Niger ’66 – A Peace Corps Diary

Peace Corps volunteer Pearl Robinson, then and now.

“Niger ’66 – A Peace Corps Diary” (2010) is a 75-minute documentary that interviews 17 US Peace Corps volunteers who had worked in Niger from 1966 to 1968. Two of the volunteers were Black, but the questions were colour-blind.

Culture shock: The hardest part was not the culture shock of Niger, but the culture shock of coming back to the US. The country had changed, in sad ways. Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy had just been killed. There was violence in the streets and helicopters in the air. They cried. One said:

“America was not a place you wanted to be, because all the good people were being killed. And whatever the struggles were about, they were going to be a lot harder because so many people were – sort of had their spirit broken. By both the killing of these two men as well as the violence that followed their death.”

This was the same country that had sent them out with the idealistic words of President John Kennedy.

Ruby slippers: In Niger they were comforted by the fact that they could always go home. But when they came home, no place felt like home anymore. Not only had the US they knew changed, but Niger had changed them too. The magic ruby slippers had brought them to an alternate universe.

“How how was Africa?” people would ask, but more out of politeness than interest. It was like they had returned from Mars: the only people who could understand what they had experienced were other Peace Corps volunteers.

They all loved Niger and their Peace Corps days. They say it made them better people – more confident, more patient, more caring, etc. They got to see another part of the world and hopefully did some good. At the very least they did not die in the Vietnam War, a big reason many of the men went.

The Nigeriens out in the countryside were hospitable, the sort who would make sure you got something to eat even when they did not have enough for themselves. Few had met a Westerner before or had fixed ideas about them (and, in fact, acted not unlike people in the Americas when they first met Westerners).

The Americans: None of the volunteers seemed to have been Ugly Americans or White Saviour arrogants. It seems they understood they were guests in another country and were representing the US. Their Peace Corps trainers, some them Nigeriens, were tough on them, apparently to weed out those they did not want to send to Niger.

Niger, 1966, from the film.

The same place in 2016. Via lakkal.

In 2008, five returned to Niger, to visit old friends and see how things had changed. Not everything they did had a lasting effect, but two things did: digging wells and starting health clinics. The children seemed healthier and the villages were unrecognizable because well water meant they could grow gardens and build with mud bricks. Many of the villages were near the edge of the Sahara, in places you would think no one could live, but somehow they did.

– Abagond, 2017.

See also:

• culture shock
• Niger
• White Saviour
  • White man’s burden
  • Kony 2012
• Martin Luther King Jr
  • 1963: March on Washington
  • 1967: Riverside Speech on the Vietnam War
• Robert Kennedy
  • his funeral train
  • RFK on MLK’s death
• Vietnam War
  • Time of Illusion
• Hidden Figures – more early-1960s idealism lost
• Guanahani

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