Six months into my project interviewing diplomats for Profiles in Service, I talked to Pamela White. Her story, and the energy with which she told it, revealed the first, cleanest line from Peace Corps service to successful diplomacy. They occur three decades apart in contrasting African landscapes: a vibrant rainforest village and the desolate Sahara. With that vision established, the other stories had a model around which to be shaped. The full profile will be published this December by Moonshine Cove.
Discipline
Sa’a, Cameroon, 1971-73 – White lived for two years in a sodden, noisy, crowded village where brilliant colors popped against the deep green rainforest.
The laughter and bartering of villagers competed with barking dogs, clucking chickens, and the steady beat of bore hole water against metal pails. From beside the swollen river in the lush rainforest came the call of monkeys, frogs, and birds, predators, drums, and bugs. Often there was singing.
Before arriving here as a Peace Corps Volunteer, White had never lived outside the U.S. She’d barely left her home state of Maine. She faced for the first time the sensory overload of culture shock. The village, sixty miles north of the capital, had much to teach her about cultural awareness, social bargaining, and basic survival.
White also struggled to find her way as a teacher. Unhelpful advice during training had White working hard to convince the students she was in charge.
“As a female,” a trainer said, “you will not get the same instant respect the male volunteers will have. You have to lay down the law as soon as you arrive.”
From day one White issued commands to the fifty students in her classes. No talking. No laughing. No daydreaming. Repeat after me. Pay attention!
In an effort to be exacting, she came off as despotic. The students, many of them eighteen-year-old males filled with self-importance, sensed an imposter, a twenty-two-year-old woman playing a man’s role.
White wrote on the chalkboard and ordered: “Repeat after me!”
By the middle of her first week, she still butchered names while calling the roll. The young volunteer hadn’t smiled in days. The inevitable blowback came.
Foot stomping on the wooden benches disrupted the roll. Just a few students, but with fifty in the room it was impossible to know where the sound originated. More feet joined. Losing control, White pointed and summoned her sternest tone, approximating the toughness of her Marine Corps father.
“You. In that corner. Do it again, I’ll send you to the surveant générale.” The school’s disciplinarian was a fright to behold.
The banging persisted. Frustrated, White singled out a target. She looked Mohammed in the eye. “If you don’t stop stomping, you’re going to the SG.”
The handsome, star football player stared back, defiant. He winked. The classroom exploded with new banging.
White stormed out, marched to the administrative block, and returned beside the SG. His massive arms crossed his thick chest as he surveyed the class. White pointed to Mohammed and the SG tucked the boy under his arm like a sack of mangoes, carrying him off.
She worked the board in silence. Monosyllabic responses met her questions. An hour later, Mohammed limped back in, welts rising on every part of his flesh. The SG stood in the doorway, whip in hand. “I don’t think you’ll have any more problems.”
White protested, but the SG said, “You call me in, this is the consequence. I’ve told the boy’s parents and he’ll get the same at home. They don’t pay school fees for him to fool around.”
When he left, fifty sullen teens glowered at White.
Poodles
She felt as miserable as they looked, so she made a pact. “That will be the last visit from the SG. But the banging has to stop, and cooperation has to start.” The students agreed without hesitation.
But White had another problem. The banging had been a symptom, not a cause. The students had rejected the learning environment and her teaching method, not White herself.
She began to loosen up, starting each day with a joke, a funny observation, a piece of news from her months-old Tribune. As she relaxed with herself and her students, she began to see the instructional materials as they did.
They were learning English from decades-old books sent by the former colonial masters, the French. Caucasians filled the pages, not a single black person anywhere. No mention of Cameroon. No mention, even, of Africa.
The dialogues centered on life in Europe: “Let’s get some pommes frites and steak,” and “Let’s take the train to Germany and visit grandmother and her poodle….”
There they were, in the middle of a rainforest in central Africa. Not one student had seen a German, a train, a poodle. Determined to stop using the books altogether, White created her own.
She visited the Peace Corps library in Yaoundé, grabbed everything in English about Africa and photocopied hundreds of pages. She redesigned the curriculum, had the students record their own stories in French and discuss them in English.
They explored cultural nuances: what it meant to be an African man; what it meant to be an African woman. The students, from a dozen disparate villages, shared the nuances and complexities of their own local beliefs and traditions.
As fascinated by their peers’ stories as they were eager to tell their own, they arrived each day enthusiastic about learning and ready to tell their stories. White had turned the curriculum on its head, basing it on the students’ world and folding in the grammar, vocabulary, and other points needed to pass the national exams.
She was smiling again.
