a sharp, pounding beat, and the spirit rushes ahead to pound loudly on the door.  Bam!  Bam! 

The boy inside is awakened by the drumming as the budding man within him is awakened by the father’s call.  Now the loud crashing against his mother's door stirs his heart to pound with fear.  Isn't mother's place supposed to be safe from all things fearful?

Ah, but the call to manhood is a compelling, awesome thing.  The mother would save him from it; but the father would save him into it.

I challenge male readers to imagine this scene.  After several retreats, drum shots, and more pounding, the nmoo pauses—and, finally, your mother goes to the door and opens it.

"Who are you?" she cries out into the darkness, shielding you behind her.  "What do you want?"

At that, your father bursts forth with a loud cry, accompanied by a supporting chorus from the elders, "COME OUT!  SON OF OUR PEOPLE, COME OUT!”

Significantly, the mask/spirit does not enter the mother's hut to seize you.  Coming out is not his job.  It's yours.  You must dare to step out from behind your mother to face the spirit and the men.

Sharper the drum beats, more feverishly the spirit dances, more firmly the mother protests, and more insistently your father and the old men shout--until finally, the mother steps aside.

It's the moment of truth for every boy in the village.  Does he yet prefer the boyhood comforts of mother—or is he ready for the rigors of manhood?

Standing there before the threshold of his mother's house, as the spirit beckons from the darkness, the boy hesitates.  The comforting scent of his mother's dinner yet fills the room.  Beside and behind him holds everything that's tender and reassuring and soft and secure.

While out there before him--and within him--cries out everything that is sharp and powerful and clean and true:  "COME OUT!" the men shout.

Uneasily, wanting but not daring to look at his mother, the boy steps forth from the dark womb of his mother's hut into the night, born again, this time as a son of the father.

At once, the spirit/mask seizes his wrist and rushes him over to the father and elders--in case he might have second thoughts!--where he is joined with other boys for this year's initiation. As he reaches the company of men, a wail of mourning breaks from the mother.  At once, a booming, masculine chorus of victory shouts bursts forth and overwhelms the mother's cries--suggesting, indeed, the mother's first painful cries at the boy's birth and the father's joy.  The drummer picks up the sharp and decisive beat, which together with the shouts, slowly fades as the men lead deeper into the forest.

And the mother's wail fades to sobs.  Her grief is deep.  She has lost something tonight, never to be regained.

The mother's little boy has died.

The man has been born.

There is no other way.  Until he has become secured in the fellowship of men, a man cannot genuinely honor his mother, or indeed, any woman--but can only fear her power to draw him back into the womb. 

Once gathered, the entire group of boys to be initiated are led out of the village area to a special place in the forest where they are turned over to several old men who instruct them in the tools of manhood for the next few weeks.  Manly skills from thatch roof construction to hunting are taught first.  Then the boy enters a period of fasting for several days, thus turning his focus from physical gratification to spiritual discipline.  During this time, the boy is circumcised and, while he is healing, taught clan history.

Circumcision is a symbolic cutting of the male organ, a yielding or sacrificial offering of manhood to the power in whose name the cut is demanded--in this case, the clan and its value system.  The immense physical pain of the operation connects the boy with the sufferings of men in his tribal heritage.

Meanwhile, back in the village, the father builds his son a small hut of his own and obtains for him a gun for hunting, a piece of farmland, and a hoe--his stake with which to establish his manhood in the clan.  Upon returning from the wilderness ordeal, the boy is regarded as a man at last.  When he re-enters the village, he is not permitted to visit his mother until he has demonstrated proficiency in these tools of manhood.

Hearing this story, I'm humbled, revealed as empty.  What does our culture offer as a validation of manhood?  The driver's license at sixteen?  Freedom at eighteen to join the Army, attend pornographic movies, smoke cigarettes, and drink beer?  The message is clear:  becoming a man means operating a powerful machine, killing other men, vicarious sex, destroying your lungs, and getting drunk.

