As it had done for over a week, it rained the day I applied to join the Peace Corps. Pavements glistened, cars swished by on the highway, and water ponded in the fields. Low sullen-looking clouds hid nearby hills. Crossing the Willamette River at Corvallis,  I saw it running swift, high and gray. Winter in western Oregon

Wet footprints and water dripping from raincoats tracked and spotted the floor around the Peace Corps recruiters’s booth at Oregon State University. Despite the presence of numerous applicants (with more arriving all the time), the room was surprisingly quiet. But then, I suppose, the weather wasn’t conducive to high spirits. Maybe if I’d thought of it, I would have assumed the others, like me, wanted to help a developing nation get on its feet, but that they also felt the lure of experiencing different cultures and landscapes. I might also have wondered which part of the world most called to them (not that they could expect to be sent there, of course). For my part I was willing to go almost anywhere, although, for reasons explained in Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika, I dreamed, with little hope of it ever happening, of being posted to the newly independent nation of Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania) in East Africa.

Guess where I went.

Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania) with its northern neighbor, Kenya.

That summer I flew to Syracuse University in upstate one York to undergo training with a group of other Tanganyika-bound volunteers. By then, however, I had already racked up a number of first-time experiences, including being finger-printed at the police station, learning from wide-eyed friends and family that the FBI had been asking questions about me (which gave me a certain mild notoriety), and even being interviewed by the local newspaper, the Longview Daily News. Then, on my way east I flew for the first time in a large airplane.

But now here I was in Syracuse, and to my surprise, enjoying it, largely,  think, because I and the other volunteers had similar interests and goals (I was especially taken with a certain nurse from Philadelphia). Thus, even though I still tended to fall silent in the presence of three or more people, I wasn’t as shy as usual.

Our group, Tanganyika-V, was to be the fifth sent to that country. Previous volunteer groups to Tanganyika had included geologists, engineers, nurses, and teachers. Tanganyika-V lacked teachers but included large contingents of nurses and engineers (the latter primarily meant to work on roads), not to mention a geologist, veterinarian and wildlife biologist, a few agriculturists and two lawyers.  I and several others were to help concentrate widely scattered farmers into centralized locations to better provide them with needed services.

(Here’s an interesting bit of trivia: Tanganyika-I has the honor of being the very first group of Peace Corps volunteers to enter training after the Peace Corps came into existence in 1961. However, Ghana-I grabbed all the headlines by being first on the ground [they even had a book, Being First by Robert Klein, written about them.] This is because Ghana had been independent (from Great Britain) since 1957 whereas Tanganyika was not quite there, yet.)

Our training included lessons in Kiswahili. A Bantu language strongly influenced by Arabic, Kiswahili is the first language of the Swahili, a Muslim people of coastal Kenya and Tanganyika, as well as a trade language used throughout East Africa, a region with numerous ethnic groups, each with its own language (130 in Tanganyika alone). Some Kiswahili words (safari and simba, for instance) are even familiar to English speakers.

Other subjects included Tanganyika’s history, culture, and geography. On a more technical level most of us took a short course in surveying.

We also did a practical in basic construction during which we built a bridge. There were three stages:

Design

Procurement

Construction

Now, over half a century later, I wonder if it’s still there.

On August 4th, 1964, we took a break to see President Lyndon Johnson speak at the dedication of the university’s Newhouse Academic Building. It was during this speech that he accused North Vietnam of an unprovoked attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, thereby setting the  stage for our involvement in the long and ultimately fruitless war in Vietnam. This was an I was there occasion for me, actually being on the spot, listening to our president all but formally declare war on another nation. (It also was my first sighting of an American president in the flesh.) Nonetheless, I must confess that my most vivid memory of the event is of the building (the one being dedicated) that backdropped the speaker’s podium. Designed by the renowned architect, I.M.Pei, the single-story, bare concrete structure with its projecting flat roof had the aesthetic appeal of a military bunker (thereby fitting right in with the tone of the presidents’s speech).

Upon completing our training, we went by chartered bus to Boston to celebrate. A high point of the ride was seeing the reaction of one of our trainers, a British road engineer employed in Tanganyika, to our interstate highway system. Used as he was to narrow, dirt and gravel roads that dealt with topography by going around or over it, he was transfixed by I-90 sweeping imperiously through the rolling Massachusetts countryside, cutting straight through any hill with the temerity to stand in its way. As we passed through one large cut, I heard him mutter, “Bloody hell, they just remove the hills!”

If he thought an interstate highway was exciting, how might I react to his “normal and mundane” in Tanganyika? I was eager to find out.