The secret recipe
Northern Mali, 2002-05 – Pamela White raised her binoculars and scanned the Sahara. She tipped her headwrap low over her eyes and squinted, adjusting the lenses to sharpen the shadows shrinking on the dunes. Sun scorched the landscape. Fine dust dried her mouth despite the thin cotton veiling her lips.
Behind her, the drivers lugged tents from the vehicles and set up camp. The local governor, who’d joined their convoy in Timbuktu, reclined in his Land Cruiser. In another vehicle, an embassy reporting officer and the interpreter swapped notes about yesterday’s meeting with the team managing USAID’s radio program.
White swept the dunes, eager for a sighting. Her task among the Tuareg, the reason she’d traveled 600 miles from Bamako and another two hours from Timbuktu, was to deliver two messages. With a stick, she could have written them in the sand:
Educate your girls.
Wear condoms.
Wouldn’t that make a fine point, after 16 hours of travel? White had no intention of being so blunt. She’d come to listen. Those ideas might not cross her lips at all, this trip. The objective was to get the dialogue going, confirm the next meeting, and the next. For this, she was prepared to listen.
White returned many times to meet the Tuareg chiefs. To sip tea. To engage in more chatter: the lack of rain, the mining of salt. They discussed a UN program that paid civilians to turn in their weapons. She asked if anyone had participated. Everyone raised a hand.
“Fabulous! Good for you!”
The chiefs sat in silence. White, more familiar now with their ways, sensed a hint of something more. She set it aside. During the hottest part of the day, everybody napped, right where they were. Later, after more tea, White circled back to the UN.
“How many of you still have weapons?”
The chiefs looked at each other. Sheepish grins tugged at their faces. All hands went up. They’d gotten twenty bucks apiece for broken down old rifles.
These chiefs, being warriors, had no intention of giving up all their weapons.
“Well,” White said, returning to their first discussion. “We’ve talked about everything but education today. If you are ready, let’s talk about the fact that your girls aren’t in school. Have you sent your girls to school before?”
Through the interpreter, one chief said, “Some did go, yes.”
“And was it good or was it bad?”
“It was bad.”
“What happened?”
“They didn’t learn anything.”
“They didn’t learn anything?”
“No. And the teachers were from the south. We didn’t like them. They didn’t speak our language. When they spoke it, they spoke it strangely. We don’t want them teaching our girls. They have a different culture. Their dresses are too short. One wore pants.”
White’s mind raced, 100 miles an hour. Not, “Can she find Tuareg teachers?” but “Where to find Tuareg teachers?” She stalled for time, asking, “What did they teach the girls?”
“From books. All White people in the books.”
Now her mind really revved. All those books she’d ditched in Sa’a with all those pictures of White people talking about poodles and trains and grandmothers in neighboring European countries. Remembering how her students reacted to sharing their own stories and learning about the lives of their classmates, she knew exactly what to do.
I can almost tell instantaneously if people I’ve worked with have had that Peace Corps experience. You learn patience, you learn to take the time to look at problems through somebody else’s eyes, and you take the time to listen—such an important part of interacting.
-Pamela White
“I get you,” she said. “Thank you. There’s so much to think about. If you work with us to start a school for your girls, you will have only Tuareg teachers. No teachers from the south. No books portraying only White people.”
As she spoke, she had no idea how she’d fulfill the promise. But she resolved to try.
One of the chiefs said, “We really don’t want the girls to go to school. We have no idea why they should.”
This was also progress. She had broken through and gotten honesty. She sipped another cup of tea. “What would make going to school valuable?”
More silence. More tea. More thinking.
White said, “How about this. How about we make the lessons more relevant and helpful to the village?”
Another chief said, “We are happy with our girls learning from their mothers and grandmothers. No need for school.”
A third: “Others have come and tried it before.”
White nodded.
“I hear what you’re saying. You don’t think your girls need formal education. But what if they were taught informally, in their own language? What if we throw out all the books you saw before? What if we record your history—stories you heard from your parents and grandparents?”
The chiefs absorbed this, and the nods were more like “Maybe” than “No,” more like “Yes” than “Maybe.”
“We can have the girls start by writing down the recipes that have been passed down orally for centuries. So, they aren’t forgotten. If they learn to read and write, they can read anything that comes through the mail, anything that might help with the health and security of your villages. Reading to be useful, not because somebody else says literacy is a good thing.”
The chiefs were giving the Maybe-Yes nod.
Read more from White’s oral history with the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
To follow White’s and other diplomats’ stories from the forthcoming Profiles in Service, consider subscribing below. And please share your thoughts in the comments section. Thank you.
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Ben East Books 
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