We are lost males, all of us.  We are cast adrift from our masculine heritage, cut off from the community of men, abandoned to machines, organizations, fantasies, drugs.  Is it any wonder we're often afraid to get married, and terrified of fatherhood?  We haven't even become men yet.

At 47, I became a father for the first time.  My son is now 7.  As I travel around the world ministering to the epidemic father-wound in men today, many ask me, “Can you send me the program for calling the boys out?”  I sigh.

No program, no CD-ROM makes a boy into a man.  Only real men can do that.  Men, that is, who are real—not hiding from their masculinity behind ideologies, programs, or even women, but stepping out together to do the tough work of truth-telling.  Today, at 55, I’m pouring myself into becoming such a man myself and fostering communities of such men, because I want a world that’s ready for my son.

Editor’s Note:  Gordon started the Men’s Movement, in 1988 when he published  Healing the Masculine Soul and has since published Father and Son (1992) and Fight Like a Man (1996).  He  earned his BA from Duke and went on to earn a masters in journalism from Stanford in 1968, and a Masters of Divinity from Harvard in 1977. Today a lecturer and writer, he travels to conferences and retreats, has done over 500 radio and TV shows.  He and wife Mary, a psychotherapist, live with their son John-Miguel in Santa Barbara, CA.
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PEACE CORPS NIGERIA IN THE 1990s                                   

 Group 02 arrived a year later to join the eight volunteers of  Group 01 still there working in three different programs.  The largest was the Guinea Worm Eradication Program in which volunteers worked with local government and were affiliated with the Global 2000/Carter Center.  The two other programs were affiliated with Combating Childhood Communicable Disease (CCCD), a USAID program.  The Continuing Education Unit (CEU) trained state health trainers.  The Health Information Systems (HIS) volunteers worked at both state and local levels to train health workers to use statistics. 

I was a Group 02 volunteer in the Guinea Worm Eradication Program.  Our 12-week training was in a health care facility in Igbo-ora, outside Abeokuta—vastly different from sixties training.  We were told how advantageous it was to be trained in-country.  I am not so sure.

Monday through Friday, Nigerian  and American staff taught technical and language/cultural classes from 8 to 5:30.  Our group also received motorcycle training because we would travel to outlying villages. 

Training was was poorly organized.  I studied the Hausa/Muslim culture and language, but ended up living in an Igbo area.  Technical training focused on guinea worm eradication techniques and public health theory and some other topics so poorly presented I don’t really remember what they were.  We didn’t talk about how to deal with corruption or with local government officials.  We didn’t learn a lot about basic Nigerian culture.  We weren’t allowed to travel away from the training site, so we didn’t even learn how to use the public transportation system those first three months.

My village had two PCVs back in the 1960s, but only the old-timers in the village  remembered them.  Whenever I identified myself as a Peace Corps Volunteer, very few Nigerians knew what that meant. 

There is, however, a lasting legacy—Nigerian Youth Service Corps (the “Youth Corpers”).  NYSC was designed after the Peace Corps model.  Today every Nigerian university graduate must a give year’s service to Nigeria, and is usually sent to adifferent ethnic area than from where one comes.  Most Nigerians confused  a “Peace Corper” with “Youth Corper.”

It’s hard for me to imagine Peace Corps Nigeria in the sixties—the number of programs and volunteers back then is staggering.  For many months, there were only two PCVs in southeast Nigeria.  Luckily, we were only 50 km apart, and usually the road was passable even during the worst of the rainy season. 

Ibadan, Ife, and Osogbo each had one volunteer, and rural areas of the west had two.  There was a handful in Jos, a couple in Minna, and a few others scattered in the rural areas of the north. The only Peace Corps office was in Kaduna, which had a number of volunteers. 

What defined the Nigeria experience for my group was the political situation.  When we arrived in Sept. 1992, there was much optimism because presidential elections were to be held within a month.  (They were actually held nine months later.)   People hoped if Nigeria could gather itself into a democracy again, all Africa could follow.

Following the June 13, 1993, election, the situation in Nigeria became unstable.  Those in the southwest were evacuated; two to Ghana, the rest remained in Kaduna from mid-June to Sept.  During this highly stressful time, a few volunteers terminated early.  I stayed in my village with my cat, trying to go on with my projects, not knowing if we would have to leave on a moment’s notice.  Tension continued for months.  Then things calmed down—at least until the next summer when trouble erupted again.

Group 03 arrived in Nov. with 25 volunteers, mostly young women.  Abacha’s military coup had occurred about a week before  In contrast to our group’s arrival amid optimism for  Nigeria, Group 03 entered with a sense of foreboding.  The country was falling apart around them. 

Many of  Group 03 didn’t connect with Nigeria or their projects.  When they arrived, all of Group 01 had left, and only eight of  Group 02 remained.  I finished my tour in Nov. 1994 and within a few months  heard that Peace Corps was leaving Nigeria. 

By June 1995 Peace Corps Nigeria left, again.  Why?  British and Canadian volunteer organizations stayed after the Biafran War in the sixties.  They are still there. 

I suspect one reason Peace Corps left this time was our projects weren’t working out very well.  Peace Corps had been in Africa for three decades  before we arrived, but we had to learn everything fresh.  We were told about the “postcard incident,” but, we had no training in how to interact in Nigeria and work within its social structure.  We re-invented the wheel. 

When the country seemed on the brink of implosion, Peace Corps  placed

volunteers in areas of high political energy (i.e. Yoruba areas).  Volunteers like I stayed in the bush when the political situation intensified.  There we felt safe.  Agubia villagers had so many problems they didn’t worry about who was elected president.  And they certainly weren’t enthusiastic about joining the Yorubas for another war. 

Our volunteers also had a lot of  illness, some very serious and requiring medical evacuation.  This problem is not unique to Nigeria, but the Nigeria country director wasted a lot of money, wasn’t interested in learning about Nigeria, and simply wasn’t committed to staying in Nigeria. 

Finally, perhaps Peace Corps Washington realized volunteers had potential for more success elsewhere in the world.   It’s also likely that the US was so disappointed in Nigeria’s political directions removing Peace Corps was an act of disapproval.

Today I have a love-hate relationship with Nigeria.  On one hand, Nigeria frustrates me with its unspeakable poverty and corruption.  On the other hand, it fascinates me with its strong, spirited people and enormous resources.  Anyone who spends time in Nigeria is deeply affected by it. 

We all we can talk about it for hours and only scratch the surface of our experiences there.

In fall 1998, I returned to Nigeria to participate in medical research in Jos.  It was fun to be in Nigeria as a visitor.  Unfortunately, it was too dangerous to travel to the southeast, so I didn’t visit my village.  But in the four years since I left Nigeria, not much had changed.  I suspect the real Nigeria hasn’t changed much since the sixties. 
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MBARI REVISITED

There was violence, horrific violence, going on in Ibadan at the time.  Massacres of Ibos, mobs moving through neighborhoods looting and burning.  I didn’t question my acquaintances and friends about their involvement in any of it.  If they expressed prejudicial or shocking opinions, I listened and didn’t argue.  After all, these  fascinating people were my “friends.”

If you were in Nigeria then, did you  know a despot? Even a benevolent despot?      Now, what if you were a doctor in Uganda on loan to the National Health Service and Idi Amin made you not only his personal physician, but also his confidant?  That’s the premise of this harrowing, exceptional first novel by English writer Giles Foden.  Young Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan is the very flawed hero-narrator of this extraordinary tale, a story grounded in fact-based research and a wonderfully real sense of Africa that you would recognize.

Garrigan is alternately repelled and fascinated by Amin who also scares him to death.  At one point, the doctor asks the dictator about eating human flesh.

He just burst out laughing. ‘Ah well, Doctor Nicholas, you know the thing about cannibalism?’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘You just can’t prove it.’

‘He slapped his thigh.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the evidence—it has been eaten!’ ”

The first part of the novel is set far from Kampala, at a clinic in the countryside.  Those who have lived in bush villages will recognize the milieu.  Foden describes what we called a mammy wagon in Nigeria:

“Filled with silky-haired goats, chickens and what must have been nearly thirty human bodies—in a space meant for about ten—the matatu didn’t feel like a vehicle at all.  With its windscreen cracked and browned, several of the door handles sheared off, one of the wheel arches missing and a general weariness distributed throughout the whole structure, onto which various bits of wood and steel plate had been tacked, it seemed less like a machine than an ancient artifact, something to worship or view at an exhibition.”

After he moves to Kampala and into a government cottage on the same grounds as one of Amin’s residences and of the dungeon headquarters of the Gestapo-like State Research Bureau, the doctor becomes increasingly aware of the horrors of the regime.  But he is still fascinated by Amin, whose attraction is a lethal mix of charisma and terror. When Amin discovers that Garrigan has been keeping a journal recounting their conversations, he has the doctor imprisoned in that dungeon overnight, forces him to witness the slaying (by Amin) of a native Ugandan doctor he’d worked with, and then frees him. But with the stipulation that he tape record future conversations, so that he gets them right. In these megalomaniacal rantings, one of Amin’s repeated claims is that he is the last king of Scotland.

What do you do when you’re confronted by evil?  And that evil is also a fascinating person? That’s the moral conundrum at the heart of this novel.  Garrigan doesn’t “do the right thing.”  In fact he often does the wrong things—paralyzed by fear or driven by his own selfish agendas.

In the most chilling scene in the book, Garrigan confronts Amin in the dungeon as anzanian soldiers and an angry mob are searching the building for the dictator. Amin sits talking to the frozen skull of the bishop whom he had beheaded. The doctor tells Amin a crowd is coming to kill him.

“‘They love me really,’ he said.  ‘They have forgotten.  They will remember.  Because I am like a father to them.  There is a part of me in every one of those people.  In Uganda and worldwide.  Completely.  Otherwise, how could they have supported me?’”

That’s a question America has to answer too.  Not just about Amin, but about many other Africans.

Puzzler No. 3
I received conflicting answers on my puzzler about an Mbari House.  From Tom Herbert, 62-64, came the one I originally heard from Wole Soyinka.

“An Ibo Mbari House,” writes Tom, “which washes away, dissolves, in a single wet season, symbolizes that it is the public act of creation itself, not the product, that is important to a community’s well-being.  I would add that besides current events and humor (in the paintings and carvings) the Mbari House represents the community’s fertility, health, prosperity, and determination to survive.  Lastly, I assume it demonstrates annually the power or working together, partnership, and communion.”

From Festus Obi in California, who identifies himself as “Nigerian and Ibo, 35,” comes this:

“Mbari House in Ibo culture is a secluded resting and refreshing place where a maiden about to be espoused to an approved suitor stays for seven Ibo weeks (28 days).  The purpose is to turn the maiden into a most ravishing person for the groom.  Besides, the woman gets plump and radiant.  For women, it’s a nonpareil experience.”

Puzzler No. 4
Tom Hebert also came up with the answer to last issue’s puzzler, identifying Oshogbo as the Yoruba city where artists Uli Bier and his wife Susan Wenger (who became a Yoruba priestess) taught young artists to explore traditional themes with modern art techniques. Some of you may remember the fantasmogoric paintings, usually on cloth, of Twins Seven-Seven, one of the most famous of the Oshogbo school artists.  Oshogbo was also an important Yoruba religious center, with a shrine  famous for its central tree.  Tom notes that in his time, Oshogbo had a famous Oba “very friendly to the Peace Corps.”

Puzzler No. 5
I became secretary pro-tem of Mbari Artists and Writers Club in Ibadan because the resident secretary, a poet, left to take up arms for Biafra.  He was killed in the war.  Who was he?  Also, there is a novel called The Trial of (this Puzzler poet).  What is it about and what kind of contest resolves the novel’s  conflict? 
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